Reasoning on Future Punishment.
By R. F. COTTRILL
“GIVE up the material fire, and you lose the bodily resurrection. Renounce the bodily resurrection, and away goes the visible coming of Christ to a general judgment. Abandon the general judgment, and the climacteric completion of the church-scheme of redemption is wanting. Mar the wholeness of the redemption-plan, and farewell to the incarnation and vicarious atonement. Neglect the vicarious atonement, and down tumbles the hollow, broken shell of the popular theology helplessly into its grave. The old literal doctrine of a material hell, however awful its idea, as it has been set forth in flaming views and threats by all the accredited representatives of the church, must be uncompromisingly clung to, else the135whole popular system of theology will be mutilated, shattered and lost from sight.” — Alger, p. 518. This reasoning all proceeds upon the supposed truth of the popular view of the separate conscious existence of the soul, and its consequent immediate entrance upon its reward or punishment at death. From this stand-point the reasoning is very plausible, to say the least. I cannot see how it can be refuted without abandoning the ground. The doctrine of eternal torment in a real lake of fire and brimstone, is so outrageous and incredible to every mind that carefully contemplates it, and in a small degree approximates to the apprehension of its terrible, unspeakable and incomprehensible import, that the enlightened mind involuntarily shrinks from it, and is forced to consider the seemingly literal expressions of the Bible relating to future punishment as only figurative of the mental anguish of the lost; and hence the present popular tendency is to discard the idea of literal, physical torment altogether. Then, if the soul only, and not the body, is to suffer the threatened punishment, and can realize its punishment independent of the body, no reason can be given for the resurrection of this material frame. And if there is to be no resurrection of the body, the real return of the Son of man is without an object and unreasonable: since the souls of men are not here in the graves, but have been, some with him in Heaven, and some in the hell of torment, for hundreds or thousands of years. And in this case, the climacteric completion, as our author says, of the great plan of redemption fails; and that failing, the whole scheme falls to the ground. From an examination of this chain of reasoning, we can see how men become infidels. The fault is not in the reasoning, but in the premises—the starting point is a false assumption. And professed Christians have laid this false foundation, as a prime, essential article in their creed. Had they kept to the simple teachings of the word of God, and had not engrafted the immortal soul of heathen philosophy upon Christianity, they would not have been responsible for the prevailing infidelity of the times. But having departed from the simplicity of revealed truth, and adopted a theory of man’s nature which, by making man deathless independent of Christ, renders “the resurrection of life” unnecessary and unreasonable, they cannot escape sharing largely the responsibility of modern spiritual infidelity. Spiritualism flows from the doctrine of natural immortality, as naturally as a stream flows from its fountain. Overthrow one of the main pillars of the temple of truth, and all must go to destruction together. Do away with the reality of either sin, death, atonement, righteousness, coming of Christ, judgment, resurrection, life, or future punishment, and the whole structure of revealed truth is endangered, and will be rejected by those who follow out the position to its logical sequence. Proclaim man immortal, independent of redemption through Christ and the resurrection from the dead, and you virtually destroy the main pillars of Christian doctrine. And if thinking men are led into infidelity by justly reasoning from premises furnished by professed believers in revelation, these must bear a heavy responsibility. Let the simple, intelligible story of man’s creation and fall, and the death-penalty incurred, be taught; and then the plan of redemption through a bodily Saviour literally dying upon the cross, rising from the dead, ascending to Heaven in the sight of his disciples, and leaving the promise that he would return in a like visible manner; that then the dead in the graves being awakened shall come forth, they that have done good, to the resurrection of life, and they that have done evil, to the resurrection of condemnation to the second death; and all is plain and harmonious, and no occasion is given for infidelity to object to the scheme on account of its inconsistency. Every part is consistent with all the rest; no chance is left to reason it away; and all that the learned can do against it, is to repeat the objection of the Grecian philosophers by calling it “foolishness.” But the popular theology, by granting man immortality independent of the body and of the plan of redemption, puts a weapon into the hands of infidelity, and furnishes a seemingly plausible reason for rejecting the great characteristic doctrines of the gospel. The weapon is powerful against said theology, but falls harmlessly at the feet of Heaven-revealed truth. But how many souls will perish in the battle, by means of the aid and comfort thus given to the enemy by the professed friends of the truth, and upon whom the blood of these souls will be found, the judgment alone will reveal. A heavy responsibility rests on those who have knowingly and willfully aided in this work of mutilating and marring the beauty of revealed truth, thus bringing it into disrepute and driving men into infidelity. Pride of self, the applause of men, a standing in some sect, and lusty bribes in the form of salaries, are some of the strong motives that have introduced and perpetuated these hideous perversions of the word of God. Multitudes however receive by tradition these errors as the pure teachings of the word of God. They may learn their falsity by a careful study of the Bible. It is a matter of fearful moment to traduce the character of the Almighty. If we make sin a small thing and mitigate the terrors of his fearful threatenings against it, we do this. Many are guilty of this in their teaching, and are thus deceiving their fellowmen; but many more, though holding outwardly the doctrine of endless torment, are deceiving themselves with the secret persuasion that it will not be so terrible after all. They think that if punishment is infinite in duration, it must be moderate in severity; and indeed professed Christians have expressed the opinion that some poor sinners will be happier, or less miserable, in hell, than they were in this world. On the other hand, those who magnify the severity of God, representing him as a cruel, unmerciful tyrant, inflicting the severest torments of which men are capable, and increasing their capacity for suffering to glut his vengeance, and protracting its duration to eternity continually increasing in intensity—things which God has not spoken—are guilty of a libel against God, which traduces his character and renders his name odious to those whose sense of justice cannot be compelled to admit its propriety. All this is the result of the false doctrine of the immortality of the soul, which taken in connection with the teaching of the Bible, makes it necessary that the misery of the lost should be eternal in duration. Admitting the doctrine of the soul’s separate existence and immortality, it is more reasonable to believe that the body will never be raised from the dust. In this, Spiritualists are more consistent than Christians. But these are forced into this inconsistency by the express teaching of the resurrection in the Bible. With them, though the soul is capable of happiness or misery independent of the body, yet the vengeance of God is not satisfied with its endless misery alone, but the inanimate dust must be made alive and immortal for the express purpose of inflicting upon it eternal pain; as if the endless torture of the “naked soul” was not sufficient. Another inconsistency of the immortal-soul theory, is seen when you place the penalty of eternal misery by the side of a vicarious atonement. Christ did not suffer eternal misery, but a terrible and painful death, when he “bore our sins in his own body on the tree.” And learned divines have puzzled their brains with the question, how Christ could undergo, in a few hours, an amount of suffering equal to the endless misery of the damned in the fiercest flames of hell. The only solution of the question is to be found in the infinite power of the Father to condense the sufferings, and the divine nature of the Son to endure it. Drop the immortality of the soul from the creed, and let death be the wages of sin, and the difficulty vanishes and all is clear to the comprehension of a child. Our lives were forfeited by sin; but “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.” But I am protracting this writing beyond my intention. I wished merely to show the process by which infidels are made, and this from their own published method of reasoning; and also to call attention to the overwhelming responsibility resting upon those who so inconsistently mix up the first and favorite doctrine of the Devil—“thou shalt not surely die”—with the word of God, and pass off this poisonous mixture as the “unadulterated milk of the word.” It is not a small and harmless thing thus to aid the enemy of mankind in bringing the word of God into disrepute and making infidels of our race. And if what I have said shall separate and vindicate the truth of God from the errors of the wicked, in the minds of any, and shall save any from infidelity, or from causing others to stumble into infidelity, my prayer to God will be answered and my object attained.