The Doctrine of Endless Torment Not Essential to the Maintenance of Religion.
We referred to the philosophy of human nature and affirmed that it lent no countenance to the objection of our friends, that the doctrine of infinite terror was indispensable to the maintenance of religion; that if it were abandoned for the theory of ultimate destruction, men would thereby be encouraged to persist in sin; and that nothing less than the fear of infinite misery would suffice as an adequate motive. Now, not to press the fact that human governments have uniformly found crime to rise in amount and aggravation in proportion to the severity of the punishment, and to diminish in proportion as the penalty has accorded with the universal sense of justice, I content myself with asking on what known principle of our nature a man will be more thoroughly and beneficially affected by an indefinite amount of punishment, which he therefore cannot realize, if that which is more level to his apprehension, and more consonant with his sense of justice, is utterly powerless. On what principle would a man be deterred from any course by the threat of a million years of misery, if he laughed to scorn the threat of a thousand years of punishment? In reference to the hitherto untried, we must be affected to a great extent through the imagination. And that which can be somewhat comprehended and realized, will inevitably be more powerful than that which no effort can avail to grasp. The definite will prevail more than the indefinite. And if we dared to imagine such a thing, as that it were left to us to represent such future punishment for the impenitent as we deemed most likely to affect them beneficially, I, for one, should represent the sinner who would not return to God, and who therefore could answer no end by his continued existence, as blotted out of being by a solemn and judicial act, in sight of numberless spectators, who would thereby learn what an evil and bitter thing is sin, and how God will by no means clear the guilty. And this, if I mistake not, would prevail more than the scheme of never-ending misery, for these two reasons already suggested; namely, First, That it could be more thoroughly realized, and so would more powerfully affect the mind; and secondly, and chiefly, Inasmuch as the sinner would in the deep recesses of his conscience feel it to be just, and so, instead of being additionally hardened against God, would be the more ready to embrace his message, and seek to love him with all his heart. On this part of our subject, the reader perhaps may be pleased with an extract from the valuable work of the late Abraham Tucker:— “Let us suppose, then, we could know for certain that the duration of future punishment were precisely one thousand years; what encouragement could this give to the sinner? Is not this length far greater than that of any enjoyment he can expect to get by sinning? Let him consider what it is to pass a day, a week, a month, in exquisite tortures, and he will soon find a less time than that we have specified sufficient to discourage him effectually from running the hazard. Suppose a wicked man talked to by the parson of the parish, who terrifies him with the dread of everlasting flames into the resolution of amendment. You come in afterwards and bid him not mind the parson, for you know better than all of them put together, and can assure him there is no such thing as everlasting flames. Ay, says the man, I am heartily glad of that, for then I may take my pleasure without fear of an after-reckoning. No, you say, I cannot engage for so much either; you must expect to smart, but it will be but for a while, only a thousand years, and all will be well again. What comfort could this give him? Must it not rather damp his spirits, and the naming so vast a length increase his terrors more than the limitation to that term abate them? “For both choice and evidence have their certain weight to render them complete; while below this pitch, you may increase them by adding to the weights; but when once arrived at it, all further audition is superfluous. For in moral arithmetic, as observed before under the article of pleasure, the same rules do not hold good as in the common; nor does two and two always make four. If I hear an unlikely fact related by somebody I know little of, I shall not heed him much; if another confirms what he said, I may begin to doubt; two or three more agreeing in the same story may make me think it probable; but if twenty persons of approved honor and veracity assert it upon their own knowledge, I should give an unreserved assent, nor could I do more though a hundred of the same character were to come in. So were a man offered a long life of pleasure for a month's future sufferings, perhaps he might be stout enough to accept the condition; were they increased to a year, he might hesitate; but were they multiplied to a thousand years, he could not delay his choice a moment, if he had any consideration at all. Where demonstration will not convince, nor things beyond all comparison determine the choice, it proves an insensibility in the mind which no further outward application can cure. If those who hear not Moses and the prophets would not believe though one rose from the dead, neither would he that is not touched with a thousand years of severest punishment be moved with an eternity. For it is plain the present wholly engrosses his imagination; he has no regard for the future, and you may as well make a blind man see by lighting more candles; or a mortified limb, that has utterly lost its sensation, feel by laying on more stripes, as affect him by any future sufferings whatsoever. “Therefore since a mind that has any feeling of futurity will be filled with as much terror by the length above specified as it is capable of receiving. you cannot lessen the discouragement by paring off what lies beyond; and one that has no sense of anything further than this present life, will not be affected by all you can say concerning a hereafter; so you cannot lessen the discouragement where there was none. Besides, for a man to pretend he should have paid a due regard to his future state if I had not persuaded him it was finite, would be contradicting himself in the same breath, for why does he make nothing of a limited term unless because he conceives it fifty or threescore years distant? How absurd then is it to tell me he sets no value on a reversion after threescore years, yet should value one extremely after a thousand years? He that makes this excuse either is not in earnest or deceives himself egregiously, and only catches hold of a specious argument to cover his thorough attachment to present pleasures. “After all that has been suggested, if any considerate person should happen to come into my notion upon this article, I think he could not be induced thereby to become a whit the less careful of his future concerns; and for the inconsiderate, they are not likely to meddle with my speculations. But if any of them should be hurt, it may be attributed to the common practice of expatiating, with all the powers of oratory, upon the word eternal, which carries a tacit implication that if punishment were not eternal, it wou'd not be worth minding. This seems to be inuring men never to stir unless upon the strongest inducement; perhaps it might be more expedient to bring them into a habit of answering the gentlest call of judgment. It has been remarked that a trader never grows rich who despises little gains; and it might as justly be said, that a man never grows happy or prudent who despises little advantages, although large enough to be visible. The mind has been often compared to a fine balance, and we know the excellence of a balance lies in its turning with a hair; so the excellence of judgment lies in discerning the minutest difference, and the excellence of disposition, in pursuing measures readily upon view of the slightest preference.”—The Light of Nature Pursued, &c., vol. i, pp. 653, 654. But we pass on to consider another objection already hinted at, namely, That the idea of a literal destruction being the doom of the impenitent, has an untoward aspect on the doctrine of atonement. Thus writes the Eclectic Reviewer:— “The salvation of the soul is the object and result of the redemption which is in Christ Jesus. The expiatory offering of the Son of God is a mystery at least as great as any involved in the doctrine of eternal punishment; and the awe which a serious contemplation of it is adapted to produce passes into actual pain unless we take some grand and awful view of the object which was to be effected by it. To think of the eternal Father slaying his well-beloved Son for any purpose is amazing; but to think of his doing so for a slight one is altogether appalling and impossible. The immortality of the soul stands in the fullest harmony with the vastness of the price that was paid for its redemption, and the eternity of future punishment with the infinite costliness of the ransom. It would afford a devout heart little satisfaction to adopt a view which would represent the Most Blessed as tender to his rebellious creatures, at the cost of representing him as cruel to his Son.” Let me be pardoned by the writer if I say that I read this with deep and painful regret. The unutterably glorious fact of an adequate expiation for human guilt, by the mysterious sacrifice of our adorable Redeemer, is ever to be spoken of with reverent lips. And the idea of God's being represented as “cruel to his Son,” unless all sinners are kept alive through eternity to be tormented, does strike me as unutterably painful. Will my esteemed friend then peril the prime doctrine of atonement, by resting it on this solid basis? Is the atonement of Christ worthless unless the eternity of hell torment is a reality? And is the voluntary death of the Saviour, who is somewhat unhappily designated as “slaying his beloved Son,” an act of cruelty? If the incorrigible are destroyed, notwithstanding “a great multitude which no man can number,” “having washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb,” spend a joyous eternity in Heaven as the glorious reward of his mediatorial undertaking? Must the ears of the compassionate Redeemer drink in, not merely the songs of the saved, but also the groans of the impenitent, through eternal ages, in order that he may not resent his former ignominy as an act of cruelty on the part of the Father? I tremble at the thought. For if I must express my regret at the strain, which, though I am sure it was well intended, will be acknowledged to be most unhappy, I may also deplore that the writer should have allowed himself to build the fortification of his own position with what, in any less honorable opponent, one would have called the wood, hay, and stubble of misrepresentation. I allude to his exhibiting “the Almighty Father as slaying his beloved Son” for “a slight purpose,” if our view be correct; that is, if it were only to save innumerable millions of sinners from destruction, and endow them with immortality, and raise them to Heaven, and make them, in some bright and glorious spheres of action, kings and priests unto God, rendering them growingly happy as the ages of eternity roll on, so that Christ is everlastingly glorified in them, and the eye of paternal Deity rests on them with ineffable complacency and love. All this is accomplished by our blessed Saviour, “whom having not seen we love, in whom though now we see him not, yet believing we rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.” But unless it were unending misery that was originally threatened to man, and unless this be the portion of the lost still, “it was a slight purpose,” says the Reviewer, for which the Mediator died! Let me remind the reader that, when we believe the fact of an atonement for sin, we believe it, not because we have first of all reasoned out the propriety of such an amazing procedure in the government of God, but because it is revealed. The Scriptures, which we know to be from God, affirm it, to our apprehension, with unmistakable plainness. And as nothing can ever set aside a fact, all reasoning against facts being absurd, nothing else that we find in Scripture will shake our confidence in this. And as all facts lie quietly side by side with one another, so, whatever be the fact touching the final destiny of the incorrigible, it cannot in the faintest degree affect the previously ascertained fact of an atonement. And as a guilty sinner, humbly basing my hope of Heaven on the merits of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, I grieve at such a dangerous doctrine as that which I regret being thus called to notice. And I beseech my beloved brethren to beware how they snatch up weapons which a common enemy would take from their hands and employ against us both. Let us keep close to the word, and hold fast all facts, whether we can harmonize them or not. Let us not forget, as humble, child-like disciples, that our duty is emphatically “the obedience of faith.”—D. M. Canright, in Future Punishment.