It is perhaps best, before passing to an examination of particular texts concerning the soul, to bestow a comment or two on a few of the common extra-Biblical arguments for natural immortality, with especial reference to their bearing upon the great questions of character and sin. We shall do this briefly without transgressing our intention of avoiding the metaphysical.
1. In the past we have dealt with a contention for inherent immortality based upon a fact (the dignity of man) which is urged under various phases, only one of which we have given. But we have seen that whatever the inferences derived from this fact, they lose their force when the character of the beings God had in mind in creation, the kind of persons He intended to perpetuate, fails to be found in sinful men.
It is urged that to say man ends in extinction argues a waste of energy not to be supposed of God. This might have some weight when applied to the whole race, regardless of character, and of free will as a necessary gift to creatures from whom God would receive honor; but it is of no value against the destruction of the sinner who perversely refuses to fulfil the divine purpose.
The eternal purpose requires holiness, righteousness. This is the one eternal, immortal thing. The grave could not hold a sinless Saviour. But holiness is not inevitable in creatures of free will. Hence some may perish—must perish. And that many would refuse holiness and therefore must be rejected, with an apparent waste of energy, before His sovereign purpose of saving “all Israel” (Rom. 11:26), “the Israel of God” (Gal. 6:16)—not literal Israel—could be accomplished, He thus announced to the mother of the race and through her to her daughters: “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception.” Gen. 3:16. Thus sin is found to occasion all the apparent waste of energy. Nor does this prove that God is not absolute; for His purpose is conditioned by sin through His forbearance and permission, not of necessity. But as this involves both a problem of metaphysics and a different line of thought, we shall not pursue it. The fate of the disobedient must be learned from Scripture itself. Science and philosophy shed no light upon this problem; but since science itself is placing unbounded confidence in the “survival of the fittest,” and the fittest in God’s purpose are those that fulfil it, the inference would certainly be against unfit souls.
2. Another argument for natural immortality is drawn from the incompleteness of life.
Must all our longings and aspirations, it is asked, have nowhere their fruition? Is man born only to be tantalized with a mirage? Are these hopes and desires correlated to nothing in the universe? The eye pre-supposes light, the ear sound, the nerves objects of sensation, the instinct of love an object to love; but are the organic impulses of the human soul the only class of facts having no correlative? Can it be that man has been endowed with reason, only that he may the more keenly realize the meaning of disappointment? Is the broken shaft of marble, so often seen in our graveyards, a true symbol of life in its entirety? Was the innocent babe that burned to death in the explosion of a gasoline stove, born only for that?
“The existence of an organic or constitutional instinct,” science says, “is adequate proof of its correlative. Therefore the instinctive desire for a complete life, which can never be fully realized in this state of being, proves the future life.”
We admit with thanks to God the feeble light of this reasoning! We would that it were a demonstration of the future life! But natural present immortality for good and bad alike, is a very different thing from a future life not necessarily begun at, nor continuing in death, but which may begin a million years after mortal dissolution; a future life confined to those that are “Complete in Him” (Col. 2:10), that is, to the righteous. No, no; the possibility, or, rather, the certainty, praise the Lord! of a future life beginning after the resurrection, based upon righteousness in this state of existence, is a totally different thing from a soul-life of righteous and wicked alike, beginning with birth, first connected with a mortal body; second, existing independent of any sort of a body; and third, re-united to an immortal body.
Let it be emphasized that future immortality, commencing at the resurrection, founded on character, meets perfectly every requirement of the argument drawn from the incompleteness of life. Indeed, the person who talks of a complete realization of every instinct and aspiration without righteousness, is neither a psychologist, moral scientist, nor philosopher; for he disregards the fact that aspirations after holiness, after mastery of self, after freedom from bondage to habit, a longing for peace of conscience, for certainty of knowledge concerning life’s meaning and the destiny of man, and the instinct of prayer, are as truly desires of the soul as others mentioned above.
Immortality and Sin.
But this failure of natural immortality to reckon with character, is the negative side of the case. Let us view the positive bearing of this well-nigh universal hypothesis upon the estimate it places on sin. If it condemns sin, there may be good in it; if it ignores, minimizes, depreciates, its desperate nature, we may be sure the subtle snare of the devil is hidden there. It is when we focus upon this phase that the insidious nature of the belief becomes apparent. It is perhaps nothing more than might be expected that the mind of the carnal philosopher, too full of pride of self to admit his necessity of a Saviour’s deliverance from sin, should fail to notice this side of the question, evident and decisive as it is.
When Achilles was dipped in the river Styx to render him invulnerable, he was held by the heel, the Achilles tendon. Hence that part, being untouched by the magic waters, was still unprotected against the mortal stroke. To my mind every argument for universal conscious soul-continuance in and after death, possesses this vulnerable heel. More than this, as the fangs of a wolf would betray him, tho clad in the skin of a sheep, so in each of these plausible reasonings there lies, not quite4concealed, the glitter of the serpent’s cunning logic. Every argument for inherent immortality ignores the fact and consequences of sin. This puts the devil’s trade-mark upon every invention of the sort.
If all men are alike immortal, then sin does not affect that fact in any way; it can not possibly hinder them from being immortal. According to this belief, soul-perpetuity is in no manner dependent on sin or righteousness. None of the arguments for natural immortality dare mention sin; while some positively require, in order to have any force in that direction, that the fact of sin go absolutely for nothing.
Take, for instance, the inference of immortality from the incompleteness of life.
If the incompleteness of this life argues the conscious soul-continuance of all persons, it can do so only with the implied conclusion that all shall become complete in the future life. If all there realize in their experience that completeness for which the life is given, then sin in this life can not possibly hinder them from attaining all their aspirations, can not possibly frustrate them in the next. Hence how one lives here is a matter wholly indifferent. This savors of the pit; for such reasoning positively requires that unrighteousness, with all its hideous deformity, be ignored as a factor of any consequence in the life to come.
Immortality and Eternal Torment:
Natural immortality, when coupled with eternal torment, makes God a fiend. The result is atheism, infidelity, agnosticism, skepticism. Immortality without conscious eternal punishment is practical Universalism. Either way, the devil has the case. It is, “Head up, I win; tail up, you lose,” and the master trickster flips the penny.
But we are not yet done with the tendency of this doctrine. If the devil can lead a man to believe that the Creator will not destroy, annihilate if you please, the work of His hands for any reason, his Satanic subtlety will shortly lead that same man to doubt that God would do what is infinitely more fearful, namely, torture him eternally. Few minds, no matter what they think they believe, actually do hold that a Being of infinite love can take pleasure in insatiable hatred. Few minds are acute enough to see how darkness and light can occupy the same space at the same time, or understand how freezing can melt a substance. Likewise, few minds can grasp the paradox of a God of boundless benevolence eternally tormenting a victim whom His irrevocable decree has made incapable of repentance. The enormous disproportion between just one unforgiven sin,—sufficient to entail (according to popular orthodoxy) an ever-enduring anguish in the Gehenna of sulphurous flame,—or even between several years of a sinful lifetime, and never-ending woe, an eternity of excruciating agony, is too monstrous for common sense to span or ignore.
The pleasure some persons find in gloating over the miseries of the damned seems to us more truly diabolic than divine. The scope of these articles will not permit us the ecstasy of paralyzing the fears of sinners with the terrors of ghastly clippings we have on this subject from orthodox sources. Our Catholic brethren may get large, copious doses of this brain-palsying dogma from almost any of their regularly ordained spiritual doctors, saying nothing of the poetry of Dante. Protestants who wish to revel in horrors so hideous that the gaping jaws of the tiger, which finally kills its prey (and the tortures of inquisitors and savages are symbols of benevolence compared with them), may read Jonathan Edwards on the state of the lost and Michael Wigglesworth’s “Day of Doom,” from the latter of which the following verses are reproduced from memory:—
“With iron bands they bind their hands
And cursed feet together,
And cast them all, both great and small,
Into that lake forever.”
“Where day and night, without respite,
They wail and cry and howl,
For torturing pain which they sustain
In body and in soul.”
He is never weary of impressing the fact that eternally “their torment’s smoke ascendeth,” and “their torment never endeth,” and—
“Live they must, while God is just,
That He may plague them so.”
Doubtless little children that are made to stand forever on white-hot griddles should be very thankful for the fact that they are not roasted all over.
It has been estimated by a German scientist that it takes about 20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (twenty sextillion) atoms of hydrogen to make a grain, a grain being less than an ounce. All the water of the globe is two-thirds hydrogen. Let us remember that when from the endless punishment of the lost there have been counted off as many years as there are atoms of hydrogen in the waters of the earth, eternity has scarcely begun to dawn. And still the wretched creatures of God’s handiwork languish on and on without hope of any amelioration of their condition, still blaspheming High Heaven who has made them incapable of repenting; while saints, angels, and the King of kings look over the battlements of the celestial city, and regale themselves with the delightful spectacle! And all this the work of One whom we must worship as the personification of love. But enough. I know not what baseness of spirit, what sycophancy of action, what hypocrisy of service, the reality of suffering might beget in me; but certain I am, when left free to judge, that I would rather bear the stigma of atheism in this life and blister in hell in the next, than degrade and stultify the dignity of reason and manhood by bowing in adoration before a monster like that! If the tender minds of children could grasp in its entirety this fearful doctrine, and the alternative of worshiping such a fiend, they would go stark mad, as some have gone. The results in the minds of older persons who get a slightly broader view is, that they tacitly repudiate or mollify this condition of the unsaved. Those that reject it adopt some form of Universalism or become infidels. Those that soften the state of the lost, either accept purgatory with an ultimate exit, or something very much less than literal fire. Rather than impartially and candidly search the Bible to see what it actually does teach, they will discard all, or a large part, of what they think it teaches; but hang they must, at all events, to the evil, illogical, unphilosophical, unscriptural doctrine of natural immortality.
The result of all this on the sinner is, that when he sees pretended believers disbelieving their own standard of doctrine, interpreting it in spiritual ways, toning it down to appeal to common sense, he concludes that either revelation is a very dim and uncertain light, or that after all sin and iniquity can not be so very bad. So sin itself is lightly esteemed.
“Son of man, prophesy against the prophets of Israel that prophesy, and say thou unto them that prophesy out of their own hearts, Hear ye the Word of the Lord: Thus saith the Lord God, Woe unto the foolish prophets, that follow their own spirit, and have seen nothing! . . . They have seen vanity and lying divination, saying, The Lord saith; and the Lord hath not sent them; and they have made others to hope that they would confirm the word.” Eze. 13:2, 3, 6.
It can thus be seen that the whole tendency of the immortal-soul idea is to depreciate the sinfulness of sin. Its most probable consequence to those who try to form some idea of the future consistent with this theory is belief in such a one as is taught by Spiritualists; namely, that the after-life consists of all grades of morality, each individual gravitating naturally to his own sphere, no other punishment involved, and capable of progression to higher spheres. If this doctrine does not reveal the stamp and finger-touches of the old arch-enemy of God and righteousness, it would be difficult for me to find any teaching that does.
If there is anything taught in the Word of God; if there is any meaning to the Gospel; if the infinite gift of the Son of God has any significance; then character in man is the very purpose of creation and redemption. If not, why was the very first command a prohibition against sinning?
But we have before indicated this line of study, and therefore we shall not enlarge upon it here.
[The next article, No. 6 of the series, is entitled, “The Necessity of a Revelation.”]
