WANTED—A LANGUAGE THAT MEANS SOMETHING.
We rise from the perusal of those works which are written to prove the eternal conscious suffering of the wicked, with a lively sense of the lack that still exists in the English language, and in all others, if their reasoning is correct. For it appears, if we admit their claims, that there are certain conceivable ideas in regard to the future condition of the wicked, which language, so far as at present written or spoken, has no terms to express. For instance, it can be conceived that the wicked might, after a limited period in the future, have no further life, that they might cease to exist, have no organization, no powers of body or mind, and nothing to constitute individuality or consciousness, any more than if they had never been created. The only terms which we have to express such ideas are to die, be destroyed, perish, be consumed, burnt up, devoured, cut off, rooted out of the land of the living, turned into ashes, be as though they had not been, &c. These terms are all used in reference to the wicked; yet we are gravely told that on such a subject they don’t convey any such ideas as above suggested, but, rather, that the wicked will live forever in the very midst of the most destructive agents known in the laboratory of nature. We have just been reading a little pamphlet by A. Campbell on Life and Death, which suggests the heading prefixed to these remarks. He admits that the terms, death, destruction, perdition, damnation, everlasting destruction, to be destroyed, to perish, &c., are all applied to the future condition of the wicked. Yet he coolly and deliberately goes to work to prove that all these words have in these cases the signification of continued existence, or, at least, that they sustain the idea of eternal conscious suffering. Now we would sincerely ask any writer of that school to tell us what terms God should have employed if he had really intended to convey the idea that the wicked would suffer an absolute extinction of personal being. Every term known to the English language, which could be used to express or imply such an idea, is applied in the Scriptures to the wicked. Yet Mr. Campbell takes them through all these, and brings them out alive and well; yes, so intensely alive, and with such tremendous powers of being, that they can endure hell’s hottest flames to all eternity. They have died; but lo! they are still alive. They have been burnt up root and branch; but that hasn’t effected anything; they are still all there. They have perished; but they still exist. They have consumed away into smoke; yet there they are, personal beings, as full in form and weight as before. They have been devoured; but the devourer has been thwarted, and they are still unchanged. They have “become as though they had not been”; but lo! they still have being as much as ever they had. The first part of all these propositions the Bible affirms; the last part theologians affirm. And this being the condition of this question, either the Bible or theology must back down, or we are still in want of a language that means something. The manner in which Mr. Campbell endeavors to defend his use of the terms perish, destroy, die, &c., strikes us as peculiarly unworthy a logician and a religious teacher. Concisely stated it is this: He takes one of these terms and says, “Let us see if it always and invariably has the sense of extinction of being. If it does not, then it does not mean that when applied to the future condition of the wicked.” Then finding a passage in which the word is used in a limited or figurative sense, he claims his point as established. Should this principle be adopted generally in the treatment of language, it would destroy all the utility of language; for it would be impossible for men to communicate their ideas intelligibly one to another. For instance, we hear that a friend is dead; but we find him only suffering severely (for to die, theologically, only means to be unhappy, to suffer); another took passage on the steamer, and was lost; but we find he only encountered a few storms, and had some unpleasant experiences on the journey; others we hear were caught in a prairie snow storm, lost their way and perished; but we find them all alive, only a little frost-bitten. Thus we never should know what to depend upon, nor what to understand from what was written. Why treat the word of God in this dishonorable manner? That there is a figurative use, not a figurative meaning, of these words, we know; but this must be determined by their literal use and by their fixed and determinate meaning. What idea could possibly be gathered from the expressions “dead to sin,” and “dead in trespasses and sins,” unless the word, dead, had a determinate meaning, and signified some fixed condition, from which, as a basis, a figurative use of the word could be derived. Whether a word is used figuratively or literally must be determined by the subject and the context. But there is nothing in God’s threatenings against sin and evil-doers to show that his language is to be taken in any other than its literal sense. Then let the believers in eternal misery tell us what terms should have been employed to express it, if the utter destruction of the wicked as personal conscious beings had been intended, before they longer contend that such a condition is not described by the terms already given us.