DEGREES IN PUNISHMENT by H. P.

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 2, 1879

DEGREES IN PUNISHMENT.

By H. P.

The following from the Congregationalist was copied into the Chicago Advance of Aug. 29, as the Congregationalist’s theory of the annihilation of the wicked: “It implies and necessitates a wrong in the treatment of unrepentant men so outrageous as to be a libel upon the divine justice, that simply proposes to have all who are bad treated alike, not merely, but all who are not positively good treated alike. The young man whom the Saviour loved, and who lacked only the one thing needful, and Judas who by transgression fell; the tender girl of pure life and gentle affections who still rejects the Saviour, and dies in that rejection, and the most hardened, bloody, and loathsome scoundrel and villain whose dying ever disinfected earth, it serves alike. One event happeneth to them all. They die, and sleep—together sleep—the sleep that knows no waking. And he who owes a farthing is made as much an everlasting bankrupt as he who owes millions of pounds. ‘Doth God pervert judgment? or doth the Almighty pervert justice?’”

These editors seem to think that any limitation of the duration of punishment in a future state would shut up God to the necessity of having the existence of all cease at the same time. It does not seem to occur to them that God could have life and punishment continue one year, or for any period of time which might be necessary to vindicate law and satisfy divine justice; or else they believe our kind Heavenly Father could not be satisfied short of an eternity of torture such as a finite mind can have no conception of.

But they propose no plan of punishing those interesting “almost Christians,” although they denounce what they term “annihilation” as “necessitating a wrong in the treatment of unrepentant men so outrageous as to be a libel on divine justice.” No alternative is left for “that young man whom Jesus loved, and the tender girl of pure life and gentle affections who still rejects the Saviour,” but to suffer eternally with the obnoxious characters described. Admitting the future place of punishment to be a lake of liquid fire, and that young man and girl to be as well protected from fire as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were in the fiery furnace, to spend eternity in such company would be intolerable punishment. If all impenitent sinners must suffer eternally, how are the less guilty to “be beaten with few stripes”? And how is every one to be judged and punished according to his works? H. P.