p. 322 | Love and Hell-Fire by Lyman Abbott

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · May 29, 1884

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 10, No. 21.

Love and Hell-Fire.

By Lyman Abbott

If I believe in the hopeless doom of incorrigible sin, and also in the undimmed glory of a perfected kingdom, I must believe in the annihilation of the incorrigibly wicked. Fire, in the Bible, is generally an emblem of destruction, not of torment. The chaff, the tares, the fruitless tree, are not to be tortured, but to be destroyed. The hell-fire spoken of in the New Testament is the fire of Gehenna, kept burning outside the walls of Jerusalem, to destroy the offal of the city; here was the worm that dieth not, and the fire that is not quenched; emblems of destruction, not of torment. I find nothing in the New Testament to warrant the terrible opinion that God sustains the life of his creatures throughout eternity, only that they may continue in sin and misery. That immortality is the gift of God through our Lord Jesus Christ; that man is mortal, and must put on immortality; that only he can put it on who becomes, through Christ, a partaker of the divine nature, and so an inheritor of him "who only hath immortality;" that eternal life is life eternal, and eternal death is death eternal, and everlasting destruction is destruction without remedy,—this is the most natural, as it is the simplest reading of the New Testament.—Lyman Abbott.