Being a Selection of Brief Testimonies on Man’s Present Condition, the Intermediate State, Future Punishment, &c., from the Pens of Reputable Authors.
GEN. ii, 17. "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." LocKE, the great Mental Philosopher and Christian, says: "It seems a STRANGE way of understanding a law which requires the plainest and directest words, that by death, should be meant eternal life IN MISERY." OLSHAUSER, in his comments on 1 Cor. xv, 19, "If in this life only we have hope in Christ," &c., says, "The doctrine of the IMMORTALITY of the SOUL, and the name, are alike unknown to the ENTIRE BIBLE." And in explaining Luke xvi, 24–26, he also states: "The Bible knows not either the expression, ' Immortality of the soul,' (God is he 'who alone hath immortality,' 1 Tim. vi, 16), or the modern doctrine of immortality." Eld. J. BLAIN, Baptist minister of Buffalo, makes use of the following sarcastic paragraph: "It is a notorious fact that in our theological works a nondescript dictionary is made with definitions, as follows: To be dead, means to be more conscious. To die, is to live on in woe. To lose life, is to preserve a miserable existence. Life means happiness. To burn up is to make a living salamander. To destroy, is to preserve whole. To devour, perish, consume, &c., mean to make indestructible and immortal. Not to be, to be without end!" BISHOP NEWTON, the noted writer on the prophecies, justly remarks: "Nothing can be more CONTRARY to the divine nature and attributes, than for a God all-wise, all-good, all-powerful, all-perfect, to bestow existence on any being whose destiny he foresees and foreknows, must terminate in wretchedness and misery, without recovery or remedy, without respite or end. God is love, and he would rather have not given life, than render that life a torment and curse to ALL ETERNITY. Imagine such a state of misery you may, but you can NEVER seriously believe it, nor reconcile it to God and goodness."—Newton’s Works, v. 6.131 In Siam a priest came to our missionary, and asked "how long his God tormented bad men in a future state," and when answered, "Forever," he replied, "Our god torments the worst of men only one thousand years, so we will not have your American God in Siam!" The doctrine is a barrier to the gospel to the heathen as well as to us. JUSTIN MARTYR, who was born A. D. 89, and suffered martyrdom for Christ A. D. 163, in his dialogue with Trypho, the Jew, says: "Should you happen upon some who are called Christians, . . . and say there is no resurrection of the dead, but instantly when they die are received up into heaven, do not count these among Christians." It is said, "The terror of eternal woe is greater than that of destruction, and so more salutary." This might be partly true if men believed it; but in our day it affects sinners just as a child ten years old is affected by the parent’s saying, "Obey, or I’ll cut your head off!" It is the certainty and justness, and not the severity of threatened punishment which is salutary. This great Reformer, "Defense, Prop. 27," says: "I permit the pope to make articles of faith for himself and his faithful, such as, the pope is emperor of the world, and the king of heaven, and God upon earth, (that) the soul is IMMORTAL, with all those monstrous opinions found in the Roman dung-hill of decretals!" Audlin, in his "Life of Luther," speaking of Italian reformers, says: "They left Wittemburg and went to Geneva, where we find them in 1561, sustaining in a crowded school and in printed theses, that all which was said about the immortality of the soul was invented by anti-christ, for the purpose of making the pope's pot boil!" This great man and translator of the Bible, while writing to Sir Thomas Moore, a Catholic, says: "In putting departed souls in heaven, hell, and purgatory, you destroy the argument wherewith Christ and Paul prove the resurrection. . . . If the souls be in heaven, tell me why they be not in as good case as the angels be? And then what cause is there of the resurrection?" Mr. DARBY, in his "Hopes of the Church," frankly admits what many others now begin to see. He says: "We would express our conviction that the immortality of the soul HAS NO SOURCE IN THE GOSPEL: that it comes, on the contrary, from the Platonists. . . . The immortality of the soul came in to replace that of the resurrection." Says ELD. BLAIN, "Death not Life," p. 114: "An old Baptist minister lately told me it would be impossible to convert sinners by preaching destruction!" This is the same as saying, We must preach error for fear God will not, or cannot, bless the truth; and so join hands with the heathen, who go on the principle of doing evil that good may come! Dr. McCULLOH, an author of Baltimore, says: "There is no word in the Hebrew language that signifies either soul or spirit in the technical sense in which we use the terms, as implying something distinct from the body."—Credibility of the Scriptures, vol ii, pp. 466–8. The doctrine of eternal woe has a pernicious effect even upon children. This is well illustrated by the following authentic fact: Said a pious minister, "The first I ever heard of a God was by my mother’s telling me when two years old, that there was a God, and if I was bad he would burn me forever in such a fire as I saw on the hearth. My reply was, 'If God does so, he is a bad man!' I grew up an infidel, and remained so till converted by those who preached destruction." The Am. Tract Society published a tract, No. 277, by REV. JAMES SAURIN, which says: "The wicked (in the fire of hell) utter as many blasphemies AGAINST God as the happy souls in heaven shout HALLELUJAHS to his PRAISE!" To such teaching we answer in the words of the prophet: "Wo to them that utter error against the Lord," "Wo unto them that put darkness for light," "Wo unto the blind guides." Give us the "mind of the Spirit," if it tears every creed in christendom to atoms. It is contended by the advocates of endless woe, that "the eternal sufferings of the lost will give the intelligent creation, as a whole, a higher knowledge and ENJOYMENT of God." That is, "The woes of some will make others happy." So teaches DR. BEECHER. To this slanderous sentiment the REV. S. COBв retorts: "Now be it known that I, Sylvanus Cobb, will consent, and even petition to be permitted to forego that extra share of happiness which was to be added to me by the infinite sufferings of my brothers and sisters, and so put up with that moderate degree of happiness which I may enjoy in the divine love and grace in common with all, for the sake of having them too, reformed and blessed." This sarcastic reviewer adds, we should "have a unanimous petition from the righteous to be disencumbered of that enormous surfeit of ENJOYMENT which should be derived from the endless misery of others!" Speaking of the miseries of the lost, MR. BENSON, the commentator, says: "God will exert all his divine attributes to make them as wretched as the capacity of their natures will admit." The "Rev." Mr. VINCENT adds: "The wicked will always be roaring and never breathe out the last; always sinking and never come to the bottom; always burning in the flames and never be consumed; the eternity of hell will be the hell of hell!" And PRES. FINNEY of Oberlin outdoes them all, by saying "this torment will eternally INCREASE!" May we not suppose with MR. JOHN FOSTER of England, "that if so trandcendently DREADFUL a doctrine had been meant to be taught, there would have been such forms of propositions as to render all doubt a palpable absurdity." But the devotees of this doctrine may find relief in the remarks of PROF. STUART. He says: "Perhaps God may in mercy extinguish our social susceptibilities in heaven! The great and godly DR. VINET once sagaciously observed, that "Even now after eighteen centuries of Christianity, we are very probably involved in some ENORMOUS ERROR, of which Christianity will at some future time make us ashamed." The doctrine of endless woe is just such an "enormous error," and many in the churches are beginning to be ashamed of it. MR. PANTON HAM, of Bristol England, in writing of the Immortality of the Soul, says: "Let it be registered as the genuine genealogy, that Pagan Plato was its father, and the profligate Pope Leo its foster-father. Born and bred by the Pagan philosophy, the protege of Popery, this notion of the soul’s immortality has become a pet dogma of popular Protestantism, which with a strange forgetfulness of its low lineage, openly declares it to be the honorable offspring of a true orthodoxy!" WHERE THE JEWS GOT THE DOCTRINE OF THE SOUL'S IMMORTALITY.
DR. GEO. CAMPBELL, in a criticism on the word hades, in the Appendix to his translation of the gospels, says: "Before the captivity, and the Macedonian and Roman conquests, the Jews observed the most profound silence upon the state of the dead, as to their happiness or misery. They spoke of it simply as a state of silence, darkness, and inactivity. But after the Hebrews mingled with the Greeks and Romans, they insensibly slided into their use of terms, and adopted some of their ideas on such subjects as those on which their Oracles were silent." Here is a valuable historic testimony concerning the former dispensation. Said Christ to his followers, "Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees." "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." This passage is clung to with much tenacity by those who believe in the popular theory of the soul. We are glad, however, to note the following concessions from the pens of those who hold the common view: Dr. BAGNALL, a writer in the Methodist Quarterly Review for April, 1852, makes the following frank admission on this text, though his article is an effort to prove the soul's immortality. The Dr. says: "Some have supposed that the account of the creation of the soul, Gen. ii, 7, contains an intimation of its immortality. If there be in this verse such an intimation, it must be found either in the expression, 'the Lord God . . . breathed into his nostrils,' or in the phrases, 'breath of life,' and 'man became a living soul.' If it be in the former phrase, then the idea is that God infused a portion of HIMSELF, of his own divinity, into the human body at that time. But few will admit this idea. Most of us think there is more poetry than truth in the line of one of our hymns:
"'Our souls are his immortal breath.'
"If the proof is sought in the phrases, 'breath of life,' and, 'living soul,' these do not prove anything, for both of them are applied, in the first chapters of Genesis, to brutes, and prove the same things concerning them. Thus the words in Gen. vii, 18, and Gen. i, 20, rendered life, are the same with those rendered in Gen. ii, 7, 'a living soul.'" Says the Union Bible Dictionary (art. Adam): "It seems as if the most proper idea resulting from these words is, that Adam became a LIVING PERSON." The Columbian Bible, in a foot-note at the bottom of its mammoth page thus explains: "Adam became a living soul—that is, a living man." MR. KITTO, author of the Bible Cyclopedia, in speaking of those theologists who find an immortal soul in this text, thus frankly concedes: "We should be acting unfaithfully if we were to assume its being contained or implied in this passage." DICK'S VIEW OF ETERNAL SUFFERING.
DR. THOMAS DICK, in adverting to the doctrine of endless misery, thus candidly expresses his convictions: "When I consider the boundless nature of eternity, when I consider the limited duration of man, I can scarcely bring myself to believe that the sins of a few brief years are to be punished throughout a duration that HAS NO END." Thus wrote that distinguished Christian Philosopher, and thus, kind reader, do we believe. Is it strange that a certain divine who held to this awful doctrine should say, "It renders society tiresome, pleasure disgustful, nourishment insipid, and life itself a cruel bitter?" We trow not. THE TWO VIEWS CONTRASTED.
Some professed Christians (and for charity's sake, we say only those who have but superficially examined the subject) ask us, What matters it whether we believe in eternal misery, or not? Much every way; but especially would we be averse to any position which is derogatory to the character of God. We think, to use the language of another, that there is a vast difference between Jehovah's passing by and proclaiming, "The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity, and that will by no means clear the guilty,"—and the statement of some modern divine who "passes by" and virtually "proclaims," "The Lord, unmerciful, implacable, and who will preserve countless myriads of beings created in his own image, eternally, for the sole and only purpose of torturing them, without mercy, without intermission, without end, without object, and without aim." The doctrine of the destruction of the wicked speaks to us in these beatific words of Jehovah, but the revolting sentiment of eternal woe appears in the language of the other. "GOD IS LOVE," therefore we believe that sin and sinners will both ultimately cease to be.