ESCHATOLOGY, DOCTRINE OF FINAL THINGS.

Neither the individual Christian character, nor the Christian or the church as a whole, attains its destined perfection in this life ( Romans 8:24).

This perfection is reached in the world to come ( 1 Corinthians 13:10).

As preparing the way for the kingdom of God in its completeness, certain events are to take place, such as death, Christ’s Second Coming, the resurrection of the body, the general judgment. As stages in the future condition of men, there is to be an intermediate and an ultimate state, both for the righteous and for the wicked. We discuss these events and states in what appears from Scripture to be the order of their occurrence. Romans 8:24 — “in hope were we saved: but hope that is seen is not hope: for who hopeth for that which he seeth?” 1 Corinthians 13:10 — “when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away.” Original sin is not wholly eradicated from the Christian and the Holy Spirit is not yet sole ruler. So too, the church is still in a state of conflict and victory is hereafter. But as the Christian life attains its completeness only in the future, so with the life of sin. Death begins here but culminates hereafter. James 1:15 — “the sin, when it is full grown, bringeth forth death.” The wicked man here has only a foretaste of “the wrath to come” ( Matthew 3:7). We may “lay up...treasures in heaven” ( Matthew 6:20), but we may also “treasure up for ourselves wrath” ( Romans 2:5). i .e., lay up treasures in hell.

Dorner: “To the actuality of the consummation of the church belongs a cessation of reproduction through which there is constantly renewed a world, which the church must subdue. The mutually external existence of spirit and nature must give way to a perfect internal existence. Their externality to each other is the ground of the mortality of the natural side and of its being a means of temptation to the spiritual side. For in this externality the natural side has still too great independence and exerts a determining power over the personality. Art, the beautiful, receives in the future state its special place for it is the way of art to delight in visible presentation, to achieve the classical and perfect with unfettered play of its powers. Every one morally perfect will thus wed the good to the beautiful. In the rest, there will be no inactivity and in the activity also, no unrest.”

Schleiermacher: “Eschatology is essentially prophetic and is therefore vague and indefinite, like all unfulfilled prophecy.” Schiller’s Thekla: “Every thought of beautiful, trustful seeming Stands fulfilled in Heaven’s eternal day; Shrink not then from erring and from dreaming, — Lofty sense lies oft in childish play.” Frances Power Cobbe, Peak of Darien, 265 — “Human nature is a ship with the tide out; when the tide of eternity comes in, we shall see the purpose of the ship.” Eschatology deals with the precursors of Christ’s Second Coming, as well as with the Second Coming itself. We are to labor for the coming of the kingdom of God in society as well as in the individual and in the church, in the present life as well as in the life to come.

Kidd, in his Principles of Western Civilization, says that survives which helps the greatest number. But the greatest number is always in the future.

The theatre has become too wide for the drama. Through the roof, the eternal stars appear. The image of God in man implies the equality of all men. Political equality implies universal suffrage; economic equality implies universal profit. Society has already transcended, first, isolation of the city, and secondly, isolation of the state. The United States presents thus far the largest free trade area in history. The next step is the unity of the English-speaking peoples. The days of separate nationalities are numbered. Laissez faire = surviving barbarism. There are signs of larger ideas in art, ethics, literature, philosophy, science, politics, economics and religion. Competition must be moralized, and must take into account the future as well as the present. See also Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis.

George B. Stevens, In Am. Jour. Theology, Oct. 1902:666-684, asks, “Is there a self-constituted New Testament Eschatology?” He answers, for substance, that only three things are sure. 1. The certain triumph of the kingdom. This being the kernel of truth in the doctrine of Christ’s second coming. 2. The victory of life over death. This is the truth of the doctrine of the resurrection. 3. The principle of judgment. The truth is at the basis of the belief in rewards and punishments in the world to come. This meager and abstract residuum argues denial in both the unity and the sufficiency of Scripture.

Our view of inspiration, while it does not assure us of minute details, does, notwithstanding, give us a broad general outline of the future consummation and guarantees its trustworthiness by the word of Christ and his apostles.

Faith, in that consummation, is the main incitement to poetic utterance and to lofty achievement. Shairp, Province of Poetry,28 — “If poetry be not a river fed from the clear wells that spring on the highest summits of humanity, but only a canal to drain off stagnant ditches from the flats, it may be a very useful sanitary contrivance but has not, in Bacon’s words, any participation of divineness.”’ Shakespeare uses prose, such as the merrymaking of clowns or the maundering of fools, for ideas detached from emotion. But lofty thought with him puts on poetry as its singing robe. Savage, Life beyond Death, 1-5 — “When Henry D. Thoreau lay dying at Concord, his friend Parker Pillsbury sat by his bedside. He leaned over, took him by the hand, and said, ‘Henry, you are so near to the border now, can you see anything on the other side?’ And Thoreau answered: ‘One world at a time, Parker!’ But I cannot help asking about that other world, and if I belong to a future world as well as to this, my life will be a very different one.” Jesus knew our need of certain information about the future and therefore he said: “In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you.” ( John 14:2).

Hutton, Essays, 2:211 — “Imagination maybe powerful without being fertile; it may summon up past scenes and live in them without being able to create new ones. National unity and supernatural guidance were beliefs which kept Hebrew poetry from being fertile or original in its dealings with human story for national pride is conservative, not inventive and believers in actual providence do not care to live in a world of invention.

The Jew saw in history only the illustration of these two truths. He was never thoroughly stirred by mere individual emotion. The modern poet is a student of beauty; the O.T. poet is a student of God. To the latter, all creation is a mere shadow, the essence of its beauty and the sustaining power of its life are in the spiritual world. Go beyond the spiritual nature of man and the sympathy of the Hebrew poet is dried up at once. His poetry was true and divine but at the expense of variety of insight and breadth of sympathy. It was heliocentric rather than geocentric. Only Job, the latest, is a conscious effort of the imagination.” Apocalyptic poetry for these reasons was most natural to the Hebrew mind.

Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 66 — “Somewhere and for some Being, there shines an unchanging splendor of beauty, of which in nature and in art we see, each of us from his own standpoint, only passing gleams and stray reflections, whose different aspects we cannot now coordinate, whose import we cannot fully comprehend but which, at least, is something other than the chance play of subjective sensibility or the far off echo of ancestral lusts.” Dewey, Psychology, 200 — “All products of the creative imagination are unconscious testimonials to the unity of spirit which binds man to man, and man to nature, in one organic whole.”

Tennyson, Idylls of the King: “As from beyond the limit of the world, Like the last echo born of a great cry, Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice Around a king returning from his wars.” See, on the whole subject of Eschatology, Luthardt, Lehre von den letzten Dingen, and Saving Truths of Christianity; Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3:713-880; Hovey, Biblical Eschatology; Heagle, That Blessed Hope.

I. PHYSICAL DEATH.

Physical death is the separation of the soul from the body. We distinguish it from spiritual death, or the separation of the soul from God, and from the second death, or the banishment from God and final misery of the reunited soul and body of the wicked.

Spiritual death: Isaiah 59:2 — “but your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, so that he will not hear”; Romans 7:24 — “Wretched man that I am!

Who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?” Ephesians 2:1 — “deal through your trespasses and sins.” The second death: Revelation 2:11 — “He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death”; 20:14 — “And death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death, even the lake of fire”; 21:8 — “But for the fearful, and unbelieving, and abominable, and murderers, and fornicators, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, their part shall be in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone; which is the second death.”

Julius Muller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:303 — “Spiritual death, the inner discord and enslavement of the soul and the misery resulting therefrom, to which belongs that other death, the second death, an outward condition corresponding to that inner slavery.” Trench, Epistles to the Seven Churches, 151 — “This phrase [‘second death’] is itself a solemn protest against the Sadduceeism and Epicureanism, which would make natural death the be all and the end all of existence. As there is a life beyond the present life for the faithful, so there is death beyond that which falls under our eyes for the wicked.” E. G. Robinson: “The second death is the continuance of spiritual death in another and timeless existence.” Hudson, Scientific Demonstration of a Future Life, 222 — “If a man has a power that transcends the senses, it is at least presumptive evidence that it does not perish when the senses are extinguished. The activity of the subjective mind is in inverse proportion to that of the body, though the objective mind weakens with the body and perishes with the brain” Prof. H. H. Bawden: “Consciousness is simply the growing of an organism, while the organism is just that which grows. Consciousness is a function, not a thing and not an order of existence at all. It is the universe coming to a focus, flowering so to speak, in a finite center. Society is an organism in the same sense that the human being is an organism. The spatial separation of the elements of the social organism is relatively no greater than the separation of the unit factors of the body. As the neuron cannot deny the consciousness, which is the function of the body, so the individual member of society has no reason for denying the existence of a cosmic life of the organism which we call society.”

Emma M. Caillard, on Man in the Light of Evolution, in Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1893:878 — “Man is nature risen into the consciousness of its relationship to the divine. There is no receding from this point. When ‘that which drew from out the boundless deep turns again home,’ the persistence of each personal life is necessitated. Human life as it is, includes though it transcends the lower forms through which it has developed. Human life as it will be, must include though it may transcend its present manifestation, viz., personality.” “Sometime, when all life’s lessons have been learned, And suns and stars forevermore have set, And things which our weak judgments here have spurned, The things o’er which we grieved with lashes wet, Will flash before us through our life’s dark night, As stars shine most in deepest tints of blue: And we shall see how all God’s plans were right, And most that seemed reproof was love most true: And if sometimes commingled with life’s wine We find the wormwood and rebel and shrink, Be sure a wiser hand than yours or mine Pours out this portion for our lips to drink. And if some friend we love is lying low, Where human kisses cannot reach his face, O do not blame the loving Father so, But wear your sorrow with obedient grace; And you shall shortly know that lengthened breath Is not the sweetest gift God sends his friend, And that sometimes the sable pall of death Conceals the fairest boon his love can send. If we could push ajar the gates of life, And stand within, and all God’s working see, We could interpret all this doubt and strife, And for each mystery find a key.”

Although physical death falls upon the unbeliever as the original penalty of sin, to all whom are united in Christ, it loses its aspect of penalty and becomes a means of discipline and of entrance into eternal life.

To the Christian, physical death is not a penalty: see <19B615> Psalm 116:15 — “Precious in the sight of Jehovah is the death of his saints”; Romans 8:10 — “And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the spirit is life because of righteousness”; 14:8 — “For whether we live, we live unto the Lord; or whether we die, we die unto the Lord: whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord’s”; 1 Corinthians 3:22 — “whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours”; 15:55 — “O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?” 1Pet.4:6 — “For unto this end was the gospel preached even to the dead that they might be judged indeed according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit”; cf . Romans 1:18 — “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hinder the truth in unrighteousness”; 8:1, 2 — “There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and of death’, Hebrews 12:6 — “for whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.”

Dr. Hovey says “the present sufferings of believers are in the nature of discipline, with an aspect of retribution, while the present sufferings of unbelievers are retributive with a glance toward reformation.” We prefer to say that all penalties has been borne by Christ and that for him, who is justified in Christ, suffering of whatever kind is of the nature of fatherly chastening, never of judicial retribution. See our discussion of the Penalty of Sin, pages 652-660. “We see but dimly through the mists and vapors Amid these earthly damps; What are to us but sad funereal tapers May be Heaven’s distant lamps. There is no death, what seems so is transition; This life of mortal breath Is but a suburb of the life Elysian Whose portal men call death.” “‘Tis meet that we should pause awhile, Ere we put off this mortal coil, And in the stillness of old age, Muse on our earthly pilgrimage.”

Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 4:5 — “Heaven and yourself Had part in this fair maid; now Heaven hath all, And all the better is it for the maid:

Your part in her you could not keep from death, But Heaven keeps his part in eternal life. The most you sought was her promotion, For ‘twas your heaven she should be advanced; And weep ye now, seeing she is advanced Above the clouds, as high as Heaven itself?” Phoebe Cary’s Answered: “I thought to find some healing clime For her I loved; she found that shore, That city whose inhabitants Are sick and sorrowful no more. I asked for human love for her; The Loving knew how best to still The infinite yearning of a heart Which but infinity could fill. Such sweet communion had been ours, I prayed that it might never end; My prayer is more than answered; now I have an angel for my friend. I wished for perfect peace to soothe The troubled anguish of her breast; And numbered with the loved and called She entered on untroubled rest. Life was so fair a thing to her, I wept and pleaded for its stay; My wish was granted me, for lo! She hath eternal life today!”

Victor Hugo: “The tomb is not a blind alley; it is a thoroughfare. It closes with the twilight to open with the dawn...I feel that I have not said the thousandth part of what is in me...The thirst for infinity proves infinity.”

Shakespeare: “Nothing is here for tears; nothing to wail, Or knock the breast; no weakness, no contempt, Dispraise or blame; nothing but well and fair.” O. W. Holmes: “Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!” J. G. Whittier: “So when Time’s veil shall fall asunder, The soul may know No fearful change or sudden wonder, Nor sink the weight of mystery under, But with the upward rise, and with the vastness grow.”

To neither saint nor sinner is death a cessation of being. This we maintain, against the advocates of annihilation: 1. Upon rational grounds. (a) The metaphysical argument. The soul is simple, not compounded.

Death, in matter, is the separation of parts. But in the soul there are no parts to be separated. The dissolution of the body therefore, does not necessarily constitute the dissolution of the soul. But, since there is an immaterial principle in the brute, and this argument taken by itself, might seem to prove the immortality of the animal creation equally with that of man. We pass to consider the next argument.

The Gnostics and the Manichæans held that beasts had knowledge and might pray. The immateriality of the brute mind was probably the consideration which led Leibnitz, Bishop Butler, Coleridge, John Wesley, Lord Shaftesbury, Mary Somerville, James Hogg, Toplady, Lamartine and Louis Agassiz to encourage the belief in animal immortality. See Bp. Butler, Analogy, part i, chap. i (Bohn’s ed., 81-91); Agassiz, Essay on Classification, 99 — “Most of the arguments for the immortality of man apply equally to the permanency of this principle in other living beings.”

Elsewhere Agassiz says of animals: “I cannot doubt of their immortality any more than I doubt of my own.” Lord Shaftesbury in 1881 remarked: “I have ever believed in a happy future for animals. I cannot say or conjecture how or where but sure I am that the love, so manifested by dogs especially is an emanation from the divine essence and as such it can, or rather, it will never be extinguished.” St. Francis of Assisi preached to birds and called sun, moon, earth, fire, water, stones, flowers, crickets, and death his brothers and sisters. “He knew not if the brotherhood His homily had understood; He only knew that to one ear The meaning of his words was clear” (Longfellow, The Sermon of St. Francis — to the birds). “If death dissipates the sagacity of the elephant, why not that of his captor?” See Buckner, Immortality of Animals; William Adams Brown, Christian Theology in Outline, 240.

Mansel, Metaphysics, 371, maintains that all this argument proves is that the objector cannot show the soul to be compound and so, cannot show that it is destructible. Calderwood, Moral Philosophy, 259 — “The facts which point toward the termination of our present state of existence are connected with our physical nature, not with our mental.” John Fiske, Destiny of the Creature, 110 — “With his illegitimate hypothesis of annihilation, the materialist transgresses the bounds of experience quite as widely the poet who sings of the New Jerusalem, with its river of life and its streets of gold. Scientifically speaking, there is not a particle of evidence for either view.” John Fiske, Destiny of the Creature, 80-85 — “How could immortal man have been produced through heredity from an ephemeral brute? We do not know. Nature’s habit is to make prodigious leaps, but only after long preparation. Slowly rises the water in the tank, inch by inch through many a weary hour, until at length it overflows and straightway vast systems of machinery are awakened into rumbling life.

Slowly the ellipse becomes eccentric, until suddenly the finite ellipse becomes an infinite paraboloid.”

Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 206 — “The ideas of dividing up or splitting off are not applicable to mind. The argument for the indestructibility of mind as growing out of its indiscerptibility, and the argument by which Kant confuted it, are alike absurd within the realm of mental phenomena.”

Adeney, Christianity and Evolution, 127 — “Nature, this argument shows, has nothing to say against the immortality of that which is above the range of physical structure.” Lotze: “Everything which has once originated will endure forever so soon as it possesses an unalterable value for the coherent system of the world but it will, as a matter of course, in turn cease to be, if this is not the case.” Bowne, Introduction to Psych.

Theory, 315-318 — “Of what use would brutes be hereafter? We may reply: Of what use are they here? Those things which have perennial significance for the universe will abide.” Bixby, Crisis in Morals, 203 — “In living beings there is always a pressure toward larger and higher existence. The plant must grow, must bloom, must sow its seeds or it withers away. The aim is to bring forth consciousness and in greatest fullness. Beasts of prey and other enemies to the ascending path of life are to be swept out of the way.”

But is not the brute a part of that Nature, which has been subjected to vanity, which groans and travails in pain and which waits to be redeemed?

The answer seems to be that the brute is a mere appendage to man, has no independent value in the creation, is incapable of ethical life or of communion with God, the source of life and so has no guarantee of continuance. Man, on the other hand, is of independent value. But this is to anticipate the argument that follows. It is sufficient here to point out that there is no proof that consciousness is dependent upon the soul’s connection with a physical organism. McLane, Evolution in Religion, — “As the body may preserve its form and be, to a degree made to act after the psychic element, is lost by removal of the brain so this psychic element may exist and act according to its nature after the physical element ceases to exist.” Hovey, Bib. Eschatology, 19 — “If I am in a house, I can look upon surrounding objects only through its windows but open the door and let me go out of the house, and the windows are no longer of any use to me.” Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 295 — “To perpetuate mind after death is less surprising than to perpetuate or transmit mind here by inheritance.” See also Martineau, Study, 2:332- 337, 363-365.

William James, in his Essay on Human Immortality, argues that thought is not necessarily a productive function of the brain, it may rather, be a permissive or transmissive function. Thought is not made in the brain, so that when the brain perishes the soul dies. The brain is only the organ for the transmission of thought, just as the lens transmits the light, which it does not produce. There is a spiritual world behind and above the material world. Our brains are thin and half-transparent places in the veil through which knowledge comes in. Savage, Life after Death, 289 — “You may attach a dynamo for a time to some particular machine. When you have removed the machine, you have not destroyed the dynamo. You may attach it to some other machine and find that you have the old time power.

So the soul may not be confined to one body.” These analogies seem to us, to come short of proving personal immortality. They belong to “psychology without a soul,” and while they illustrate the persistence of some sort of life, they do not render more probable the continuance of my individual consciousness beyond the bounds of death. They are entirely consistent with the pantheistic theory of a remerging of the personal existence in the great whole of which it forms a part. Tennyson, In Memoriam: “That each, who seems a separate whole Should move his rounds and, fusing all The skirts of self again, should fall Remerging in the general Soul, Is faith as vague as all unsweet.” See Pfleiderer, Die Ritschl’sche Theologie, 12; Howison, Limits of Evolution, 279-312.

Seth, Hegelianism: “For Hegel, immortality is only the permanence of the Absolute, the abstract process. This is no more consoling than the continued existence of the chemical elements of our bodies in new transformations. Human self-consciousness is a spark struck in the dark, to die away on the darkness whence it has arisen.” This is the only immortality of which George Eliot conceived in her poem, The Immortal Choir: “O may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence; live In pulses stirred to generosity, In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn For miserable aims that end in self, In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, And with their mild persistence urge man’s search To vaster issues.” Those who hold to this unconscious immortality concede that death is not a separation of parts, but rather a cessation of consciousness and that therefore, while the substance of human nature may endure, mankind may ever develop into new forms without individual immortality. To this we reply, that man’s self-consciousness and self-determination are different in kind from the consciousness and determination of the brute. As man can direct his self-consciousness and self-determination to immortal ends, we have the right to believe this self-consciousness and self-determination to be immortal. This leads us to the next argument. (b) The teleological argument. Man, as an intellectual, moral and religious being, does not attain the end of his existence on earth. His development is imperfect here. Divine wisdom will not leave its work incomplete. There must be a hereafter for the full growth of man’s powers and for the satisfaction of his aspirations. Created, unlike the brute, with infinite capacities for moral progress, there must be an immortal existence in which those capacities shall be brought into exercise. Though the wicked person forfeits his claim to this future, we have here an argument from God’s love and wisdom to the immortality of the righteous.

In reply to this argument, it has been said that many right wishes are vain.

Mill, Essays on Religion, 294 — “Desire for food implies enough to eat, now and forever? Hence, an eternal supply of cabbage?” But our argument proceeds upon three presuppositions. (1) A holy and benevolent God exists. (2) He has made man in his image. (3) Man’s true end is holiness and likeness to God.

Therefore, what will answer the true end of man will be furnished but that is not cabbage. It is holiness and love, i . e., God himself. See Martineau, Study, 2:370-381.

The argument, however, is valuable only in its application to the righteous. God will not treat the righteous as the tyrant of Florence treated Michael Angelo, when he bade him carve out of ice a statue, which would melt under the first rays of the sun. In the case of the wicked, the other law of retribution comes in — the taking away of “even that which he hath” ( Matthew 25:29). Since we are all wicked, the argument is not satisfactory, unless we take into account the further facts of atonement and justification — facts of which we learn from revelation alone.

But while, taken by itself, this rational argument might be called defective and could never prove that man may not attain his end in the continued existence of the race, rather than in that of the individual, the argument appears more valuable as a rational supplement to the facts already mentioned. It seems to render certain at least the immortality of those upon whom God has set his love and in whom he has wrought the beginnings of righteousness.

Lord Erskine: “Inferior animals have no instincts or faculties which are not subservient to the ends and purposes of their being. Man’s reason and faculties endowed with power to reach the most distant worlds would be useless if his existence were to terminate in the grave.” There would be wastefulness in the extinction of great minds. See Jackson, James Martineau, 439. As water is implied by the organization of the fish, and air by that of the bird, so “the existence of spiritual power within us is likewise presumption that some fitting environment awaits the spirit when it shall be set free and perfected and sex and death can be dispensed with” (Newman Smyth, A Place of Death in Evolution, 106). Nageli, the German botanist, says that Nature tends to perfection. Yet the mind hardly begins to awake, ere the bodily powers decline (George, Progress and Poverty, 505). “Character grows firmer and solider as the body ages and grows weaker. Can character be vitally implicated in the act of physical dissolution?” (Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 353). If a rational and moral Deity has caused the gradual evolution in humanity of the ideas of right and wrong and has added to it the faculty of creating ethical ideals, must he not have provided some satisfaction for the ethical needs which this development has thus called into existence? (Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 351).

Royce, Conception of God,50, quotes Le Conte as follows: “Nature is the womb in which, and evolution the process by which, are generated sons of God. Without immortality this whole process is balked — the whole process of cosmic evolution is futile. Shall God be so long and at so great pains to achieve a spirit capable of communing with himself, and then allow it to lapse again into nothingness?” John Fiske, Destiny of Man, 116, accepts the immorality of the soul by “a supreme act of faith in the reasonableness of God’s work.” If man is the end of the creative process and the object of God’s care, then the soul’s career cannot be completed with its present life upon the earth (Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution. 92, 93). Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 254 — “Neither God nor the future life is needed to pay us for present virtue, but rather as the condition without which our nature falls into irreconcilable discord with itself and passes on to pessimism and despair. High and continual effort is impossible without correspondingly high and abiding hopes. It is no more selfish to desire to live hereafter than it is to desire to live tomorrow.” Dr. M. B. Anderson used to say that there must be a heaven for canal horses, washerwomen and college presidents, because they do not get their deserts in this life.

Life is a series of commencements rather than of accomplished ends.

Longfellow, on Charles Sumner: “Death takes us by surprise, And stays our hurrying feet; The great design unfinished lies, Our lives are incomplete. But in the dark unknown Perfect their circles seem, Even as a bridge’s arch of stone Is rounded in the stream.” Robert Browning, Abt Vogler: “There never shall be one lost good”; Prospice: “No work begun shall ever pause for death”. “Pleasure must succeed to pleasure, else past pleasure turns to pain; And this first life claims a second, else I count its good no gain”; Old Pictures in Florence: “We are faulty — why not? We have time in store”; Grammarian’s Funeral: “What’s time? Leave Now for dogs and apes, Man has Forever.” Robert Browning wrote in his wife’s Testament the following testimony of Dante: “Thus I believe, thus I affirm, thus I am certain it is, that from this life I shall pass to another better, there where that lady lives, of whom my soul was enamored.” And Browning says in a letter: “It is a great thing — the greatest — that a human being should have passed the probation of life, and sum up its experience in a witness to the power and love of God. I see even more reason to hold by the same hope.” (c) The ethical argument. Man is not, in this world, adequately punished for his evil deeds. Our sense of justice leads us to believe that God’s moral administration will be vindicated in a life to come. Mere extinction of being would not be a sufficient penalty nor would it permit degrees of punishment corresponding to degrees of guilt. This is therefore, an argument from God’s justice to the immortality of the wicked. The guilty conscience demands a state after death for punishment.

This is an argument from God’s justice to the immortality of the wicked, as the preceding was an argument, from God’s love to the immortality of the righteous. “History defies our moral sense by giving a peaceful end to Sulla.” Louis XV and Madame Pompadour died in their beds, after a life of extreme luxury. Louis XVI and his queen, though far more just and pure, perished by an appalling tragedy. The fates of these four cannot be explained by the wickedness of the latter pair and by the virtue of the former. Alexander the Sixth, the worst of the popes, was apparently prosperous and happy in his iniquities. Though guilty of the most shameful crimes, he was serenely impenitent and to the last of his days, he defied both God and man. Since there is not an execution of justice here, we feel that there must be a “judgment to come,” such as that which terrified Felix ( Acts 24:25). Martineau, Study, 2:383-388. Stopford A. Brooke, Justice: “Three men went out one summer night, No care had they or aim, And dined and drank. ‘Ere we go home We’ll have,’ they said, ‘a game.’ Three girls began that summer night A life of endless shame, And went through drink, disease, and death As swift as racing flame. Lawless and homeless, foul, they died; Rich, loved and praised, the men: But when they all shall meet with God, And Justice speaks, what then?” See John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:255-297. G. F.

Wilkin, Control in Evolution: “Belief in immortality is a practical necessity of evolution. If the decisions of today are to determine our eternal destiny, then it is vastly more important to choose and act aright than it is to preserve our earthly life. The martyrs were right. Conscience is vindicated. We can live for the ideal of manhood. Immortality is a powerful reformatory instrument.” Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:388 — “If Death gives a final discharge to the sinner and the saint alike, Conscience has told us more lies than it has ever called to their account.”

Shakespeare, Henry V, 4:2 — “If [transgressors] have defeated the law and outrun native punishment, though they can outstrip men, they have no wings to fly from God”; Henry VI, 2d part, 5:2 — “Can we outrun the heavens?” Addison, Cato: “It must be so, Plato, thou reasonest well. Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire, This longing after immortality? Or whence this secret dread and inward horror Of falling into naught? Why shrinks the soul Back on herself and startles at destruction? ‘Tis the divinity that stirs within us, ‘Tis Heaven itself that points out a hereafter, And intimates eternity to man.”

Gildersleeve, in The Independent, March 30, 1899 — “Plato in the Phædo argues for immortality from the alternation of opposites: life must follow death as death follows life. But alternation of opposites is not generation of opposites. He argues from reminiscence. But this involves preexistence and a cycle of incarnations, not the immortality, which we crave. The soul abides as the idea abides but there is no guarantee that it abides forever. He argues from the uncompounded nature of the soul. But we do not know the soul’s nature and at most this is an analogy: as soul is like God, invisible, it must like God abide. But this is analogy, and nothing more.” William James, Will to Believe, 87 — “That our whole physical life may lie soaking in a spiritual atmosphere, a dimension of being which we at present have no organ for apprehending, is vividly suggested to us by the analogy of the life of our domestic animals. Our dogs, for example, are in our human life but are not of it. They bite but do not know what it means. They submit to vivisection and do not know the meaning of that.”

George Eliot, walking with Frederic Myers in the Fellows’ Garden at Trinity, Cambridge, “stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of men — the words God, Immortality, Duty — pronounced with terrible earnestness how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third.”

But this idea of the infinite nature of Duty is the creation of Christianity — the last infinite would never have attained its present range and intensity, had it not been indestructibly connected with the other two (Forrest, Christ of History and Experience, 16).

This ethical argument has probably more power over the minds of men than any other. Men believe in Minos and Rhadamanthus, if not in the Elysian Fields. But even here it may be replied that the judgment, which conscience threatens may be not immortality, but extinction of being. We shall see, however, in our discussion of the endlessness of future punishment, that mere annihilation cannot satisfy the moral instinct, which lies at the basis of this argument and that demands a punishment proportioned in each case to the guilt incurred by transgression.

Extinction of being would be the same to all. As it would not admit of degrees, so it would not, in any case, sufficiently vindicate God’s righteousness. F. W. Newman: “If man be not immortal, God is not just.”

But while this argument proves life and punishment for the wicked after death, it leaves us dependent on revelation for our knowledge how long that life and punishment will be. Kant’s argument is that man strives equally for morality and for wellbeing but morality often requires the sacrifice of well-being hence, there must be a future reconciliation of the two in the well-being or reward of virtue. To all of which it might be answered, first, that there is no virtue so perfect as to merit reward and secondly, that virtue is its own reward, and so is well-being. (c) The historical argument. The popular belief of all nations and ages shows that the idea of immortality is natural to the human mind. It is not sufficient to say that this indicates only such desire for continued earthly existence as is necessary to self-preservation. Multitudes expect life beyond death without desiring it and multitudes desire a heavenly life without caring for the earthly. This testimony of man’s nature to immortality may be regarded as the testimony of the God who made the nature.

Testimonies to this popular belief are given in Bartlett, Life and Death Eternal, preface: The arrowheads and earthen vessels laid by the side of the dead Indian, the silver obolus put in the mouth of the dead Greek to pay Charon’s passage money, the furnishing of the Egyptian corpse with the Book of the Dead, the papyrus roll containing the prayer he is to offer and the chart of his journey through the unseen world. The Gauls did not hesitate to lend money, on the sole condition that he to whom they lent it would return it to them in the other life, so sure were they that they should get it again (Valerius Maximus, quoted in Boissier, La Religion Romaine, 1:264). The Laplanders bury flint and tinder with the dead to furnish light for the dark journey. The Norsemen buried the horse and armor for the dead hero’s triumphant ride. The Chinese scatter paper images of sedan porters over the grave to help along in the somber pilgrimage. The Greenlanders bury, with the child, a dog to guide him (George Dana Boardman, Sermon on Immortality).

Savage, Life after Death, 1-18 — “Candles at the head of the casket are the modern representatives of the primitive man’s fire which was to light the way of the soul on its dark journey. Ulysses talks in the underworld with the shade of Hercules though the real Hercules, a demigod, had been transferred to Olympus and was there, living in companionship with the gods. The Brahman desired to escape being reborn. Socrates: ‘To die and be released is better for me.’ Here I am walking on a plank. It reaches out into the fog and I have got to keep walking. I can see only ten feet ahead of me. I know that pretty soon I must walk over the end of that plank. I haven’t the slightest idea into what, and I don’t believe anybody else knows. And I don’t like it.” Matthew Arnold: “Is there no other life? Pitch this one high.” But without positive revelation most men will say: “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” ( 1 Corinthians 15:32). “By passionately loving life, we make Loved life unlovely, hugging her to death.” Theodore Parker: “The intuition of mortality is written in the heart of man by a Hand that writes no falsehoods. There is evidence of a summer yet to be, in the buds which lie folded through our northern winter, efflorescence in human nature unaccountable if the end of man is in the grave.” But it may be replied that many universal popular impressions have proved false, such as belief in ghosts, and in the moving of the sun round the earth. While the mass of men has believed in immortality, some of the wisest have been doubters. Cyrus said: “I cannot imagine that the soul lives only while it remains in this mortal body.” But the dying words of Socrates were: “We part; I am going to die, and you to live; which of us goes the better way is known to God alone.” Cicero declared: “Upon this subject I entertain no more than conjectures;” and said that, when he was reading Plato’s argument for immortality, he seemed to himself convinced, but when he laid down the book he found that all his doubts returned. Farrar, Darkness and Dawn, 134 — “Though Cicero wrote his Tusculan Disputations to prove the doctrine of immortality, he spoke of that doctrine in his letters and speeches as a mere pleasing speculation, which might be discussed with interest, but which no one practically held.”

Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, 3:9, calls death “the most to be feared of all things, for it appears to be the end of everything and for the deceased, there appears to be no longer either any good or any evil.” Æschylus: “Of one once dead there is no resurrection.” Catullus: “When once our brief day has set, we must sleep one everlasting night.” Tacitus: “If there is a place for the spirits of the pious, if as the wise suppose, great souls do not become extinct with their bodies.” “In that if,” says Uhlhorn, “lies the whole torturing uncertainty of heathenism.” Seneca, Ep. liv. — “Mors est non esse” — “Death is not to be”; Troades. V. 393 — “Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil” — “There is nothing after death, and death itself is nothing.” Marcus Aurelius: “What springs from earth dissolves to earth again, and heaven born things fly to their native seat.” The Emperor Hadrian to his soul: “Animula, vagula, blandula, Hospes comesque corporis, Quæ nunc abibis in loca? Pallidula, rigida, nudula.” Classic writers might have said of the soul at death: “We know not where is that Promethean torch That can its light relume.”

Chadwick, 184 — “With the growth of all that is best in man of intelligence and affection, there go the development of the hope of an immortal life. If the hope thus developed is not a valid one then we have a radical contradiction in our moral nature. The survival of the fittest points in the same direction.” Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) — “At my back I always hear Time’s winged chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast Eternity.” Goethe, in his last days, came to be a profound believer in immortality. “You ask me what are my grounds for this belief? The weightiest is this, that we cannot do without it.” Huxley wrote in a letter to Morley: “It is a curious thing that I find my dislike to the thought of extinction increasing as I get older and nearer the goal. It flashes across me at all sorts of time that in 1900, I shall probably know no more of what is going on than I did in 1800. I had sooner be in hell, a great deal, at any rate in one of the upper circles, where climate and the company are not too trying.”

The book of Job shows how impossible it is for man to work out the problem of personal immortality from the point of view of merely natural religion. Shakespeare, in Measure for Measure, represents Claudio as saying to his sister Isabella: “Aye, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod.” Strauss, Glaubenslehre, 2:739 — “The other world is in all men the one enemy, in its aspect of a future world, however, the last enemy, which speculative criticism has to fight and if possible, to overcome.” Omar Khayy·m, Rub·iy·t, Stanzas 28-35 — “I came like Water, and like Wind I go...Up from Earth’s Center through the seventh gate I rose, and on the throne of Saturn sate, And many a knot unraveled by the Road, But not the master-knot of human fate. There was the Door to which I found no Key; There was the Veil through which I might not see: Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee There was, And then no more of Thee and Me. Earth could not answer, nor the Seas that mourn, In flowing purple, of their Lord forlorn: Nor rolling Heaven, with all his signs revealed, And hidden by the sleeve of Night and Morn. Then of the Thee in Me, who works behind The veil, I lifted up my hands to find A Lamp, amid the darkness; and I heard As from without — ‘The Me within Thee blind.’ Then to the lip of this poor earthen Urn I leaned, the secret of my life to learn; And Lip to Lip it murmur’d — ‘ While you live, Drink! — for, once dead, you never shall return!”’ So “The Phantom Caravan has reached The Nothing it set out from.” It is a demonstration of the hopelessness and blindness and sensuality of man, when left without the revelation of God and of the life to come.

The most that can be claimed for this fourth argument from popular belief is that it indicates a general appentency for continued existence after death. The idea is congruous with our nature. W. E. Forster said to Harriet Martineau that he would rather be damned than annihilated. See F. P. Cobbe, Peak of Darien, 44. But it may be replied that there is reason enough for this desire for life in the fact that it ensures the earthly existence of the race, which might commit universal suicide without it.

There is reason enough in the present life for its existence and we are not necessitated to infer a future life therefrom. This objection cannot be fully answered from reason alone. But if we take our argument in connection with the Scriptural revelation concerning God’s making of man in his image, we may regard the testimony of man’s nature as the testimony of the God who made it.

We conclude our statement of these rational proofs with the acknowledgment that they rest upon the presupposition that there exists a God of truth, wisdom, justice and love, who has made man in his image and who desires to commune with his creatures. We acknowledge, moreover, that these proofs give us, not an absolute demonstration, but only a balance of probability, in favor of man’s immortality. We turn therefore to Scripture for the clear revelation of a fact of which reason furnishes us little more than a presumption.

Everett Essays, 76, 77 — “In his Traume eines Geistersehers, Kant foreshadows the Method of his Kritik. He gives us a scheme of disembodied spirits, and calls it a bit of mystic (Geheimen) philosophy, then the opposite view, which he calls a bit of vulgar (gemeimen) philosophy. Then he says the scales of the understanding are not quite impartial and the one that has the inscription ‘Hope for the future’ has a mechanical advantage. He says he cannot rid himself of this unfairness.

He suffers feeling to determine the result. This is intellectual agnosticism supplemented by religious faith.” The following lines have been engraved upon the tomb of Professor Huxley: “And if there be no meeting past the grave, If all is darkness, silence, yet ‘tis rest. Be not afraid, ye waiting hearts that weep, For God still giveth his beloved sleep, And if an endless sleep he wills, so best.” Contrast this consolation with: “Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my lather’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you and if I go and prepare a place for you. I will come again, and receive you unto myself that where I am, there ye may be also” ( John 14:1-3).

Dorner: “There is no rational evidence which compels belief in immortality. Immortality has its pledge in God’s making man in his image, and in God’s will of love for communion with men.” Luthardt, Compendium, 289 — “The truth in these proofs from reason is the idea of human personality and its relation to God. Belief in God is the universal presupposition and foundation of the universal belief in immortality.”

When Strauss declared that this belief in immortality is the last enemy, which is to be destroyed, he forgot that belief in God is more ineradicable still. Frances Power Cobbe Life, 92 — “The doctrine of immortality is to me the indispensable corollary of that of the goodness of God.”

Hadley, Essays, Philological and Critical, 302-379 — “The claim of immortality may be based on one or the other of two assumptions. (1) The same organism will be reproduced hereafter and the same functions or part of them, again manifested in connection with it and accompanied with consciousness of continued identity. (2) That same functions may be exercised and accompanied with consciousness of identity, though not connected with the same organism as before, may in fact go on without interruption without being even suspended by death, though no longer manifested to us.” The conclusion is: “The light of nature, when all directed to this question, does furnish a presumption in favor of immortality, but not so strong a presumption as to exclude great and reasonable doubts upon the subject.”

For an excellent synopsis of arguments and objections, see Hase, Hutterus Redivivus, 276. See also Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 417-441; A. M.

Fairbairn, on Idea of Immortality, In Studies in Philos. of Religion and of History; Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality; Tennyson, Two Voices; Alger, Critical History of Doctrine of Future Life, with Appendix by Ezra Abbott, containing a Catalogue of Works relating to the Nature, Origin, and Destiny of the Soul; Ingersoll Lectures on Immortality, by George A.

Gordon, Josiah Royce, William James, Dr. Osler, John Fiske, B. I.

Wheeler, Hyslop, Munsterberg, Crothars. 2. Upon Scriptural grounds. (a) The account of man’s creation and the subsequent allusions to it in Scripture, show that, while the body was made corruptible and subject to death, the soul was made in the image of God, incorruptible and immortal. Genesis 1:26,27 — “Let us make man in our image”; 2:7 — “and Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” Here, as was shown in our treatment of Man’s Original State, page 523, it is not the divine image but the body, that is formed of dust and into this body the soul that possesses the divine image is breathed. In the Hebrew records, the animating soul is everywhere distinguished from the earthly body.

Gen. 3:22, 23 — “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to how good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever: therefore Jehovah God sent him forth from the garden of Eden.” Man had immortality of soul, and now, lest to this he add immortality of body, he is expelled from the tree of life. Ecclesiastes 12:7 — “the dust returneth to the earth as it was and the spirit returneth unto God who gave it”; Zechariah 12:1 — “Jehovah, who stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man within him.” Matthew 10:28 — “And be not afraid of them that kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”; Acts 7:59 — “And they stoned Stephen, calling upon the Lord, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit”: Corinthians 12:2 know a man in Christ, fourteen years ago (whether in the body, I know not; or whether out or the body, I know not; God knoweth), such one caught up even to the third heaven”; 1 Corinthians 15:45-46 — “The first man became a living soul. The last Adam became a lifegiving spirit. Howbeit that is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural then that which is spiritual” = the first Adam was made a being whose body was psychical and mortal, a body of flesh and blood that could not inherit the kingdom of God. So Paul says the spiritual is not first but the psychical; but there is no intimation that the soul also was created immortal and needed external appliances, like the tree of life, before it could enter upon immortality.

But it may be asked: Is not all this, In 1 Corinthians 15, spoken of the regenerate, those to whom a new principle of life has been communicated?

We answer, yes, but that does not prevent us from learning from the passage the natural immortality of the soul, for an regeneration the essence is not changed, no new substance is imparted, no new faculty or constitutive element is added and no new principle of holiness is infused.

The truth is simply that the spirit is morally readjusted. For substance of the above remarks, see Hovey, State of Impenitent Dead, 1-27.

Savage, Life after Death,48,53 — “The word translated ‘soul’, In Gen. 2:7, is the same word, which, in other parts of the O. T. is used to denote the life-principle of animals. It does not follow that soul implies immortality, for then all animals would be immortal. The firmament of the Hebrews was the cover of a dinner platter, solid but with little windows to let the rain through. Above this firmament was heaven where God and angels abode, but no people went there. All went below. But growing moral sense held that the good could not be imprisoned in Hades. So came the idea of resurrection. If a force, a universe with God left out, can do all that has been done, I do not see why it cannot also continue my existence through what is called death.”

Dr. H. Heath Bawden: “It is only the creature that is born that will die.

Monera and Amúbæ are immortal, as Weismann tells us. They do not die, because they never are born. The death of the individual as a somatic individual is for the sake of the larger future life of the individual in its germinal immortality. So we live ourselves spiritually into our children, as well as physically. An organism is nothing but a center or focus through which the world surges. What matter if the irrelevant somatic portion is lost in what we call death! The only immortality possible is the immortality of function. My body has changed completely since I was a boy, but I have become a larger self thereby. Birth and death simply mark steps or stages in the growth of such an individual, which in its very nature does not exclude but rather includes within it the lives of all other individuals. The individual is more than a passive member is, he is an active organ of a biological whole. The laws of his life are the social organism functioning in one of its organs. He lives and moves and has his being in the Great Spirit of the whole, which comes to a focus or flowers out in his conscious life.” (b) The account of the curse in Genesis, and the subsequent allusions to it in Scripture, show that while the death then incurred includes the dissolution of the body. It does not include cessation of being on the part of the soul, but only designates that state of the soul, which is the opposite of true life, viz., a state of banishment from God, of unholiness and of misery. Genesis 2:17 — “in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”; cf. 3:8 — “the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of Jehovah God”; 16-19 — the curse of pain and toil: 22-24 — banishment from the garden of Eden and from the tree of life. Matthew 8:22 — “Follow me; and leave the dead to bury their own dead”; 25:41, 46 — “Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire... These shall go away into eternal punishment.” Luke 15:32 — “this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is fond”; John 5:24 — “He that heareth my word, and believeth him that sent me, hath eternal life, and cometh not into judgment but hath passed out of death into life”; 6:47, 53, 63 — “He that believeth hath eternal life...except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves...the words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life”: 8:51 — “If a man keep my word, he shall never see death.” Romans 5:21 — “that, as sin reigned in death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life”; 8:13 — “if ye live after the flesh, ye must die; but if by the Spirit ye put to death the deeds of the body, ye shall live”; Ephesians 2:1 — “dead through your trespasses and sins”; 5:14 — “Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead and Christ shall shine upon thee”; James 5:20 — “he who converteth a sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall cover a multitude of sins”; 1 John 3:14 — “We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren”; Revelations 3:1 — “I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead.”

We are to interpret O. T. terms by the N. T. meaning put into them. We are to interpret the Hebrew by the Greek, not the Greek by the Hebrew. It never would do to interpret our missionaries’ use of the Chinese words for “God”, “spirit”, “holiness” by the use of those words among the Chinese before the missionaries came. By the later usage of the N.T., the Holy Spirit shows us what he meant by the usage of the O.T. (c) The Scriptural expressions, held by annihilationists to imply cessation of being on the part of the wicked, are used not only in connections where they cannot bear this meaning ( Esther 4:16) but in connections where they imply the opposite. Esther 4:16 — “if I perish, I perish”; Genesis 6:11 — “And the earth was corrupt before God.” Here, in the LXX, the word ejfqa>rh , translated “was corrupt,” is the same word, which in other places is interpreted by annihilationists as meaning extinction of being. In <19B9176> Psalm 119:176, “I have gone astray like a lost sheep” cannot mean “I have gone astray like an annihilated sheep.” Isaiah 49:17 — “thy destroyers [annihilators?] and they that made thee waste shall go forth from thee”; 57:1, 2 — “The righteous perisheth [is annihilated?] and no man layeth it to heart; and merciful men are taken away, none considering that the righteous is taken any from the evil to come. He entereth into peace; they rest in their beds, each one that walketh in his uprightness; Daniel 9:26 — “And after the three score and two weeks shall the anointed one be cut off [annihilated?].” Matthew 10:6,39,42 — “the lost sheep of the house of Israel he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it...he shall in no wise lose his reward” — in these verses we cannot substitute “annihilate” for lose; Acts 13:41 — “Behold ye despisers, and wonder, and perish “; cf. Matthew 6:16 — “for they disfigure their faces” — where the same word ajfani>zw is used. 1 Corinthians 3:17 — “If any man destroyeth [annihilates?] the temple of God, him shall God destroy”; Corinthians 7:2 — “we corrupted no man” — where the same word ajfani>zw is used. 2 Thess. 1:9 — “who shall suffer punishment even eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might” — the wicked shall be driven out from the presence of Christ.

Destruction is not annihilation. “Destruction from” = separation; (per contra, see Prof. W. A. Stevens, Com. in loco : “from” = the source from which the “destruction” proceeds). A ship engulfed in quicksand is destroyed, a temple broken down and deserted is destroyed”; see Lillie, Com., in loco . 2 Peter 3:7 — “day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.” Here the word “destruction” ajpwlei>av is the same with that used of the end of the present order of things and translated “perished” ajpw>leto in verse 6. “We cannot accordingly infer from it that the ungodly will cease to exist, but only that there will be a great and penal change in their condition” (Plumptre, Com., in loco ). (d) The passages held to prove the annihilation of the wicked at death cannot have this meaning, since the Scriptures foretell a resurrection of the unjust as well as of the just and a second death, or a misery of the reunited soul and body, in the case of the wicked. Acts 24:15 — “there shall be a resurrection both of the just and unjust”; Revelations 2:11 — “He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death”; 20:14, 15 — “And death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death, even the lake of fire. And if any was not found written in the book of life, he was cast into the lake of fire”; 21:8 — “their part shall be in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone; which is the second death.” The “second death” is the first death intensified.

Having one’s “part in the lake of fire” is not annihilation.

In a similar manner the word “life” is to be interpreted not as meaning continuance of being, but as meaning perfection of being. As death is the loss not of life, but of all that makes life desirable, so life is the possession of the highest good. 1 Timothy 5:6 — “She that giveth herself to pleasure is dead while she liveth.” Here the death is spiritual death and it is implied that true life is spiritual life. John 10:10 — “I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.” This implies that “life” is not a mere existence, for they had this before Christ came. It is not the mere motion, as squirrels go in a wheel, without making progress and neither is it merely possessions “for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of things which he possesseth” ( Luke 12:15). But life is the right relation of our powers, or holiness and the right use of our powers, or love. It is the right number of our powers, or completeness and the right intensity of our powers, or energy of will. It is the right environment of our powers, or society and the right source of our powers, or God. (e) The words used in Scripture to denote the place of departed spirits have in them no implication of annihilation and the allusions to the condition of the departed show that death, to the writers of the Old and the New Testaments, although it was the termination of man’s earthly existence, was not an extinction of his being or his consciousness.

On lwav Sheol, Gesenius, Lexicon, 10th ed., says that, though lwav is commonly explained as infinitive of la1v; , to demand, it is undoubtedly allied to l[v (root lv ) to be ‘sunk, = and sinking,’ ‘depth,’ or ‘the sunken, deep, place.’ Aidhv , Hades, = not ‘hell,’ ‘but the ‘unseen world,’ conceived by the Greeks as a shadowy, but not as an unconscious, state of being. Genung, Epic of the Inner Life, on Job 7:9 — “Sheol, the Hebrew word designating the unseen abode of the dead; a neutral word, presupposing neither misery nor happiness, and not infrequently used much as we use the word ‘the grave’, to denote the final undefined resting place of all.” Genesis 25:8,9 — Abraham “was gathered to his people. And Isaac and Ishmael his sons buried him in the cave of Machpelah.” “Yet Abraham’s father was buried in Haran, and his more remote ancestors in Ur of the Chaldees. So Joshua’s generation is said to be ‘gathered to their fathers’ though the generation that preceded them perished in the wilderness, and previous generations died in Egypt” (W. H. Green, in S.

S. Times). So of Isaac in Genesis 35:29, and of Jacob in 19:29, 33, — all of whom were gathered to their fathers before they were buried. Numbers 20:24 — “Aaron shall be gathered unto his people.” Here it is very plain that being “gathered unto his people” was something different from burial. Deuteronomy 10:6 — “There Aaron died, and there he was buried.” Job 3:13,18 — “For now should I have lain down and been quiet; I should have slept; then had I been at rest...There the prisoners are at ease together; They hear not the voice of the taskmaster”; 7:9 — “As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away, So he that goeth down to Sheol shall come up no more”; 14:22 — “But his flesh upon him hath pain, And his soul within him mourneth.” Ezekiel 3:21 “The strong among the mighty shall speak to him out of the midst of Sheol”; Luke 16:23 — “And in Hades he lifted up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom”; 23:43 — “Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise”; cf . Samuel 28:19 — Samuel said to Saul in the cave of Endor: “tomorrow shalt thou and thy sons be with me.” Evidently not in an unconscious state. Many of these passages intimate a continuity of consciousness after death. Though Sheol is unknown to man, it is naked and open to God ( Job 26:6); he can find men there to redeem them from thence ( Psalm 49:15) proof that death is not annihilation. See Girdlestone, O.

T. Synonyms, 447. (f) The terms and phrases, which have been held to declare absolute cessation of existence at death, are frequently metaphorical. An examination of them in connection with the context and with other Scriptures is sufficient to show the untenableness of the literal interpretation put upon them by the annihilationists, and to prove that the language is merely the language of appearance.

Death is often designated as a “sleeping” or a “falling asleep”; see John 11:11,14 — “Our friend Lazarus is fallen asleep; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep...Then Jesus therefore said unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead.” Here the language of appearance is used, yet this language could not have been used, if the soul had not been conceived of as alive, though sundered from the body. See Meyer on 1 Corinthians 1:18. So the language of appearance is used in Ecclesiastes 9:10 — “there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in Sheol whither thou goest” and in <19E604> Psalm 146:4 — “His breath goeth forth; he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish.”

See Mozley, Essays, 2:171 — “These passages often describe the phenomena of death as it presents itself to our eyes, and so do not enter into the reality which takes place beneath it.” Bartlett, Life and Death Eternal, 189-358 — “Because the same Hebrew word is used for ‘spirit’ and ‘breath,’ shall we say that the spirit is only breath? ‘Heart’ in English might in like manner be made to mean only the material organ and David’s heart, panting, thirsting, melting within him would have to be interpreted literally. So a man may be ‘eaten up with avarice,’ while yet his being is not only not extinct, but is in a state of frightful activity.” (g) The Jewish belief in a conscious existence after death is proof that the theory of annihilation rests upon a misinterpretation of Scripture. That such a belief in. the immortality of the soul existed among the Jews is abundantly evident from the knowledge of a future state possessed by the Egyptians ( Acts 7:22), from the accounts of the translation of Enoch and of Elijah ( Genesis 5:24; cf. Hebrews 11:5, 2 Kings 2:11); from the invocation of the dead which was practiced, although forbidden by the law ( 1 Samuel 28:7-14; cf . Leviticus 20:28; Deuteronomy 18:10,11); from allusions in the O.T. to resurrection, future retribution and life beyond the grave ( Job 19:25-27; Psalm 16:9-11; Isaiah 26:19; Ezekiel 37:1-14; Daniel 12:2,3,13); and from distinct declarations of such faith by Philo and Josephus, as well as by the writers of the N. T. ( Matthew 22:31,32; Acts 23:6; 26:6-8; Hebrews 11:13-16).

The Egyptian coffin was called “the chest of the living.” The Egyptians called their houses “hostelries,” while their tombs they called their “eternal homes” (Butcher, Aspects of Greek Genius, 30). See the Book of the Dead, translated by Birch, in Bunsen’s Egypt’s Place, 123-333: The principal ideas of the first part of the Book of the Dead are “living again after death and being born again as the sun,” which typified the Egyptian resurrection (138). “The deceased lived again after death” (134). “The Osiris lives after he dies, like the sun daily for as the sun died and was born yesterday, so the Osiris is born” (164). Yet the immortal part, in its continued existence, was dependent for its blessedness upon the preservation of the body and for this reason the body was embalmed.

Immortality of the body is as important as the passage of the soul to the upper regions. Growth or natural reparation of the body is invoked as earnestly as the passage of the soul. “There is not a limb of him without a god; Thoth is vivifying his limbs” (197).

Maspero, Recueil de Travaux, gives the following readings from the inner walls of pyramids twelve miles south of Cairo: “O Unas, thou hast gone away dead, but living,” “Teti is the living dead,” “Arise, O Teti, to die no more,” “O Pepi, thou diest no more.” These inscriptions show that, to the Egyptians, there was life beyond death. “The life of Unas is duration, his period is eternity,” “They render thee happy throughout all eternity,” “He who has given thee life and eternity is Ra.” Here we see that the life beyond death was eternal. “Rising at his pleasure, gathering his members that are in the tomb, Unas goes forth,” “Unas has his heart his legs, his arms.” This asserts reunion with the body. “Reunited to thy soul, thou takest thy place among the stars of heaven,” “the soul is thine within thee.” There was reunion with the soul. “A god is born, it is Unas,” “O Ra, thy son comes to thee, this Unas comes to thee,” “O Father of Unas, grant that he may be included in the number of the perfect and wise gods.”

Here it is taught that the reunited soul and body becomes a god and dwells with the gods.

Howard Osgood: “Osiris, the son of gods, came to live on earth. His life was a pattern for others. He was put to death by the god of evil but regained his body, lived again and became, in the other world, the judge of all men.” Tiele, Egyptian Religion, 280 — “To become like god, Osiris, a benefactor, a good being, was persecuted but justified, judged but pronounced innocent, was looked upon as the ideal of every pious man and, as the condition on which alone, eternal life could be obtained and as the means, by which, it could be continued.” Ebers, …tudes Archeologiques, 21 — “The texts in the pyramids show us that under the Pharaohs of the 5th dynasty (before 2500 B. C.), the doctrine that the deceased became god was not only extant, but was developed more thoroughly and with far higher flight of imagination than we could expect from the simple statements concerning the other world, hitherto known to us as from that early time.” Revillout, on Egyptian Ethics, in Bibliotheca Sacra, July, 1890:304 — “An almost absolute sinlessness was for the Egyptian the condition of becoming another Osiris and enjoying eternal happiness. Of the penitential side, so highly developed in the ancient Babylonians and Hebrews, which gave rise to so many admirable penitential psalms, we find only a trace among the Egyptians. Sinlessness is the rule, the deceased vaunts himself as a hero of virtue.” See Uarda, by Ebers; Dr. Howard Osgood, on Resurrection among the Egyptians, in Hebrew Student, Feb. 1885. The Egyptians, however, recognized no transmigration of souls. See Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 181-184.

It is morally impossible that Moses should not have known the Egyptian doctrine of immortality: Acts 7:22 — “And Moses was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.” That Moses did not make the doctrine more prominent in his teachings may be for the reason that it was so connected with Egyptian superstitions with regard to Osiris. Yet the Jews believed in immortality. Genesis 5:24 — “and Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him”; cf . Hebrews 11:5 — “By faith Enoch was translated that be should not see death”; 2 Kings 2:11 — “Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven”; 1 Samuel 28:7-44 — the invocation of Samuel by the woman of Endor; cf. toy. 20:27 — “A man also or a woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death”; Deuteronomy 18:10,11 — “There shall not be found with thee...a consulter with a familiar spirit, or a wizard or a necromancer.” Job 19:25-27 — “I know that my Redeemer liveth, And at last will stand up upon the earth: And after my skin, even this body, is destroyed, Then without my flesh shall I see God; Whom I, even I, shall see, on my side, And mine eyes shall behold and not as a stranger. My heart is consumed within me”; Psalm 16:9-11 — “Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth: My flesh also shall dwell in safety. For thou wilt not leave my soul to Sheol; Neither wilt thou suffer thy holy one to see corruption. Thou wilt show me the path of life: In thy presence is fullness of joy; in thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore”; Isaiah 26:19 — “Thy dead shalt live; my dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust; for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast forth the dead”; Ezekiel 37:1-14 — the valley of dry bones — “I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, O my people.” This is a prophecy of restoration based upon the idea of immortality and resurrection. Daniel 12:2, 3,13 — “And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt And they that are wise shall shine as the brightness of the Armament, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever...But go thou thy way till the end be: for thou shalt rest and shalt stand in thy lot, at the end of the days.”

Josephus, on the doctrine of the Pharisees, in Antiquities, xviii: 1:3, and Wars of the Jews, II:8:10-14 — “Souls have an immortal vigor. Under the earth are rewards and punishments. The wicked are detained in an everlasting prison. The righteous shall have power to revive and live again. Bodies are indeed corruptible but souls remain exempt from death forever. But the doctrine of the Sadducees is that souls die with their bodies.” Matthew 22:31,32 — “But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”

Christ’s argument, in the passage last quoted, rests upon the two implied assumptions. First, that love will never suffer the object of its affection to die. Beings who have ever been the objects of God’s love will be so forever. Secondly, that body and soul belong normally together. If body and soul are temporarily separated, they shall be united. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are living and therefore, they shall rise again. It was only an application of the same principle, when Robert Hall gave up his early materialism as he looked down into his father’s grave; he felt that this could not be the end; cf. Psalm 23:26 — “Your heart shall live forever.” Acts 23:6 — “I am a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees: touching the hope and resurrection of the dead I am called in question”; 26:7, 8 — “And concerning this hope I am accused by the Jews, O king! Why is it judged incredible with you, if God doth raise the dead?” Hebrews 11:13-16 — the present life was reckoned as a pilgrimage; the patriarchs sought “a better country, that is, a heavenly.” Cf . Genesis 47:9. On Jesus’ argument for the resurrection, see A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 406-421.

The argument for immortality itself presupposes not only the existence of a God but also the existence of a truthful, wise and benevolent God. We might almost say that God and immortality must be proved together, like two pieces of a broken crock when put together, there is proof of both.

And yet logically it is only the existence of God that is intuitively certain.

Immortality is an inference therefrom. Henry More: “But souls that of his own good life partake He loves as his own self; dear as his eye They are to him: he’ll never them forsake; When they shall die, then God himself shall die; They live, they live in blest eternity.” God could not let Christ die and he cannot let us die. Southey: “They sin who tell us love can die.

With life all other passions fly; All others are but vanity. In heaven ambition cannot dwell, Nor avarice in the vaults of hell; They perish where they had their birth; But love is indestructible.”

Emerson, Threnody on the death of his beloved and gifted child: “What is excellent, As God lives, is permanent: Hearts are dust, hearts loves remain; Hearts love will meet thee again.” Whittier, Snowbound, 200 sq . — “Yet Love will dream, and Faith will trust (Since He who knows our need is just), That somehow, somewhere, meet we must. Alas for him who never sees The stars shine through his cypress trees I Who hopeless lays his dead away, Nor looks to see the breaking day Across his mournful marbles play I Who hath not learned, in hours of faith, The truth to flesh and sense unknown, That Life is ever lord of death, And Love can never lose its own.” Robert Browning, Evelyn Hope: “For God above Is great to grant as mighty to make, And creates the love to reward the love; I claim you still for my own love’s sake I Delayed it may be for more lives yet, Through worlds I shall traverse not a few; Much is to learn and much to forget, Ere the time be come for taking you.”

The river St. John in New Brunswick descends seventeen feet between the city and the sea and ships cannot overcome the obstacle but, when the tide comes in, it turns the current the other way and bears vessels on mightily to the city. So the laws of nature bring death, but the tides of Christ’s life counteract them and bring life and immortality (Dr. J. W. A. Stewart).

Mozley, Lectures, 26-59 and Essays, 2:169 — “True religion among the Jews had an evidence of immortality in its possession of God. Paganism was hopeless in its loss of friends because affection never advanced beyond its earthly object and therefore, in losing it, lost all. But religious love, which loves the creature in the Creator, has that on which to fall back, when its earthly object is removed.” (h) The most impressive and conclusive of all proofs of immortality however, is afforded in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, a work accomplished by his own power, and demonstrating that the spirit lived after its separation from the body ( John 2:19,21; 10:17, 18). By coming back from the tomb, he proves that death is not annihilation ( Timothy 1:10). John 2:19,21 — “Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up...But he spoke of the temple of his body”; 10:17, 18 — “Therefore doth the Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it again...I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again”; 2 Timothy 1:10 — “our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.” That is, immortality had been a truth dimly recognized, suspected, longed for before Christ came but it was he who first brought it out from obscurity and uncertainty into clear daylight and convincing power. Christ’s resurrection, moreover, carries with it the resurrection of his people: “We two are so joined, He’ll not be in glory and leave me behind.”

Christ taught immortality by exhibiting himself the perfect conception of a human life and by actually coming back from beyond the grave. Who could believe that Christ could become forever extinct? There were many speculations about the Trans-Atlantic continent before 1492 but these were of little worth compared with the actual word, which Columbus brought of a New World beyond the sea. By providing a way through which his spiritual life and victory may be ours so that, though we pass through the valley of the shadow of death, we may fear no evil. By thus gaining authority to teach us of the resurrection of the righteous and of the wicked, as he actually does, Christ’s resurrection is not only the best proof of immortality but we have no certain evidence of immortality without it. Hume held that the same logic, which proved immortality from reason alone, would also prove preexistence. “In reality,” he said, “it is the Gospel, and the Gospel alone, that has brought immortality to light.”

It was truth, though possibly spoken in jest.

There was need of this revelation. The fear of death even after Christ has come, shows how hopeless humanity is by nature. Krupp, the great German maker of cannon, would not have death mentioned in his establishment. He ran away from his own dying relatives. Yet he died. But to the Christian, death is an exodus, an unmooring or a homecoming. Here we are as ships on the docks; at death we are launched into our true element. Before Christ’s resurrection, it was twilight; it is sunrise now.

Balfour: “Death is the fall of the curtain, not at the end of the piece, but at the end of the act.” George Dana Boardman: “Christ is the resurrection and the life. He, being the Son of man, the archetypal man, the representative of human nature, the head and epitome of mankind, mankind ideally, potentially, virtually rose, when the Son of man rose. He is the resurrection because he is the life. The body does not give life to itself, but life takes on body and uses it.”

George Adam Smith, Yale Lectures: “Some of the Psalmists have only a hope of corporate immortality. But this was found wanting. It did not satisfy Israel. It cannot satisfy men today. The O.T. is of use in reminding us that the hope of immortality is a secondary, subordinate and dispensable element of religious experience. Men had better begin and work for God’s sake and not for future reward. The O.T. development of immortality is of use most of all because it deduces all immortality from God.” Athanasius: “Man is, according to nature, mortal, as a being who has been made of things that are perishable. But on account of his likeness to God he can by piety ward off and escape from his natural mortality and remain indestructible if he retain the knowledge of God, or lose his incorruptibility if he lose his life in God” (quoted in McConnell, Evolution of Immortality, viii, 46-48). Justin Martyr, 1 Apol., 17, expects resurrection of both just and unjust; but in Dial.

Tryph., 5, he expressly denounces and dismisses the Platonic doctrine that the soul is immortal. Athenagoras and Tertullian hold to native immortality and from it argue to bodily resurrection, as does Augustine.

But Theophilus, Irenseus, Clemens Alexandrinus, with Athanasius, counted it a pagan error. For the annihilation theory, see Hudson, Debt and Grace, and Christ our Life; also Dobney, Future Punishment. Per contra, see Hovey, State of the Impenitent Dead, 1-27, and Manual of Theology and Ethics, 153-168; Luthardt, Compendium, 289-292; Delitzsch, Bib. Psych., 397-407; Hertog, Encyclop., art.: Tod; Splittgerber, Schlaf und Tod; Estes, Christian Doctrine of the Soul; Baptist Review, 1879:411-439; Presb. Rev., Jan. 1882:203.

II. THE INTERMEDTATE STATE.

The Scriptures affirm the conscious existence of both the righteous and the wicked after death and prior to the resurrection. In the intermediate state the soul is without a body, yet this state is for the righteous a state of conscious joy and for the wicked a state of conscious suffering.

It is plain from 1 Thess. 4:16, 17 and 1 Corinthians 15:52, that the righteous do not receive the spiritual body at death. An interval is intimated between Paul’s time and the rising of those who slept. The rising will occur, in the future “at the last trump.” So the resurrection of the wicked had not yet occurred in any single case ( 2 Timothy 2:18 — it was an error to say that the resurrection was “past already”); it was yet future ( John 5:28-30 — “the hour cometh” — ejrcetai w[ra, not kai< nu~n ejstin — “now is,” as in verse 25; Acts 24:15 — “there shall be a resurrection” — ajnastasin me>llin ejsesqai). Christ was the first fruits ( 1 Corinthians 15:20,23). If the saints had received the spiritual body at death, the patriarchs would have been raised before Christ. 1. Of the righteous, it is declared: (a) The soul of the believer, at its separation from the body, enters the presence of Christ. 2 Corinthians 5:1-8 — “if the earthly house of our tabernacle be dissolved, we have a building from God, a house not made with hand and eternal in the heavens. For verily in this we groan, longing to be clothed upon with our habitation which is from heaven: if so be that being clothed we shall not be found naked. For indeed we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened; not for that we would be unclothed, but that we would be clothed upon, that what is mortal may be swallowed up in life...willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be at home with the Lord.” Paul hopes to escape the violent separation of soul and body (the being “unclothed”) by living till the coming of the Lord, and then putting on the heavenly body, as it were, over the present one ejpendu>sasqai yet whether he lived till Christ’s coming or not, he knew that the soul, when it left the body, would be at home with the Lord. Luke 23:43 — “Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise”; John 14:3 — “And if I go and prepare a place for you, come again, and will receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also”; Timothy 4:18 — “The Lord will deliver me from every evil work, and will save me unto [or, ‘into’] his heavenly kingdom” = will save me and put me into his heavenly kingdom (Ellicott), the characteristic of which is the visible presence of the King with his subjects. It is our privilege to be with Christ here and now. And nothing shall separate us from Christ and his love, “neither death, nor life...nor things present nor things to come” ( Romans 8:38); for he himself has said: “Lo, I am with you always, even unto the consummation of the age” ( Matthew 28:20). (b) The spirits of departed believers are with God. Hebrews 12:23 — Ye are come “to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven and to God, the Judge of all”; cf. Ecclesiastes 12:7 — “the dust returneth to the earth as it was, and the spirit returneth unto God who gave it”; John 20:17 — “Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended unto the Father” — probably means: “my body has not yet ascended.” The soul had gone to God during the interval between death and the resurrection, as is evident from Luke 23:43, — “with me in Paradise...Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” (c) Believers at death enter paradise. Luke 23:42,43 — “And he said, Jesus, remember me when thou comest in thy kingdom. And he said unto him, Verily, I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise”; cf. 2 Corinthians 12:4 — “caught up into Paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter”; Revelation 2:7 — “To him that overcometh, to him will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the Paradise of God”; Genesis 2:8 — “And Jehovah God planted a garden eastward, in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.”

Paradise is none other than the abode of God and the blessed, of which the primeval Eden was the type. If the penitent thief went to Purgatory, it was better than a Heaven without Christ. Paradise is a place, which Christ has gone to prepare, perhaps by taking our friends there before us. (d) Their state, immediately after death, is greatly to be preferred to that of faithful and successful laborers for Christ here. Philippians 1:23 — “I am in a strait betwixt the two, having the desire to depart and be with Christ; for it is very far better.” Here Hackett says: “ajnalu~sai = departing, cutting loose, as if to put to sea, followed by sustw~| ei=nai , as if Paul regarded one event as immediately subsequent to the other.” Paul, with his burning desire to preach Christ, would certainly have preferred to live and labor, even amid great suffering, rather than to die, if death to him had been a state of unconsciousness and inaction. See Edwards the younger, Works, 2:530, 531; Hovey, Impenitent Dead, 61. (e) Departed saints are truly alive and conscious, Matthew 22:32 — “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living”; Luke 16:23 — “carried away by the angels into Abraham’s bosom”; 23:43 — “Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise” — “with me” = in the same state. Unless Christ slept in unconsciousness, we cannot think that the penitent thief did. John 11:26 — “whosoever liveth and believeth on me shall never die”; 1 Thess. 5:10 — “who died for us, that, whether we wake or sleep, we should live together with him”; Romans 8:10 — “And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the spirit is life because of righteousness.” Life and consciousness clearly belong to the “souls under the altar” mentioned under the next head, for they cry: “How long?” Philippians 1:6 — “he who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ.” This seems to imply a progressive sanctification through the Intermediate State, Up to the time of Christ’s Second Coming. This state is a conscious state (“God of the living”), a fixed state (no “passing from thence”) and an incomplete state (“not to be unclothed”). (f) They are at rest and blessed. Revelation 6:9-11 — “I saw underneath the altar the souls of them that had been slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held: and they cried with a great voice, saying, How long, O Master, the holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth? And there was given them to each one a white robe; and it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little time, until their fellow servants also and their brethren, who should be killed even as they were, should have fulfilled their course”; 14:13 — “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from henceforth: yea, saith the Spirit that they may rest from their labors; for their works follow with them”; 20:14 “And death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. See Evans, in Presb. Rev., 1833:303 — “The shadow of death lying upon Hades is the penumbra of Hell. Hence Hades is associated with death in the final doom.” 2. Of the wicked, it is declared: (a) They are in prison, that is, are under constraint and guard ( 1 Peter 3:19 — fulakhJ) 1 Peter 3:19 — “In which [spirit] also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison.” There is no need of putting unconscious spirits under guard. Hovey: “Restraint implies power of action, and suffering implies consciousness.” (b) They are in torment, or conscious suffering ( Luke 16:23 — ejn basa>noiv ). Luke 16:23 — “And in Hades he lifted up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am in anguish in this flame.”

Here many unanswerable questions may be asked: Had the rich man a body before the resurrection or is this representation of a body only figurative? Did the soul still feel the body from which it was temporarily separated or have souls in the intermediate state temporary bodies?

However we may answer these questions, it is certain that the rich man suffers, while probation still lasts for his brethren on earth. Fire is here, the source of suffering but not of annihilation. Even though this is a parable, it proves conscious existence after death to have been the common view of the Jews and to have been a view sanctioned by Christ. (c) They are under punishment ( 2 Peter 2:9 — kolazome>nouv). 2 Peter 2:9 — “the Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptation, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment unto the day of judgment.” Here “the unrighteous” = not only evil angels, but ungodly men; cf. verse 4 — “For if God spared not angels when they sinned, but cast them down to hell, and committed them to pits of darkness to be reserved unto judgment.”

In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the body is buried yet still the torments of the soul are described as physical. Jesus here accommodates his teaching to the conceptions of his time or, better still, uses material figures to express spiritual realities. Surely he does not mean to say that the Rabbinic notion of Abraham’s bosom is ultimate truth. “Parables,” for this reason among others, “may not be made primary sources and seats of doctrine.” Luckock, Intermediate State,20 — “May the parable of the rich man and Lazarus be an anticipatory picture of the final state? But the rich man seems to assume that the judgment has not yet come, for he speaks of his brethren as still undergoing their earthly probation and as capable of receiving a warning to avoid a fate similar to his own.”

The passages cited enable us properly to estimate two opposite errors.

A. They refute, on the one hand, the view that the souls of both righteous and wicked sleep between death and the resurrection.

This view is based upon the assumption that the possession of a physical organism is indispensable to activity and consciousness, an assumption, which the existence of a God who is pure spirit ( John 4:24) and the existence of angels who are probably pure spirits ( Hebrews 1:14), show to be erroneous. Although the departed are characterized as ‘spirits’ ( Ecclesiastes 12:7; Acts 7:59; Hebrews 12:23; 1Pet 3:19), there is nothing in this ‘absence from the body’ ( 2 Corinthians 5:8) inconsistent with the activity and consciousness ascribed to them in the Scriptures above referred to. When the dead are spoken of as ‘sleeping’ ( Daniel 12:2; Matthew 9:24; John 11:11; 1 Corinthians 11:30; 15:51; 1 Thess. 4:14; 5:10),we are to regard this as simply the language of appearance, and as literally applicable only to the body. John 4:24 — “God Is a Spirit [or rather, as margin, ‘God is spirit’]”; Hebrews 1:14 — “Are they [angels] not all ministering spirits?” Ecclesiastes 12:7 — “the dust returneth to the earth as it was, and the spirit returneth unto God who gave it”; Acts 7:59 — “And they stoned Stephen, calling upon the Lord, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit’; Hebrews 12:23 — “to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect” 1 Peter 3:19 — “in which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison”; 2 Corinthians 5:8 — “we are of good courage, I say, and are willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be at home with the Lord”; Daniel 12:2 — “many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake”; Matthew 9:24 — “the damsel is not dead, but sleepeth”; John 11:11 — “Our friend Lazarus is fallen asleep; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep”; Corinthians 11:30 — “For this cause many among you are weak and sickly, and not a few sleep”; 1 Thess. 4:14 — “For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also that are fallen asleep in Jesus will God bring with him”; 5:10 — “who died for us that, whether we wake or sleep, we should live together with him.”

B. The passages first cited refute, on the other hand, the view that the suffering of the intermediate state is purgatorial.

According to the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, “all who die at peace with the church, but are not perfect, pass into purgatory.” Here they make satisfaction for the sins committed after baptism by suffering a longer or shorter time, according to the degree of their guilt. The church on earth, however, has power, by prayers and the sacrifice of the Mass, to shorten these sufferings or to remit them altogether. But we urge, in reply, that the passages referring to suffering in the intermediate state give no indication that any true believer is subject to this suffering, or that the church has any power to relieve from the consequences of sin, either in this world or in the world to come. Only God can forgive, and the church is simply empowered to declare that upon the fulfillment of the appointed conditions of repentance and faith, he does actually forgive. This theory, moreover, is inconsistent with any proper new of the completeness of Christ s satisfaction ( Galatians 2:21; Hebrews 9:28); of justification through faith alone ( Romans 3:28); and of the condition after death, of both righteous and wicked, as determined in this life ( Ecclesiastes 11:3; Matthew 25:10; Luke 16:26; Hebrews 9:27; Revelation 22:11).

Against this doctrine we quote the following texts: Galatians 2:21 — “I do not make void the grace of God: for if righteousness is through the law, then Christ died for nought”; Hebrews 9:28 — “so Christ also, having been once [or, ‘once for all’] offered to bear the sins of many, shall appear a second time, apart from sin, to them that wait for him, unto salvation”; Romans 3:28 — “We reckon therefore that a man is justified by faith apart from the works of the law”; Ecclesiastes 11:3 — “if a tree fall toward the south or toward the north, in the place where the tree falleth there shall it be”; Matthew 25:10 — “And while they went away to buy, the bridegroom came; and they that were ready went in with him to the marriage feast: and the door was shut”; Luke 16:26 — “And besides all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, that they that would pass from hence to you may not he able, and that none may cross over from thence to us”; Hebrews 9:27 — “it is appointed unto men once to die, and after this cometh judgment”; Revelation 22:11 — “He that is unrighteous, let him do unrighteousness still: and he that is filthy, let him he made filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him do righteousness still: and ho that is holy, let him he made holy still.”

Rome teaches that the agonies of purgatory are intolerable. They differ from the pains of the damned only in this, that there is a limit to the one, not the other. Bellarmine, De Purgatorio, 2:14 — “The pains of purgatory are very severe, surpassing any endured in this life. “Since none but actual saints escape the pains of purgatory, this doctrine gives to the death and the funeral of the Roman Catholic a dreadful and repellent aspect.

Death is not the coming of Christ to take his disciples home but is rather, the ushering of the shrinking soul into a place of unspeakable suffering.

This suffering makes satisfaction for guilt. Having paid their allotted penalty, the souls of the purified pass into Heaven without awaiting the Day of Judgment. The doctrine of purgatory gives hope that men may be saved after death, prayer for the dead has influence and the priest is authorized to offer this prayer so the church sells salvation for money.

Amory H. Bradford, Ascent of the Soul, 267-287, argues in favor of prayers for the dead. Such prayers, he says, help us to keep in mind the fact that they are living still. If the dead are free beings, they may still choose good or evil and our prayers may help them to choose the good.

We should be thankful, he believes, to the Roman Catholic Church, for keeping up such prayers. We reply that no doctrine of Rome has done so much to pervert the gospel and to enslave the world.

For the Romanist doctrine, see Perrone, Prælectiones Theologicæ, 2:391- 420. Per contra , see Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3:743-770; Barrows, Purgatory. Augustine, Encheiridion, 69, suggests the possibility of purgatorial fire in the future for some believers. Whiton, Is Eternal Punishment Endless? page 69, says that Tertullian held to a delay of resurrection in the case of faulty Christians. Cyprian first stated the notion of a middle state of purification. Augustine thought it “not incredible” and Gregory the Great called it” worthy of belief.” It is now one of the most potent doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church; that church has been, from the third century, for all souls who accept her last consolations, practically restorationist. Gore, Incarnation,18 — “In the Church of Rome, the ‘peradventure’ of an Augustine as to purgatory for the imperfect after death — ‘non redarguo’, he says, ‘quia forsitan verum est,’ — has become a positive teaching about purgatory and full of exact information.”

Elliott, Horæ Apocalypticæ 1:410, adopts Hume’s simile and says that purgatory gave the Roman Catholic Church what Archimedes wanted, another world on which to fix its lever, that so fixed, the church might with it move this world. We must remember, however, that the Roman church teaches no radical change of character in Purgatory. Purgatory is only a purifying process for believers. The true purgatory is only in this world, for only here are sins purged away by God’s sanctifying Spirit, and in this process of purification, though God chastises, there is no element of penalty. On Dante’s Purgatory, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 515-518.

Luckock, After Death, is an argument based upon the Fathers and against the Romanist doctrine. Yet he holds to progress in sanctification in the intermediate state, though the work done in that state will not affect the final judgment, which will be for the deeds done in the body. He urges prayer for the departed righteous. In his book entitled The Intermediate State, Luckock holds to mental and spiritual development in that state, to active ministry, mutual recognition and renewed companionship. He does not believe in a second probation but in a first real probation for those who have had no proper opportunities in this life. In their reaction against purgatory, the Westminster divines obliterated the Intermediate State. In that state there is gradual purification and must be, since not all impurity and sinfulness are removed at death. The purging of the will requires time.

White robes were given to them while they were waiting (Revelations 6:11). But there is no second probation for those who have thrown away their opportunities in this life. Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book, 232 (Pope, 2129), makes the Pope speak of following Guide “Into that sad, obscure, sequestered state Where God unmakes but to remake the soul He else made first in vain, which must not be.” But the idea of hell as permitting essential change of character is foreign to Roman Catholic doctrine.

We close our discussion of this subject with a single, but an important, remark: this, namely, that while the Scriptures represent the intermediate state to be one of conscious joy to the righteous and of conscious pain to the wicked, they also represent this state to be one of incompleteness. The perfect joy of the saints and the utter misery of the wicked begin only with the resurrection and general judgment.

That the intermediate state is one of incompleteness appears from the following passages: Matthew 8:29 — “What have we to do with thee, thou Son of God? art thou come hither to torment us before the time?” 2 Corinthians 5:3,4 — “if so be that being clothed we shall not be found naked. For indeed we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened; not for that we would be unclothed, but that we would be clothed upon, that what is mortal may he swallowed up of life”; at Romans 8:23 — “And not only so, but ourselves also, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for our adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body’’; Philippians 3:11 — “if by any means I may attain unto the resurrection from the dead”; 2 Peter 2:9 — “the Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptation, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment unto the Day of Judgment.” Revelation 6:10 — “and they [the souls underneath the altar] cried with a great voice, saying, Bow long, O Master, the holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?”

In opposition to Locke, Human Understanding, 2:1:10, who said that “the soul thinks not always,” and to Turner, Wish and Will, 48, who declares that “the soul need not always think any more than the body always move; the essence of the soul is potentiality for activity.” Descartes, Kant, Jouffroy and Sir William Hamilton, all maintain that it belongs to mental existence continuously to think. Upon this view, the intermediate state would be necessarily a state of thought. As to the nature of that thought, Dorner remarks in his Eschatology that “in this relatively bodiless state, a still life begins, a sinking of the soul into itself and into the ground of its being, what Steffens calls ‘involution,’ and Martensen ‘self-brooding.’ In this state, spiritual things are the only realities. In the unbelieving, their impurity, discord and alienation from God are laid bare. If they still prefer sin, its form becomes more spiritual, more demoniacal and so ripens for the judgment.”

Even here, Dorner deals in speculation rather than in Scripture. But he goes further and regards the intermediate state as one, not only of moral progress but also of elimination of evil and holds the end of probation to be, not at death, but at the judgment, at least in the case of all nonbelievers who are not incorrigible. We must regard this as a practical revival of the Romanist theory of purgatory and as contradicted not only by all the considerations already urged but also by the general tenor of Scriptural representation that the decisions of this life are final and that character is fixed here for eternity. This is the solemnity of preaching, that the gospel is “a savor from life unto life,” or a savor from death unto death” ( 2 Corinthians 2:16).

Descartes: “As the light always shines and the heat always warms, so the soul always thinks.” James, Psychology, 1:164-175, argues against unconscious mental states. The states were conscious at the time we had them but they have been forgotten. In the Unitarian Review, Sept. 1884, Prof. James denies that eternity is given at a stroke to omniscience. Lotze, in his Metaphysics, 268, in opposition to Kant, contends for the transcendental validity of time. Green, on the contrary, in Prolegomena to Ethics, book 1, says that every act of knowledge in the case of man is a timeless act. In comparing the different aspects of the stream of successive phenomena, the mind must, he says, be itself out of time.

Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 306, denies this timeless consciousness even to God and apparently agrees with Martineau in maintaining that God does not foreknow free human acts.

De Quincey called the human brain a palimpsest. Each new writing seems to blot out all that went before yet, in reality, not one letter has ever been effaced. Loeb, Physiology of the Brain, 213, tells us that associative memory is imitated by machines like the phonograph. Traces left by speech can be reproduced in speech. Loeb calls memory a matter of physical chemistry. Stout, Manual of Psychology, 8 — “Consciousness includes not only awareness of our own states, but these states themselves, whether we are aware of them or not. If a man is angry, that is a state of consciousness, even though he does not know that he is angry.

If he does know that he is angry, that is another modification of consciousness and not the same.” On unconscious mental action, see Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 378-382 — “Cerebration cannot be identified with psychical processes. If it could be, materialism would triumph. If the brain can do these things, why not do all the phenomena of consciousness? Consciousness becomes a mere epi phenomenon.

Unconscious cerebration = wooden iron or unconscious consciousness.

What then becomes of the soul in its intervals of unconsciousness?

Answer: Unconscious finite minds exist only in the World-ground in which all minds and things have their existence.”

On the whole subject see Hovey, State of Man after Death; Savage, Souls of the Righteous; Julius Muller, Doct. Sin, 2:304-446; Neander, Planting and Training. 482-484: Delitzsch, Bib. Psychologie, 407-448; Bibliotheca Sacra 13:153; Methodist Revelations 34:240; Christian Rev., 20:381; Herzog, Encyclop. art.: Hades; Stuart, Essays on Future Punishment; Whately, Future State; Hovey, Biblical Eschatology, 79-144.

III. THE SECOND COMING OF CHRIST.

While the Scriptures represent great events in the history of the individual Christian, such as death and great events in the history of the church, the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost and the destruction of Jerusalem, as comings of Christ for deliverance or judgment, they also declare that these partial and typical comings shall be concluded by a final, triumphant return of Christ to punish the wicked and to complete the salvation of his people.

Temporal comings of Christ are indicated in Matthew 24:23,27, — “Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is the Christ, or, Here; believe it not…For as the lightning cometh forth from the east, and is seen even unto the west; so shall be the coming of the Son of man…Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass away, till all these things he accomplished”; 16:28 — “Verily I say unto you, There are some of them that stand here, who shall in no wise taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom”; John 14:3,18 — “And if I go and procure a place for you, I come again, and will receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also…I will not leave you desolate: I come unto you”; Revelations 3:20 — “Behold, I stand at the door and knock, if any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” So the Protestant Reformation, the modern missionary enterprise, the battle against papacy in Europe and against slavery in this country, the great revivals under Whitefield in England and under Edwards in America, were all preliminary and typical comings of Christ. It was a skeptical spirit, which indited the words, “God’s new Messiah, some great Cause.” Yet, it is true that in every great movement of civilization we are to recognize a new coming of the one and only Messiah, “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday and today and forever” ( Hebrews 13:8). Schaff, Hist. Christ. Church, 1:840 — “The coming began with his ascension to heaven (cf. Matthew 26:64 — “henceforth [ajp a]rpi ] ye shall see the Son of man sitting at the right hand of Power, and coming on the clouds of heaven”). “Matheson, Spir. Devel, of St. Paul, 286 — “To Paul, in his later letters, this world is already the scene of the Second Advent. The secular is not to vanish away, but is to be permanent, transfigured and pervaded by the divine life. Paul began with the Christ of the resurrection; he ends with the Christ who already makes all things new.” See Metcalf. Parousia vs. Second Advent, in Bibliotheca Sacra Jan. 1907:61-85.

The final coming of Christ is referred to in: Matthew 24:30 — “they shall see the Son of man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he shall send forth his angels with a great sound of a trumpet and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other”; 25:31 — “But when the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the angels with him, then shall he sit on the throne of his glory”; Acts 1:11 — “Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye looking into heaven? this Jesus, who was received up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye beheld him going into heaven”; 1 Thess. 4:16 — “For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven, with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God”; 2 Thessalonians 1:7,10 — “the revelation of the Lord Jesus from heaven with the angels of his power…when he shall come to be glorified in his saints, and to be marveled at in all them that believed”; Hebrews 9:28 — “so Christ also, having been once offered to bear the sins of many, shall appear a second time, apart from sin, to them that wait for him, unto salvation”; Revelation 1:7 — “Behold, he cometh with the clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they that pierced him; and all the tribes of the earth shall mourn over him.” Dr. A. C. Kendrick, Com. on Hebrews 1:6 — “And when he shall conduct back again into the inhabited world the Firstborn, he saith, And let all the angels of God worship him” = in the glory of the Second Coming Christ’s superiority to angels will be signally displayed, which will be a contrast to the humiliation of his first coming.

The tendency of our day is to interpret this second class of passages in a purely metaphorical and spiritual way. But prophecy can have more than one fulfillment. Jesus’ words are pregnant words. The present spiritual coming does not exhaust their meaning. His coming in the great movements of history does not preclude a final and literal coming, in which “every eye shall see him” ( Revelation 1:7). With this proviso, we may assent to much of the following quotation from Gould, Bib.

Theol. N. T., 44-56 — “The last things of which Jesus speaks are not the end of the world, but of the age, the end of the Jewish period in connection with the destruction of Jerusalem. After the entire statement is in, including both the destruction of Jerusalem and the coming of the Lord, which is to follow it, it is distinctly said that that generation was not to pass away until all these things are accomplished. According to this, the coming of the Son of man must be something other than a visible coming.

In O.T. prophecy, any divine interference in human affairs is represented under the figure of God coming in the clouds of heaven. Matthew 26:64 says, “From this time ye shall see the Son of man seated…and coming in the clouds of heaven.” Coming and judgment are both continuous. The slow growth in the parables of the leaven and the mustard seed contradicts the idea of Christ’s early coming. ‘After a long time the Lord of these Servants cometh’ ( Matthew 25:19). Christ came in one sense at the destruction of Jerusalem, in another sense; all great crises in the history of the world are comings of the Son of man. These judgments of the nations are a part of the process for the final setting up of the kingdom. But this final act will not be a judgment process but the final entire submission of the will of man to the will of God. The end is to be, not judgment, but salvation.” We add to this statement the declaration that the final act here spoken of will not be purely subjective and spiritual. It will constitute an external manifestation of Christ comparable to that of his first coming in its appeal to the senses but unspeakably more glorious than was the coming to the manger and the cross. We now proceed to give proof of this. 1. The Nature Of This Coming.

Although without doubt accompanied, in the case of the regenerate, by inward and invisible influences of the Holy Spirit, the Second Advent is to be outward and visible. This we argue: (a) From the objects to be secured by Christ’s return. These are partly external ( Romans 8:21,23). Nature and the body are both to be glorified. These external changes may well be accompanied by a visible manifestation of him who ‘makes all things new’ ( Revelation 21:5). Romans 8:10-23 — “in hope that the creation also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God… waiting for our adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body’; Revelations 21:5 — “Behold, I make all things new.” A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 49 — “We must not confound the Paraclete and the Parousia. It has been argued that, because Christ came in the person of the Spirit, the Redeemer’s advent in glory has already taken place. But in the Paraclete, Christ comes spiritually and invisibly; in the Parousia, he comes bodily and gloriously.” (b) From the Scriptural comparison of the manner of Christ’s return with the manner of his departure ( Acts 1:11) — see Commentary of Hackett, in loco — “dn tro>pon = visibly, and in the air. The expression is never employed to affirm merely the certainty of one event as compared with another. The assertion that the meaning is simply that, as Christ had departed, so also he would return, is contradicted by every passage in which the phrase occurs.” Acts 1:11 — “this Jesus, who was received up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye beheld him going into heaven”; cf. Acts 7:28 — “wouldest thou kill me, as [o\n tro>pon ] thou killest the Egyptian yesterday?” Matthew 23:37 — “how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as [o\n tro>pon ] a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings”; 2 Timothy 3:8 — “as [o\n tro>pon ] Jannes and Jambres withstood Moses, so do these also withstand the truth.”

Lyman Abbott refers to Matthew 23:37, and Luke 13:35, as showing that, in Acts 1:11, “in like manner” means only “in like reality .” So he says, the Jews expected Elijah to return in form, according to Malachi 4:5, whereas he returned only in spirit. Jesus primarily returned at Pentecost in spirit and has been coming again ever since. The remark of Dr. Hackett, quoted in the text above, is sufficient proof that this interpretation is wholly unexegetical. (c) From the analogy of Christ’s first coming. If this was a literal and visible coming, we may expect the Second Coming to be literal and visible also. 1 Thess. 4:16 — “For the Lord himself [ = in his own person] shall descend from heaven, with a shout [something heard], with the yoke of the archangel and with the trump of God.” See Com. of Prof. W. A. Stevens: “So different from Luke 17:20, where ‘the kingdom of God cometh not with observation.” The ‘shout’ is not necessarily the voice of Christ himself (lit. ‘in a shout,’ or ‘in shouting’ ‘Voice of the archangel’ and ‘trump of God’ are appositions, not additional.” Revelation 1:7 — “every eye shall see him”; as every ear shall hear him: John 5:28, — “all that are in the tombs shall hear his voice”; 2 Thess. 2:2 — “to the end that ye be not quickly shaken from your mind, nor yet be troubled…as that the day of the Lord is now present.” They may have “thought that the first gathering of the saints to Christ was a quiet, invisible one, a stealthy advent, like a thief in the night” (Lillie). 2 John — “For many deceivers are gone forth into the world, even they that confess not that Jesus Christ cometh in the flesh” — here denial of a future Second Coming of Christ is declared to be the mark of a deceiver.

Alford and Alexander, in their Commentaries on Acts 1:11, agree with the view of Hackett quoted above. Warren, Parousia, 61-65, 106-114, controverts this view and says, “an omnipresent divine being can come, only in the sense of manifestation.” He regards the Parousia, or coming of Christ, as nothing but Christ’s spiritual presence. A writer in the Presb.

Review, 1883:221, replies that Warren’s view is contradicted “by the fact that the apostles often spoke of the parousia as an event yet future, long after the promise of the Redeemer’s spiritual presence with his church had begun to be fulfilled. Paul expressly cautions the Thessalonians against the belief that the Parousia was just at hand.” We do not know how all men at one time can see a bodily Christ but we also do not know the nature of Christ’s body. The day exists undivided in many places at the same time. The telephone has made it possible for men widely separated to hear the same voice; it is equally possible that all men may see the same Christ coming in the clouds. 2. The time of Christ’s coming. (a) Although Christ’s prophecy of this event, in the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew, so connects it with the destruction of Jerusalem that the apostles and the early Christians seem to have hoped for its occurrence during their lifetimes. Yet, neither Christ nor the apostles definitely taught when the end should be but rather, declared the knowledge of it to be reserved in the counsels of God that men might ever recognize it as possibly at hand and so might live in the attitude of constant expectation. 1 Corinthians 15:51 — “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed”; 1 Thess. 4:17 — “then we that are alive, that are left, shall together with them be caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air; and so shall we ever be with the Lord”; 2 Timothy 4:8 — “henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give to me at that day: and not only to me, but also to all them that have loved his appearing”; James 5:7 — “Be patient therefore, brethren, until the coming of the Lord”; 1 Peter 4:7 — “But the end of all things is at hand: be ye therefore of sound mind, and be sober unto prayer”; 1 John 2:18 — “Little children, it is the last hour: and as ye heard that antichrist cometh, even now have there risen many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last hour.” Philippians 4:5 — “The Lord is at hand ejggu>v . In nothing be anxious” may mean, “the Lord is near” (in space), without any reference to the Second Coming. The passages quoted above, expressing as they do the surmises of the apostles that Christ’s coming was near, while yet abstaining from all definite fixing of the time, are at least sufficient proof that Christ’s advent may not be near to our time. We should be no more warranted than they were, in inferring from these passages alone the immediate coming of the Lord.

Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:349-350, maintains that Jesus expected his own speedy Second Coming and the end of the world. There was no mention of the death of his disciples, or the importance of readiness for it.

No hard and fast organization of his disciples into a church was contemplated by him, Matthew 16:18 and 18:17 are not authentic. No separation of his disciples from the fellowship of the Jewish religion was thought of. He thought of the destruction of Jerusalem as the final judgment. Yet his doctrine would spread through the earth, like leaven and mustard seed, though accompanied by suffering on the part of his disciples. This view of Wendt can be maintained only by an arbitrarily throwing out the testimony of the evangelist, on the grounds that Jesus’ mention of a church does not befit so early a stage in the evolution of Christianity. Wendt’s whole treatment is vitiated by the presupposition that there can be nothing in Jesus’ words, which is inexplicable upon the theory of natural development. That Jesus did not expect speedily to return to earth is shown in Matthew 25:19 — “After a long time the Lord of those servants cometh”; and Paul, in 2 Thess. had to correct the mistake of those who interpreted him as having in his first Epistle declared an immediate coming of the Lord.

A.H.. Strong, Cleveland Sermon, 1904:27 — “The faith in a Second Coming of Christ has lost its hold upon many Christians in our day. But it still serves to stimulate and admonish the great body and we can never dispense with its solemn and mighty influence. It is true that Christ comes in Pentecostal revivals and in destruction of Jerusalem, on Reformation movements and in political upheavals. But these are only precursors of another and literal and final return of Christ, to punish the wicked and to complete the salvation of his people. That day for which all other days are made will be a joyful day for those who have fought a good fight and have kept the faith. Let us look for and hasten the coming of the day of God.

The Jacobites of Scotland never teased their labors and sacrifices for their king’s return. They never tasted wine without pledging their absent prince, they never joined in song without renewing their oaths of allegiance. In many a prison cell and on many a battlefield they rang out the strain: ‘Follow thee, follow thee, wha wadna follow thee? Long hast thou lo’ed and trusted us fairly: Chairlie, Chairlie, wha wadna follow thee? King o’ the Highland hearts, bonnie Prince Chairlie!’ So they sang, so they invited him, until at last he came. But that longing for the day when Charles should come to his own again was faint and weak compared with the longing of true Christian hearts for the coming of their King. Charles came, only to suffer defeat and to bring shame to his country. But Christ will come, to put an end to the world’s long sorrow, to give triumph to the cause of truth, to bestow everlasting reward upon the faithful. ‘Even so, Lord Jesus, come! Hope of all our hopes the sum, Take thy waiting people home! Long, so long, the groaning earth, Cursed with war and flood and dearth, Sighs for its redemption birth. Therefore come, we daily pray; Bring the resurrection day; Wipe creation’s curse away!’” (b) Hence we find, in immediate connection with many of these predictions of the end, a reference to intervening events and to the eternity of God, which shows that the prophecies themselves are expressed in a large way which befits the greatness of the divine plans. Matthew 24:36 — “But of that day and hour knoweth no one, not even the angels of heaven, neither the Son, but the Father only”; Mark 13:32 — “But of that day or that hour knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but he Father. Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is”; Acts 1:7 — “And he said unto them, It is not for you to know times or seasons, which the Father hath set within his own authority”; 1 Corinthians 10:11 — “Now these things happened unto them by way of example; and they were written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the ages are come”; 16:22 — “Maranatha [margin: that is, O Lord, come!]”; 2 Thess.2:13 — “Now we beseech you brethren, touching the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and our gathering together unto him; to the end that ye be not quickly shaken from your mind, nor yet be troubled…as that the day of the Lord is now present [Am. Rev.: is just at hand’]; let no man beguile you in any wise: for it will not be, except the falling away come first, and the man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition.” James 5:8,9 — “Be ye also patient; establish your heart: for the coming of the Lord is at hand. Murmur not, brethren, one against another, that ye be not judged: behold, the judge standeth before the doors” Peter 3:3-12 — “in the last days mockers skill come…saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for, from the day that the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. For this they willfully forget, that there were heavens from of old…But forget not this one thing, beloved, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack concerning his promise…But the day of the Lord will come as a thief…what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy living and godliness, looking for and earnestly desiring [margin: ‘hasening’] the coming of the day of God,” awaiting it, and hastening its coming by your prayer and labor. Revelation 1:3 — “Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of the prophecy, and keep the things that are written therein: for the time is at hand”: 22:12, 20 — “Behold, I come quickly and my reward is with me, to render to each man according as work is…He who testifieth these things saith, Yea: I come quickly. Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.” From these passages it is evident that the apostles did not know the time of the end and that in was hidden from Christ himself while here in the flesh. He therefore, who assumes to know, assumes to know more than Christ or his apostles and assumes to know the very thing which Christ declared it was not for us to know!

Gould, Bib. Theol. N. T., 152 — “The expectation of our Lord’s coming was one of the elements and motifs of that generation and the delay of the event caused some questioning. But there is never any indication that it may be indefinitely postponed. The early church never had to face the difficulty forced upon the church today, of belief in his Second Coming founded upon a prophecy of his coming during the lifetime of a generation long since dead. And until this Epistle [2 Peter], we do not find any traces of this exegetical legerdemain as such a situation would require. But here we have it full-grown; just such a specimen of harmonic device as orthodox interpretation familiarizes us with. The definite statement that the advent is to be within that generation is met with the general principle that ‘one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day’ ( 2 Peter 3:8). “We must regard this comment of Dr. Gould as an unconscious fulfillment of the prediction that “in the last days mockers shall come with mockery” ( 2 Peter 3:3). A better understanding of prophecy, as divinely pregnant utterance, would have enabled the critic to believe that the words of Christ might be partially fulfilled in the days of the apostles, but fully accomplished only at the end of the world. (c) In this we discern a striking parallel between the predictions of Christ’s first, and the predictions of his Second Advent. In both cases the event was more distant and grander than those imagined to whom the prophecies first came. Under both dispensations, patient waiting for Christ was intended to discipline the faith, and to enlarge the conceptions, of God’s true servants.

The fact that every age since Christ ascended has had its Chiliasts and Second Adventists should turn our thoughts away from curious and fruitless prying into the time of Christ’s coming and set us at immediate and constant endeavor to be ready, at whatsoever hour he may appear. Genesis 4:1 — “And the man knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man with the help of Jehovah [lit.: ‘I have gotten a man, even Jehovah’],” an intimation that Eve fancied her firstborn to be already the promised seed, the coming deliverer; see MacWhorter, Jahveh Christ. Deuteronomy 18:15 — “Jehovah thy God will raise up unto thee a prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him ye shall hearken.” Here is a prophecy, which Moses may have expected to be fulfilled in Joshua, but which God designed to be fulfilled only in Christ. Isaiah 7:14,16 — “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel…For before the child shall know to refuse the evil, and choose the good, the land whose two kings thou abhorrest shall be forsaken.” This was a prophecy which the prophet may have expected to be fulfilled in his own time and which was partly so fulfilled, but which God intended to be fulfilled ages thereafter. Luke 2:25 — “Simeon; and this man was righteous and devout looking for the consolation of Israel.” Simeon was the type of holy men, in every age of Jewish history, who were waiting for the fulfillment of God’s promise and for the coming of the deliverer under the Christian dispensation. Augustine held that Christ’s reign of a thousand years, which occupies the last epoch of the world’s history, did not still lie ahead in the future, but began with the founding of the church (Ritschl, Just. and Recone., 286). Luther, near the time of his death, said: ‘God forbid that the world should last fifty years longer! Let him cut matters short with his last Judgment!” Melanchthon put the end less than two hundred years from his time. Calvin’s motto was: ‘ Domine, quousque?” — “O Lord, how long?” Jonathan Edwards, before and during the great Awakening, indulged high expectations as to the probable extension of the movement until it should bring the world, even in his own lifetime, into the love and obedience of Christ (Life, by Allen, 234). Better than any one of these is the utterance of Dr. Broadus: “If I am always ready, I shall be ready when Jesus comes.” On the whole subject see Hovey, in Baptist Quarterly, Oct. 1877:416-432; Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 2:641-646; Stevens, in Am. Com. on Thessalonians, Excursus on The Parousia, and notes on Thess. 4:13, 16; 5:11; 2 Thess. 2:3, 12; Godspeed, Messiah’s Second Advent; Heagle, That Blessed Hope. 3. The precursors of Christ’s coming. (a) Through the preaching of the gospel in all the world, the kingdom of Christ is steadily to enlarge its boundaries, until Jews and Gentiles alike become possessed of its blessings and a millennial period is introduced in which Christianity generally prevails throughout the earth. Daniel 2:44,45 — “And in the days of those kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed, nor shall the sovereignty thereof be left to another people; but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand forever. Forasmuch as thou sawest that a stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, and that it brake in pieces the iron, the brass, the clay, the silver, and the gold; the great God hath made known to the king what shall come to pass hereafter: and the dream is certain, and the interpretation thereof sure,” Matthew 13:31,32 — “The kingdom of heaven is like unto a grain of mustard seed… which indeed is less than all seeds; but when it is grown, it is greater than the herbs, and becometh a tree so that the birds of heaven come and lodge in the branches thereof.” The parable of the leaven, which follows, apparently illustrates the intensive, as that of the mustard seed illustrates the extensive, development of the kingdom of God. It is as impossible to confine the reference of the leaven to the spread of evil as it is impossible to confine the reference of the mustard seed to the spread of good. Matthew 24:14 — “And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world for a testimony unto all the nations; and then shall the end come”; Romans 11:25,26 — “a hardening in part hath befallen Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles be come in; and so all Israel shall be saved”; Revelation 20:4-6 — “And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that had been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus, and for the word of God, and such as worshipped not the beast neither his image, and received not the mark upon their forehead and upon their hand; and they lived, and reigned with Christ a thousand years.” Colossians 1:23 — “the gospel which ye heard, which was preached in all creation under heaven.” Paul’s phrase here and the apparent reference in Matthew 24:14 to A. D. 70 as the time of the end, should restrain theorizers from insisting that the Second Coming of Christ cannot occur until this text has been fulfilled with literal completeness (Broadus). (b) There will be a corresponding development of evil, either extensive or intensive, whose true character shall be manifest not only in deceiving many professed followers of Christ and in persecuting true believers, but in constituting a personal Antichrist as its representative and object of worship. This rapid growth shall continue until the millennium, during which evil, in the person of its chief, shall be temporarily restrained. Matthew 13:30,38 — “Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of the harvest I will say to the reaper; Gather up first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn…the field is the world; and the good seed, these are the sons of the kingdom; and the tares are the sons of the evil one”; 24:5, 11, 12, 24 — “For many shall come in my name, saying, I ant the Christ; and shall lead many astray…And many false prophets shall arise, and shall lead many astray. And because iniquity shall be multiplied, the love of the many shall wax cold…For there shall arise false Christs and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders; so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect.” Luke 21:12 — “But before all these things, they shall lay their hands on you, and shall persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues and prisons, bringing you before kings and governors for my name’s sake”; 2 Thess. 2:3, 4, 7, 8. — “it will not be, except the falling away come first, and the man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition, he that opposeth and exalteth himself against all that is called God or that is worshipped; so that he sitteth in the temple of God, getting himself forth as God…For the mystery of lawlessness doth already work: only there is one that restraineth now, until he be taken out of the way. And then shall be revealed the lawless one, whom the Lord Jesus shall slay with the breath of his mouth, and bring to nought by the manifestation of his coming.”

Elliott, Horæ Apocalypticæ, 1:65, holds that “Antichrist means another Christ, a pro-Christ, a vice-Christ, a pretender to the name of Christ, and in that character, an usurper and adversary. The principle of Antichrist was already sown in the time of Paul. But a certain hindrance, i.e., the Roman Empire as then constituted, needed first to be removed out of the way before room could be made for Antichrist’s development.” Antichrist, according to this view, is the hierarchical spirit, which found its final and most complete expression in the Papacy. Dante, Hell, 19:106-117, speaks of the Papacy, or rather the temporal power of the Popes, as Antichrist: “To you St. John referred, O shepherds vile, When she who sits on many waters, had Been seen with kings her person to defile”; see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 507.

It has been objected that a simultaneous growth both of evil and of good is inconceivable and that the progress of the divine kingdom implies a diminution in the power of the adversary. Only a slight reflection however convinces us that, as the population of the world is always increasing, evil men may increase in numbers, even though there is increase in the numbers of the good. But we must also consider that evil grows in intensity just in proportion to the light which good throws upon it. “Wherever God erects a house of prayer, The devil always builds a chapel there.” Every revival of religion stirs up the forces of wickedness to opposition. As Christ’s First Advent occasioned an unusual outburst of demoniac malignity, so Christ’s Second Advent will be resisted by a final desperate effort of the evil one to overcome the forces of good. The great awakening in New England under Jonathan Edwards caused on the one hand a most remarkable increase in the number of Baptist believers but also, on the other hand, the rise of modern Unitarianism. The optimistic Presbyterian pastor at Auburn argued with the pessimistic chaplain of the State’s Prison that the world was certainly growing better because his congregation was increasing, whereupon the chaplain replied that his own congregation was increasing also. (c) At the close of this millennial period, evil will again be permitted to exert its utmost power in a final conflict with righteousness. This spiritual struggle, moreover, will be accompanied and symbolized by political convulsions and by fearful indications of desolation in the natural world. Matthew 24:29,30 — “But immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken: and then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven’; Luke 21:8-28 — false prophets, wars and tumults, earthquakes, pestilence, persecutions, signs in the sun, moon, and stars, “And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.

But when these things begin to come to pass, look up, and lift up your heads; because your redemption draweth nigh.”

Interpretations of the book of Revelation are divided into three classes: (1) the Prúterist (held by Grotius, Moses Stuart, and Warren), which regards the prophecy as mainly fulfilled in the age immediately succeeding the time of the apostles (666 = Neron Kaisar). (2) the Continuous (held by Isaac Newton, Vitringa, Bengel, Elliott, Kelly, and Cumming), which regards the whole as a continuous prophetical history extending from the first age until the end of all things (666 = Lateinos).

Hengstenberg and Alford hold substantially this view, though they regard the seven seals, trumpets and vials as synchronological, each succeeding set going over the same ground and exhibiting it in some special aspect. (3) the Futurist (held by Maitland and Todd), which considers the book as describing events yet to occur during the times immediately preceding and following the coming of the Lord.

Of all these interpretations, the most learned and exhaustive is that of Elliott, in his four volumes entitled Horæ Apocalypticæ. The basis of his interpretation is the “time 2nd times and half a time” of Daniel 7:25, which according to the year/day theory means 1260 years or the year, according to ancient reckoning, containing 360 days, and the “time” being therefore 360 years [360 + (2 x 360) + 180 = 1260]. This phrase we find recurring with regard to the woman nourished in the wilderness ( Revelation 12:14). The blasphemy of the beast for forty-and two months ( Revelation 13:5) seems to refer to the same period [42 x 30 = 1260, as before]. The two witnesses prophecy 1260 days ( Revelation 11:3); and the woman’s time in the wilderness is stated ( Revelation 12:6) as 1260 days. Elliott regards this period of 1260 years as the time of the temporal power of the Papacy.

There is a twofold terminus a quo, and correspondingly a twofold terminus ad quem. The first commencement is A. D. 531, when in the edict of Justinian the dragon of the Roman Empire gives its power to the beast of the Papacy and resigns its throne to the rising Antichrist giving opportunity for the rise of the ten horns as European king 5 ( Revelation 13:1-3). The second commencement, adding the seventy-five supplementary years of Daniel 12:12 [1335-1260 = 75], is A. D. 606, when the Emperor Phocas acknowledges the primacy of Rome and the ten horns, or kings, now diademed, submit to the Papacy ( Revelation 17:12,13). The first ending point is A.D.1791, when the French Revolution struck the first blow at the independence of the Pope [531 + 1260 = 1791]. The second ending point is A.D. 1866, when the temporal power of the Pope was abolished at the unification of the kingdom of Italy [606 + 1260 = 1866]. Elliott regards the two-horned beast ( Revelation 13:11) as representing the Papal Clergy and the image of the beast ( Revelation 13:14,15) as representing the Papal Councils.

Unlike Hengstenberg and Alford, who consider the seals, trumpets and vials as synchronological, Elliott makes the seven trumpets to be an unfolding of the seventh seal and the seven vials to be an unfolding of the seventh trumpet. Like other advocates of the pre-millennial advent of Christ, Elliott regards the four chief signs of Christ’s near approach as being (1) the decay of the Turkish Empire (the drying up of the river Euphrates, Revelation 16:12), (2) the Pope’s loss of temporal power (the destruction of Babylon, Revelation 17:19), (3) the conversion of the Jews and their return to their own land (Ezekiel 37; Romans 11:12-15, 25-27. On this last, see Meyer), (4) the pouring out of the Holy Spirit and the conversion of the Gentiles (the way of the kings of the East — Revelations 16:12; the fullness of the Gentiles — Romans 11:25).

Elliott’s whole scheme, however, is vitiated by the fact that he wrongly assumes the book of Revelation to have been written under Domitian (94 or 96), instead of under Nero (67 or 68). His terminus a quo is therefore incorrect, and his interpretation of chapters 5-9 is rendered very precarious. The year 1866, moreover, should have been the time of the end and so the terminus ad quem seems to be clearly misunderstood, unless, indeed, the seventy-five supplementary years of Daniel are to be added to 1668. We regard the failure of this most ingenious scheme of apocalyptic interpretation as a practical demonstration that a clear understanding of the meaning of prophecy is, before the event, impossible.

We are confirmed in this view by the utterly untenable nature of the theory of the millennium, which is commonly held by so called Second Adventists, a theory, which we now proceed to examine.

A long preparation may be followed by a sudden consummation. Drilling the rock for the blast is a slow process, firing the charge takes but a moment. The woodwork of the Windsor Hotel in New York was in a charred and superheated state before the electric wires that threaded it wore out their insulation, then a slight increase of voltage turned heat into flame. The Outlook, March 30, 1895 — “An evolutionary conception of the Second Coming, as a progressive manifestation of the spiritual power and glory of Christ, may issue in a denouement as unique as the first advent was which closed the preparatory ages.”

Joseph Cook, on A. J. Gordon: “There is a wide distinction between the flashlight theory and the burning glass theory of missions. The latter was Dr. Gordon’s view. When a burning glass is held over inflammable material, the concentrated rays of the sun rapidly produce in it discoloration, smoke and sparks. At a certain instant, after the sparks have been sufficiently diffused, the whole material suddenly bursts into flame. There is then no longer any need of the burning glass for fire has itself fallen from on high and is able to do its own work. So the world is to be regarded as inflammable material to be set on fire from on high. Our Lord’s life on earth is a burning glass, concentrating rays of light and heat upon the souls of men. When the heating has gone on far enough, and the sparks of incipient conflagration have been sufficiently diffused, suddenly spiritual flame will burst up everywhere and will fill the earth. This is the Second Advent of him who kindled humanity to new life by his First Advent. As I understand the pre-millenarian view of history, the date when the sparks shall kindle into flame is not known but it is known that the duty of the church is to spread the sparks and to expect at any instant, after their wide diffusion, the victorious descent of millennial flame, that is, the beginning of our Lord’s personal and visible reign over the whole earth.” See article on Millenarianism, by G. P. Fisher, in McClintock and Strong’s Cyolopædia; also by Semisch, in Schaff-Herzog, Cyclopædia; cf.

Schaff, History of the Christian Church, 1:840. 4. Relation of Christ’s Second Coming to the millennium.

The Scripture foretells a period, called in the language of prophecy “a thousand years,” when Satan shall be restrained and. the saints shall reign with Christ on the earth. A comparison of the passages bearing on this subject leads us to the conclusion that this millennial blessedness and dominion is prior to the Second Advent. One passage only seems at first sight to teach the contrary, viz.: Revelation 20:4-10. But this supports the theory of a pre-millennial advent only when the passage is interpreted with the barest literalness. A better view of its meaning will be gained by considering: (a) That it constitutes a part, and confessedly an obscure part, of one of the most figurative books of Scripture and therefore, ought to be interpreted by the plainer statements of the other Scriptures.

We quote here the passage alluded to. Revelation 20:4-10 — “And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that had been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus, and for the word of God, and such as worshipped not the beast, neither his image, and received not the mark upon theft forehead and upon theft hand; and they lived, and reigned with Christ a thousand years. The rest of the dead lived not until the thousand years should be finished. This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: over these the second death hath no power; but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years.”

Emerson and Parker met a Second Adventist who warned them that the end of the world was near. Parker replied: “My friend, that does not concern me; I live in Boston.” Emerson said, “Well, I think I can get along without it.” A similarly cheerful view is taken by Denney, Studies in Theology, 232 — “Christ certainly comes, according to the picture in Revelation, before the millennium; but the question of importance is, whether the conception of the millennium itself, related as it is to Ezekiel, is essential to faith. I cannot think that it is. The religious content of the passages, what they offer for faith to grasp is, I should say, simply this: that until the end the conflict between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world must go on. As the end approaches it becomes ever more intense, progress in humanity (not being a progress in goodness merely or in badness only) but in the antagonism between the two and that the necessity for conflict is sure to emerge even after the kingdom of God has won its greatest triumphs. I frankly confess that to seek more than this in such Scriptural indications seems to me trifling.” (b) That the other Scriptures contain nothing with regard to a resurrection of the righteous, which is widely separated in time from that of the wicked but rather declare distinctly that the Second Coming of Christ is immediately connected both with the resurrection of the just and the unjust and with the general judgment. Matthew 16:27 — “For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels; and then shall he render unto every man according to his deeds”; 25:31-33 — “But when the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the angels with him, then shall he sit on the throne of his glory: and before him shall be gathered all the nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as the shepherd separateth the sheep from the goats”; John 5:28,29 — “Marvel not at this: for the hour cometh, in which all that are in the tombs shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of judgment”; Corinthians 3:10 — “For we must all be made manifest before the judgment seat of Christ; that each one may receive the things done in the body, according to what he hath done, whether it be good or bad”; Thess. 1:6-10 — “if so be that it is a righteous thing with God to recompense affliction to them that afflict you, and to you that are afflicted rest with us, at the revelation of the Lord Jesus from heaven with the angels of his power in flaming fire, rendering vengeance to them that know not God, and to them that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus: who shall suffer punishment, even eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might, when he shall come to be glorified in his saints and to be marveled at in all them that believed.” 1 Peter 3:7,10 — “the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men…But the day of the Lord will come as a thief; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall be dissolved with fervent heat, and the earth and the works that are therein shall be burned up”; Revelation 20:11-15 — “And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat upon it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them. And I saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne; and books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of the things that were written in the book, according to their works. And the sea gave up the dead that were in it; and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.

And death and Hades were cast into the lake if fire. This is the second death, even the lake of fire. And if any was not found written in the book of life, he was cast into the lake of fire.”

Here is abundant evidence that there is no interval of a thousand years between the Second Coming of Christ and the resurrection, general judgment, and end of all things. All these events come together. The only answer of the premillennialists to this objection to their theory is that the Day of Judgment and that the millennium may be contemporaneous. In other words, the Day of Judgment may be a thousand years long. Elliott holds to a conflagration, partial at the beginning of this period, complete at its close. Peter’s prophecy treating the two conflagrations as one, while the book of Revelation separates them so a nearer view resolves binary stars into two. But we reply that, if the judgment occupies the whole period of a thousand years, then the coming of Christ, the resurrection and the final conflagration should all be a thousand years also. It is indeed possible that, in this case, as Peter says in connection with his prophecy of judgment, one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day”; 2 Peter 3:8). But if we make the word “day” so indefinite in connection with the judgment, why should we regard it as so definite, when we come to interpret the 1260 days? (c) That the literal interpretation of the passage, holding, as it does, to a resurrection of bodies of flesh and blood and to a reign of the risen saints in the flesh and in the world as at present constituted, is inconsistent with other Scriptural declarations with regard to the spiritual nature of the resurrection body and of the coming reign of Christ. 1 Corinthians 15:44,50 — “it is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body…Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption.”

These passages are inconsistent with the view that the resurrection is a physical resurrection at the beginning of the thousand years, a resurrection to be followed by a second life of the saints in bodies of flesh and blood. They are not, however, inconsistent with the true view, soon to be mentioned that “the first resurrection” is simply the raising of the church to a new life and zeal. Westcott, Bib. Com. on John 14:18, — “I will not leave you desolate [margin: ‘orphans’] I come unto you. Yet a little while, and the world beholdeth me no more; but ye behold me: — “The words exclude the error of those who suppose that Christ will ‘come’ under the same conditions of earthly existence as those to which he submitted at his first coining.” See Hovey, Bib. Eschatology, 66-78. (d) That the literal interpretation is generally and naturally connected with the expectation of a gradual and necessary decline of Christ’s kingdom upon earth, until Christ comes to bind Satan and to introduce the millennium. This view not only contradicts such passages as Daniel 2:34,35, and Matthew 13:31,32 but it begets a passive and hopeless endurance of evil. The Scriptures enjoin a constant and aggressive warfare against it, upon the very ground that God’s power shall assure to the church a gradual but constant progress in the face of it, even to the time of the end. Daniel 2:34-35 — “Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon its feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them in pieces. Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken in pieces together and became like the chaff of the summer threshing floors; and the wind carried them away, so that no place was found for them: and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth.” Matthew 13:31,32 — “The kingdom of heaven is like unto a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: which indeed is less than all seeds; but when it is grown, it is greater than the herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the heaven come and hide in the branches thereof.” In both these figures there is no sign of cessation or of backward movement, but rather every indication of continuous advance to complete victory and dominion.

The pre-millennial theory supposes that for the principle of development under the dispensation of the Holy Spirit, God will substitute a reign of mere power and violence. J. B. Thomas: “The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed, not like a can of nitroglycerine.” Leighton Williams: “The kingdom of God is to be realized on earth, not by a cataclysm, apart from effort and will, but through the universal dissemination of the gospel all but lost to the world.” E. G. Robinson: “Second Adventism stultifies the system and scheme of Christianity.” Dr. A. J. Gordon could not deny that the early disciples were mistaken in expecting the end of the world in their day. So we may be. Scripture does not declare that the end should come in the lifetime of the apostles and no definite date is set. “After a long time” ( Matthew 25:19) and “the falling away come first” ( 2 Thess. 2:3) are expressions which postpone indefinitely. Yet, a just view of Christ’s coming as ever possible in the immediate future may make us as faithful as were the original disciples.

The theory also divests Christ of all kingly power until the millennium or rather, maintains that the kingdom has not yet been given to him. See Elliott, Horæ Apocalypticæ, 1:94 — where Luke 19:12 — “A certain nobleman went into a far country, to receive for himself a kingdom, and to return” is interpreted, “Subordinate kings went to Rome to receive the investiture to their kingdoms from the Roman Emperor and then returned to occupy them and reign. So Christ received from his father, after his ascension, the investiture to his kingdom but with the intention not to occupy it till his return at his Second Coming. In token of this investiture he takes his seat as the Lamb on the divine throne” ( Revelation 5:6-8).

But this interpretation contradicts Matthew 28:18,20 — “All authority hath been given unto me in heaven and on earth…lo. I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” See Presb. Rev. 1882:228.

On the effects of the pre-millennial view in weakening Christian endeavor, see J. H. Seelye, Christian Missions, 94-127; per contra, see A. J.

Gordon, in Independent, Feb. 1886. (e) We may therefore best interpret Revelation 20:4-10 as teaching in highly figurative language, not a preliminary resurrection of the body in the case of departed saints but a period in the later days of the church militant when, under special influence of the Holy Ghost, the spirit of the martyrs shall appear again, true religion be greatly quickened and revived and the members of Christ’s churches become so conscious of their strength in Christ that they shall, to an extent unknown before, triumph over the powers of evil both within and without. So the spirit of Elijah appeared again in John the Baptist ( Malachi 4:5; cf. Matthew 11:13,14). The fact that only the spirit of sacrifice and faith is to be revived is figuratively indicated in the phrase: “The rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years should be finished” = the spirit of persecution and unbelief shall be, as it were, laid to sleep. Since resurrection, like the coming of Christ and the judgment, is twofold, first, spiritual (the raising of the soul to spiritual life), and secondly, physical (the raising of the body from the grave), the words in Revelation 20:5 — “this is the first resurrection” seem intended distinctly to preclude the literal interpretation we are combating. In short, we hold that Revelations 20:4-10 does not describe the events commonly called the Second Advent and resurrection but rather, describes great spiritual changes in the later history of the church, which are typical of, and preliminary to, the Second Advent and resurrection and therefore, after the prophetic method, are foretold in language literally applicable only to those final events themselves (cf. Ezekiel 37:1-14; Luke 15:32). Malachi 4:5 — “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day of Jehovah come”; cf. Matthew 11:13,14 — “For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John. And if ye are willing to receive it, this is Elijah, that is to come”; Ezekiel 37:1-14 — the vision of the valley of dry bones = either the political or the religious resuscitation of the Jews; Luke 15:32 — “this thy brother was dead, and is alive again,” of the prodigal son. It will help us in our interpretation of Revelations 20:4-10, to notice that death, judgment, the coming of Christ, and the resurrection, are all of two kinds, the first spiritual, and the second literal. (1) First, a spiritual death ( Ephesians 2:1 — “dead through your trespasses and sins”) and secondly, a physical and literal death, whose culmination is found in the second death ( Revelation 20:14 — “And death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death, even the lake of fire”). (2) First, a spiritual judgment ( Isaiah 26:9 — “when thy judgments are in the earth”; John 12:31 — “Now is the judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out” 3:18 — “he that believeth not hath been judged already”). Secondly, an outward and literal judgment ( Acts 17:31 — “hath appointed a day an which he will judge the world in righteousness by the man whom he hath ordained”). (3) First, the spiritual and invisible coming of Christ ( Matthew 16:28 — “shall in no wise taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom” — at the destruction of Jerusalem; John 14:#18 16:18 — “another comforter...I come unto you” — at Pentecost; 14:3 — “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I come again, and will receive you unto myself” — at death) and secondly, a visible literal coming ( Matthew 25:31 — “the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the angels with him”). (4) First, a spiritual resurrection ( John 5:25 — “The hour cometh, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God; and they that hear shall live”) and secondly, a physical and literal resurrection ( John 5:28,29 — “the hour cometh, in which all that are in the tombs shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of judgment”). The spiritual resurrection foreshadows the bodily resurrection.

This twofoldness of each of the four terms, death, judgment, coming of Christ and resurrection, is so obvious a teaching of Scripture that the apostle’s remark in Revelations 20:5 — “This is the first resurrection” seems distinctly intended to warn the reader against drawing the premillenarian inference and to make clear the fact that the resurrection spoken of is the first or spiritual resurrection, an interpretation, which is made indubitable by his proceeding, further on, to describe the outward and literal resurrection in verse 13 — “And the sea gave up the dead that were in it: and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them.” This physical resurrection takes place when “the thousand years” are “finished” (verse 5.).

This interpretation suggests a possible way of reconciling the premillenarian and post-millenarian theories, without sacrificing any of the truth in either of them. Christ may come again, at the beginning of the millennium in a spiritual way and his saints may reign with him spiritually, in the wonderful advances of his kingdom while the visible, literal coming may take place at the end of the thousand years. Dorner’s view is post-millennial in the sense that the visible coming of Christ will be after the thousand years. Hengstenberg curiously regards the millennium as having begun in the Middle Ages (A. D. 800-1300). This strange view of an able interpreter, as well as the extraordinary diversity of explanations given by others, convinces us that no exegete has yet found the key to the mysteries of the Apocalypse. Until we know whether the preaching of the gospel in the whole world ( Matthew 24:14) is to be a preaching to nations as a whole or to each individual in each nation, we cannot determine whether the millennium has already begun, or whether it is yet far in the future.

The millennium then is to be the culmination of the work of the Holy Spirit, a universal revival of religion, and a nation born in a day, the kings of the earth bringing their glory and honor into the city of God. A. J.

Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 211 — “After the present elective work of the Spirit has been completed, there will come a time of universal blessing when the Spirit shall literally be poured out upon all flesh, when that which is perfect shall come and that which is in part shall be done away…The early rain of the Spirit was at Pentecost; the latter rain will be at the Parcusia.”

A.H. Strong, Sermon before the Baptist World Congress, London, July 12, 1905 — “Let us expect the speedy spiritual coming of the Lord. I believe in an ultimate literal and visible coming of Christ in the clouds of heaven to raise the dead, to summon all men to the judgment and to wind up the present dispensation. But I believe that this visible and literal coming of Christ must be preceded and prepared for by his invisible and spiritual coming and by a resurrection of faith and love in the hearts of his people. ‘This is the first resurrection’ (Rev.20:5). I read in Scripture of a spiritual Second Coming that precedes the literal. It is an inward revelation of Christ to his people, a restraining of the powers of darkness, a mighty augmentation of the forces of righteousness, a turning to the Lord of men and nations, such as the world has not yet seen. I believe in a long reign of Christ on earth, in which his saints shall in spirit be caught up with him and shall sit with him upon his throne, even though this muddy vesture of decay compasses them about and the time of their complete glorification has not yet come. Let us hasten the coming of the day of God by our faith and prayer. ‘When the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?’ ( Luke 18:8). Let him find faith, at least in us. Our faith can certainly secure the coming of the Lord into our hearts.

Let us expect that Christ will be revealed in us, as of old he was revealed in the Apostle Paul.”

Our own interpretation of Revelation 20:1-10, was first given, for substance, by Whitby. Hewas followed by Vitringa and Faber. For a fuller elaboration of it, see Brown, Second Advent, 206-259; Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 447-453. For the post-millennial view generally, see Kendrick, in Bap. Quar., Jan. 1870; New Englander, 1874:356; 1879:47-49, 114-147; Pepper, in Bap. Rev. 1880:15; Princeton Review, March 1879:415-434; Presb. Rev., 1883:221-252; Bibliotheca Sacra 15:381, 625; 17:111; Harris, Kingdom of Christ, 220-237; Waldegrave, Bampton Lectures for 1854, on the Millennium; Neander, Planting and Training, 526, 527; Cowles, Dissertation on Pre-millennial Advent, in Com. on Jeremiah and Ezekiel; Weiss, Pre-millennial Advent; Crosby, Second Advent; Fairbairn on Prophecy, 432-480; Woods, Works. 3:267; Abp. Whately, Essays on Future State. For the pre-millennial view, see Elliott, Horæ Apocalypticæ, 4:140-196; William Kelly, Advent of Christ Pre-millennial; Taylor, Voice of the Church on the Coming and Kingdom of the Redeemer; Litch, Christ Yet to Come.

IV. THE RESURRECTION.

While the Scriptures describe the impartation of new life to the soul in regeneration as a spiritual resurrection, they also declare that, at the Second Coming of Christ, there shall be a resurrection of the body and a reunion of the body to the soul from which, during the intermediate state, it has been separated. Both the just and the unjust shall have part in the resurrection. To the just, it shall be a resurrection unto life and the body shall be a body like Christ’s, a body fitted for the uses of the sanctified spirit. To the unjust, it shall be a resurrection unto condemnation and analogy would seem to indicate that here also, the outward form will fitly represent the inward state of the soul, being corrupt and deformed as is the soul which inhabits it. Those who are living at Christ’s coming shall receive spiritual bodies without passing through death. As the body is after corruption and dissolution, so the outward world after destruction by fire shall be rehabilitated and fitted for the abode of the saints.

Passages describing a spiritual resurrection are: John 5:24-27, especially 25 — “The hour cometh, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God; and they that hear shall live”; Romans 6:4,5 — “as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we also might walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with him by the likeness of his death, we shall be also by the likeness of his resurrection”; Ephesians 2:1,5,6 — “And you did he make alive, when ye were dead through your trespasses and sins…even when we were dead through our trespasses made us alive together with Christ…and raised us up with him, and made us to sit with him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus”; 5:14 — “Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall shine upon thee.” Philippians 3:10 — “that I may know him, and the power of his resurrection”; Colossians 2:12,13 — “having been buried with him in baptism, wherein ye were also raised with him through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead. And you, being dead through your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, you, I say, did he make alive together with him”; cf. Isaiah 26:19 — “Thy dead shall live; my dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust; for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast forth the dead”; Ezekiel 37:1-14 — the valley of dry bones: “I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your grave; O my people; and I will bring you into the land, of Israel.”

Passages describing a literal and physical resurrection are Job 14:12-15 — “So man lieth down and riseth not: Till the heavens are no more, they shall not awake, Nor he raised out of their sleep. Oh that thou wouldest hide me in Sheol That thou wouldest keep me secret, until thy wrath is past, That thou wouldest appoint me a set time and remember me! If a man die, shall he live again? All the days of my warfare would I wait, Till my release should come. Thou wouldest call, and I would answer thee: Thou wouldest have a desire to the work of thy hands”; John 5:28,29 — “the hour cometh, in which all that are in the tombs shall hear his voice and shalt come forth: they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of judgment.” Acts 24:15 — “having hope toward God…that there shall be a resurrection both of the just and unjust”: 1 Corinthians 15:13,17,22,42,51,52 — “if there is no resurrection of the dead, neither hath Christ been raised…and if Christ hath not been raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins…as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive...it is sown in corruption: it is raised in incorruption…We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible”; Philippians 3:21 — “who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, according to the working whereby he is able even to subject all things unto himself”; 1 Thess. 4:14-16 — “For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also that are fallen asleep in Jesus will God bring with him. For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we that are alive, that are left unto the coming of the Lord, shall in no wise precede them that are fallen asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven, with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first.” 2 Peter 3:7,10,13 — “the heavens that now are, and the earth, by the same word have been stored up for fire being reserved against the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men…But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall be dissolved with fervent heat, and the earth and the works that are therein shall be burned up…But, according to his promise, we look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness”; Revelations 20:13 — “And the sea gave up the dead that were in it; and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them”; 21:1, 5 — “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth are passed away; and the sea is no more…And he that sitteth on the throne said, Behold, I make all things new.”

The smooth face of death with the lost youth restored and the pure white glow of the marble statue with all passion gone and the lofty and heroic only visible are indications of what is to be. Art, in its representations alike of the human form, and of an ideal earth and society in landscape and poem, is prophetic of the future and it suggests the glorious possibilities of the resurrection morning. Nicoll, Life of Christ: “The river runs through the lake and pursues its way beyond. So the life of faith passes through death and is only purified thereby. As to the body, all that is worth saving will be saved. Other resurrections [such as that of Lazarus] were resurrections to the old conditions of earthly life; the resurrection of Christ was the revelation of new life.”

Stevens, Pauline Theology, 357 note — “If we could assume with confidence that the report of Paul’s speech before Felix accurately reproduced his language in detail, the apostle’s belief in a ‘resurrection both of the just and of the unjust’ ( Acts 2:15) would be securely established. In view of the silence of his epistles, this assumption becomes a precarious one. Paul speaks afterwards of ‘attaining to the resurrection from the dead’ ( Philippians 3:11), as if this did not belong to all.” The skepticism of Prof. Stevens seems to us entirely needless and unjustified.

It is the blessed resurrection to which Paul would “attain and which he has in mind in Philippians, as in 1 Corinthians 15 — a fact perfectly consistent with a resurrection of the wicked to “shame and everlasting contempt” ( Daniel 12:2; John 5:29).

A.J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 205, 206 — “The rapture of the saints ( 1 Thess. 4:17) is the earthly Christ rising to meet the heavenly Christ, the elect church, gathered in the Spirit and named oJ Cristo>v ( 1 Corinthians 12:12), taken up to be united in glory with Christ the head of the church, ‘himself the Savior of the body’ ( Ephesians 5:23).

It is not by acting upon the body of Christ from without but by energizing it from within, that the Holy Ghost will effect its glorification. In a word, the Comforter, who on the day of Pentecost came down to form a body out of flesh, will at the Parousia return to heaven in that body having fashioned it like unto the body of Christ ( Philippians 3:31). Here then is where the lines of Christ’s ministry terminate, in sanctification, the perfection of the spirit’s holiness and in resurrection, the perfection of the body’s health.”

E. G. Robinson: “Personality is the indestructible principle, not intelligence, else deny that infants have souls. Personality takes to itself a material organization. It is a divinely empowered second cause. This refutes materialism and annihilationism. No one pretends that the individual elements of the body will be raised. The individuality only, the personal identity will be preserved. The soul is the organic power.

Medical practice teaches that merely animal life is a mechanical process but this is used by a personal power. Materialism, on the contrary, would make the soul the product of the body. Every man, in becoming a Christian, begins the process of resurrection. We do not know but resurrection begins at the moment of dissolution, yet we do not know that it does. But if Christ arose with identically the same body unchanged, how can his resurrection be a type of ours? Answer: The nature of Christ’s resurrection body is an open question.”

Upon the subject of the resurrection, our positive information is derived wholly from the word of God. Further discussion of it may be most naturally arranged in a series of answers to objections. The objections commonly urged against the doctrine, as above propounded, may be reduced to two:

The exegetical objection. It rests upon a literalizing of metaphorical language, and has no sufficient support in Scripture. To this we answer: (a) Though the phrase “resurrection of the body” does not occur in the New Testament, the passages which describe the event indicate a physical, as distinguished from a spiritual, change ( John 5:28,29; Philippians 3:21; 1 Thess. 4:13-17). The phrase “spiritual body” ( 1 Corinthians 15:44) is a contradiction in terms, if it be understood as signifying ‘a body which is simple spirit.’ It can only be interpreted as meaning a material organism, perfectly adapted to be the outward expression and vehicle of the purified soul. The purely spiritual interpretation is, moreover, expressly excluded by the apostolic denial that “the resurrection is past already” ( 2 Timothy 2:18), and by the fact that there is a resurrection of the unjust, as well as of the just ( Acts 24:15). John 5:28,29 — “all that are in the tombs shall hear his voice, and shall come forth”; Philippians 3:21 — “who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation”; 1 Thess. 4:16, 17 — “For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven, with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first”; Corinthians 15:44 — “it is sown a natural [margin: ‘psychical’] body; it is raised a spiritual body”; 2 Timothy 2:17,18 — “Hymenæus and Philetus; men who concerning the truth have erred, saying that the resurrection is past already, and overthrow the faith of some”; Acts 24:15 — “Having hope toward God...that there shall be a resurrection both of the just and the unjust.”

In 1 Corinthians 15:44, the word yuciko>n, translated “natural” or “psychical,” is derived from the Greek word yuch> , soul, just as the word pneumatiko>n, translated “spiritual,” is derived from the Greek word pneu~ma , spirit. And as Paul could not mean to say that this earthly body is composed of soul, neither does he say that the resurrection body is composed of spirit. In other words, these adjectives “psychical” and “spiritual” do not define the material of the respective bodies but describe those bodies in their relations and adaptations, in their powers and uses.

The present body is adapted and designed for the use of the soul; the resurrection body will be adapted and designed for the use of the spirit. 2 Timothy 2:18 — “saying that the resurrection is past already” = undue contempt for the body came to regard the resurrection as a purely spiritual thing (Ellicott). Dr. A. J. Gordon said that the “spiritual body” means, “the body spiritualized.” E. H. Johnson: “The phrase ‘spiritual body’ describes not so much the nature of the body itself, as its relations to the spirit.” Savage, Life after Death, 80 — “Resurrection does not mean the raising up of the body and it does not mean the mere rising of the soul in the moment of death but a rising again from the prison house of the dead after going down at the moment of death.” D. R. Goodwin, Journ. Soc. Bib. Exegesis, l881:84 — “The spiritual body is body and not spirit, and therefore, must come under the definition of body. If it were to be mere spirit, then every man in the future state would have two spirits, the spirit that he has here and another spirit received at the resurrection.” (b) The redemption of Christ is declared to include the body as well as the soul ( Romans 8:23; 1 Corinthians 6:13-20). The indwelling of the Holy Spirit has put such honor upon the frail mortal tenement which he has made his temple, that God would not permit even this wholly to perish ( Romans 8:11 — dia< to< eJnoikou~n aujtou~ pneu~ma ejn uJmi~n, i e., because of his indwelling Spirit, God will raise up the mortal body). It is this belief, which forms the basis of Christian care for the dead ( Philippians 3:21; cf. Matthew 22:32). Romans 8:23 — “waiting for our adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body”; 1 Corinthians 6:13-20 — “Meats for the belly and the belly for meats: but God shall bring to nought both it and them. But the body is not for fornication but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body: and God both raised the Lord, and will raise up us through his power…But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit…Or know ye not that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you, which ye have from God…glorify God therefore in your body”; Romans 8:11 — “But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwelleth in you, he that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead shall give life also to your mortal bodies through his Spirit that dwelleth in you.” Here the Revised Version follows Tisch. 8th ed., and Westcott and Hort’s reading of dia< tou~ ejnoikou~ntov aujtou~ pneu>matov . Tregelles, Tisch. 7th ed., and Meyer, have dia< to< ejnoikou~n aujtiu~ pneu~ma , and this reading we regard as, on the whole, the best supported. Philippians 3:21 — “shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation.”

Dr. R. D. Hitchcock, in South Church Lectures, 338, says that there is no Scripture declaration of the resurrection of the flesh nor even of the resurrection of the body.” While this is literally true, it conveys a false idea. The passages just cited foretell a quickening of our mortal bodies, a raising of them up, a changing of them into the likeness of Christ’s body.

Dorner, Eschatology: “The New Testament is not contented with a bodiless immortality. It is opposed to a naked spiritualism and accords completely with a deeper philosophy, which discerns in the body. It is not merely the sheath or garment of the soul, but a side of the person belonging to his full idea, his mirror and organ, of the greatest importance for his activity and history.”

Christ’s proof of the resurrection in Matthew 22:32 — “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” This has for its basis this very assumption that soul and body belong normally together and that, since they are temporally separated in the case of the saints who live with God, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob shall rise again. The idealistic philosophy of thirty years ago has led to contempt of the body. The recent materialism has done at least this service, that it has reasserted the claims of the body to be a proper part of man. (c) The nature of Christ’s resurrection, as literal and physical, determines the nature of the resurrection in the case of believers ( Luke 24:36; John 20:27). As, in the case of Christ, the same body that was laid in the tomb was raised again. Although possessed of new and surprising powers (so the Scriptures intimate), not simply that the saints shall have bodies, but that these bodies shall be in some proper sense an outgrowth or transformation of the very bodies that slept in the dust ( Daniel 12:2; 1 Corinthians 15:53,54). The denial of the resurrection of the body, in the case of believers, leads naturally to a denial of the reality of Christ’s resurrection ( 1 Corinthians 15:13). Luke 24:39 — “See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye behold me having”; John 20:27 — “Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and see my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and put it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing”; Daniel 12:2 — “And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt”; 1 Corinthians 15:53,54 — “For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality But when this corruption shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory’; 13 — “But if there is no resurrection of the dead, neither hath Christ been raised.”

Sadducean materialism and Gnostic dualism, which last held matter to be evil, both denied the resurrection. Paul shows that to deny it is to deny that Christ rose since, if it were impossible in the case of his followers, it must have been impossible in his own case. As believers, we are vitally connected with him and his resurrection could not have taken place without drawing in its train the resurrection of all of us. Having denied that Christ rose, where is the proof that he still is not under the bond and curse of death? Surely then our preaching is vain. Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians was written before the Gospels and is therefore, as Hanna says, the earliest written account of the resurrection. Christ’s transfiguration was a prophecy of his resurrection.

S. S. Times, March 22, 1902:161 — “The resurrection of Jesus was not a mere rising again, like that of Lazarus and the son of the widow of Nain.

He came forth from the tomb so changed that he was not at once or easily recognized and was possessed of such new and surprising powers that he seemed to be pure spirit, no longer subject to the conditions of his natural body. So he was the “first fruits” of the resurrection harvest ( Corinthians 15:20). Our resurrection, in like manner, is to involve a change from a corruptible body to an incorruptible, from a psychical to a spiritual.” (d) The accompanying events, as the Second Coming and the judgment since they are themselves literal, imply that the resurrection is also literal. Romans 8:19-23 — “For the earnest expectation of the creation waiteth for the revealing of the sons of God…the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now…even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for our adoption, to wit the redemption of our body.”

Here man’s body is regarded, as a part of nature or the “creation” and as partaking in Christ of its deliverance from the curse. Revelations 21:4, — “he shall wipe away every tear from their eyes; and death shall be no more…And he that sitteth on the throne said, Behold, I make all things new.” This is a declaration applicable to the body, the seat of pain and the avenue of temptation, as well as to outward nature. See Hanna, The Resurrection, 28; Fuller, Works, 3:291; Boston, Fourfold State, in Works. 8:271-289. On Olshausen’s view of immortality as inseparable from body, see Aids to the Study of German Theology, 63. On resurrection of the flesh, see Jahrbuch f. d. Theol., 1:289-317. 2. The scientific objection. This is threefold: (a) A resurrection of the particles which compose the body at death is impossible, since they enter into new combinations and not unfrequently become parts of other bodies which the doctrine holds to be raised at the same time. We reply that the Scripture not only does not compel us to hold but it distinctly denies, that all the particles which exist in the body at death are present in the resurrection body ( 1 Corinthians 15:37 — ouj to< sw~ma to< genhso>menon : 50). The Scripture seems only to indicate a certain physical connection between the new and the old, although the nature of this connection is not revealed. It is not necessary to suppose, that even a germ or particle that belonged to the old body, exists in the new so long as the physical connection is maintained. 1 Corinthians 15:37,38 — “that which thou sowest, thou sowest not the body that shall be, but a bare grain, it may chance of wheat or of some other kind; but God giveth it a body even as it pleased him, and to each seed a body of its own.” Jerome tells us that the risen saints “habent dentes, ventrem, genitalia, et tamen nec cibis nec uxoribus indigent.” This view of the resurrection is exposed to the objection mentioned above.

Pollok’s Course of Time represented the day of resurrection as a day on which the limbs that had been torn asunder on earth hurtled through the air to join one another once more. The amputated arm that has been buried in China must traverse thousands of miles to meet the body of its former owner as it rose from the place of its burial in England.

There are serious difficulties attending this view. The bodies of the dead fertilized the field of Waterloo. The wheat grown there has been ground and made into bread and eaten by thousands of living men. Particles of one human body have become incorporated with the bodies of many others. “The Avon to the Severn runs, The Severn to the sea, And Wycliffe’s dust shall spread abroad, Wide as the waters be.” Through the clouds and the rain, particles of Wycliffe’s body may have entered into the water, which other men have drunk from their wells and fountains.

There is a propagation of disease by contagion or the transmission of infinitesimal germs from one body to another, sometimes by infection of the living from contact with the body of a friend just dead. In these various ways, the same particle might, in the course of history, enter into the constitution of a hundred living men. How can this one particle, at the resurrection, be in a hundred places at the same time? “Like the woman who had seven husbands, the same matter may belong in succession to many bodies, for ‘they all had it’” (Smyth). The cannibal and his victim cannot both possess the same body at the resurrection. The Providence Journal had an article entitled: “Who ate Roger Williams?’ When his remains were exhumed, it was found that one large root of an apple tree followed the spine, divided at the thighs, and turned up at the toes of Roger Williams. More than one person had eaten its apples. This root may be seen today in the cabinet of Brown University.

These considerations have led some, like Origen, to call the doctrine of a literal resurrection of the flesh, “the foolishness of beggarly minds.” To say that resurrection may be only “the gathering round the spirit of new materials and the vitalizing them into a new body by the spirit’s Godgiven power.” See Newman Smyth, Old Faiths in a New Light, 349-391; Porter, Human Intellect, 39. But this view seems as great no extreme as that from which it was a reaction. It gives up all idea of unity between the new and the old. If my body were this instant annihilated, and if then, an hour hence. God should create a second body precisely like the present. I could not call it the same with the present body, even though it were animated by the same informing soul and that soul had maintained an uninterrupted existence between the time of the annihilation of the first body and the creation of the second. So, if the body laid in the tomb were wholly dissipated among the elements and God created at the end of the world a wholly new body, it would be impossible for Paul to say, “this corruptible must put on incorruption” ( 1 Corinthians 15:53) or, “it is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory” (verse 43). In short, there is a physical connection between the old and the new, which is intimated by Scripture, but which this theory denies.

Paul himself gives us an illustration which shows that his view was midway between the two extremes: “that which thou sowest thou sowest not the body that shall be” ( 1 Corinthians 15:37). On the one hand, the wheat that springs up does not contain the precise particles, perhaps does not contain any particles, that were in the seed. On the other hand, there has been a continuous physical connection between the seed sown and the ripened grain at the harvest. If the seed had been annihilated and then ripe grain created, we could not speak of identity between the one and the other. But, because there has been a constant flux, the old particles pressed out by new and these new in their turn succeeded by others that take their places. We can say: “the wheat has come up.” We bury grain in order to increase it. The resurrection body will be the same with the body laid away in the earth, in the same sense as the living stalk of grain is identical with the seed from which it germinated. “This mortal must put on immortality” = not the immortal spirit put on an immortal body, but the mortal body put on immortality, the corruptible body put on incorruption ( 1 Corinthians 15:53). “Ye know not the Scriptures, nor the power of God” ( Mark 12:24), says our Lord; and Paul asks: “fly is it judged incredible with you, if God doth raise the dead?” ( Acts 26:8).

Or, to use another illustration nearer to the thing we desire to illustrate:

My body is the same that it was ten years ago, although physiologists declare that every particle of the body is changed, not simply once in seven years, but once in a single year. Only the constant throwing off of dead matter and the introduction of new preserve life. There is indeed a unity of consciousness and personality, without which I should not be able to say at intervals of years: “this body is the same; this body is mine.” But a physical connection between the old and the new is necessary in addition.

The nails of the hands are renewed in less than four months, or about twenty-one times in seven years. They grow to full length, an average of seven twelfths of an inch, in from 121 to 138 days. Young people grow them more rapidly, old people more slowly. In a man of 21, it took days, in a man of 67, it took 244 but the average was a third of a year. A Baptist pastor attempted to prove that he was a native of South Carolina though born in another state, upon the ground that the body he brought with him from Tennessee had exchanged its physical particles for matter taken from South Carolina. Two dentists, however, maintained that he still had the same teeth, which he owned in Tennessee seven years before, there being no circulation in the enamel. Should we then say: Every particle of the body has changed, except the enamel of the teeth?

Pope’s Martinus Scriblerus: “Sir John Cutler had a pair of black worsted stockings which his maid darned so often with silk that they became at last a pair of silk stockings.” Adeney, in Christianity and Evolution, 122, l23 — “Herod’s temple was treated as identical with the temple that Haggai knew, because the rebuilding was gradual, and was carried on side by side with the demolition of the several parts of the old structure.” The ocean wave travels around the world and is the same wave but it is never in two consecutive seconds composed of the same particles of water.

The North River is the same today that it was when Hendrick Hudson first discovered it yet not a particle of its current nor the surface of the banks which that current touches now, is the same that it was then. Two things make the present river identical with the river of the past. The first is, that the same formative principle is at work, the trend of the banks is the same, and there is the same general effect in the flow and direction of the waters drained from a large area of country. The second is the fact that, ever since Hendrick Hudson’s time, there has been a physical connection; old particles are continuous succession having been replaced by new.

So there are two things requisite to make our future bodies one with the bodies we now inhabit. First, the same formative principle is at work in them. Secondly, there is to be some sort of physical connection between the body that now is and the body that shall be. What that physical connection is, it is vain to speculate. We only teach that, though there may not be a single material particle in the new that was present in the old, there yet will be such a physical connection that it can be said, “the new has grown out of the old.” “That which was in the grave has come forth”; “this mortal has put on immortality.” (b) A resurrection body, having such a remote physical connection with the present body, cannot be recognized by the inhabiting soul or by other witnessing spirits as the same with that which was laid in the grave.

To this we reply that bodily identity does not consist in absolute sameness of particles during the whole history of the body but in the organizing force. Even in the flux and displacement of physical particles, this makes the old the basis of the new and binds both together in the unity and a single consciousness. In our recognition of friends, moreover, we are not wholly dependent, even in this world, upon our perception of bodily form; and we have reason to believe that in the future state there may be methods of communication far more direct and intuitive than those with which we are familiar here. Cf. Matthew 17:3,4 — “And behold, there appeared unto them Moses and Elijah talking with him. And Peter answered, and said unto Jesus, Lord, it is good for us to be here: if thou wilt, I will make here three tabernacles; one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” Here there is no mention of information given to Peter as to the names of the celestial visitants; it would seem that, in his state of exalted sensibility, he at once knew them. The recent proceedings of the English Society for Psychical Research seem to indicate the possibility of communication between two minds without physical intermediaries. Hudson, Scientific Demonstration of a Future Life, 294, 295, holds that telepathy is the means of communication in the future state.

G. S. Fullerton, Sameness and Identity, 6, 32, 67 — “Heracleitus of Ephesus declared it impossible to enter the same river twice. Cratylus replied that the same river could not be entered once. The kinds of sameness are 1. Thing same with itself at any one instant, 2. Same pain today I felt yesterday = a like pain,3. I see the same tree at different times = two or more percepts represent the same object, 4. Two plants belonging to the same class are called the same, 5. Memory gives us the same object that we formerly perceived but the object is not the past, it is the memory-image which represents it, 6. Two men perceive the same object they have like percepts, while both percepts are only representative of the same object, 7. External thing same with its representative in consciousness, or with the substance or noumenon supposed to underlie it.”

Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 153, 255 — “What is called ‘remaining the same,’ in the case of all organic beings is just this, remaining faithful to some immanent idea, while undergoing a great variety of changes in the pursuit, as it were, of the idea. Self-consciousness and memory are themselves processes of becoming. The mind that does not change, in the way of growth, has no claim to be called mind. One cannot be conscious of changes without also being conscious of being the very being that is changed. When he loses this consciousness, we say that ‘he has lost, his mind.’ Amid changes of its ideas the ego remains permanent because it is held within limits by the power of some immanent idea. Our bodies as such have only a formal existence. They are a stream in constant flow and are ever changing. My body is only a temporary loan from Nature to be repaid at death.”

With regard to the meaning of the term “identity,” as applied to material things, see Porter, Human Intellect, 631 — “Here the substance is called the same, by a loose analogy taken from living agents and their gradual accretion and growth.” The Euphrates is the same stream that flowed, “When high in Paradise By the four rivers the first roses blew,” even though after that time, the flood or deluge, stopped its flow and obliterated all the natural features of the landscape. So this flowing organism which we call the body may be the same after the deluge of death has passed away.

A different and less satisfactory view is presented in Dorner’s Eschatology. “Identity involves 1. Plastic form, which for the earthly body had its molding principle in the soul. That principle could effect nothing permanent in the intermediate state but with the spiritual consummation of the soul, it attains the full power which can appropriate to itself the heavenly body, accompanied by a cosmical process, made like Christ. 2.

Appropriation, from the world of elements of what it needs. The elements, into which everything bodily of earth is dissolved, are an essentially uniform mass, like an ocean and it is indifferent what parts of this are assigned to each individual man. The whole world of substance, which makes the constant change of substance possible, is made over to humanity as a common possession ( Acts 4:32 — ‘not one of them said that aught of the things which he possessed was his own but they had all things common’). (c) A material organism can only be regarded as a hindrance to the free activity of the spirit. The assumption of such an organism by the soul, which, during the intermediate state had been separated from the body, would indicate a decline in dignity and power rather than a progress.

We reply that we cannot estimate the powers and capacities of matter when brought by God into complete subjection to the spirit. The bodies of the saints may be more ethereal than the air, and capable of swifter motion than the light and yet be material in their substance. That the soul, clothed with its spiritual body, will have more exalted powers and enjoy a more complete felicity than would be possible while it maintained a purely spiritual existence, is evident from the fact that Paul represents the culmination of the soul’s blessedness as occurring, not at death, but at the resurrection of the body. Romans 8:22 — “waiting for our adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body”; 2 Corinthians 5:4 — “not for that we would be unclothed, but that we would be clothed upon, that what is mortal may be swallowed up of life”; Philippians 3:11 — “if by my means I may attain unto the resurrection from the dead.” Even Psalm 86:11 — “Unite my heart to fear thy name” may mean the collecting of all the powers of the body as well as soul. In this respect for the body, as a normal part of man’s being, Scripture is based upon the truest philosophy. Plotinus gave thanks that he was not tied to an immortal body and refused to have his portrait taken because the body was too contemptible a thing to have its image perpetuated. But this is not natural nor is it probably anything more than a whim or affectation. Ephesians 5:29 — “no man ever hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it.” What we desire is not the annihilation of the body, but its perfection.

Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 188 — “In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the soul reunites itself to the body, with the assurance that they shall never again be separated.” McCosh, Intuitions, 213 — “The essential thing about the resurrection is the development, out of the dead body, of an organ for the communion and activity of the spiritual life.” Ebrard, Dogmatik, 2:226-234, has interesting remarks upon the relation of the resurrection body to the present body. The essential difference he considers to be this, that whereas, in the present body, matter is master of the spirit, in the resurrection body spirit will be the master of matter, needing no reparation by food and having control of material laws. Ebrard adds striking speculations with regard to the glorified body of Christ.

A.J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 126 — “Now the body bears the spirit, a slow chariot whose wheels are often disabled and whose swiftest motion is but labored and tardy. Then the spirit will bear the body, carrying it, as on wings of thought whither so ever it will. The Holy Ghost, by his divine in working will, has completed in us the divine likeness and perfected over us the divine dominion. The human body will now be in sovereign subjection to the human spirit and the human spirit to the divine Spirit and God will be all in all.” Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, 112 — “Weismann maintains that the living germ not only persists and is potentially immortal, but also that under favorable conditions it seems capable of surrounding itself with a new body. If a vital germ can do this, why not a spiritual germ?” Two martyrs were led to the stake. One was blind, the other lame. As the fires kindled, the latter exclaimed: “Courage, brother! This fire will cure us both!”

We may sum up our answers to objections, and may at the same time throw light upon the doctrine of the resurrection, by suggesting four principles which should govern our thinking with regard to the subject.

These are namely 1. Body is in continual flux, 2. Since matter is but the manifestation of God’s mind and will, body is plastic in God’s hands,3. The soul, in complete union with God, may be endowed with the power of God,4. Soul determines body and not body soul, as the materialist imagines.

Ice, the flowing stream, the waterfall with the rainbow upon it, steam with its power to draw the railway train or to burst the boiler of the locomotive are all the same element in varied forms and they are all material. Wundt regards physical development, not as the cause, but as the effect of psychical development. Aristotle defines the soul as ‘the prime entelechy of the living body.” Swedenborg regarded each soul here as fashioning its own spiritual body, either hideous or lovely. Spenser, A Hymne to Beautie: “For of the soul the body form doth take, For soul is form, and doth the body make.” Wordsworth, Sonnet 36, Afterthought: “Far backward, Duddon, as I cast my eyes, I see what was, and is, and will abide; Still glides the stream, and shall not cease to glide; The Form remains, the Function never dies”; The Primrose of the Rock: “Sinblighted as we are, we too, The reasoning sons of men, From one oblivious winter called, Shall rise and breathe again, And in eternal summer lose Our three-score years and ten. To humbleness of heart descends This prescience from on high, The faith that elevates the just Before and when they die, And makes each soul a separate heaven, A court for Deity.” Robert Browning, Asolando: “One who never turned his back, but marched breastforward; Never doubted clouds would break; Never dreamed, though right were worsted, Wrong would triumph; Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, Sleep to wake.” Mrs. Browning: “God keeps a niche In heaven to hold our idols, and albeit He broke them to our faces and denied That our close kisses should impair their white, I know we shall behold them raised, complete, The dust shook off, their beauty glorified.”

On the spiritual body as possibly evolved by will, see Harris, Philos.

Basis of Theism, 386. On the nature of the resurrection body, see Burnet, State of the Departed, chaps. 3 and 8; Cudworth, Intell. System, 3:310 sq.; Splittgerber, Tod, Fortleben and Auferstehung. On the doctrine of the Resurrection among the Egyptians, see Dr. Howard Osgood, in Hebrew Student, Feb. 1885; among the Jews, see Grobler, in Studien und Kritiken, 1879: Heft 4; DeWunsche, in Jahrbuch f. prot. Theol., 1880:

Heft 2 and 4; Revue Theologique, 1881:1-17. For the view that the resurrection is wholly spiritual and takes place at death, see Willmarth, in Bap. Quar. October 1868, and April 1870; Ladd, in New Englander, April 1874; Crosby, Second Advent.

On the whole subject, see Hase, Hutterus Redivivus, 280; Herzog, Encyclop., art.: Auferstehung; Goulburn, Bampton Lectures for 1850, on the Resurrection; Cox, The Resurrection; Neander, Planting and Training, 479-487, 524-526; Naville, La Vie …ternelie, 253, 254; Delitzsch, Bib.

Psychologie, 453-463; Moorhouse, Nature and Revelation, 87-112; Unseen Universe, 33; Hovey, in Baptist Quarterly, Oct. 1867; Westcott, Revelation of the Risen Lord, and in Contemporary Review, vol. 30; R.

W. Macan, Resurrection of Christ; Cremer, Beyond the Grave.

V. THE LAST JUDGMENT.

While the Scriptures represent all punishment of individual transgressors and all manifestations of God’s vindicatory justice in the history of nations as acts or processes of judgment, they also intimate that these temporal judgments are only partial and imperfect. They are therefore, to be concluded with a final and complete vindication of God’s righteousness.

This will be accomplished by making known to the universe the characters of all men and by awarding to them corresponding destinies.

Passages describing temporal or spiritual judgment are Psalm 9:7 — “He hath prepared his throne for judgment” Isaiah 26:9 — “when thy judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness” Matthew 16:27,28 — “For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels; and then shall he render unto every man according to his deeds. Verily I say unto you, There be some of them that stand here, who shall in no wise taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom” John 3:18,19 — “he that believeth not hath been judged already, because he hath not believed on the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the judgment that the light is come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light; for their works were evil”; 9:39 — “For judgment came I into this world, that they that see not may see; and that they that see may become blind”; 12:31 — “Now is the judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out.’

Passages describing the final judgment are Matthew 25:31-46 — “But when the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the angels with him, then shall he sit on the throne of his glory: and before him shall be gathered all the nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as the shepherd separateth the sheep from the goats…”; Acts 17:31 — “he hath appointed a day, in which he will judge the world in righteousness by the man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead”; Romans 2:16 — “in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men, according to my gospel, by Jesus Christ”; 2 Corinthians 5:10 — “For we must all be made manifest before the judgment seat of Christ; that each one may receive the things done in the body, according to what he hath done, whether it be good or bad”; Hebrews 9:27,28 — “And inasmuch as it is appointed unto men once to die, and after this cometh judgment; so Christ also, having been once offered to bear the sins of many, shall appear a second time, apart from sin, to them that wait for him, unto salvation”; Revelation 20:12 — “And I saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne; and books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of the things which were written in the books, according to their works.”

Delitzsch: “The fall of Jerusalem was the day of the Lord. It was the bloody and fiery dawn of the last great day — the day of days, the ending day of all days, the settling day of all days, the day of the promotion of time into eternity, the day which for the church breaks through and breaks off the night of this present world.” E. G. Robinson: “Judgment begins here. The callusing of conscience in this life is a penal infliction.

Punishment begins in this life and is carried on in the next. We leave no right to assert that there is no positive infliction but, if there is none, still every word of Scripture threatening would stand.

There is no day of judgment or of resurrection all at one time. Judgment is an eternal process. The angels, in 2 Peter 2:4 — ‘cast...down to hell’ suffer the self-perpetuating consequences of transgression...Man is being judged every day. Every man, honest with himself, knows where he is going. Those who are not honest with themselves are playing a trick and, if they are not careful, they will get a trick played on them.” 1. The nature of the final judgment.

The final judgment is not a spiritual, invisible, endless process, identical with God’s providence in history but is an outward and visible event, occurring at a definite period in the future. This we argue from the following considerations: (a) The judgment is something for which the evil are “reserved” ( Peter 2:4, 9); something to be expected in the future ( Acts 24:25; Hebrews 10:27); something after death ( Hebrews 9:27); something for which the resurrection is a preparation ( John 5:29). 1 Peter 2:4,9 — “God spared not angels when they sinned, but cast them down to hell…reserved unto judgment the Lord knoweth how…to keep the unrighteous unto punishment unto the day of judgment”; Acts 24:25 as he reasoned of righteousness, and self-control and the judgment to come, Felix was terrified”; Hebrews 10:27 — “a certain fearful expectation of judgment”; 9:27 — “it is appointed unto men once to die, and after this cometh judgment”; John 5:29 — “the resurrection of judgment.” (b) The accompaniments of the judgment, such as the Second Coming of Christ, the resurrection and the outward changes of the earth are events which have an outward and visible, as well as an inward and spiritual, aspect. We are compelled to interpret the predictions of the last judgment upon the same principle. John 5:28,29 — “Marvel not at this: for the hour cometh, in which all that are in the tombs shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of judgment”; 2 Pet.3:7, 10 — “the day of judgment…the day of the Lord…in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall be dissolved with fervent heat”; 2 Thess. 1:7, 8, 2:10 — “the revelation of the Lord Jesus from heaven with the angels of his power in flaming fire, rendering vengeance to them that know not God…when he shall come…in that day.” (c) God’s justice, in the historical and imperfect work of judgment, needs a final outward judgment as its vindication. “A perfect justice must judge, not only moral units, but moral aggregates, not only the particulars of life, but the life as a whole.” The crime that is hidden and triumphant here and the goodness that is here maligned and oppressed must be brought to light and fitly recompensed. “Otherwise man is a Tantalus, longing but never satisfied” and God’s justice of which his outward administration is the expression, can only be regarded as approximate.

Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 194 — “The Egyptian Book of the Dead represents the deceased person as standing in the presence of the goddess Ma·t, who is distinguished by the ostrich feather on her head; she holds the scepter in one hand and the symbol of life in the other. The man’s heart, which represents his entire moral nature, is being weighed in the balance in the presence of Osiris, seated upon his throne as judge of the dead.” Rationalism believes in only present and temporal judgment and this it regards as but the reaction of natural law: “Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht — the world’s history is the world’s judgment” (Schiller, Resignation). But there is an in inner connection between present, temporal, spiritual judgments and the final, outward, complete judgment of God. Nero’s murder of his mother was not the only penalty of his murder of Germanicus.

Dorner: “With Christ’s appearance, faith sees that the beginning of the judgment and of the end has come. Christians are a prophetic race.

Without judgment, Christianity would involve a sort of dualism, evil and good would be of equal might and worth.

Christianity cannot always remain a historic principle alongside of the contrary principle of evil. It is the only reality.” God will show or make known his righteousness with regard to the disparity of lots among men,) the prosperity of the wicked, the permission of moral evil in general and the consistency of atonement with justice. “The sunte>leia tou~ aijw~nov (‘end of the world,’ Matthew 13:39) = stripping hostile powers of their usurped might, revelation of their falsity and impotence, consigning them to the past. Evil shall be utterly cut off, given over to its own nothingness or made a subordinate element.”

A great statesman said that what he dreaded for his country was not the Day of Judgment but the day of no judgment. “Jove strikes the Titans down, Not when they first begin their mountain piling, But when another rock would crown their work.” R. W. Emerson: “God said: I am tired of kings, I suffer them no more; Up to my ears the morning brings The outrage of the poor.” Royce, The World and the Individual, 2:384 sq. — “if God’s life is given to free individual souls, then God’s life can be given also to free nations and to a free race of men. There may be an apostasy of a family, nation, race and a judgment of each according to their deeds.”

The Expositor, March 1898 — “It is claimed that we are being judged now, that laws execute themselves, that the system of the universe is automatic, that there is no need for future retribution. But all ages have agreed that there is not here and now any sufficient vindication of the principle of eternal justice. The mills of the gods grind slowly. Physical immorality is not proportionately punished. Deterioration is not an adequate penalty. Telling a second lie does not recompense the first.

Punishment includes pain and here is no pain. That there is not punishment here is due, not to law, but to grace.”

Denney, Studies in Theology, 240, 241 — “The dualistic conception of an endless suspense, in which good and evil permanently balance each other and contest with each other the right to inherit the earth, is virtually atheistic and the whole Bible is a protest against it. It is impossible to overestimate the power of the final judgment, as a motive, in the primitive church. On almost every page of St. Paul, for instance, we see that he lives in the presence of it; he lets the awe of it descend into his heart to keep his conscience quick.” 2. The object of the final judgment.

The object of the final judgment is not the ascertainment, but the manifestation, of character and the assignment of outward condition corresponding to it. (a) The omniscient Judge already and fully knows the condition of all moral creatures. The last day will be only “the revelation of the righteous judgment of God.”

They are inwardly judged when they die, and before they die; they are outwardly judged at the last day. Romans 2:5,6 — “treasurest up for thyself wrath in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God; who will render to every man according to his works.” See Meyer on this passage, not “against the day of wrath,” but “in the day of wrath” wrath existing beforehand, but breaking out on that day. 1 Timothy 5:24,25 — “Some men’s sins are evident going before unto judgment; and some men also they follow after. In like manner also there are good works that are evident; and such as are otherwise cannot be hid”; Revelation 14:13 — “for their works follow with them” as close companions, into God’s presence and judgment (Ann. Par. Bible).

Epitaph: “Hic jacet in expectatione diei supremi…Qualis erat, dies iste indicabit” — “here lies, in expectation of the last day…Of what sort he was, that day will show.” Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3:3 — “In the corrupted currents of this world Offence’s gilded hand may shove by justice. But ‘t is not so above. There is no shuffling, there the action lies In his true nature; and we ourselves compelled, Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults, To give in evidence”; King John, 4:2 — “Oh, when the last account ‘twixt heaven and earth Is to be made, then shall this hand and seal [the warrant for the murder of Prince Arthur] Witness against us to damnation.” “Not all your piety nor wit Can lure it [justice] back to cancel half a line, Nor all your tears wash out one word of it.” (b) In the nature of man, there are evidences and preparations for this final disclosure. Among these may be mentioned the law of memory, by which the soul preserves the records of its acts, both good and evil ( Luke 16:25), the law of conscience, by which men involuntarily anticipate punishment for their own sins ( Romans 2:15,16; Hebrews 10:27) and the law of character, by which every thought and deed makes indelible impress upon the moral nature ( Hebrews 3:8,15).

The law of memory, Luke 16:25 — “Son, remember!” See Maclaren, Sermons, 1:109-122. Memory will embrace all the events of the past life, it will embrace them all at the same moment and it will embrace them continuously and continually. Memory is a process of self-registry. Every business house keeps a copy of all letters sent or orders issued, so every man retains in memory the record of his sins. The mind is a palimpsest, though the original writing has been erased, the ink has penetrated the whole thickness of the parchment and God’s chemistry is able to revive it.

Hudson, Dem. of Future Life, 212, 213 — ““Subjective memory is the retention of all ideas, however superficially they may have been impressed upon the objective mind and it admits of no variation in different individuals. Recollection is the power of recalling ideas to the mind. This varies greatly. Sir William Hamilton calls the former ‘mental latency.’” The law of conscience, Romans 2:15,16 — “they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness therewith, and their thoughts one with another accusing or else excusing them; in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men, according to my gospel, by Jesus Christ”; Hebrews 10:27 — “a certain fearful expectation of judgment, and a fierceness of fire which shall devour the adversaries.”

Goethe said that his writings, taken together, constituted a great confession. Wordsworth, Excursion, III:579 — “For, like a plague will memory break out, And, in the blank and solitude of things, Upon his spirit, with a fever’s strength, Will conscience prey.” A man who afterwards became a Methodist preacher was converted in Whitefield’s time by a vision of the judgment, in which he saw all men gathered before the throne. Each one coming up to the book of God’s law, tearing open his heart before it “as one would tear open the bosom of his shirt,” comparing his heart with the things written in the book. According as they agreed or disagreed with that standard, either passing triumphant to the company of the blest or going with howling to the company of the damned. No word was spoken; the Judge sat silent for the judgment was one of selfrevelation and self-condemnation. See Autobiography of John Nelson (quoted in the Diary of Mrs. Kitty Trevylyan, 207, by Mrs. E. Charles, the author of The Schonberg-Cotta Family).

The law of character, Hebrews 3:8,15 — “Harden not your hearts, as in the provocation, Like as in the day of the trial in the wilderness…Today, if ye shall hear his voice, Harden not your hearts, as in the provocation.” Sin leaves its marks upon the soul; men become “past feeling” ( Ephesians 4:19). In England, churchmen claim to toil a dissenter by his walk. This is not a bad sign by which to know a man.

God needs only to hold up our characters to show what have been our lives. Sin leaves its scars upon the soul as truly as lust and hatred leave their marks upon the body. So it is with the manifestation of the good — “the chivalry that does the right and disregards the yea and nay of the world…Expect nor question nor reply At what we figure as God’s judgment bar” (Robert Browning, Ring and Book, 178, 202). Mr. Edison says “In a few years the world will be just like one big ear; it will be unsafe to speak in a house till one has examined the walls and the furniture for concealed phonographs.” But the world even now is “one big ear” and we ourselves, in our characters, are writing the books of the judgment. Brooks, Foundations of Zoology, 134,135 — “Every part of the material universe contains a permanent record of every change that has taken place therein and there is also no limit to the power of minds like ours to read and interpret the record.”

Draper, Conflict of Science and Religion: “If on a cold polished metal, such as a new razor, any object such as a wafer, is laid and the metal breathed upon, when the moisture has had time to disappear, the wafer is thrown off. Now the most critical inspection of the polished surface can discern no trace of any form, if we breathe once more upon it, a spectral image of the wafer comes plainly into view. This may be done again and again. Nay, more; if the polished metal be carefully put aside where nothing can injure its surface and be kept so for many months, on breathing upon it again, the shadowy form emerges. A. shadow never falls upon a wall without leaving thereon a permanent trace, a trace, which might be made visible by resorting to proper, processes. Upon the walls of our most private apartments, where we think the eye of intrusion is altogether shut out and our retirement can never be profaned, there exist the vestiges of all our acts.”

Babbage, Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, 113-115 — “If we had power to follow and detect the minutest effects of any disturbance, each particle of existing matter would furnish a register of all that has happened. The track of every canoe, of every vessel that has yet disturbed the surface of the ocean, whether impelled by manual force or elemental power, remains forever registered in the future movement of all succeeding particles which may occupy its place. The furrow, which it left, is indeed filled up by the closing waters but they draw after them other and larger portions of the surrounding element and these again, once moved, communicate motion to others in endless succession. The air itself is one vast library, in whose pages are forever written all that man has said or even whispered.

There, in their mutable but unerring characters, mixed with the earliest as well as the latest sighs of mortality, stand forever recorded vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled, perpetuating in the united movements of each particle the testimony of man’s changeful will.” (c) Single acts and words, therefore, are to be brought into the judgment only as indications of the moral condition of the soul. This manifestation of all hearts will vindicate not only God’s past dealings but also his determination of future destinies. Matthew 12:36 — “And I say unto you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment”; Luke 12:2,8,9 — “there is nothing covered up that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known…. Every one who shall confess me before men, him shall the Son of man also confess before the angels of God: but he that denieth me in the presence of men shall be denied the presence of the angels of God”; John 3:18 — “He that believeth on him is not judged: he that believeth not hath been judged already, because he hath not believed on the name of the only begotten Son of God”; Corinthians 5:10 — “for we must all he made manifest [not, ‘must all appear,’ as in Authorized Version] before the judgment seat of Christ.”

Even the human judge, in passing sentence, commonly endeavors so to set forth the guilt of the criminal that he shall see his doom to be just. So God will awaken the consciences of the lost and lead them to pass judgment on themselves. Each lost soul can say as Byron’s Manfred said to the fiend that tortured his closing hour, “I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey, But was my own destroyer.” Thus God’s final judgment will be only the culmination of a process of natural selection, by which the unfit are eliminated and the fit are caused to survive.

O. J. Smith, The Essential Verity of Religion: “Belief in the immortality of the soul and belief in the accountability of the soul are fundamental beliefs in all religion. The origin of the belief in immortality is found in the fact that justice can be established in human affairs only upon the theory that the soul of man is immortal. The belief that man is accountable for his actions eternally is based upon the conviction that justice should and will be enforced. The central verity in religion therefore, is eternal justice. The sense of justice makes us men. Religion has no miraculous origin; it is born with the awakening of man’s moral sense. Friendship and love are based on reciprocity, which is justice. ‘Universal justice,’ says Aristotle, ‘includes all virtues.’” If by justice here is meant the divine justice, implied in the awakening of man’s moral sense, we can agree with the above. As we have previously intimated, we regard the belief in immortality as an inference from the intuition of God’s existence and every new proof that God is just strengthens our conviction of immortality. 3. The Judge in the final judgment.

God, in the person of Jesus Christ, is to be the judge. Though God is the judge of all ( Hebrews 12:23), yet this judicial activity is exercised through Christ, at the last day, as well as in the present state ( John 5:22,27). Hebrews 12:23 — “to God the judge of all”; John 5:22,27 — “For neither doth the Father judge any man, but he hath given all judgment unto the Son…and he gave him authority to execute judgment because he is a son of man.” Stevens, Johannine Theology, 349 — “Jesus says that he judges no man ( John 8:15). He does not personally judge men. His attitude toward men is solely that of Savior. It is rather his work, his word and his truth, which pronounces condemnation against them both here and hereafter. The judgment is that light is come, men’s attitude toward the light involves their judgment, the light judges them or they judge themselves. The Savior does not come to judge but to save them but, by their rejection of salvation, they turn the saving message itself into a judgment.”

This, for three reasons: (a) Christ’s human nature enables men to understand both the law and the love of God and so makes intelligible the grounds on which judgment is passed.

Whoever says that God is too distant and great to be understood may be pointed to Christ, in whose human life the divine “law appears, drawn out in living characters.” The divine love is manifest, as suffering upon the cross to save men from their sins.

The perfect human value of Christ, united as it is to the divine, ensures all that is needful in true judgment, viz.: that it be both merciful and just. Acts 17:31 — “he will judge the world in righteousness by the man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead.”

As F. W. Robertson has shown in his sermon on “The Sympathy of Christ (vol. 1:sermon vii), it is not sin that most sympathizes with sin. Sin blinds and hardens. Only the pure can appreciate the needs of the impure and feel for them. (c) Human nature, sitting upon the throne of judgment, will afford convincing proof that Christ has received the reward of his sufferings and that humanity has been perfectly redeemed. The saints shall “judge the world” only as they are one with Christ.

The lowly Son of man shall sit upon the throne of judgment. And with himself he will join all believers. Matthew 19:28 — “ye who have followed me, in the regeneration when the Son of man shall sit on the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel”; Luke 22:28-30 — “But ye are they that have continued with me in my temptations; and I appoint unto you a kingdom, even as my Father appointed unto me, that ye may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom; and ye shall sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel”; 1 Corinthians 6:2,3 — know ye not that the saints shall judge the world?…Know ye not that we shall judge angels?” Revelations 3:21 — “He that overcometh, I will give to him to sit down with me in my throne, as I also overcame, and sat down with my Father in his throne.” 4. The subjects of the final judgment.

The persons upon whose characters and conduct this judgment shall be passed are of two great classes. (a) All men, each possessed of body as well as soul, the dead having been raised and the living having been changed. 1 Corinthians 15:51,52 — “We all shall not sleep, but we shall all he changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed”; 1 Thess. 4:16, 17 — “For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven, with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first; then we that are alive, that are left, shall together with them be caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.” (b) All evil angels, good angels appearing only as attendants and ministers of the Judge.

Evil angels: 2 Peter 2:4 — “For if God spared not angels when they sinned, but cast them down to hell, and committed them to pits of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment”; Jude 6 — “And angels that kept not their own principality, but left their proper habitation, he hath kept in everlasting bonds under darkness unto the judgment of the great day”; Good angels: Matthew 13:41,42 — “The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that cause stumbling, and them that do iniquity, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be the weeping and the gnashing of teeth”; 25:31 — “But when the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the angels with him, then shall he sit on the throne of his glory: and before him shall be gathered all the nations.” 5. The grounds of the final judgment.

These will be two in number. (a) The law of God, as made known in conscience and in Scripture. John 12:48 — “He that rejecteth me, and receiveth not my sayings, hath one that judgeth him: the word that I spake, the same shall judge him in the last day”; Romans 2:12 — “For as many as have sinned without the law shall also perish without the law: and as many as have sinned under the law shall be judged by the law.” On the self, registry and disclosure of sin, see F. A. Noble, Our Redemption, 59-76. Dr. Noble quotes Daniel Webster in the Knapp case at Salem: “There is no refuge from confession but suicide, and suicide is confession.” Thomas Carlyle said to Lord Houghton, “Richard Milnes! in the day of judgment, when the Lord asks you why you did not get that pension for Alfred Tennyson, it will not do to lay the blame on your constituents. It is you that will be damned.” (b) The grace of Christ ( Revelation 20:12), those whose names are found “written in the book of life” being approved, simply because of their union with Christ and participation in his righteousness. Their good works shall be brought into judgment only as proofs of this relation to the Redeemer. Those not found the law of God will judge “written in the book of life” as God has made it known to each individual. Revelation 20:12 — “And I saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne; and books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of the things which were written in the book; according to their works.” The “book of life” = the book of justification, in which are written the names of those who are united to Christ by faith. The “book of death” would = the book of condemnation, in which are written the names of those who stand in their sins, as unrepentant and unforgiven transgressors of God’s law.

Ferries, in Hastings’ Bible Dictionary, 2:821 — “The judgment, in one aspect or stage of it, is a present act. For judgment Christ is come into this world ( John 9:39). There is an actual separation of men in progress here and now. This judgment, which is in progress now is destined to be perfected; in the last assize, Christ will be the Judge as before. It may be said that men will hereafter judge themselves. Those who are unlike Christ will find themselves as such to be separate from him. The two classes of people are parted because they have acquired distinct natures like the sheep and the goat. The character of each person is a ‘book’ or record, preserving in moral and spiritual effects, all that he has been and done and loved and in the judgment, these books will be ‘opened, or each man’s character will be manifested as the light of Christ’s character falls upon it. The people of Christ receive different rewards, according as their life has been.”

Dr. H. E. Robins, in his Restatement, holds that only under the grace system can the deeds done in the body be the grounds of judgment. Their deeds will be repentance and faith, not words of external morality. They will be fruits of the Spirit, such as spring from the broken and contrite heart. Christ, as head of the mediatorial kingdom, will fitly be the Judge.

So Judgment will be an unmixed blessing to the righteous. To them the words “prepare to meet thy God” ( Amos 4:12) should have no terror, for to meet God is to meet their deliverance and their reward. “Teach me to live that I may dread The grave as little as my bed: Teach me to die, that so I may Rise glorious at the judgment day.” On the whole subject, see Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 456, 457; Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 465, 466; Neander, Planting and Training, 524-526; Jonathan Edwards, Works, 2:499, 500; 4:202-225; Fox, in Lutheran Rev., 1887:206-226.

VI. THE FINAL STATES OF THE RIGHTEOUS AND OF THE WICKED

1. Of the righteous.

The final state of the righteous is described as eternal life ( Matthew 25:46), glory ( 2 Corinthians 4:17), rest ( Hebrews 4:9), knowledge ( 1 Corinthians 13:8-10), holiness ( Revelation 21:27), service ( Revelation 22:3), worship ( Revelation 19:1), society ( Hebrews 12:23), communion with God ( Revelation 21:3). Matthew 25:46 — “And these shall go any into eternal punishment: but the righteous into eternal life”; 2 Corinthians 4:17 — “For our light affliction, which is for the moment worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory”; Hebrews 4:9 — “There remaineth therefore a Sabbath rest for the people of God”; Corinthians 13:8-10 — “Love never faileth: but whether there be prophesies, they shall be done away; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall be done away. For we know an part, and we prophesy in part: but when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away”; Revelation 21:27 — “and there shall in no wise enter into it anything unclean, or he that maketh an abomination and a lie: but only they that are written in the Lamb’s book of life”; 22:3 — “and his servants shall serve him”; 19:1, 2 — “After these things I heard as it were a great voice of a great multitude in heaven, saying, Hallelujah; Salvation, and glory, and power, belong to our God; for true and righteous are his judgments”; Hebrews 12:23 — “to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven”; Revelation 21:3 — “And I heard a great voice out of the throne saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he shall dwell with them, and they shall be his peoples, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.” Isaiah 35:7 — “The mirage shall become a pool” = aspiration shall become reality. Hosea 2:15 — “I will give her…the valley of Achor [that is, Troubling] for a door of hope.” Victor Hugo: “If you persuade Lazarus that there is no Abraham’s bosom awaiting him, he will not lie at Dives’ door, to be fed with his crumbs; he will make his way into the house and fling Dives out of the window.” It was the preaching of the Methodists that saved England from the general crash of the French Revolution. It brought the common people to look for the redress of the inequalities and injustices of this life in a future life, a world of less friction than this (S. S. Times). In the Alps one has no idea of the upper valleys until he enters them. He may long to ascend but only actual ascending can show him their beauty. And then, “beyond the Alps lies Italy,” and the revelation of heaven will he like the outburst of the sunny landscape after going through the darkness of the St. Gothard tunnel.

Robert Hall, who for years had suffered acute bodily pain, said to Wilberforce: “My chief conception of heaven is rest.” “Mine,” replied Wilberforce, “is love, love to God and to every bright inhabitant of that glorious place.” Wilberforce enjoyed society. Heaven is not all rest. On the door is inscribed: “No admission except on business.” “His servants shall serve him” ( Revelation 21:3). Butler, Things Old and New, — “We know not, but if life be there The out come and the crown of this:

What else can make their perfect bliss Than in their Master’s work to share? Resting, but not in slumberous ease, Working, but not in wild unrest, Still ever blessing, ever blest, They see us as the Father sees.”

Tennyson, Crossing the Bar: “Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me; And may there be no meaning of the bar When I put out to sea I But such a tide as moving seems asleep, Too full for sound and foam, When that which drew from out the boundless deep Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell, And after that the dark; And may there be no sadness of farewell, When I embark. For though from out our bourne of time and place The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face, When I have crossed the bar.” Matthew 6:20 — “lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven” = there are no permanent investments except in heaven. A man at death is worth only what he has sent on before him. Christ prepares a place for us ( John 14:3) by gathering our friends to himself. Louise Chandler Moulton: “Some day or other I shall surely come Where true hearts wait for me; Then let me learn the language of that home, While here on earth I be; Lest my poor lips for want of words be dumb In that high company.”

Bronson Alcott: “Heaven will be to me a place where I can get a little conversation.” Some of his friends thought it would be a place where he could hear himself talk. A pious Scotchman, when asked whether he ever expected to reach heaven, replied: “Why, mon, I live there noo!”

Summing up all these, we may say that it is the fullness and perfection of holy life, in communion with God and with sanctified spirits. Although there will be degrees of blessedness and honor, proportioned to the capacity and fidelity of each soul ( Luke 19:17,19; 1 Corinthians 3:14,15). Each will receive as great a measure of reward as it can contain ( 1 Corinthians 2:9) and this final state, once entered upon, will be unchanging in kind and endless in duration ( Revelation 3:12; 22:15). Luke 19:17,19 — “Well done, thou good servant: because thou wast found faithful in a very little, have thou authority over ten cities…Be thou also over five cities”; 1 Corinthians 3:14,15 — “If any man’s work shall abide which be built thereon, he shall receive a reward. If any man’s work shall he burned, he shall safer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as through fire”; 2:9 — “Things which eye saw not, and ear heard not, And which entered not into the heart of man, Whatsoever things God prepared for them that love him”; Revelation 3:12 — “He that overcometh, I will make him a pillar in the temple of my God and he shall go out thence no more”; 22:15 — “Without are the dogs, and the sorcerers, and the fornicators, and the murderers, and the idolaters, and every one that loveth and maketh a lie.”

In the parable of the laborers ( Matthew 20:1-16), each receives a penny. Rewards in heaven will be equal, in the sense that each saved soul will be filled with good. But rewards will vary, in the sense that the capacity of one will be greater than that of another and this capacity will be in part the result of our improvement of God’s gifts in the present life.

The relative value of the penny may in this way vary from a single unit to a number indefinitely great, according to the work and spirit of the recipient. The penny is good only for what it will buy. For the eleventh hour man who has done but little work, it will not buy so sweet rest as it buys for him who has “borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.” It will not buy appetite nor will it buy joy of conscience.

E. G. Robinson: “Heaven is not to be compared to a grasshopper on a shingle floating down stream. Heaven is a place where men are taken up, as they leave this world and are carried forward. No sinners will be there, though there may be incompleteness of character. There is no intimation in Scripture of that sudden transformation in the hour of dissolution, which is often supposed.” Psalm 84:7 — “They go from strength to strength; Every one of them appeareth before God in Zion.” It is not possible that progress should cease with our entrance into heaven rather, is it true that uninterrupted progress will then begin. 1 Corinthians 13:12 — “now we see in a mirror, darkly; but then face to face.” There, progress is not towards but within, the sphere of the infinite. In this world we are like men living in a cave and priding themselves on the rush-lights with which they explore it, unwilling to believe that there is a region of sunlight where rush-lights are needless.

Heaven will involve deliverance from defective physical organization and surroundings, as well as from the remains of evil in our hearts. Rest, in heaven, will be consistent with service, an activity without weariness and a service that is perfect freedom. We shall be perfect when we enter heaven, in the sense of being free from sin but we shall grow to greater perfection thereafter, in the sense of a larger and more complete being.

The fruit tree shows perfection at each stage of its growth, the perfect bud, the perfect blossom and finally the perfect fruit yet, the bud and the blossom are preparatory and prophetic; neither one is a finality. So “when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away” ( 1 Cor 13:10). A broad shouldered convert at the Rescue Mission said: “I’m the happiest man in the room to night. I couldn’t be any happier unless I were larger.” A little pail can be as full of water as is a big tub but the tub will hold much more than the pail. To be “filled unto all the fullness of God” ( Ephesians 3:19) will mean much more in heaven than it means here. We shall then “be strong to apprehend with all the saints what is the breath and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge.” In the book of Revelation, John seems to have mistaken an angel for the Lord himself and to have fallen down to worship ( Revelation 22:8). The time may come in eternity when we shall be equal to what we now conceive God to be ( Corinthians 2:9).

Plato’s Republic and More’s Utopia are only earthly adumbration of St. John’s City of God. The representation of heaven as a city seems intended to suggest security from every foe, provision for every want, intensity of life, variety of occupation, and closeness of relation to others or, as Hastings’ Bible Dictionary, 1:446, puts it, “Safety, Security, Service.”

Here, the greatest degradation and sin are found in the great cities. There, the life of the city will help holiness, as the life of the city here helps wickedness. Brotherly love in the next world implies knowing those we love and loving those we know. We certainly shall not know less there than here. If we know our friends here, we shall know them there. And, as love to Christ here draws us nearer to each other, so there we shall love friends, not less but more, because of our greater nearness to Christ. Zechariah 8:5 — “And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof.” Newman Smyth, Through Science to Faith, 125 — “As of the higher animals, so even more of men and women it may be true, that those who play best may succeed best and thrive best.” Horace Bushnell, in his essay, Work and Play, holds that ideal work is work performed so heartily and joyfully, and with such a surplus of energy, that it becomes play. This is the activity of heaven. John 10:10 — “I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.”

We enter into the life of God. John 5:17 — “My Father worketh even until now, and I work.” A nurse, who had been ill for sixteen years, said, “If I were well, I would be at the smallpox hospital. I’m not going to heaven to do nothing.” Savage, Life after Death, 129, 292 — “In Dante’s universe, the only reason for any one’s wanting to get to heaven is for the sake of getting out of the other place. There is nothing in heaven for him to do and nothing human for him to engage in. A good deacon, in his depression, thought he was going to hell but when asked what he would do there, he replied that he would try to start a prayer meeting.”

With regard to heaven, two questions present themselves. (a) Is heaven a place, as well as a state?

We answer that this is probable, for the reason that the presence of Christ’s human body is essential to heaven, and that this body must be confined to place. Since deity and humanity are indestructibly united in Christ’s single person, we cannot regard Christ’s human soul as limited to place without vacating his person of its divinity. But we cannot conceive of his human body as thus omnipresent. As the new bodies of the saints are confined to place so, it would seem, must be the same with the body of their Lord. But, though heaven is the place where Christ manifests his glory through the human body which he assumed in the incarnation, our ruling conception of heaven must be something higher even than this, namely, that of a state of holy communion with God. John 14:2,3 — “In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I come again, and will receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also”; Hebrews 12:14 — “Follow after peace with all men, and the sanctification without which no man shall see the Lord.”

Although heaven is probably a place, we are by no means to allow this conception to become the preponderant one in our minds. Milton: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” As he goes through the gates of death, every Christian can say, as Caesar said when he crossed the Rubicon: “Omnia mea mecum porto.”

The hymn, “O sing to me of heaven, when I am called to die” is not true to Christian experience. In that hour the soul sings, not of heaven but of Jesus and his cross. As houses on river-flats, accessible in time of flood by boats, keep safe only goods in the upper story, so only the treasure laid up above escapes the destroying floods of the last day. Dorner: “The soul will possess true freedom, in that it can no more become unfree and that, through the indestructible love energy springing from union with God.”

Milton: “What if earth be But the shadow of heaven, and things therein Each to the other like, more than on earth is thought?” Omar Khayy·m, Rub·iydt, stanzas 66, 67 — “I sent my soul through the Invisible, Some letter of that After life to spell: And by and by my soul returned to me, And answered ‘I myself am Heaven and Hell’…Heaven but the vision of fulfilled desire. And Hell the shadow of a soul on fire.” In other words, not the kind of place but the kind of people in it, makes Heaven or Hell.

Crane, Religion of Tomorrow, 341 — “The earth is but a breeding ground from which God intends to populate the whole universe. After death, the soul goes to that place which God has prepared as its home. In the resurrection they ‘neither marry nor are given in marriage’ ( Matthew 22:20) = ours is the only generative planet. There is no reproduction hereafter. To incorporate himself into the race, the Father must come to the reproductive planet.”

Dean Stanley: “Till death us part! So speaks the heart When each repeats to each the words of doom; Through blessing and through curse, For better and for worse, We will be one till that dread hour shall come. Life, with its myriad grasp, Our yearning souls shall clasp, By ceaseless love and still expectant wonder, In bonds that shall endure, Indestructibly sure, Till God in death shall part our paths asunder. Till death us join! O voice yet more divine, That to the broken heart breathes hope sublime; Through lonely hours and shattered powers, We still are one despite of change or time. Death, with his healing hand, Shall once more knit the band, Which needs but that one link which none may sever; Till through the only Good, Heard, felt and understood, Our life in God shall make us one forever.” (b) Is this earth to be the heaven of the saints? We answer:

First, that the earth is to be purified by fire and perhaps prepared to be the abode of the saints although, this last is not rendered certain by the Scriptures. Romans 8:19-23 — “For the earnest expectation of the creation waiteth for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will but by reason of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God.

For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only so, but ourselves also, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for our adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body”; 2 Peter 3:12,13 — “looking for and earnestly desiring the coming of the day of God, by reason of which the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat. But, according to his promise, we look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness”; Revelation 21:1 — “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth are passed away; and the sea is no more.”

Dorner: “Without loss of substantiality, matter will have exchanged its darkness, hardness, heaviness, inertia, and impenetrableness for clearness, radiance, elasticity and transparency. A new stadium will begin; God’s advance to new creations, with the cooperation of perfected mankind.”

Is the earth a molten mass, with a thin solid crust? Lord Kelvin says no, it is more rigid and solid than steel. The interior may be intensely hot, yet pressure may render in solid to the very center, The wrinkling of the surface may be due to contraction, or “solid flow,” like the wrinkling in the skin of a baked apple that has cooled. See article on The Interior of the Earth, by G. F. Becker, in N. American Rev. April 1893. Edward S.

Holden, Director of the Lick Observatory, in The Forum, Oct. 1893:211- 220, tells us that “the star Nova Aurigæ, which doubtless resembled our sun, within two days increased in brilliancy sixteen fold. Three months after its discovery it had become invisible. After four months again it reappeared and was comparatively bright. But it was no longer a star but a nebula. In other words it had developed changes of light and heat which, if repeated in the case of our own sun, would mean a quick end of the human race and the utter annihilation of every vestige of animal and other life upon this earth. This catastrophe occurred in December 1891, or was announced to us by light, which reached us then. But this light must have left the star twenty, perhaps fifty, years earlier.”

Secondly, that this fitting-up of the earth for man’s abode, even if it were declared in Scripture, would not render it certain that the saints are to be confined to these narrow limits ( John 14:2). It seems rather to be intimated that the effect of Christ’s work will be to bring the redeemed into union and intercourse with other orders of intelligence, from communion with whom they are now shut out by sin ( Ephesians 1:20; Colossians 1:20). John 14:2 — “In my Fathers house are many mansions”; Ephesians 1:10 — “unto a dispensation of the fullness of the times, to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens, and the things upon the earth”; Colossians 1:20 — “through him to reconcile all things unto himself having made peace through the blood of his cross; through him, I say, whether things upon the earth, or things in the heavens.

See Dr. A. C. Kendrick, in Bap. Quarterly, Jan. 1870. Dr. Kendrick thinks we need local associations. Earth may be our home yet from this home we may set out on excursions through the universe, after a time returning again to our earthly abodes. So Chalmers, interpreting literally 2 Peter 3, we certainly are in a prison here, and look out through the bars, as the Prisoner of Chillon looked over the lake to the green isle and the singing birds. Why are we shut out from intercourse with other worlds and other orders of intelligence? Apparently it is the effect of sin. We are in an abnormal state of durance and probation. Earth is out of harmony with God. The great harp of the universe has one of its strings out of tune and that one discordant string makes a jar through the whole. All things in heaven and earth shall be reconciled when this one jarring string is keyed right and set in tune by the hand of love and mercy. See Leitch, God’s Glory in the Heavens, 327-330. 2. Of the wicked.

The final state of the wicked is described under the figures of eternal fire ( Matthew 25:41); the pit of the abyss ( Revelation 9:2,11); outer darkness ( Matthew 8:12); torment ( Revelation 14:10,11); eternal punishment ( Matthew 25:46); wrath of God ( Romans 2:5); second death ( Revelation 21:8); eternal destruction from the face of the Lord ( 2 Thess. 1:9); eternal sin ( Mark 3:29). Matthew 25:41 — “Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels”; Revelation 9:2,11 — “And he opened the pit of the abyss; and there went up a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace.

They have over them as king the angel of the abyss: his name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in the Greek tongue he hath the name Apollyon”; Matthew 8:12 — “but the sons of the kingdom shall be cast forth into the outer darkness: there shall be the weeping and the gnashing of teeth”; Revelation 14:10,11 — “he also shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is prepared unmixed in the cup of his anger; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb: and the smoke of their torment goeth up for ever and ever”; Matthew 25:46 — “And these shall go away into eternal punishment.” Romans 2:5 — “after thy hardness and impenitent heart treasurest up for thyself wrath in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God”; Revelation 21:8 — “But for the fearful, and unbelieving, and abominable, and murderers, and fornicators, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, their part shall be in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone; which is the second death”; 2 Thess. 1:9 — “who shall suffer punishment even eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might.” here ajpo> , from, = not separation but “proceeding from,” and indicates that the everlasting presence of Christ, once realized, ensures everlasting destruction. Mark 3:29 — “whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.” A text, which implies that some will never cease to sin, this eternal sinning will involve eternal misery and this eternal misery, as the appointed vindication of the law, will be eternal punishment. As Uzziah, when smitten with leprosy, did not need to be thrust out of the temple, but “himself hasted also to go out” ( 2 Chronicles 25:20). Judas is said to go “to his own place” ( Acts 1:25; cf . 4:23 — where Peter and John, “being let go, they came to their own company”). Cf. John 8:35 — “the bondservant abideth not in the house forever” = whatever be his outward connection with God, it can be only for a time. 15:2 — “Every branch in me that beareth not fruit, he taketh it away” at death. The history of Abraham showed that one might have outward connection with God that was only temporary; Ishmael was cast out; the promise belonged only to Isaac.

Wrightnour: “Gehenna was the place into which all the offal of the city of Jerusalem was swept. So hell is the penitentiary of the moral universe.

The profligate is not happy in the prayer meeting, but in the saloon; the swine is not at home in the parlor, but in the sty. Hell is the sinner’s own place; he had rather be there than in heaven. He will not come to the house of God, the nearest thing to heaven. Why should we expect him to enter heaven itself?”

Summing up all, we may say that it is the loss of all good, whether physical or spiritual and the misery of an evil conscience banished from God and from the society of the holy and dwelling under God’s positive curse forever. Here we are to remember, as in the case of the final state of the righteous, that the decisive and controlling element is not the outward, but the inward. If hell is a place, it is only that the outward may correspond to the inward. If there be outward torments, it is only because these will be fit, though subordinate, accompaniments of the inward state of the soul.

Every living creature will have an environment suited to its character, “its own place.” “I know of the future judgment, How dreadful so e’er it be, That to sit alone with my conscience Will be judgment enough for me.”

Calvin: “The wicked have the seeds of hell in their own hearts.”

Chrysostom, commenting on the words “Depart, ye cursed,” says, “Their own works brought the punishment on them; the fire was not prepared for them, but for Satan. Yet, since they cast themselves into it, ‘Impute it to yourselves,’ he says, ‘that you are there.’” Milton, Par. Lost, 4:75, Satan: “Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.” Byron: “There is no power in holy men, Nor charm in prayer, nor purifying form Of penitence, nor outward look, nor fast, Nor agony, nor greater than all these, The innate torture of that deep despair Would make a hell of heaven, can exorcise From out the unbounded spirit the quick sense Of its own sins.”

Phelps, English Style, 223, speaks of “a law of the divine government, by which the body symbolizes, in its experience, the moral condition of its spiritual inhabitant. The drift of sin is toward physical suffering. Moral depravity tends always to a corrupt and tortured body. Certain diseases are the products of certain crimes. The whole catalogue of human pains, from a toothache to the angina pectoris, is but a witness to a state of sin expressed by an experience of suffering. Carry this law into the experience of eternal sin. The bodies of the wicked live again as well as those of the righteous. You have therefore a spiritual body, inhabited and used, and therefore tortured, by a guilty soul, a body, perfected in its sensibilities, inclosing and expressing a soul matured in its depravity.”

Augustine, Confessions, 15 — “Each man’s sin is the instrument of his punishment and his iniquity is turned into his torment.” Lord Bacon: “Being, without well-being, is a curse, and the greater the being, the greater the curse.”

In our treatment of the subject of eternal punishment we must remember that false doctrine is often a reaction from the unscriptural and repulsive over-statements of Christian apologists. We freely concede that future punishment does not necessarily consist of physical torments, that it may be wholly internal and spiritual. The pain and suffering of the future are not necessarily due to positive infliction of God (they may result entirely from the soul’s sense of loss and from the accusations of conscience) and that eternal punishment does not necessarily involve endless successions of suffering. God’s eternity is not mere endlessness, so we may not be forever subject to the law of time.

An over-literal interpretation of the Scripture symbols has had much to do with such utterances as that of Savage, Life after Death, 101 — “If the doctrine of eternal punishment was clearly and unmistakably taught in every leaf of the Bible and on every leaf of all the Bibles of all the world, I could not believe a word of it. I should appeal from these misconceptions of even the seers and the great men to the infinite and eternal Good, who only is God and who only on such terms could be worshiped.”

The figurative language of Scripture is a miniature representation of what cannot be fully described in words. The symbol is a symbol yet it is less, not greater, than the thing symbolized. It is sometimes fancied that Jonathan Edwards, when, in his sermon on Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” he represented the sinner as a worm shriveling in the eternal fire, supposed that hell consists mainly of such physical torments. But this is a misinterpretation of Edwards. He did not fancy heaven essentially to consist in streets of gold or pearly gates, but rather in holiness and communion with Christ, of which these are the symbols. He did not regard hell as consisting in fire and brimstone, but rather in the unholiness and separation from God of a guilty and accusing conscience, of which the fire and brimstone are symbols. He used the material imagery because he thought that this best answered to the methods of Scripture. He probably went beyond the simplicity of the Scripture statements and did not sufficiently explain the spiritual meaning of the symbols he used but we are persuaded that he neither understood them literally himself nor meant them to be so understood by others.

Sin is self-isolating, unsociable and selfish. By virtue of natural laws the sinner reaps as he has sown and sooner or later is repaid by desertion or contempt. Then the selfishness of one sinner is punished by the selfishness of another, the ambition of one by the ambition of another, the cruelty of one by the cruelty of another. The misery of the wicked hereafter will doubtless be due in part to the spirit of their companions. They dislike the good, whose presence and example is a continual reproof and reminder of the height from which they have fallen and they shut themselves out of their company. The judgment will bring about a complete cessation of intercourse between the good and the bad. Julius Muller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:239 — “Beings whose relations to God are diametrically opposite, and persistently so, differ so greatly from each other that other ties of relationship became as nothing in comparison.”

In order, however, to meet opposing views, and to forestall the common objections, we proceed to state the doctrine of future punishment in greater detail.

A. The future punishment of the wicked is not annihilation. In our discussion of Physical Death, we have shown that, by virtue of its original creation in the image of God, the human soul is naturally immortal, neither for the righteous nor the wicked is death a cessation of being. On the contrary, the wicked enter at death upon a state of conscious suffering which the resurrection and the judgment only augment and render permanent. It is plain, moreover, that if annihilation took place at death, there could be no degrees in future punishment; a conclusion itself at variance with express statements of Scripture.

The old annihilationism is represented by Hudson, Debt and Grace, and Christ our Life; also by Dobney, Future Punishment. It maintains that ko>lasiv , “punishment” (in Matthew 25:46 — “eternal punishment”), means etymologically an everlasting “cutting-off.” But we reply that the word had to a great degree lost its etymological significance, as is evident from the only other passage where it occurs in the New Testament, namely, 1 John 4:18 — “fear hath punishment” (A.V.: “fear hath torment”). For full answer to the old statements of the annihilation theory, see under Physical Death, pages 991-998.

That there are degrees of punishment in God’s administration is evident from Luke 12:47,48 — “And that servant who knew his Lord’s will, and made not ready, nor did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes but he that know not, and did things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes”; Romans 2:5,6 — “after thy hardness and impenitent heart treasurest up for thyself wrath in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God; who will render so every man according to his works”; 2 Corinthians 5:10 — “For we must all be made manifest before the judgment seat of Christ; that each one may receive the things done in the body, according to what he hast done, whether it be good or bad”; 11:15 — “whose end shall be according to their works”; 2 Timothy 4:14 — “Alexander the coppersmith did me much evil: the Lord will render to him according to his works”; Revelation 2:23 — “will give unto each one of you according to your works”; 18:5, 6 — “her sins have reached even unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities. Render unto her even as she rendered, and double unto her the double according to her works: in the cup, which she mingled, mingle unto her double.”

A French Christian replied to the argument of his deistic friend, “Probably you are right, probably you are not immortal; but I am.” This was the doctrine of conditional immortality, the doctrine that only the good survive. We grant that the measure of our faith in immortality is the measure of our fitness for its blessings but it is not the measure of our possession of immortality. We are immortal beings, whether we believe it or not. The acorn is potentially an oak but it may never come to its full development. There is a saltless salt which, though it does not cease to exist, is cast out and trodden under foot of men. Denney, Studies in Theology, 256 — “Conditional immortality denies that man can exist after death without being united to Christ by faith. But the immortality of man cannot be something accidental or something appended to his nature after he believes in Christ. It must be something, at the very lowest, for which his nature is constituted, even if apart from Christ it can never realize itself as it ought.”

Broadus, Com. on Matthew 25:46 (page 514) — “He who caused to exist could keep in existence. Mark 9:49 — ‘Every one shall be salted with fire’ has probably this meaning: Fire is usually destructive but this unquenchable fire will act like salt, preserving instead of destroying. So Keble, Christian Year, 5th Sunday in Lent, says of the Jews in their present condition: ‘Salted with fire, they seem to show How spirits lost in endless woe May undecaying live. Oh, sickening thought! Yet hold it fast Long as this glittering world shall last, Or sin at heart survive.’” There are two forms of the annihilation theory which are more plausible and which, in recent times, find a larger number of advocates. (a) The powers of the wicked are gradually weakened, as the natural result of sin, so that they finally cease to be. We reply first, that moral evil does not, in this present life, seem to be incompatible with a constant growth of the intellectual powers, at least in certain directions. We have no reason to believe the fact to be different in the world to come. Secondly, that if this theory were true, the greater the sin, the speedier would be the relief from punishment.

This form of the annihilation theory is suggested by Bushnell, in his Forgiveness and Law, 146, 147, and by Martineau, Study, 2:107-8.

Dorner also, in his Eschatology, seems to favor it as one of the possible methods of future punishment, he says, “To the ethical also pertains ontological significance. The ‘second death’ may be the dissolving of the soul itself into nothing. Estrangement from God who is the source of life, ends in extinction of life. The orthodox talk about demented beings raging in impotent fury amounts to the same annihilation of their human character. Evil is never the substance of the soul; this remains metaphysically good.” It is argued that even for saved sinners there is a loss. The prodigal regained his father’s favor but he could not regain his lost patrimony. We cannot get back the lost time or the lost growth. Much more, then, in the case of the wicked will there be perpetual loss. Draper: “At every return to the sun, comets lose a portion of their size and brightness, stretching out until the nucleus loses control, the mass breaks up, and the greater portion navigates the sky, in the shape of disconnected meteorites.”

To this argument it is often replied that certain minds grow in their powers, at least in certain directions, in spite of their sin. Napoleon’s military genius, during all his early years, grew with experience. Sloane, in his Life of Napoleon, however, seems to show that the Emperor lost his grip as he went on. Success unbalanced his judgment, he gave way to physical indulgence, his body was not equal to the strain he put upon it and at Waterloo he lost precious moments of opportunity by vacillation and inability to keep awake. There was physical, mental and moral deterioration. But may this not be the result of the soul’s connection with a body? Satan’s cunning and daring seem to be on the increase from the first mention of him in Scripture to its end. See Princeton Review, 1882:673-694. Will not this very cunning and daring however, work its own ruin and lead Satan to his final and complete destruction? Does not sin blunt the intellect, unsettle one’s sober standards of decision and lead one to prefer a trifling present triumph or pleasure to a permanent good?

Gladden, What is Left? 104, 105 — “Evil is benumbing and deadening.

Selfishness weakens a man’s mental grasp and narrows his range of vision. The schemer becomes less astute as he grows older; he is morally sure, before he dies, to make some stupendous blunder, which even a tyro would have avoided. The devil, who has sinned longest, must be the greatest fool in the universe and we need not be at all afraid of him.” To the view that this weakening of powers leads to absolute extinction of being, we oppose the consideration that its award of retribution is glaringly unjust in making the greatest sinner the least sufferer since to him relief, in the way of annihilation, comes the soonest. (b) There is for the wicked, certainly after death, and possibly between death and the judgment, a positive punishment proportioned to their deeds but that this punishment issues in, or is followed by, annihilation. We reply first, that upon this view, as upon any theory of annihilation, future punishment is a matter of grace as well as of justice. It is a notion for which Scripture affords no warrant. Secondly, Scripture not only gives no hint of the cessation of this punishment but also declares, in the strongest terms, its endlessness.

The second form of the annihilation theory seems to have been held by Justin Martyr (Trypho, Edinb. transi.) — “Some, who have appeared worthy of God, never die but others are punished so long as God wills them to exist and be punished.” The soul exists because God wills and for no longer than he wills. “Whenever it is necessary that the soul should cease to exist, the spirit of life is removed from it and there is no more soul but it goes back to the place from which it was taken.”

Schaff, Hist. Christ. Church, 2:608, 609 — “Justin Martyr teaches that the wicked or hopelessly impenitent will be raised at the judgment to receive an eternal punishment. He speaks of it in twelve passages: ‘We believe that all who live wickedly and do not repent will be punished in eternal fire.’ Such language is inconsistent with the annihilation theory for which Justin Martyr has been claimed. He does indeed reject the idea of the independent immortality of the soul and hints at the possible final destruction of the wicked but he puts that possibility countless ages beyond the final judgment, so that it loses all practical significance.”

A modern advocate of this view is White, in his Life in Christ. He favors a conditional immortality, belonging only to those who are joined to Christ by faith but he makes a retributive punishment and pain fall upon the godless, before their annihilation. The roots of this view lie in a false conception of holiness as a form or manifestation of benevolence and of punishment as deterrent and preventive instead of vindicative of righteousness. To the minds of its advocates, extinction of being is a comparative blessing and they, for this reason, prefer it to the common view. See Whiton, Is Eternal Punishment Endless?

A view similar to that which we are opposing is found in Henry Drummond, Natural Law In the Spiritual World. Evil is punished by its own increase. Drummond, however, leaves no room for future life or for future judgment in the case of the unregenerate. See reviews of Drummond, in Watts, New Apologetic, 332; and in Murphy, Nat.

Selection and Spir. Freedom, 19-21, 77-124. While Drummond is an annihilationist, Murphy is a restorationist. More rational and Scriptural than either of these is the saying of Tower: “Sin is God’s foe. He does not annihilate it but he makes it the means of displaying his holiness, as the Romans did not slay their captured enemies but made them their servants.” The terms aijw>n and aijw>niov , which we have still to consider, afford additional Scripture testimony against annihilation. See also the argument from the divine justice, pages 1046-1051; article on the Doctrine of Extinction, in New Englander, March, 1879:201-204; Hovey, Manual of Theology and Ethics, 153-168; J. S. Barlow, Endless Being; W. H. Robinson, on Conditional Immortality, in Report of Baptist Congress for 1886.

Since neither one of these two forms of the annihilation theory is Scriptural or rational, we avail ourselves of the evolutionary hypothesis as throwing light upon the problem. Death is not degeneracy ending in extinction nor is punishment ending in extinction. It is atavism that returns, or tends to return, to the animal type. As moral development is from the brute to man, so abnormal development is from man to the brute.

Lord Byron: “All suffering doth destroy, or is destroyed.” This is true, not of man’s being, but of his well being. Ribot, Diseases of the Will, 115 — “Dissolution pursues a regressive course from the more voluntary and more complex to the less voluntary and more simple, that is to say, toward the automatic. One of the first signs of mental impairment is incapacity for sustained attention. Unity, stability, power, have ceased and the end is extinction of the will.” We prefer to say loss of the freedom of the will. On the principle of evolution, abuse of freedom may result in reversion to the brute, annihilation not of existence but of higher manhood, punishment from within rather than from without, eternal penalty in the shape of eternal loss. Matthew 24:13 — “he that endureth to the end, the same shall be saved” has for its parallel passage Luke 21:19 — “In your patience ye shall win your souls,” i.e. , shall by free will get possession of your own being. Losing one’s soul is just the opposite, namely, losing one’s free will, by disuse renouncing freedom, becoming a victim of habit, nature, circumstance and this is the cutting off and annihilation of true manhood. “To be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer “(Bernard Shaw).

In John 15:2 Christ says of all men (the natural branches of the vine), “Every branch in me that beareth not fruit, he taketh it away”; Psalm 49:20 — “Man that is in honor, and understandeth not, Is like the beasts that perish”; Revelation 22:15 — “Without are the dogs.” In heathen fable men were turned into beasts and even into trees. The story of Circe is a parable of human fate; men may become apes, tigers or swine. They may lose their higher powers of consciousness and will. By perpetual degradation they may suffer eternal punishment. All life that is worthy of the name may cease, while still existence of a low animal type is prolonged. We see precisely these results of sin in this world. We have reason to believe that the same Laws of development will operate in the world to come.

McConnell, Evolution of Immortality, 85-95, 99, 124, 180 — “Immortality, or survival after death, depends upon man’s freeing himself from the law which sweeps away the many and becoming an individual (indivisible) that is fit to survive. The individual must become stronger than the species. By using will aright, he lays hold of the infinite Life and becomes one who, like Christ, has ‘life in himself’ ( John 5:25).

Gravitation and chemical affinity had their way in the universe until they were arrested and turned about in the interest of life. Over production, death and the survival of the fittest had their ruthless sway until they were reversed in the interest of affection. The supremacy of the race at the expense of the individual we may expect to continue until something in the individual comes to be of more importance than that law and no longer.

Goodness can arrest and turn back for nations the primal law of growth, vigor and decline. Is it too much to believe that it may do the same for an individual man?.

Life is a thing to be achieved. At every step there are a thousand candidates who fail, for one that attains. Until moral sensibility becomes self-conscious, all question of personal immortality becomes irrelevant because there is, accurately speaking, no personality to be immortal. Up to that point the individual living creature, whether in human form or not, falls short of that essential personality for which eternal life can have any meaning.” But how about children who never come to moral consciousness? McConnell appeals to heredity. The child of one who has achieved immortality may also prove to be immortal. But is there no chance for the children of sinners. The doctrine of McConnell leans toward the true solution but it is vitiated by the belief that individuality is a transient gift which only goodness can make permanent. We hold on the other hand that this gift of God is “without repentance” ( Romans 11:29), and that no human being can lose life except, in the sense of losing all that makes life desirable.

B. Punishment after death excludes new probation and ultimate restoration of the wicked. Some have maintained the ultimate restoration of all human beings, by appeal to such passages as the following: Matthew 19:28; Acts 3:21; Ephesians 1:9,10. Matthew 19:28 — “in the regeneration when the Son of man shall sit on the throne of his glory”; Acts 3:21 — Jesus, “whom the heaven must receive until the times of restoration of all things”; 1 Corinthians 15:26 — “The last enemy that shall be abolished is death”; Ephesians 1:9,10 — “according to his good pleasure which he purposed in him unto a dispensation of the fullness of the times, to sum up all things in Christ the things in the heavens and the things upon the earth”; Philippians 2:10,11 — “that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven and things on earth and things under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father”; 2 Peter 3:9,13 — “not wishing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance…But, according to his promise, we look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.”

Robert Browning: “That God, by God’s own ways occult, May — doth, I will believe — bring back All wanderers to a single track.” B. W.

Lockhart: “I must believe that evil is essentially transient and mortal, or alter my predicates of God. And I must believe in the ultimate extinction of that personality whom the power of God cannot sometime win to goodness. The only alternative is the termination of a wicked life either through redemption or through extinction.” Mulford, Republic of God, claims that the soul’s state cannot be fixed by any event, such as death, outside of itself. If it could, the soul would exist, not under a moral government but under fate and God himself would be only another name for fate. The soul carries its fate, under God, in its power of choice and who dares to say that this power to choose the good ceases at death?

For advocacy of a second probation for those who have not consciously rejected Christ in this life, see Newman Smyth’s edition of Dorner’s Eschatology. For the theory of restoration, see Farrar, Eternal Hope; Birks, Victory of Divine Goodness; Jukes, Restitution of All Things; Delitzsch, Bib. Psychologie, 469-476; Robert Browning, Apparent Failure; Tennyson, In Memoriam, ß liv. Per contra, see Hovey, Bib.

Eschatology, 95 — l44. See also, Griffith Jones, Ascent through Christ, 406-440. (a) These obscure passages are to be interpreted in the light of those plainer ones, which we have already cited. Thus interpreted, they foretell only the absolute triumph of the divine kingdom and the subjection of all evil to God.

The true interpretation of the passages above mentioned is indicated in Meyer’s note on Ephesians 1:9,10. This namely, that “the allusion is not to the restoration of fallen individuals, but to the restoration of universal harmony, implying that the wicked are to be excluded from the kingdom of God.” That there is no allusion to probation after this life is clear from Luke 16:19-31 — the parable of the rich man and Lazarus.

Here penalty is inflicted for the sins done “in thy lifetime” (v. 25); this penalty is unchangeable. “There is a great gulf fixed” (v. 26); the rich man asks favors for his brethren who still live on the earth, but none for himself (v. 27, 28). John 5:25-29 — “The hour cometh, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God; and they that hear shall live. For as the Father hath life in himself, even so gave he to the Son also to have life in himself: and he gave him authority to execute judgment, because he is a son of man. Marvel not at this: for the hour cometh, in which all that are in the tombs shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, until the resurrection of judgment.” Here it is declared that, while for those who have done good there is a resurrection of life; there is for those who have done ill only a resurrection of judgment. John 8:21-24 — “shall die in your sin: whither I go, ye cannot come…except ye believe that I am he, ye shall die in your sins” — sayings which indicate finality in the decisions of this life.

Orr, Christian View of God and the World, 248 — “Scripture invariably represents the judgment as proceeding on the data of this life and it concentrates every ray of appeal unto the present.” John 9:4 — “We must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh when no man can work” intimates that there is no opportunity to secure salvation after death. The Christian hymn writer has caught the meaning of Scripture when he says of those who have passed through the gate of death: “Fixed in an eternal state, They have done with all below; We a little longer wait; But how little, none can know.” (b) A second probation is not needed to vindicate the justice or the love of God since Christ, the immanent God, is already in this world present with every human soul, quickening the conscience, giving to each man his opportunity and making every decision between right and wrong a trite probation. In choosing evil against their better judgment even the heathen unconsciously reject Christ. Infants and idiots, as they have not consciously sinned, are, as we may believe, saved at death by having Christ revealed to them and by the regenerating influence of his Spirit. Romans 1:18-28 — there is probation under the light of nature as well as under the gospel. Under the law of nature as well as under the gospel men may be given up “unto a reprobate mind.” 2:6-16 — Gentiles shall be judged, not by the gospel, but by the law of nature, and shall “perish without the law…in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men.” 2 Corinthians 5:10 — “For we must all be made manifest before the judgment seat of Christ [not that each may have a new opportunity to secure salvation, but] that each one may receive the things done in the body, according to what he hath done, whether it be good or bad”; Hebrews 6:8 — “whose end is to be burned” — not to be quickened again; 9:27 — “And inasmuch as it is appointed unto men once to die, and after this cometh [not a second probation, but] judgment” Luckock, Intermediate State,22 — “In Hebrews 9:27, the word ‘judgment’ has no article. The judgment alluded to is not the final or general judgment, but only that by which the place of the soul is determined in the Intermediate State.”

Denney, Studies in Theology, 243 — “In Matthew 25, our Lord gives a pictorial representation of the judgment of the heathen. All nations (all the Gentiles) are gathered before the King. Their destiny is determined, not by their conscious acceptance or rejection of the historical Savior but by their unconscious acceptance or rejection of him in the persons of those who needed services of love. This does not square with the idea of a future probation. It rather tells us plainly that men may do things of final and decisive import in this life, even if Christ is unknown to them. The real argument against future probation is that it depreciates the present life and denies the infinite significance that, under all conditions, essentially and inevitably belongs to the actions of a self-conscious moral being. A type of will may be in process of formation even in a heathen man, on which eternal issues depend. Second probation lowers the moral tone of the spirit. The present life acquires a relative unimportance. I dare not say that if I forfeit the opportunity the present life gives me I shall ever have another and therefore, I dare not say so to another man.”

For an able review of the Scripture testimony against a second probation, see G. F. Wright, Relation of Death to Probation, iv. Emerson, the most recent advocate of restorationism, in his Doctrine of Probation Examined,42, is able to evade these latter passages, only by assuming that they are to be spiritually interpreted and that there is to be no literal outward day of judgment. This is an error, which we have previously discussed and refuted. See pages 1024, 1025. (c) The advocates of universal restoration are commonly the most strenuous defenders of the inalienable freedom of the human will to make choices contrary to its past character and to all the motives which are or can be brought to bear upon it. As a matter of fact, we find in this world that men choose sin in spite of infinite motives to the contrary. Upon the theory of human freedom just mentioned, no motives, which God can use, will certainly accomplish the salvation of all moral creatures. The soul, which resists Christ here, may resist him forever.

Emerson, in the book just referred to, says, “The truth that sin is in its permanent essence a free choice. However for a time in may be held in mechanical combination with the notion of moral opportunity arbitrarily closed, can never mingle with it and must, in the logical outcome, permanently cast it off. Scripture presumes and teaches the constant capability of souls to obey as well as to be disobedient.” Emerson is correct. If the doctrine of the unlimited ability of the human will be a true one, then restoration in the future world is possible. Clement and Origen founded on this theory of will, their denial of future punishment. It will be essentially the power of contrary choice and if will may act independently of all character and motive, there can be no objective certainty that the lost will remain sinful. In short, there can be no finality, even to God’s allotments, nor is any last judgment possible. Upon this view, regeneration and conversion are as possible at any time in the future as they are today.

But those who hold to this defective philosophy of the will should remember that unlimited freedom is unlimited freedom to sin, as well as unlimited freedom to turn to God. If restoration is possible, endless persistence in evil is possible also and this last the Scripture predicts.

Whittier: “What if thine eye refuse to see, Thine ear of heaven’s free welcome fail, And thou a willing captive be, Thyself thine own dark jail?”

Swedenborg says that the man who obstinately refuses the inheritance of the sons of God is allowed the pleasures of the beast and enjoys in his own low way the hell to which he has confined himself. Every occupant of hell prefers it to heaven. Dante, Hell, iv — “All here together come from every clime, And to o’erpass the river are not loth, For so heaven’s justice goads them on, that fear Is turned into desire. Hence never passed good spirit.” The lost are Heautoutimoroumenoi, or self-tormentors, to adopt the title of Terence’s play. See Whedon, in Methodist Quarterly Rev., Jan. 1884; Robbins, in Bibliotheca Sacra, 1881:460-507.

Denney, Studies in Theology, 255 — “The very conception of human freedom involves the possibility of its permanent misuse or of what our Lord himself calls ‘eternal sin’ ( Mark 3:29). Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 2:699 — “Origen’s restorationism grew naturally out of his view of human liberty” — the liberty of indifference — “endless alternations of falls and recoveries, of hells and heavens so that practically, he taught nothing but a hell.” J.C. Adams, The Leisure of God: “It is lame logic to maintain the inviolable freedom of the will, and at the same time insist that God can, through his ample power, through protracted punishment, bring the soul into a disposition which it does not wish to feel. There is no compulsory holiness possible. In our Civil War there was some talk of ‘compelling men to volunteer,’ but the idea was soon seen to involve a self-contradiction.” (d) Upon the more correct view of the will, which we have advocated, the case is more hopeless still. Upon this view, the sinful soul, in its very sinning, gives to itself a sinful bent of intellect, affection and will. In other words, makes for itself a character, which, though it does not render necessary, yet does render certain, apart from divine grace, the continuance of sinful action. In itself it finds a self-formed motive to evil strong enough to prevail over all inducements to holiness which God sees it wise to bring to bear. It is in the next world, indeed, subjected to suffering. But suffering has in itself no reforming power. Unless accompanied by special renewing influences of the Holy Spirit, it only hardens and embitters the soul. We have no Scripture evidence that such influences of the Spirit are exerted, after death, upon the still impenitent but abundant evidence, on the contrary, that the moral condition in which death finds men is their condition forever.

See Bushnell’s “One Trial Better than Many,” in Sermons on Living Subjects; also see his Forgiveness and Law, 146, 147. Bushnell argues that God would give us fifty trials, if that would do us good. But there is no possibility of such result. The first decision adverse to God renders it more difficult to make a right decision upon the next opportunity.

Character tends to fixity and each new opportunity may only harden the heart and increase its guilt and condemnation. We should have no better chance of salvation if our lives were lengthened to the term of the sinners before the flood. Mere suffering does not convert the soul. See Martineau, Study, 2:100. A life of pain did not make Blanco White a believer. See Mozley, Hist. and Theol. Essays, vol.2, essay 1.

Edward A. Lawrence, Does Everlasting Punishment Last Forever? — “If the deeds of the law do not justify here, how can the penalties of the law hereafter? The pain from a broken limb does nothing to mend the break and the suffering from disease does nothing to cure it. Penalty pays no debts, it only shows the outstanding and unsettled accounts.” If the will does not act without motive, then it is certain that without motives men will never repent. To an impenitent and rebellious sinner the motive must come, not from within, but from without. Such motives God presents by his Spirit in this life; but when this life ends and God’s Spirit is withdrawn, no motives to repentance will be presented. The soul’s dislike for God will issue only in complaint and resistance. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3:4 — “Try what repentance can? what can it not? Yet what can it, when one cannot repent?” Marlowe, Faustus: “Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed in one self-place for where we are, is hell, and where hell is, there we must ever be.”

Resistance of the atmospheric pressure inside the body counteracts the outside pressure of the atmosphere. So God’s life within is the only thing that can enable us to bear God’s afflictive dispensations without. Without God’s Spirit to inspire repentance the wicked man in this world never feels sorrow for his deeds, except as he realizes their evil consequences.

Physical anguish and punishment inspire hatred, not of sin, but of the effects of sin. The remorse of Judas induced confession but not true repentance. So in the next world, punishment will secure recognition of God and of his justice, on the part of the transgressor, but it will not regenerate or save. The penalties of the future life will be no more effectual to reform the sinner than were the invitations of Christ and the strivings of the Holy Spirit in the present life. The transience of good resolves which are forced out of us by suffering is illustrated by the old couplet: “The devil was sick, the devil a monk would be; The devil got well, the devil a monk was he.”

Charles G. Sewall: “Paul Lester Ford, the novelist, was murdered by his brother Malcolm because the father of the two brothers had disinherited the one who committed the crime. Has God the right to disinherit any one of his children? We answer that God disinherits no one. Each man decides for himself whether he will accept the inheritance. It is a matter of character. A father cannot give his son an education. The son may play truant and throw away his opportunity. The prodigal son disinherited himself. Heaven is not a place, it is a way of living, a condition of being.

If you have a musical ear, I will admit you to a lovely concert. If you have not a musical ear, I may give you a reserved seat and you will hear no melody. Some men fail of salvation because they have no taste for it and will not have it.”

The laws of God’s universe are closing in upon the impenitent sinner, as the iron walls of the medæval prison closed in night by night upon the victim, each morning there was one window less, and the dungeon came to be a coffin. In Jean Ingelow’s poem, “Divided,” two friends parted by a little rivulet across which they could clasp hands. They walk on in the direction in which the stream is flowing till the rivulet becomes a brook and the brook a river and the river an arm of the sea across which no voice can be heard and there is no passing. By constant neglect to use our opportunity, we lose the power to cross from sin to righteousness, until between the soul and god “there is a great gulf fixed” ( Luke 16:26).

John G. Whittier wrote within a twelve month of his death: “I do believe that we take with us into the next world the same freedom of will we have here and that there, as here, he that turns to the Lord will find mercy. God never ceases to follow his creatures with love and is always ready to hear the prayer of the penitent. But I also believe that now is the accepted time, and that he who dallies with sin may find the chains of evil habit too strong to break in this world or the other.” And the following is the Quaker poet’s verse: “Though God be good and free be heaven, Not force divine can love compel; And though the song of sins forgiven Might sound through lowest hell, The sweet persuasion of his voice Respects the sanctity of will. He giveth day: thou hast thy choice To walk in darkness still.”

Longfellow, Masque of Pandora: “Never by lapse of time The soul defaced by crime Into its former self returns again; For every guilty deed Holds in itself the seed Of retribution and undying pain. Never shall be the loss Restored, till Helios Hath purified them with his heavenly fires; Then what was lost is won, And the new life begun, Kindled with nobler passions and desires.” Seth, Freedom as Ethical Postulate, 43 — “Faust’s selling his soul to Mephistopheles, and signing the contract with his life’s blood, is no single transaction, done deliberately, on one occasion; rather, that is the lurid meaning of a life which consists of innumerable individual acts, the life of evil means that.” See John Caird, Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, 2:88; Crane, Religion of Tomorrow, 315. (e) The declaration regarding Judas, in Matthew 26:24, could not be true upon the hypothesis of a final restoration. If at any time, even after the lapse of ages, Judas were redeemed, his subsequent infinite duration of blessedness must outweigh all the finite suffering through which he has passed. The Scripture statement that “good were it for that man if he had not been born” must be regarded as a refutation of the theory of universal restoration. Matthew 26:24 — “The Son of man goeth, even as it is written of him: but woe unto that man through whom the Son of man is betrayed I good were it for that man if he had not been born.” G. F. Wright, Relation of Death to Probation: “As Christ of old healed only those who came or were brought to him, so now he waits for the cooperation of human agency. God has limited himself to an orderly method in human salvation.

The consuming missionary zeal of the apostles and the early church shows that they believed the decisions of this life to be final decisions. The early church not only thought the heathen world would perish without the gospel, but they found a conscience in the heathen answering to this belief. The solicitude drawn out by this responsibility for our fellows may be one means of securing the moral stability of the future. What is bound on earth is bound in heaven, else why not pray for the wicked dead?” It is certainly a remarkable fact, if this theory is true, that we have in Scripture not a single instance of prayer for the dead.

The apocryphal 2Maccabees 12:39 sq. gives an instance of Jewish prayer for the dead. Certain who were slain had concealed under their coats things consecrated to idols. Judas and his host therefore prayed that this sin might be forgiven to the slain and they contributed 2,000 drachmas of silver to send a sin offering for them to Jerusalem. So modern Jews pray for the dead. See Luckock, After Death, 54-66 — an argument for such prayer. John Wesley, Works, 9:55, maintains the legality of prayer for the dead. Still it is true that we have no instance of such prayer in canonical Scriptures. <19D201> Psalm 132:1 — “Jehovah, remember for David All his affliction” — is not a prayer for the dead, but signifies “Remember for David”, so as to fulfill thy promise to him, “all his anxious cares,” with regard to the building of the temple, the psalm having been composed.

Paul prays that God will “grant mercy to the house of Onesiphorus,” in all probability for the temple dedication. ( 2 Timothy 1:16), from which it has been unwarrantably inferred that Onesiphorus was dead at the time of the apostle’s writing. Paul’s further prayer in verse 18 — “the Lord grant unto him to find mercy of the Lord in that day” seems rather to point to the death of Onesiphorus as yet in the future.

Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 2:715 note — “Many of the arguments constructed against the doctrine of endless punishment proceed upon the supposition that original sin, or man’s evil inclination, is the work of God, that because man is born in sin ( Psalm 51:5), he was created in sin.

All the strength and plausibility of John Foster’s celebrated letter lies in the assumption that the moral corruption and impotence of the sinner, whereby it is impossible to save himself from eternal death, is not selforiginated and self-determined, but infused by his Maker. ‘If,’ says he, ‘the very nature of man, as created by the Sovereign Power be in such desperate disorder that there is no possibility of conversion or salvation except in instances where that Power interposes with a special and redeeming efficacy, how can we conceive that the main portion of the race, thus morally impotent (that is, really and absolutely impotent), will be eternally punished for the inevitable result of this moral impotence?’ If this assumption of con-created depravity and impotence is correct, Foster’s objection to eternal retribution is conclusive and fatal. Endless punishment supposes the freedom of the human will, and is impossible without it. Self-determination runs parallel with hell.”

The theory of a second probation, as recently advocated, is not only a logical result of that defective view of the will already mentioned. It is also, in part, a consequence of denying the old orthodox and Pauline doctrine, of the organic unity of the race in Adam’s first transgression.

New School Theology has been inclined to deride the notion of a fair probation of humanity in our first father and of a common sin and guilt of mankind in him. It cannot find what it regards as a fair probation for each individual since that first sin. The conclusion is easy that there must be such a fair probation for each individual in the world to come. But we may advise those who take this view to return to the old theology. Grant a fair probation for the whole race already passed and the condition of mankind is no longer that of mere unfortunates in unjustly circumstances.

It is rather, that of beings guilty and condemned, to whom present opportunity and even present existence, is a matter of pure grace, much more the general provision of a salvation, and the offer of it to any human soul. This world is already a place of second probation and since the second probation is due wholly to God’s mercy, no probation after death is needed to vindicate either the justice or the goodness of God. See Kellogg, in Presb. Rev., April 1885:226-256; Cremer, Beyond the Grave, preface by A. A. Hodge, xxxvi sq .; E. D. Morris, Is There Salvation After Death? A. H. Strong, on The New Theology, in Bap. Quar. Rev., Jan. 1888, reprinted in Philosophy and Religion, 164-179.

C. Scripture declares this future punishment of the wicked to be eternal. It does this by its use of the terms aijw>n aijw>niov. Some however, maintain that these terms do not necessarily imply eternal duration. We reply: (a) It must be conceded that these words do not etymologically necessitate the idea of eternity and that, as expressing the idea of “age-long,” they are sometimes used in a limited or rhetorical sense. 2 Timothy 1:9 — “his own purpose ant grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before times eternal.” But the past duration of the world is limited; Hebrews 9:26 — “now once at the end of the ages hath he been manifested.” Here the aiJw~nev , have an end; Titus 1:2 — “eternal life…promised before times eternal” but here there may be a reference to the eternal covenant of the Father with the Son; Jeremiah 31:3 — “I have loved thee with an everlasting love” = a love which antedated time; Romans 16:25,26 — “the mystery which hath been kept in silence through times eternal…according to the commandment of the eternal God.” Here “eternal” is used in the same verse in two senses. It is argued that in Matthew 25:46 — “these shall go away into eternal punishment.” The word “eternal” may be used in the narrower sense.

Arthur Chambers, Our Life after Death, 222-236 — “In Matthew 13:39 — ‘the harvest is the end of the aijw>n ,’ and in 2 Timothy 4:10 — ‘Demas forsook me, having loved this present aijw>n .’ The word aijw>n clearly implies limitation of time. Why not take the word aijw>n in this sense in Mark 3:29 — ‘hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin’? We must not translate aijw>n by ‘world,’ and so express limitation, while we translate aijw>niov by ‘eternal’ and so express endlessness which excludes limitation.; Cf. Genesis 13:15 — ‘all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed forever’; Numbers 25:13 — ‘it shall be unto him [Phinehas], and to his seed after him, the covenant of an everlasting priesthood’; Joshua 24:2 — ‘your fathers dwelt of old time [from eternity] beyond the River’; Deuteronomy 23:3 — ‘An Ammonite or a Moabite shall not enter…into the assembly of Jehovah for ever’; Psalm 24:8 — ‘be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors.’” (b) They do however, express the longest possible duration of which the subject to which they are attributed is capable so that, if the soul is immortal, its punishment must be without end. Genesis 49:26 — “the everlasting hills”; 17:8, 13 — “I will give unto thee…all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession…my covenant: [of circumcision] shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant”; Ezekiel 21:6 — “he [the slave] shall serve him [his master] forever”; 2 Chron. 6:2 — “But I have built thee an house of habitation, and a place for thee to dwell in for ever” — of the temple at Jerusalem; Jude 6, 7 — “angels…he hath kept in everlasting bonds under darkness unto the judgment of the great day. Even as Sodom and Gomorrah…are set forth as an example, suffering the punishment of eternal fire.” Here in Jude 6, bonds which endure only to the judgment day are called aji`di>ov (the same word which is used in Romans 1:20 — “his everlasting power and divinity”) and fire which lasts only till Sodom and Gomorrah are consumed is called ai=wni>ou . Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 2:687 — “To hold land forever is to hold it as long as grass grows and water runs, i.e., as long as this world or eon endures.”

In all the passages cited above, the condition denoted by aijw>niov lasts as long as the object endures of which it is predicated. But we have seen (pages 982-998) that physical death is not the end of man’s existence and that the soul, made in the image of God, is immortal. A punishment, therefore, that lasts as long as the soul, must be an ever lasting punishment. Another interpretation of the passages in Jude is, however, entirely possible. It is maintained by many that the “everlasting bonds” of the fallen angels do not cease at the judgment and that Sodom and Gomorrah suffer “the punishment of eternal fire” in the sense that their condemnation at the judgment will be a continuation of that begun in the time of Lot (see Matthew 10:15 — “It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city”). (c) If, when used to describe the future punishment of the wicked, they do not declare the endlessness of that punishment, there are no words in the Greek language which could express that meaning.

C.F. Wright, Relation of Death to Probation: “The Bible writers speak of eternity in terms of time and make the impression more vivid by reduplicating the longest time-words they had [e.g . eijv tounwn = ‘unto the ages of the ages’]. Plato contrasts cro>nov and aijwtime and eternity, and Aristotle says that eternity [aijwbelongs to God. The Scriptures have taught the doctrine of eternal punishment as clearly as their general style allows.” The destiny of lost men is bound up with the destiny of evil angels in Matthew 25:41 — “Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels.” If the latter are hopelessly lost then the former are hopelessly lost, also. (d) In the great majority of Scripture passages where they occur, they have unmistakably the signification “everlasting.” They are used to express the eternal duration of God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit ( Romans 16:26; 1 Timothy 1:17; Hebrews 9:14; Revelations 1:18); the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit with all true believers ( John 14:17); and the endlessness of the future happiness of the saints ( Matthew 19:29; John 6:54,58; 2 Corinthians 9:9). Romans 16:26 — “the commandment of the eternal God”; Timothy 1:17 — “Now unto the King eternal, incorruptible, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory for ever and ever”; Hebrews 9:14 — “the eternal Spirit”; Revelation 1:17,18 — “I am the first and the last, and the Living one; and I was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore”; John 14:16,17 — “And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth”; Matthew 19:29 — “every one that hath left houses, or brethren, or sisters…for my name’s sake, shall receive a hundred-fold, and shall inherit eternal life”; John 6:54,58 — “He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life…he that eateth this bread shall live for ever”; 2 Corinthians 9:9 — “His righteousness abideth for ever”; cf. Dan. 7:18 — “But the saints of the Most High shall receive the kingdom, and possess the kingdom for ever, even for ever and ever.”

Everlasting punishment is sometimes said to be the punishment which takes place in, and belongs to, an aijw>n , with no reference to duration.

But President Woolsey declares, on the other hand, that” aijw>niov cannot denote ‘pertaining to an aijw>n , or world period.’” The punishment of the wicked cannot cease, any more than Christ can cease to live or the Holy Spirit to abide with believers, for all these are described in the same terms. aijw>niov is used in the N. T. 66 times, 51 times of the happiness of the righteous,2 times of the duration of God and his glory,6 times where there is no doubt as to its meaning ‘eternal,’ 7 times of the punishment of the wicked. aijw>n is used 95 times, 55 times of unlimited duration, times of duration that has limits, 9 times to denote the duration of future punishment.” See Joseph Angus, in Expositor, Oct. 1887:274-286. (e) The same word used in Matthew 25:46 describes both the sufferings of the wicked and the happiness of the righteous, shows that the misery of the lost is eternal and, in the same sense, as the life of God or the blessedness of the saved. Matthew 25:46 — “And these shall go away into eternal punishment: but the righteous into eternal life.” On this passage see Meyer: “The absolute idea of eternity, in respect to the punishments of hell, is not to be set aside either by an appeal to the popular use of aijw>niov , or by an appeal to the figurative term ‘fire,’ to the incompatibility of the idea of the eternal with that of moral evil and its punishment, or to the warning design of the representation. It stands fast exegetically, by means of the contrasted zwhnion, which signifies the endless Messianic life.” (f) Other descriptions of the condemnation and suffering of the lost, excluding as they do, all hope of repentance or forgiveness, render it certain that aijw>n and aijw>niov, in the passages referred to, describe a punishment that is without end. Matthew 12:31,32 — “Every sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men; but the blasphemy against the Spirit shall not be forgiven…it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come”; 25:10 — “and the door was shut”; Mark 3:29 — “whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”; 9:43, 48 — “to go into hell, into the unquenchable fire…where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched,” not the dying worm but the undying worm; not the fire that is quenched, but the fire that is unquenchable. Luke 3:17 — “the chaff he will burn up with. unquenchable fire”; 16:25 — “between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, that they that would pass from hence to you may not be able, and that none may cross over from thence to us”; John 3:36 — “he that obeyeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him.”

Review of Farrar’s Eternal Hope, in Bibliotheca Sacra Oct. 1878:782 — “The original meaning of the English word ‘hell’ and ‘damn’ was precisely that of the Greek words for which they stand. Their present meaning is widely different, but from what did it arise? It arose from the connotation imposed upon these words by the impression the Scriptures made on the popular mind. The present meaning of these words is involved in the Scripture and cannot be removed by any mechanical process. Change the words and in a few years ‘judge’ will have in the Bible the same force that ‘damn’ has at present. In fact, the words were not mistranslated but the connotation, of which Dr. Farrar complains, has come upon them since and that through the Scriptures. This proves what the general impression of Scripture upon the mind is and shows how far Dr. Farrar has gone astray.” (g) “While, therefore, we grant that we do not know the nature of eternity or its relation to time, we maintain that the Scripture representations of future punishment forbid both the hypothesis of annihilation and the hypothesis that suffering will end in restoration. Whatever eternity may be, Scripture renders it certain that after death there is no forgiveness.

We regard the argument against endless punishment drawn from aijw>n and aiJw>niov ; as a purely verbal one, which does not touch the heart of the question at issue. We append several utterances of its advocates. The Christian Union: “Eternal punishment is punishment in eternity, not throughout eternity; as temporal punishment is punishment in time, not throughout time.” Westcott: “Eternal life is not an endless duration of being in time, but being of which time is not a measure. We have indeed no powers to grasp the idea except through forms and images of sense.

These must be used but we must not transfer them to realities of another order.”

Farrar holds that ajidiov , ‘everlasting’, which occurs but twice in the N.

T. ( Romans 1:20 and Jude 6), is not a synonym of aijw>niov , ‘eternal’, but the direct antithesis of it. The former is the unrealizable conception of endless time and the latter referring to a state from which our imperfect human conception of time is absolutely excluded. Whiton, Gloria Patri, 145, claims that the perpetual immanence of God in conscience makes recovery possible after death yet he speaks of the possibility that in the incorrigible sinner conscience may become extinct. To all these views we may reply with Schaff, Ch. History, 2:66 — “After the general judgment we have nothing revealed but the boundless prospect of æonian life and æonian death. Everlasting punishment of the wicked always was and always will be the orthodox theory.”

For the view that aijw>n and aijw>niov are used in a limited sense. See De Quincey, Theological Essays, 1:126-146; Maurice, Essays, 436; Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:485-488; Farrar, Eternal Hope, 200; Smyth, Orthodox Theology of Today, 118-123; Chambers, Life after Death; Whiton, Is Eternal Punishment Endless? For the common orthodox view, see Fisher and Tyler, in New Englander, March 1878; Gould, in Bibliotheca Sacra 1880:212-248; Princeton Review, 1873:620; Shedd, Doctrine of Endless Punishment, 12-117; Broadus, Com. on Matthew 25:45.

D. This everlasting punishment of the wicked is not inconsistent with God’s justice, but is rather a revelation of that justice. (a) We have seen in our discussion of Penalty (pages 652-656) that its object is neither reformatory nor deterrent but simply vindicatory; in other words, that it primarily aims, neither at the good of the offender nor at the welfare of society, but at the vindication of law. “We have also seen (pages 269, 291) that justice is not a form of benevolence but is the expression and manifestation of God’s holiness. Punishment, therefore, as the inevitable and constant reaction of that holiness against its moral opposite, cannot come to an end until guilt and sin come to an end.

The fundamental error of Universalism is its denial that penalty is vindicatory, and that justice is distinct from benevolence. See article on Universalism, in Johnson’s Cycloædia: “The punishment of the wicked, however severe or terrible it may be, is but a means to a beneficent end, not revengeful but remedial, not for its own sake but for the good of those who suffer its infliction.” With this agrees Rev. H. W. Beecher: “I believe that punishment exists, both here and hereafter, but it will not continue after it ceases to do good. With a God who could give pain for pain’s sake, this world would go out like a candle.” But we reply that the doctrine of eternal punishment is not a doctrine of ‘pain for pain’s sake,’ but of pain for holiness’ sake. Punishment could have no beneficial effect upon the universe, or even upon the offender, unless it was just and right in itself. And if just and right in itself, then the reason for its continuance lies, not in any benefit to the universe or to the sufferer, to accrue therefrom.

F. L. Patton, in Brit. and For. Ev. Rev., Jan. 1878:126-139, on the Philosophy of Punishment — “If the Universalist’s position were true, we should expect to find some manifestations of love and pity and sympathy in the infliction of the dreadful punishments of the future. We look in vain for this, however. We read of God’s anger, of his judgments, of his fury, of his taking vengeance but we get no hint, in any passage which describes the sufferings of the next world, that they are designed to work the redemption and recovery of the soul. If the punishments of the wicked were chastisements, we should expect to see some bright outlook in the Bible-picture of the place of doom. A gleam of light, one might suppose, might make its way from the celestial city to this dark abode. The sufferers would catch some sweet refrain of heavenly music, which would be a promise, and prophecy of a far-off but coming glory. But there is a finality about the Scripture statements as to the condition of the lost, which is simply terrible.”

The reason for punishment lies not in the benevolence, but in the holiness, of God. That holiness reveals itself in the moral constitution of the universe. It makes itself felt in conscience, imperfectly here but fully hereafter. The wrong merits punishment. The right binds, not because it is the expedient, but because it is the very nature of God. “But the great ethical significance of this word right will not be known.” (We quote again from Dr. Patton,) “its imperative claims, its sovereign behests, its holy and imperious sway over the moral creation will not be understood, until we witness, during the lapse of the judgment hours, the terrible retribution, which measures the ill-desert of wrong.” When Dr. Johnson seemed over-fearful as to his future, Boswell said to him: “Think of the mercy of your Savior.” “Sir,” replied Johnson, “my Savior has said that he will place some on his right hand and some on his left.”

A Universalist during our Civil War announced his conversion to Calvinism, upon the ground that hell was a military necessity. “In Romans 12:19, ‘vengeance,’ ejkdikhsiv, means primarily ‘vindication’ God will show to the sinner and to the universe that the apparent prosperity of evil was a delusion and a snare” (Crane, Religion of Tomorrow, 319 note). That strange book, Letters from Hell, shows how memory may increase our knowledge of past evil deeds but may lose the knowledge of God’s promises. Since we retain most perfectly that which has been the subject of most constant thought, retribution may come to us through the operation of the laws of our own nature.

Jackson, James Martineau, 193-195 — “Plato holds that the wise transgressor will seek, not shun, his punishment. James Martineau painted a fearful picture of the possible lashing of conscience. He regarded suffering for sin, though dreadful, yet as altogether desirable, not to be asked reprieve from, but to be prayed for: ‘Smite, Lord; for thy-mercy’s sake, spare not!’ The soul denied such suffering is not favored but defrauded. It learns the truth of its condition, and the truth and the right of the universe are vindicated.” The Connecticut preacher said: “My friends, some believe that all will be saved; but we hope for better things. Chaff and wheat are not to be together always. One goes to the garner and the other to the furnace.”

Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 2:755 — “Luxurious ages and luxurious men recalcitrate at hell and ‘kick against the goad’ ( Acts 26:14). No theological doctrine is more important than eternal retribution to those modem nations which, like England, Germany and the United States, are growing rapidly in riches, luxury and earthly power. Without it, they will infallibly go down in that vortex of sensuality and wickedness that swallowed up Babylon and Rome. The bestial and shameless vice of the dissolute rich that has recently been uncovered in the commercial metropolis of the world is a powerful argument for the necessity and reality of ‘the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone’ (Revelations 21:8).” The conviction that after death there must be punishment for sin has greatly modified the older Universalism. There is little modern talk of all men, righteous and wicked alike, entering heaven the moment this life is ended. A purgatorial state must intervene. E. G. Robinson: “Universalism results from an exaggerated idea of the atonement. There is no genuine Universalism in our day. Restorationism has taken its place.” (b) But guilt, or ill desert, is endless. However long the sinner may be punished, he never ceases to be ill deserving. Justice therefore, which gives to all according to their deserts, cannot cease to punish since the reason for punishment is endless, the punishment itself must be endless. Even past sins involve an endless guilt, to which endless punishment is simply the inevitable correlate.

For full statement of this argument that guilt, as never coming to an end, demands endless punishment. See Shedd, Doctrine of Endless Punishment, 118-163 — “Suffering that is penal can never come to an end. Guilt is the reason for its infliction and guilt, once incurred, never ceases to be. One sin makes guilt and guilt makes hell.” Man does not punish endlessly, because he does not take account of God. “Human punishment is only approximate and imperfect, not absolute and perfect like the divine. It is not adjusted exactly and precisely to the whole guilt of the offense but is more or less modified first, by not considering its relation to God’s honor and majesty, secondly, by human ignorance of inward motives and thirdly, by social expediency.” But “hell is not a penitentiary. The Lamb of God is also Lion of the tribe of Judah. The human penalty that approaches nearest to the divine is capital punishment. This punishment has a kind of endlessness. Death is a finality; it forever separates the murderer from earthly society, even as future punishment separates forever from the society of God and heaven.” See Martineau, Types, 2:65-69.

The lapse of time does not convert guilt into innocence. The verdict “Guilty for ten days” was Hibernian. Guilt is indivisible and nontransferable. The whole of it rests upon the criminal at every moment.

Richelieu: “All places are temples and all seasons summer, for justice.”

George Eliot: “Conscience is harder than our enemies, knows more, accuses with more niceties.” Shedd: “Sin is the only perpetual motion that has ever been discovered. A slip in youth, committed in a moment, entails lifelong suffering. The punishment nature inflicts is infinitely longer than the time consumed in the violation of law, yet the punishment is the legitimate outgrowth of the offense.” (c) Not only eternal guilt, but eternal sin, demands eternal punishment. So long as moral creatures are opposed to God, they deserve punishment.

Since we cannot measure the power of the depraved will to resist God, we cannot deny the possibility of endless sinning. Sin tends evermore to reproduce itself. The Scriptures speak of an “eternal sin” ( Mark 3:29).

But it is just, in God to visit endless sinning with endless punishment. Sin, moreover, is not only an act but also a condition or state, of the soul; this state is impure and abnormal, involves misery. This misery, as appointed by God to vindicate law and holiness, is punishment; this punishment is the necessary manifestation of God’s justice. It is not the punishing but the not punishing that would impugn his justice for, if it is just to punish sin at all it is just to punish sin as long as it exists. Mark 3:29 — “whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”; Revelations 22:11 — “He that is unrighteous, let him do unrighteousness still; and he that is filthy, let him be made filthy still.” Calvin says, “God has the best reason for punishing everlasting sin everlastingly.”

President Dwight: “Every sinner is condemned for his first sin, and for every sin that follows, though they continue forever.” What Martineau (Study, 2:106) says of this life, we may apply to the next: “Sin being there, it would be simply monstrous that there should be no suffering.”

But we must remember that men are finally condemned, not merely for sins, but for sin; they are punished, not simply for acts of disobedience, but for evil character. The Judgment is essentially a remanding of men to their “own place” ( Acts 1:25). The soul that is permanently unlike God cannot dwell with God. The consciences of the wicked will justify their doom and they will themselves prefer hell to heaven. He who does not love God is at war with himself, as well as with God, and cannot be at peace. Even though there were no positive infliction from God’s hand, the impure soul that has banished itself from the presence of God and from the society of the holy has in its own evil conscience a source of torment.

Conscience gives us a pledge of the eternity of this suffering. Remorse has no tendency to exhaust itself. The memory of an evil deed grows not less but more keen with time and self-reproach grows not less but more bitter.

Ever renewed affirmation of its evil decision presents to the soul, forever a new occasion for conviction and shame. F. W. Robertson speaks of “the infinite maddening of remorse.” And Dr. Shedd, in the book above quoted, remarks: “Though the will to resist sin may die out of a man, the conscience to condemn it never can. This remains eternally. And when the process is complete, when the responsible creature, in the abuse of free agency, has perfected his ruin, when his will to good is all gone there remain these two in his immortal spirit, sin and conscience, ‘brimstone and fire’ (Revelations 21:8).”

E. G. Robinson: “The fundamental argument for eternal punishment is the reproductive power of evil. In the divine law penalty enforces itself. Romans 6:19 — “ye presented your members as servants…Iniquity unto iniquity.” Wherever sin occurs, penalty is inevitable No man of sense would now hold to eternal punishment as an objective judicial infliction and the sooner we give this up the better. It can be defended only on the ground of the reactionary power of elective preference, the reduplicating power of moral evil. We have no right to say that there are no other consequences of sin but natural ones; but, were this so, every word of threatening in Scripture would still stand. We shall never be as complete as if we never had sinned. We shall bear the scars of our sins forever. The eternal law of sin is that the wrong doer is cursed thereby and harpies and furies follow him into eternity. God does not need to send a policeman after the sinner; the sinner carries the policeman inside. God does not need to set up a whipping post to punish the sinner; the sinner finds a whipping post wherever ho goes and his own conscience applies the lash.” (d) The actual facts of human life and the tendencies of modern science show that this principle of retributive justice is inwrought into the elements and forces of the physical and moral universe. On the one hand, habit begets fixity of character, and in the spiritual world sinful acts, often repeated, produce a permanent state of sin, which the soul, unaided, cannot change. On the other hand, organism and environment are correlated to each other. In the spiritual world, the selfish and impure find surroundings corresponding to their nature, while the surroundings react upon them and confirm their evil character. If these principles act in the next life as they do in this, will ensure increasing and unending punishment. Galatians 6:7,8 — “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth unto his own flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption”; Revelations 21:11 — “He that is unrighteous, let him do unrighteousness still: and he that is filthy, let him be made filthy still.” Dr. Heman Lincoln, in an article on Future Retribution (Examiner, April 2, 1885) — speaks of two great laws of nature, which confirm the Scripture doctrine of retribution. The first is that “the tendency of habit is towards a permanent state. The occasional drinker becomes a confirmed drunkard. One who indulges in oaths passes into a reckless blasphemer. The gambler who has wasted a fortune and ruined his family is a slave to the card-table. The Scripture doctrine of retribution is only an extension of this well-known law to the future life.”

The second of these laws is that “organism and environment must be in harmony. Through the vast domain of nature, every plant and tree and reptile and bird and mammal has organs and functions fitted to the climate and atmosphere of its habitat. A sudden climatic change from torrid to temperate or from temperate to arctic or if the atmosphere changed from dry to humid or from carbonic vapors to pure oxygen, sudden death is certain to overtake the entire fauna and flora of the region affected. Plastic nature would necessitate change to the organism to conform to the new environment. The Interpreters of the Bible find the same law ordained for the world to come. Surroundings must correspond to character. A soul in love with sin can find no place in a holy heaven. If the environment be holy, the character of the beings assigned to it must be holy also. Nature and Revelation are in perfect accord.” See Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, chapters: Environment, Persistence of Type, and Degradation. Hosea 13:9 — “It is thy destruction, O Israel, that thou art against me against thy help” = if men are destroyed, it is because they destroy themselves. Not God, but man himself, makes hell. Schurman: “External punishment is unthinkable of human sins.” Jackson, James Martineau, 152 — “Our light, such as we have, we carry with us and he who in his soul knows not God is still in darkness though, like the angel in the Apocalypse, he were standing in the sun.” Crane, Religion of Tomorrow, 313 — To insure perpetual hunger deprive a man of nutritious food, and so long as he lives he will suffer, so pain will last so long as the soul is deprived of God, after the artificial stimulants of sin’s pleasures have lost their effect. Death has nothing to do with it for as long as the soul lives apart from God, whether on this or on another planet, it will be wretched.

If the unrepentant sinner is immortal, his sufferings will be immortal.” “Magnas inter opes, inops” — poverty stricken amid great riches — his very nature compels him to suffer. Nor can he change his nature; for character, once set and hardened in this world, cannot be cast into the melting pot acid remolded in the world to come. The hell of Robert G.

Ingersoll is far more terrible than the orthodox hell. He declares that there is no forgiveness and no renewal. Natural law must have its way. Man is a Mazeppa bound to the wild horse of his passions, a Prometheus, into whose vitals remorse, like a vulture, is ever gnawing. (e) As there are degrees of human guilt, so future punishment may admit of degrees and yet in all those degrees be infinite in duration. The doctrine of everlasting punishment does not imply that, at each instant of the future existence of the lost, there is infinite pain. A line is infinite in length, but it is far from being infinite in breadth or thickness. “An infinite series may make only a finite sum and infinite series may differ infinitely in their total amount.” The Scriptures recognize such degrees in future punishment, while at the same time they declare it to be endless ( Luke 12:47,48; Revelation 20:12,13). Luke 12:47,48 — “And that servant who knew his Lord’s will, and made not ready, nor did according to his will shall be beaten with many stripes; but he that knew not and did things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes”; Revelation 20:12,13 — “And I saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne; and books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of the things which were written in the books, according to their works…judged every man according to their works.” (f) We know the enormity of sin only by God’s own declarations with regard to it, and by the sacrifice, which he has made to redeem us from it.

As committed against an infinite God, and as having in itself infinite possibilities of evil, it may itself be infinite, and may deserve infinite punishment. Hell, as well as the Cross-, indicates God’s estimate of sin. Cf. Ezekiel 14:23 — “ye shall know that I have not done without cause all that I have done in it saith the Lord Jehovah.” Valuable as the vine is for its fruit, it is fit only for fuel when it is barren. Every single sin, apart from the action of divine grace, is the sign of pervading and permanent apostasy. But there is no single sin. Sin is a germ of infinite expansion. The single sin, left to itself would never cease in its effects of evil, it would dethrone God. “The idea of disproportion between sin and its punishment grows out of a belittling of sin and its guilt. One who regards murder as a slight offense will think hanging is an outrageous injustice. Theodore Parker hated the doctrine of eternal punishment, because he considered sin as only a provocation to virtue, a step toward triumph, a fail upwards, good in the making.” But it is only when we regard its relation to God that we can estimate sin’s ill desert. See Edwards the younger, Works, 1:1-294.

Dr. Shedd maintains that the guilt of sin is infinite, because it is measured, not by the powers of the offender, but by the majesty of the God against whom it is committed. See his Dogm. Theology, 2:740, — “Crime depends upon the object against whom it is committed, as well as upon the subject who commits it. To strike is a voluntary act but to strike a post or a stone is not a culpable act. Killing a dog is as bad as killing a man, if merely the subject who kills and not the object killed is considered. As God is infinite, offense against him is infinite in its culpability. Any man who, in penitent faith, avails himself of the vicarious method of setting himself right with the eternal Nemesis, will find that it succeeds but he who rejects it must, through endless cycles, grapple with the dread problem of human guilt in his own person, and alone.”

Quite another view is taken by others, as for example E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 292 — “The notion that the qualities of a finite act can be infinite — that its qualities can be derived from the person to whom the act is directed rather than from the motives that prompt it, needs no refutation. The notion itself, one of the bastard thoughts of mediæval metaphysical theology, has maintained its position in respectable society solely by the services it has been regarded as capable of rendering.” Simon, Reconciliation, 123 — “To represent sins as infinite, because God against whom they are committed is infinite, logically requires us to say that trust or reverence or love towards God are infinite, because God is infinite.” We therefore regard it as more correct to say, that sin as a finite act demands finite punishment, but as endlessly persisted in demands an endless, and in that sense an infinite, punishment.

E. This everlasting punishment of the wicked is not inconsistent with God’s benevolence. It is maintained however, by many whom object to eternal retribution, that benevolence requires God not to inflict punishment upon his creatures except as a means of attaining some higher good. We reply: (a) God is not only benevolent but also holy and holiness is his ruling attribute. The vindication of God’s holiness is the primary and sufficient object of punishment. This constitutes a good, which fully justifies the infliction.

Even love has dignity and rejected love may turn blessing into cursing.

Love for holiness involves hatred of unholiness. The love of God is not a love without character. Dorner: “Love may not throw itself away. We have no right to say that punishment is just only when it is the means of amendment.” We must remember that holiness conditions love (see pages 296-298). Robert Buchanan forgot God’s holiness when he wrote: “If there is doom for one, Thou, Maker, art undone!” Shakespeare, King John, 4:3 — “Beyond the infinite and boundless reach Of mercy, if thou didst this deed of death, Art thou damned, Hubert!” Tennyson: “He that shuts Love out, in turn shall be Shut out from Love, and on the threshold lie Howling in utter darkness.” Theodore Parker once tried to make peace between Wendell Phillips and Horace Mann, whom Phillips had criticized with his accustomed severity. Mann wrote to Parker: “What a good man you are! I am sure nobody would be damned if you were at the head of the universe. But,” he continued, “I will never treat a man with respect whom I do not respect, be the consequences what they may, so help me — Horace Mann!” (Chadwick, Theodore Parker, 330). The spirit, which animated Horace Mann may not have been the spirit of love but we can imagine a case in which his words might be the utterance of love as well as of righteousness. For love is under law to righteousness and only righteous love is true love. (b) In this life, God’s justice does involve certain of his creatures in sufferings which are of no advantage to the individuals who suffer; as in the case of penalties which do not reform and of afflictions, which only harden and embitter. If this be a fact here, it may be a fact hereafter.

There are many sufferers on earth, in prisons and on sickbeds, whose suffering results in hardness of heart and enmity to God. The question is not a question of quantity but of quality. It is a question whether any punishment at all is consistent with God’s benevolence, any punishment, that is to say, which does not result in good to the punished. This we maintain and claim that God is bound to punish moral impurity, whether any good comes therefrom to the impure or not. Archbishop Whately says it is as difficult to change one atom of lead to silver as it is to change a whole mountain. If the punishment of many incorrigibly impenitent persons is consistent with God’s benevolence, so is the punishment of one incorrigibly impenitent person. If the punishment of incorrigibly impenitent persons for eternity is inconsistent with God’s benevolence, so is the punishment of such persons for a limited time, or for any time at all.

In one of his early stories William Black represents a sour-tempered Scotchman as protesting against the idea that a sinner he has in mind should be allowed to escape the consequences of his acts: “What’s the good of being good,” he asks, “if things are to turn out that way?” The instinct of retribution is the strongest instinct of the human heart. It is bound up with our very intuition of God’s existence, so that to deny its rightfulness is to deny that there is a God. There is “a certain fearful expectation of judgment’ ( Hebrews 10:27) for ourselves and for others, in case of persistent transgression, without which the very love of God would cease to inspire respect. Since neither annihilation nor second probation is Scriptural, our only relief in contemplating the doctrine of eternal punishment must come from the fact that eternity is not endless time. It is a state inconceivable to us, and the fact that evolution suggests reversion to the brute as the necessary consequence of abusing freedom. (c) The benevolence of God, as concerned for the general good of the universe, requires the execution of the full penalty of the law upon all who reject Christ’s salvation. The Scriptures intimate that God’s treatment of human sin is matter of instruction to all moral beings. The self-chosen ruin of the few may be the salvation of the many.

Dr. Joel Parker, Lectures on Universalism, speaks of the security of free creatures as attained through a gratitude for deliverance “kept alive by a constant example of some who are suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.” Our own race may be the only race (of course the angels are not a “race”) that has fallen away from God. Through the church, the manifold wisdom of God is made manifest “to principalities and powers in the heavenly places” ( Ephesians 3:10). Though the punishment of the lost, God’s holiness may be made known to a universe that, without it might have no proof so striking, that sin is moral suicide and ruin and that God’s holiness is its irreconcilable antagonist.

With regard to the extent and scope of hell, we quote the words of Dr. Shedd, in the book already mentioned: “Hell is only a spot in the universe of God. Compared with heaven, hell is narrow and limited. The kingdom of Satan is insignificant, in contrast with the kingdom of Christ. In the immense range of God’s dominion, good is the rule and evil is the exception. Sin is a speck upon the infinite azure of eternity; a spot on the sun. Hell is only a corner of the universe. The Gothic etymon denotes a covered-up hole. In Scripture, hell is a ‘pit,’ a ‘lake,’ not an ocean. It is ‘bottomless,’ not boundless. The Gnostic and Dualistic theories, which make God and Satan or the Demiurge nearly equal in power and dominion, find no support in Revelation. The Bible teaches that there will always be some sin and death in the universe. Some angels and men will forever be the enemies of God. But their number, compared with that of unfallen angels and redeemed men, is small. They are not described in the glowing language and metaphors by which the immensity of the holy and blessed is delineated ( Psalm 68:17; Deuteronomy 32:2; <19A321> Psalm 103:21; Matthew 6:13 1 Corinthians 15:25; Revelation 14:1; 21:16, 24, 25.) The number of the lost spirits is never thus emphasized and enlarged upon. The brief, stern statement is, that ‘the fearful and unbelieving... their part shall be in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone’ ( Revelation 21:8). No metaphors and amplifications are added to make the impression of an immense multitude, which no man can number.’” Dr. Hodge: “We have reason to believe that the lost will bear to the saved no greater proportion than the inmates of a prison do to the mass of a community.”

The North American Review engaged Dr. Shedd to write an article vindicating eternal punishment, and also engaged Henry Ward Beecher to answer it. The proof sheets of Dr. Shedd’s article were sent to Mr. Beecher whereupon he telegraphed from Denver to the Review: “Cancel engagement, Shedd is too much for me. I half believe in eternal punishment now myself. Get somebody else.” The article in reply was never written, and Dr. Shedd remained unanswered. (d) The present existence of sin and punishment is commonly admitted to be in some way consistent with God’s benevolence, in that it is made the means of revealing God’s justice and mercy. If the temporary existence of sin and punishment lead to good, it is entirely possible that their eternal existence may lead to yet greater good. A priori, we should have thought it impossible for God to permit moral evil, heathenism, prostitution, the saloon or the African slave trade. But sin is a fact. Who can say how long it will be a fact? Why not forever?

The benevolence that permits it now may permit it through eternity. And yet, if permitted through eternity, it can be made harmless only by visiting it with eternal punishment. Lillie on Thessalonians, 457 — “If the temporary existence of sin and punishment lead to good, how can we prove that their eternal existence may not lead to greater good?” We need not deny that it causes God real sorrow to banish the lost. Christ’s weeping over Jerusalem expresses the feelings of God’s heart. Matthew 23:37,33 — “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that killeth the prophets, and stoneth them that are sent unto her! how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathered her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate”; cf. Hosea 11:8 — “How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? how shall I cast thee off, Israel? how shall I make thee as Admah? how shall I set thee as Zeboiim? my heart is turned within me, my compassions are kindled together.” Dante, Hell. Iii — the inscription over the gate of Hell: “Justice the founder of my fabric moved; To rear me was the task of power divine, Supremest wisdom and primeval love.”

A.H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 254, 267 — “If one thinks of the Deity as an austere monarch, having a care for his own honor but none for those to whom he has given being, optimism is impossible. For what shall we say of our loved ones who have committed sins? That splendid boy, who yielded to an inherited tendency, what has become of him? Those millions, who with little light and mighty passions have gone wrong, what of them?

Those countless myriads who peopled the earth in ages past and had no clear motive to righteousness, since their perception of God was dim, is this all that can be said of them: In torment they are exhibiting the glorious holiness of the Almighty in his hatred of sin? Some may believe that but, thank God, the number is not large. No, penalty, remorse, despair are only signs of the deep remedial force in the nature of things, which has always been at work and always will be, and which, unless counteracted, will result sometime in universal and immortal harmony.

Retribution is a natural law. It is universal in its sweep; it is at the same time a manifestation of the beneficence that pervades the universe. This law must continue its operation so long as one free agent violates the moral order. Neither justice nor love would be honored if one soul were allowed to escape the action of that law. But the sting in retribution is ordained to be remedial and restorative rather than punitive and vengeful.

Will any forever resist that discipline? We know not, but it is difficult to understand how any can be willing to do so, when the fullness of the divine glory is revealed.” (e) As benevolence in God seems in the beginning to have permitted moral evil, not because sin was desirable in itself, but only because it was incident to a system, which provided for the highest possible freedom and holiness in the creature. So benevolence in God may to the end permit the existence of sin and may continue to punish the sinner, undesirable as these things are in themselves, because they are incidents of a system which provides for the highest possible freedom and holiness in the creature through eternity.

But the condition of the lost is only made more hopeless by the difficulty with which God brings himself to this, his “strange work” of punishment ( Isaiah 28:21). The sentence, which the judge pronounces with tears, is indicative of a tender and suffering heart but it also indicates that there can be no recall. By the very exhibition of “eternal judgment” ( Hebrews 6:2), not only may a greater number be kept true to God, but a higher degree of holiness among that number is forever assured. The Endless Future, published by South. Meth. Pub. House, supposes the universe yet in its infancy, an eternal liability to rebellion, an evergrowing creation kept from sin by one example of punishment. Matthew 7:13,14 — “few there be that find it” — “seems to have been intended to describe the conduct of men then living, rather than to foreshadow the two opposite currents of human life to the end of time”; see Hovey, Bib. Eschatology, 167. See Goulburn, Everlasting Punishment; Haley, The Hereafter of Sin.

A.H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 239, mentions as causes for the modification of view as to everlasting punishment: 1. Increased freedom in expression of convictions: 2. Another cause is interpretation of the word “eternal.” 3. There is the doctrine of the immanence of God. If God is in every man, then he cannot everlastingly hate himself, even in the poor manifestation of himself in a human creature. 4. Consider the influence of the poets, Burns, Browning, Tennyson, and Whittier. Whittier, Eternal Goodness: “The wrong that pains my soul below, I dare not throne above: I know not of his hate, I know His goodness and his love.”

We regard Dr. Bradford as the most plausible advocate of restoration. But his view is vitiated by certain untenable theological presuppositions: 1. Righteousness is only a form of love,2. righteousness, apart from love, is passionate and vengeful, 3. Man’s freedom is incapable of endless abuse,4. Not all men here have a fair probation,5. The amount of light against which they sin is not taken into consideration by God,6. The immanence of God does not leave room for free human action, 7. God’s object in his administration is, not to reveal his whole character, and chiefly his holiness, but solely to reveal his love,8. The declarations of Scripture with regard to “an eternal sin” ( Mark 3:29), “eternal punishment” ( Matthew 25:46), “eternal destruction” ( 2 Thess 1:9), still permit us to believe in the restoration of all men to holiness and likeness to God.

We regard as more Scriptural and more rational the view of Max Muller, the distinguished Oxford philologist: “I have always held that this would be a miserable universe without eternal punishment. Every act, good or evil, must carry its consequences and the fact that our punishment will go on forever seems to me a proof of the everlasting love of God. For an evil deed to go unpunished would be to destroy the moral order of the universe.” Max Muller simply expresses the ineradicable conviction of mankind that retribution must follow sin. God must show his disapproval of sin by punishment, the very laws of man’s nature express in this way God’s righteousness and that the abolition of this order would be the dethronement of God and the destruction of the universe.

F. the proper preaching of the doctrine of everlasting punishment is not a hindrance to the success of the gospel. It is one of its chief and indispensable auxiliaries and it is maintained by some however that, because men are naturally repelled by it, it cannot be a part of the preacher’s message. We reply: (a) If the doctrine be true, and clearly taught in Scripture, no fear of consequences to ourselves or to others can absolve us from the duty of preaching it. The minister of Christ is under obligation to preach the whole truth of God and if he does this, God will care for the results. Exodus 2:7 — “And thou shalt speak my words unto them, whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear”; 3:10, 11, 18, 19 — “Moreover he said unto me, Son of man, all my words that I shall speak unto thee receive in thine heart and hear with thine ears. And go, get thee to them of the captivity, unto the children of thy people, and speak unto them, and tell them, Thus saith the Lord Jehovah; whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear — When I say unto the wicked, Thou shalt surely die; and thou givest him not warning, nor speakest so to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life; the same wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thy hand. Yet it thou warn the wicked, and he turn not from his wickedness, nor from his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity; but thou but delivered thy soul.”

The old French Protestant church had as a coat of arms the device of an anvil, around which were many broken hammers, with this motto: “Hammer away, ye hostile bands; Your hammers break, God’s anvil stands.” St. Jerome: “If an offense come out of the truth, better is it that the offense come, than that the truth be concealed.” Shedd, Dogm.

Theology, 2:680 — “Jesus Christ is the Person responsible for the doctrine of eternal perdition.” The most fearful utterances with regard to future punishment are those of Jesus himself, as for example, Matthew 23:33 — “Ye serpents, ye offspring of vipers now shall ye escape the judgment of hell?” Mark 3:29 — “whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”; Matthew 10:22 — “be not afraid of them that kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”; 25:46 — “these shall go away into eternal punishment” (b) All preaching which ignores the doctrine of eternal punishment just so far lowers the holiness of God, of which eternal punishment is an expression and degrades the work of Christ, which was needful to save us from it. The success of such preaching can be but temporary and must be followed by a disastrous reaction toward rationalism and immorality.

Much apostasy from the faith begins with refusal to accept the doctrine of eternal punishment. Theodore Parker, while he acknowledged that the doctrine was taught in the New Testament, rejected it and came at last to say of the whole theology which includes this idea of endless punishment, that it “sneers at common sense, spits upon reason and makes God a devil.”

But, if there be no eternal punishment, then man’s danger was not great enough to require an infinite sacrifice and we are compelled to give up the doctrine of atonement. If there were no atonement, there was no need that man’s Savior should himself be more than man and we are compelled to give up the doctrine of the deity of Christ and with this, that of the Trinity. If punishment be not eternal, then God’s holiness is but another name for benevolence, all proper foundation for morality is gone and God’s law ceases to inspire reverence and awe. If punishment be not eternal, then the Scripture writers who believed and taught this were fallible men who were not above the prejudices and errors of their times and we lose all evidence of the divine inspiration of the Bible. With this goes the doctrine of miracles, God is identified with nature and becomes the impersonal God of pantheism.

Theodore Parker passed through this process and so did Francis W.

Newman. Logically, every one who denies the everlasting punishment of the wicked ought to reach a like result and we need only a superficial observation of countries like India, where pantheism is rife, to see how deplorable is the result in the decline of public and of private virtue.

Emory Storrs: “When hell drops out of religion, justice drops out of politics.” The preacher who talks lightly of sin and punishment does a work strikingly analogous to that of Satan, when he told Eve: ‘Ye shall not surely die” ( Genesis 3:4). Such a preacher lets men go on what Shakespeare calls “the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire” (Macbeth, 2:3).

Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:671 — “Vicarious atonement is incompatible with universal salvation. The latter doctrine implies that suffering for sin is remedial only, while the former implies that it is retribution. If the sinner himself is not obliged by justice to suffer in order to satisfy the law he has violated, then certainly no one needs suffer for him for this purpose.” Sonnet by Michael Angelo: “Now hath my life across a stormy sea Like a frail bark reached that wide port where all Are bidden, ere the final reckoning fall Of good and evil for eternity. Now know I well how that fond fantasy, Which made my soul the worshiper and thrall Of earthly art, is vain; how criminal Is that which all men seek unwillingly.

Those amorous thoughts that were so lightly dressed — What are they when the double death is nigh? The one I know for sure, the other dread.

Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest My soul that turns to his great Love on high, Whose arms, to clasp us, on the Cross were spread.” (c) The fear of future punishment, though not the highest motive, is yet a proper motive for the renunciation of sin and the turning to Christ. It must therefore be appealed to, in the hope that the seeking of salvation, which begins in fear of God’s anger, may end in the service of faith and love. Luke 12:4,5 — “And I say unto you my friends, Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do, But I will warn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, who after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him”; Jude 23 — “and some save, snatching them out of the fire.” It is noteworthy that the Old Testament, which is sometimes regarded, though incorrectly, as a teacher of fear, has no such revelations of hell as are found in the New Testament.

Only when God’s mercy was displayed in the Cross were there opened to men’s view the depths of the abyss from which the Cross was to save them. And, as we have already seen, it is not Peter or Paul, but our Lord himself, who gives the most fearful descriptions of the suffering of the lost, and the clearest assertions of its eternal duration.

Michael Angelo’s picture of the Last Judgment is needed to prepare us for Raphael’s picture of the Transfiguration. Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:752 — “What the human race needs is to go to the divine Confessional.

Confession is the only way to light and peace. The denial of moral evil is the secret of the murmuring and melancholy with which so much of modern letters is filled.” Matthew Arnold said to his critics: “Non me tua fervida terrent dicta; Dii me terrent et Jupiter hostis” — “I am not afraid of your violent judgments; I fear only God and his anger.” Hebrews 10:31 — “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

Daniel Webster said: “I want a minister to drive me into a corner of the pew and make me feel that the devil is after me.” (d) In preaching this doctrine, while we grant that the material images used in Scripture to set forth the sufferings of the lost are to be spiritually and not literally interpreted, we should still insist that the misery of the soul, which eternally hates God, is greater than the physical pains, which are used to symbolize it. Although a hard and mechanical statement of the truth may only awaken opposition, a solemn and feeling presentation of it upon proper occasions and in its due relation to the work of Christ and the offers of the gospel, cannot fail to accomplish God’s purpose in preaching and to be the means of saving some who hear. Acts 20:31 — “Wherefore watch ye, remembering that by the space of three years I ceased not to admonish every one night and day with tears”; 2 Corinthians 2:14-17 — “But thanks be unto God, who always leadeth us in triumph in Christ, and maketh manifest through us the savor of his knowledge every place. For we are a sweet savor of Christ unto God, in them that are being saved, and in them that are perishing; to the one a savor from death unto death; to the other a savor from life unto life.

And who is sufficient for these things? For we are not as the many, corrupting the word of God: but as of sincerity, but as of God, in the sight of God, speak we in Christ”; 5:11 — “Knowing therefore the fear of the Lord, we persuade men, but we are made manifest unto God; and I hope that we are made manifest also in your consciences”; 1 Timothy 4:16 — “Take heed to thyself and to thy teaching. Continue in these things; for in doing this thou shalt save both thyself and them that hear thee.” “Omne simile claudicat” as well as “volat” — “Every simile halts as well as flies.” No symbol expresses all the truth. Yet we need to use symbols, and the Holy Spirit honors our use of them. It is “God’s good pleasure through the foolishness of the preaching to save them that believe” ( Corinthians 1:21). It was a deep sense of his responsibility for men’s souls that moved Paul to say: “woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel” ( 1 Corinthians 9:16). And it was a deep sense of duty fulfilled that enabled George Fox, when he was dying, to say: “I am clear! I am clear!”

So Richard Baxter wrote: “I preached as never sure to preach again, And as a dying man to dying man.” It was Robert McCheyne who said that the preacher ought never to speak of everlasting punishment without tears.

McCheyne’s tearful preaching of it prevailed upon many to break from their sins and to accept the pardon and renewal that are offered in Christ.