Part 13 (1/2)
One can see how the constant study of such pa.s.sages should lead men to an enthusiastic hope and lead them to study less carefully the stream of darker teaching that seemed to conflict with these. Whatever may be said against the advocates of Universalism we at least owe to them a clearer emphasizing of the mysterious hopefulness of Scripture as to the final triumph of good.
But with deep reluctance one is bound to a.s.sert that the advocates of Universal Salvation to a great degree ignore or explain away unsatisfactorily much of the sterner side of the Bible. For amid all its hopefulness there is a steadily persistent note in Scripture, stern, awful, sorrowful, which seems impossible to reconcile with Universalism. There are clear and repeated a.s.sertions that some men at any rate will not be saved. It is St. Paul, the author of so many of those hopeful Scriptures quoted, who tells us ”even weeping” of men ”whose end is destruction” (Phil. iii. 19), and of those whose fate shall be ”eternal destruction from the presence of G.o.d” (2 Thess. i.
9). It is the loving Christ Himself who said of one of His apostles, ”It were good for that man if he had not been born” (St. Matt. xxvi.
24).
We are warned back too by the tendency of character to grow permanent.
And when we are told that G.o.d ”willeth all men to be saved,” and that G.o.d can do everything, we are forced to ask, Can G.o.d do contradictory things? Can G.o.d make a door to be open and shut at the same time? Can G.o.d make a thing to be and not to be at the same time? Can G.o.d make a man's will free to choose good or evil and yet secure that he shall certainly choose good at the last? One longs to believe that Universalism should be true, but to believe it we must ignore much of the evidence of Scripture.
III
_The theory of Conditional Immortality, i. e._, that all souls who fail of Eternal Life shall be punished not by Endless Torment, but by Annihilation and the loss of G.o.d and Heaven for ever and ever.
This is another conjecture framed to escape the difficulties of the former two. It would be consistent both with retribution for evil and also with the final victory of good. That in the mysterious nature of things when the malignity of sin becomes incurable, a soul rotted through with sin might ultimately die out of existence; this opinion is at least allowable as a conjecture to escape from the theory of Endless Torment and Sin. It would in a real sense be an everlasting punishment, being an everlasting loss of Heaven and G.o.d. But it too is founded only on part of the evidence, on such texts as ”The gift of G.o.d is eternal life,” ”He that hath the Son hath life,” implying that immortality is a conditional thing granted only to those who are saved, and such texts as ”eternal _destruction_ from the presence of G.o.d,” and the idea of utter annihilation in such pa.s.sages as ”burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” There is much in favor of it but there is much in Scripture which makes it difficult to accept it. And it contradicts straight out the wide-spread Christian belief in the essential immortality of the soul (though that belief also needs to be examined). At any rate it cannot claim authority as a theory of future punishment.
IV
These are the only conjectures offered us to solve the difficulties connected with Final Retribution. We find them all unsatisfactory. We have reached no definite doctrine of h.e.l.l. With the evidence at our disposal it seems impossible to do so. The failure of all attempts at reconciling the seeming contradictions of Scripture must suggest to us that the solution of this problem is beyond the range of our present powers. At any rate it is beyond the range of our present knowledge.
Surely it is wise and reverent to think that this points to _some dealing of G.o.d beyond our human ken_ which will one day reconcile all the difficulties.[5] Our little guesses do not exhaust G.o.d's possibilities. Some day we shall find the answer in that land where we shall know even as we are known. And when we find it we know it will be consistent with our highest thoughts of G.o.d. I like to think that it is those who have grown closest to Christ in sympathy for sorrow and pain and who unlike us, know all the facts of the case, who are represented as joining in that glad shout hereafter, ”Hallelujah!
salvation and glory and power belong to our G.o.d, FOR TRUE AND RIGHTEOUS ARE HIS JUDGMENTS.” Leave the manifestation of this to G.o.d. A wise old man once said, ”G.o.d has a good deal of time to do things between this and the other side of eternity.”
This then is the conclusion of the whole matter. A return to the reserve and reticence of Scripture. But with this result of our study, that we feel no longer forced to believe of G.o.d that which Conscience declares to be unworthy of Him. We are set free to believe that the Judge of all the earth will do right--that h.e.l.l as well as Heaven is within the confines of His dominion--that evil shall not last for ever; that in spite of all its conflicting evidence the trend of Scripture moves towards the golden age, the final victory of good.
Thus we leave it.
In our final vision of humanity in Christ's great drama of the Judgment, those on the left are pa.s.sing into the outer darkness and as they pa.s.s the curtain falls behind them and we see them no more. We know not what is pa.s.sing in that outer darkness where there is ”weeping and gnas.h.i.+ng of teeth.” We have no grounds to believe that any soul there is being born again through sorrow and shame, that any spoiled and deformed life is being remoulded in that awful crucible of G.o.d.
But as we watch the awful shadows of that outer darkness, there comes beyond it on the far horizon the quivering of a coming dawn. For that age of G.o.d's Gehenna is to have its end, and far away the day will dawn for which the whole creation groaneth and travaileth together; when evil shall have vanished out of the universe for ever; when death and h.e.l.l, the evil and the Evil One shall be cast into the lake of fire; when ”at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow of things in Heaven and earth, and under the earth” (in the world of the dead). ”And every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of G.o.d the Father.” ”Then cometh the end,” says St. Paul, ”when Christ shall deliver up the Kingdom to G.o.d, even the Father, when all His enemies shall be subjected unto Him. And when all His enemies have been subjected unto Him, then shall the Son also Himself be subjected unto Him that put all things under Him, that G.o.d may be all in all.”
That is what shall be. One day, somewhere in the far mysterious future the ”purpose of the ages” shall be accomplished. Evil shall have vanished out of the universe for ever and G.o.d shall be all in all. One day again it shall be as at the creation when ”G.o.d looked on everything that He had made and behold it was very good.” How? We know not and we need not know. We need not be able to a.s.sert dogmatically how He will accomplish His purpose. We need not be able to a.s.sert that all men shall be saved or that all who are not will be annihilated. But we must be able with trustful hearts to a.s.sert G.o.d's love and G.o.d's power and the final abolis.h.i.+ng of evil, even though we can only do it with the poet's vagueness:
At last I heard a voice upon the slope Cry to the summit, ”Is there any hope?”
To which an answer pealed from that high land, But in a tongue no man could understand, And on the glimmering summit far withdrawn G.o.d made Himself an awful rose of dawn.
[1] 1 John iii. 8.
[2] Gen. iii. 15.
[3] _kolasis_--chastis.e.m.e.nt, correction, punishment (see Greek Lexicon).
[4] The same Greek words are used of His enemies' subjection to Christ as of Christ's subjection to the Father suggesting that it would be of the same kind.
[5] In other antinomies of Scripture, _e. g._, Man's free will and G.o.d's foreknowledge, we have to take refuge in a similar belief.
III