251 TRINITY IN UNITY. COD is the One-etern Reality; GOD The All is but His dream: God is the solid earth, the sunlit sky, The seeing eye, but seem. Say you, "I am because I think?" Ah! no: Within His basal thought your being is, A thought within a thought. Ask you what God in essence is? True thought; TRUE THOUGHT, of which the threefold strands are these- Light-the pure Reason, in whose perfect glass Lies all that e'er may be ; In one unclouded vision that aright All fates and ends can see. Will the dread Power that of its very self Moulds all things with a breath; Which to obey alone is life-to thwart Must needs be utter death. Love, too-the Motive, that doth ever blend With Light and Will all free; At once the Light of Will-the Will of Light: THE GODHEAD-One in Three! W. MAUDE. SOME MODERN APOLOGIES FOR THE DOCTRINE OF ETERNAL SUFFERING. ISAA SAAC Taylor, in his "History of Enthusiasm," speaks of a “fanatic malign spirit, that finds its home, and seems to revel in the awful scenes of future punishment, and coolly drives its car, curious and at ease among the regions of the lost." And we have heard of a minister who so much answered to that description, that one of his hearers described him as preaching about hell as if he had newly arrived from it. Various writers on the subject, both ancient and modern, have, in describing the agony, bodily and mental, which they believed that the unsaved are to suffer through all eternity, depicted scenes truly horrible and sickening, not only to contemplate, but even to read. One cannot help thinking, from the sketch of fancy and minuteness of detail, which these men employ, that the scenes they describe afforded them some satisfaction in the conception, especially when they inform us that the sight of the eternal agonies of the lost will form an element of the blessedness of the redeemed! 66 There is, however, another, and happily a more common class of mind, on which the belief of the doctrine in question produces a very different effect. They shudder to think of what will become of the great multitude of the unsaved. The idea of their failing to be gathered with the ransomed of the Lord into His everlasting Kingdom, and of their being blotted out of the book of life, were sufficiently terrible. But the thought of their writhing under the infliction of God's wrath in all the agonies of hell for ever, and for ever; and that He who made them, either cannot, or will not, put an end to their miserable existence; to be obliged to believe that there is no such thing as capital punishment under the government of God, that although He threatens them with death, He will never execute them, but will imprison and torment them for ever, and for ever. This fills them with dismay. They are utterly confounded. Their pious hearts are wrung with inexpressible grief." They are also sorely perplexed with the shadow that the doctrine seems to cast on the goodness and justice of God, which they are solicitous to vindicate. Our present object is to give some examples of the effect of the belief this doctrine of eternal suffering has on the minds of some good men; and their attempts to defend and reconcile the strange work with the love and justice of the great and good God. Dr. Isaac Watts believed that doctrine, and maintained it, and this is how he felt in his heart regarding it: "I must confess here if it were possible for the great and blessed God, in any other way to vindicate His own eternal and unchangeable hatred of sin, the inflexible justice of His government, the wisdom of His severe threatenings, and the verity of His predictions; if it were possible for Him, without this terrible execution, to vindicate the veracity, sincerity, and wisdom of the prophets and apostles, and Jesus Christ His Son, the greatest and chiefest of divine messengers; and then, if the blessed God should, at any time, in a consistence with His glorious and incomprehensible perfection, release those wretched creatures from their acute pains and long imprisonment in hell, either with a design of the utter destruction of their beings by annihilation, or to put them into some unknown world, upon a new foot of trial, I think I ought cheerfully and joyfully to accept this appointment of God for the good of millions of my fellow creatures, and add my joys and praises to all the songs and triumphs of a heavenly world, in the day of such a divine and glorious release of the prisoners." "The Theological Trilemma." By Rev. J. H. Pettingell, M.A. "Yet I must rest, and acquiesce where our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father's chief minister, both of His wrath and His love, has left me in the divine revelations of Scripture; and I am constrained there to leave those unhappy creatures, under the chains of everlasting darkness, into which they have cast themselves by their iniquities, till the blessed God shall see fit to release them" (Preface to "The World to Come"). FRANCIS XAVIER. Here is the utterance of one of the most zealous and selfsacrificing missionaries of the Church of Rome, S. Francis Xavier. In his letters from India, Xavier speaks only the uniform teaching of his church when he describes the destiny of the unbaptized millions around him as involving the prospect of eternal torment, and maintains that the unevangelised millions of previous ages had descended to that irrevocable doom. In a letter written in 1555, he says, "One of the things that most of all pains and torments these Japanese is that we teach them that the prison of Hell is irrevocably shut, so that there is no egress therefrom. For they grieve over the fate of their departed children, parents and relations, and they often show their grief by their tears. So they ask us if there is any hope, any way to free them, by prayer from eternal misery, and I am obliged to answer them that there is absolutely none. Their grief at this affects and torments them wonderfully; they almost pine away with sorrow. But there is this good thing about their trouble-it makes one hope that they will be all the more laborious for their own salvation, lest they, like their forefathers, should be doomed to everlasting punishment." "They often ask if God cannot take their fathers out of hell, and why their punishment must never end. We gave them a satisfactory answer, but they did not cease to grieve over the misfortunes of their relatives, and I can hardly restrain my tears sometimes at seeing men so dear to my heart suffer such intense pain about a thing which is already done with, and can never be undone."-" Life in Christ," p. 58 (2nd edition). The description of the intense grief of these Japanese converts to a spurious Christianity, 300 years ago, is peculiarly interesting and impressive. And there can be no doubt that Xavier, who "could hardly restrain his tears at the sight of the grief of these men so dear to his heart," also shared that grief in contemplating the thought of untold millions suffering, and doomed to suffer for evermore, the torments of a fancied Popish hell. Let me now quote the words of a good man of our own day--who, as a minister of a Presbyterian Church for many years, has had often to deal with this awful subject. Dr. Joseph Brown, of Glasgow, in a speech on the "Macrae Case (1879), said that he "Did not wonder that Mr. Macrae had felt the burden of the punish ment of the lost. They had all felt that that was the burden of the Lord; and the longer he had lived and preached, the more he felt the burden, and spoke on that subject with a tremulousness and solemnity in his spirit which he did not remember to have felt when he was a younger man. He felt the burden of the Lord; but he dared not forbear to preach what he believed to be the truth. They would all feel it a relief if they could, on a honest and conscientious interpretation of the Bible, come to the conclusion that sin and misery would ultimately perish in God's universe. That would be such a relief that a man might be willing to sacrifice his position in any church in Christendom, to enjoy that comfort, and the joy of preaching it" (Messenger, July, 1879). No wonder that the contemplation of such a fate for the lost as Dr. Joseph Brown believes in, so perplexes and saddens the hearts of those who think it is taught in the Bible, and consider themselves bound to preach it. The infliction of endless misery, for a human lifetime of sin, completely baffles our ideas of justice and mercy; the more so, that the infliction is by Him who "delighteth in mercy," and is "just in all His ways.' Nowhere have I met with so graphic a description of the state of mind I am referring to, than in 2 letter of the well-known author of "Foster's Essays," to Mr. Edward White, of London, written in 1841. The letter is quoted by Mr. White in his "Life in Christ," pp. 67-69 (2nd Edition); and appears entire in "The Life and Correspondence of John Foster," Vol. II. Believing that man was possessed of inherent immortality, Mr. Foster fled from the horrid idea of eternal suffering to the false and unscriptural solace of Restorationism. Painfully conscious of the truth of such reflections, and unable to find relief, as Foster did, in "Restorationism," honest believers in the Augustinian doctrine have often made various attempts to lessen the appearance of the cruelty and injustice of the infliction of endless suffering. Thus it is said, that as the condemned sinner will continue to sin in the place of punishment, where forgiveness is impossible, he continues to suffer eternally, because he will be eternally sinning. But whence this information? Not from the Bible; and that is the only reliable source of knowledge regarding the subject, available to men, learned or unlearned. Not only are the Scriptures silent about this idea-they plainly contradiet it. For (1), the only punishment threatened in the Bible to the ungodly in the future life, is for "the deeds done in the body." For their conduct in this life, they are threatened with everlasting destruction after judgment. (2) The Bible represents the everlasting punishment to be inflicted on the finally impenitent in such terms as these: " death," destruction," everlasting destruction," a being "burned up " like chaff and decayed vine-branches, utterly perishing, like brute beasts in their own corruption," being consumed" and vanishing "into smoke like the fat 66 66 of lambs"-terms which necessarily preclude the idea of eternal preservation. The theory in question is but one of many vain attempts to make the dogma of eternal misery appear somewhat compatible with reason and justice. Pressed with the idea that an eternity of suffering is out of all proportion as a punishment for the sins men commit during a lifetime, seldom extending beyond eighty years; that it appears something like cruelty and injustice to inflict unending suffering on such a frail being as man, surrounded as he is from his birth with powerful and too well adapted temptations to evil, they have endeavoured to render their theory somewhat feasible by affirming that the ungodly will be kept in "the devil's hell for ever," not for iniquities done here, but for sins committed in hell. And yet, after all, the plea utterly fails, yea, rather makes the case more conflicting with those ideas of the justice and goodness of God, so plainly expressed in Holy Scripture. For, be it observed, this continual persistence in sin by the condemned is a necessary part of the penal infliction for sins done on earth; that is, the sinner is judicially sent, for trespasses committed in time, to a place where all saving influences are denied him; where, thus shut out from all hope, and continually surrounded with other beings as wicked, or more so than himself, he must remain as vile as ever, nay, from the necessities of his nature, become progressively more corrupt; and thus his everlasting suffering and everlasting sinning is arranged for by Him who "delighteth in mercy," and is "of purer eyes than to look on sin." 66 Well and wisely did Mr. David Macrae reply to the question of the U. P. Synod's Commission: "Is it reconcilable with the character of God to permit a human being to continue for ever in a state of active sin? Permission," said Mr. Macrae, "is not the word for life. If such beings exist for ever it is because God keeps them in existence. And it is, in my view, irreconcilable with the character of God that He should keep human beings alive for ever in a state of conscious active sin, if that state is the horrible one described in our Standards as the state of the lost. It is also irreconcilable, in my view, with the revealed purpose of God, and therefore, with His character, that such beings should even be permitted to continue in a state of what the committee call, active conscious sin, for ever." Yes, if the doctrine in question was true, the immortalization of sinners and sinning would be the result of the Divine fiat, for sinners cannot exist longer than God wills. Believing, as we believe, that the immortalization of sinners misrepresents and traduces the character of our Father in heaven, Mr. Macrae did well to claim for Himself and others "the right to stand up and vindicate the character of his heavenly Father, leaving the Church to turn us out for this if it will.” A minister, who was an active preacher of Life in Christ, was T |