that of the Protestants, who divide men sharply into two classes, assigned respectively to heaven and hell. Catholics also teach that there was a limbus,' where the souls of saints before the advent of Christ enjoyed a peaceful habitation, without any sense of pain, and supported by the blessed hope of redemption. These were liberated through Christ's descent into hell.1

In regard to the duration of punishments Catholics and Protestants are agreed: this life decides man's fate once for all. The former, however, make a merciful distinction. The receptacles of the damned are not all of one and the same kind. There are hidden retreats in which souls are detained who have not reached heavenly beatitude; but there is another most foul and dismal prison where the souls of the damned are tortured with perpetual and inextinguishable fire, in the company of unclean spirits.2 The sternness of Calvinism combines these two states into a single doctrine. According to the Westminster Divines, 'The punishments of sin in the world to come, are everlasting separation from the comfortable presence of God, and most grievous torments in soul and body, without intermission, in hell fire for ever."3 This doctrine has appeared to many moderns so atrocious, and so irreconcilable with the love of God revealed in Christ, that they reject it, and try to show that the New Testament contains a larger hope. The Universalists believe in the final salvation of all souls; others have recourse to the thought of conditional immortality, and suppose that the incorrigible will at last cease to exist. The New Testament is eagerly explored, and ingeniously interpreted, in order to obtain authority for these more comforting expectations; but since we have not regarded the Bible as a store of magical cryptograms, we need not join in the controversy, and I may be content to refer the reader to the careful and judicious treatment of the question 2 Cat. Rom., ibid. § iv.

1 Cat. Rom., ibid. § vi.

3 Larger Catechism, 29.

by Professor Salmond.1 He himself, relying upon man's freedom and moral responsibility, accepts the view'that man's immortality is determined by the spiritual attitude to which he commits himself here, that the moral decision made in the brief opportunity of this life is final, and that the condition consequent on it in the other world is one of eternal blessedness or the opposite'; but this has no necessary connexion with ideas of punishment which were once current, or with those realistic pictures of hell and crude conceptions of the retributive awards of Divine justice with which it has been burdened. . . . it has to be relieved of all such accessories.' He adds that 'the principle of degrees in reward and punishment must be taken in all its breadth as an essential and qualifying element in the doctrine in question.' This, he thinks, 'is the proper corrective to the dogmas of a second probation and a universal restoration. It gives all the alleviation which other views of the future profess to give, and it gives it without doing violence either to the power of man's will or to the sufficiency of grace here.'3 Now I think it must be admitted that there is such a thing as being too late; that there are opportunities which, if once let slip, never recur; and that in this life the sins of long ago leave a spot of pain in the memory, which even becomes more acute as the conscience becomes more sensitive. Nevertheless, this pain is not constant, and may vanish in either of two ways. It may disappear in a deadness of the moral nature, which is sometimes described as death in the New Testament; but if moral pain is obliterated in this way, it is succeeded by the misery of unsatisfied desire, for selfish craving gnaws the heart, and poisons the fountains of life. On the other hand, the pain of the awakened soul, which perhaps we may describe as purgatorial, though it becomes more acute as our love of righteousness deepens, may yet be lost in a divine glory, when the soul is conscious only of the 1 Christian Doctrine of Immortality, pp. 523 sqq., 592 sqq.

love of God, and there is no room for any thought of self. These are the moral facts which govern our judgment, and we may feel assured that, as men pass away into the future world, they must reap as they have sown; and there, for us, the curtain drops. It is hardly safe to take the brief span of our life on earth as the measure of eternity; and though there is many a small hell on our fair planet, and wicked men harden themselves in sin, nevertheless, so long as we believe in Divine love, and see the pain of the cross borne for sinful man, we must believe that God does not pronounce an irreversible doom, and that the sufferings of the future may be not only punitive, but remedial. It is, I think, true that Christ seems to sanction a final division between the good and the bad, and holds out no hope of future restoration; but it is difficult to believe that he who came to seek and save the lost had no such hope. It may be that the question never presented itself as it does to our minds. As space has, to our imagination, enlarged its borders, so has time; and when Christ or others spoke of 'eternal,' I doubt whether they were thinking of what would be the state of souls billions of centuries hence. Death was the great crisis, which sifted men according to their deeds; and they passed away to the rewards and punishments belonging to eternity, in contrast with those of our earthly state. This was what immediately concerned mankind, and they did not attempt to see beyond the decisions of the great assize. For us too it may be more reverent not to endeavour to penetrate the dark veil. It is enough to know that the good and bad alike are in the hands of God, and that he will be neither cruel nor unjust. There are mysteries of iniquity and suffering on earth which we cannot solve; much less, with our limited knowledge, can we solve the mysteries of eternity. But God is love; and we may wait in trust for the lifting of the veil.

CHAPTER VIII

ESCHATOLOGY

THE Consummation of the divine life in society is spoken of as the kingdom of God.' This is present wherever the will of God is the accepted rule of life. Its essence lies in the communion of the soul with God. As St. Paul pithily describes it,' The kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit." In other words, it does not consist either of scruples about merely external observances or in disregard of such scruples, but in the perfection of spiritual character; and since we are not already perfect, we may, while recognizing its presence, nevertheless pray for its fuller advent in ourselves. The case of society is analogous, but different. There are individuals who, whatever their imperfections may be, seem to enshrine the Divine Spirit, and make us feel the presence of an overruling sanctity. But there is no civil society which we can acknowledge as an organized expression of the Divine will. The kingdom of God is indeed present as a power of holy life working against the world's evil; but society as a whole, teeming as it does with unconquered evil, appears sadly remote from the spirit of Christ. It is the universal prevalence of that spirit, drawing together the nations of the world into a holy brotherhood of the children of God, which must constitute the Divine kingdom upon earth; and therefore the advent of that kingdom is not

1 Rom. xiv. 17.

inappropriately described as a return of Christ in glory, victorious over all evil, and making the spiritual power of righteousness everywhere triumphant. The hope of this blessed consummation of the world's history may enter into all our prayers, while we leave to the imagination of the poet the forms which it will assume, the catastrophe which will precede it, and the heavenly splendours which will accompany its advent. But the aspiration after a new heaven. and a new earth, wherein shall dwell righteousness, has been shaped by Christian faith into a dogma of Christ's return in the most literal sense. This dogma is most clearly expressed in the New Testament; and yet, in the form which it assumed in the minds of the first disciples, it has been completely falsified by history. It is, at least to my mind, an incontrovertible proof that the abiding power of Christianity lies deeper than dogma, and that even the divinest inspiration is not a guarantee against intellectual error. But how far Jesus himself sanctioned this error it is very difficult to decide; and in order to arrive at a reasonable opinion we must survey the evidence.

The Evangelists ascribe to Christ certain predictions of a second coming before the then living generation had passed away. We must not dismiss these as a late and unspiritual interpolation simply because a belief of this kind would, from our modern point of view, be extravagant and fanatical. Whether a belief is fanatical or not depends largely on the prevalent ideas of the time; for the fanaticism is due, not to the falsity of the belief in itself, but to the excited and unbalanced state of mind in which it has its origin. Paul was a man of education, full of sound practical wisdom, and capable of writing the deepest spiritual truth in imperishable words; and yet he believed that the Lord would descend from heaven with a shout, and that the disciples then living would be caught up in the clouds, to meet him in the air. No one with Paul's mental power could hold

1 I Thess. iv. 16 sq.