MERCY AND JUDGMENT.
MERCY AND JUDGMENT:
LAST WORDS ON
CHRISTIAN ESCHATOLOGY WITH REFERENCE TO
DR. PUSEY S "WHAT IS OF FAITH?"
BY
F. W. FARRAR, D.D, F.R.S.,
CANON OF WESTMINSTER, RECTOR OF ST. MARGARET S, WESTMINSTER, LATE FELLOW OP
TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, AND CHAPLAIN IN ORDINARY TO THE QUEEN.
eAeoc Kpiceeoc.
Mercy boasteth over Judgment."
JA. ii. 13.
SECOND EDITION .
MACMILLAN AND CO.
1882.
The Rights f Translation and Reproduction, are Reserved.
R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR,
BREAD STREET HILL, E.G.
TO
ALFRED TENNYSON, ESQ.,
POET LAUREATE,
&C., &C.,
WHO, AMONG HIS MANY HIGH SERVICES TO
ALL THAT IS PURE IN CONDUCT AND GREAT IN THOUGHT,
WILL ALSO BE REMEMBERED BY POSTERITY AS
THE POET OF "THE LARGER HOPE,"
THESE PAGES ARE, BY HIS OWN KIND PERMISSION,
MOST GRATEFULLY AND RESPECTFULLY
* I trust in the mercy of God for ever and ever."
(Olam vaed, "for ever and beyond.") Ps. lii. 8.
" His mercy is everlasting." PSALMS passim.
"Who is a God like unto Thee, that pardoneth iniquity, and passeth
by the transgression of the remnant of His heritage ? He retaineth not
His anger for ever, because He delighteth in mercy. He will turn
again, He will have compassion upon us ; He will subdue our iniquities ;
and Thou wilt cast all their sins into the depths of the sea."
MICAH vii. 1 8, 19.
" Mercy is dear to God, and intercedes for the sinner, and breaks
his chains, and dissipates the darkness, and quenches the fire of hell,
and destroys the worm, and rescues from the gnashing of teeth. To
her the gates of heaven are opened. She is the queen of virtues, and
makes man like to God, for it is written, * Be ye merciful, as your
Father which is in heaven is merciful. She has silver wings, like the
dove, and feathers of gold, and soars aloft, and is clothed with the
divine glory, and stands by the throne of God ; when we are in danger
of being condemned she rises up and pleads for us, and covers us with
her defence, and folds us in her wings. God loves mercy more than
sacrifice." ST. CHRYSOSTOM.
" Judicium cum misericordia copulatum est, at veritas judicii miser-
atione Dei temperetur." S. AMBROSE, Beati Immaculati, xx. 4.
"Justitia Dei et misericordia non sunt duae res, sed una res. . .
Misericordia est crga miseros, bonitas erga quoslibet."
PETR. LOMBARD, Sentent. iv. ; Dist. xlv. c. D.
TABULAR ANALYSIS.
CHAPTER I.
PREFATORY AND PERSONAL, pp. 1-15.
PAGE
" Eternal " Punishment not denied *. . . . . i
The Sermons on " Eternal Hope " ...... 2
Treatment of disputed questions in the pulpit .... 3
Alleged vehemence of tone ....... 5
* Above what is written " ........ 5
Modifications of popular opinion . . . . . . .7
Supposed "inconsistencies" ....... 7-9
Explanation of terms which have been misunderstood . . 10-12
" Antinomies " of Scripture ....... 12
Concluding remarks . . . . . . . . 13-15
CHAPTER II.
THE OPINIONS OF MANY FATHERS, SAINTS, AND DIVINES IN
ALL AGES, HAVE BEEN MORE HOPEFUL THAN THOSE OF
THE CURRENT TEACHING, pp. 16-57.
Four unauthorised accretions to Catholic eschatology . .* 1 6, 17
The Author s agreement with Dr. Pusey .... 18-20
The Author s agreement with many who in all ages have embraced
" the larger hope " ......... 21
St. Clemens of Alexandria . . . . . . . .21
Eusebius of Gaul, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, St. Paulinus . 22
St. Methodius, Theodoret, Sibylline Books, St. Isidore, Johannes
Scotus Erigena, Theophylact ....... 23
TABULAR ANALYSIS.
PAGE
St. Anselm, St. Thomas Aquinas, Luther, Curio . . .24
Weigel, Suarez, Episcopius, Petavius . . V. .25
Jeremy Taylor, Henry More . . ... . .26
Cudworth, Bishop Rust . ; . ... . .27
Bishop Burnet, Spener, Dr. White, Sir Isaac Newton . . 28
Bishop Butler, Bishop de Pressy . . . . . .29
Archbishop Wake, Dr. Isaac Watts, Emery, Dr. Johnson,
Macknight, Schleiermacher . . 30
Dr. Chalmers, Perrone, F. W. Robertson, Dean Alford . 31
Canon Kingsley, Rev. Dr. Guthrie, Dean Milman . . 32
Opinions of living and recent Divines .... 33-39
Many Divines have gone farther still . . , . 39-41
Opinions tending to Universalism .... 41-50
Similar opinions among Nonconformist and other Divines 50-53
Opinions concerning Conditional Immortality . . 53*57
CHAPTER III.
ON PURGATORY ; THE DESCENT OF CHRIST INTO HELL ;
PRAYERS FOR THE DEAD ; MITIGATIONS ; AND THE
MILDER ASPECT OF FUTURE RETRIBUTION, pp. 58-90.
Varying views of different schools .... 58-60
" The Romish doctrine concerning Purgatory " . . 61-71
The Twenty-second Article . 62
" Doctrina Scholasticorum " . ...... 63
St. Gregory the Great ........ 64
Mediaeval visions and Dante s Inferno ..... 65
The Scholastic doctrine of Purgatory 65
Rejection of " Purgatory " by the Reformers . . .66
Neg^ive teaching of the Reformers . . . . .66
Hooker, &c., on the " Romish doctrine of Purgatory" . 67
The Intermediate State ....... 68
The Probatory Fire ........ 69
Late formulation of the doctrine of Purgatory . . 70
Opinion of Cardinal Wiseman on Purgatory . . . -71
ON PRAYERS FOR THE DEAD 72-75
Belief that the dead benefit by the prayers of the living . 72
TABULAR ANALYSIS. xi
PACK
Prayers for " the lost " .... . 73
Early legends ......... 74
The Burial Service 74
ON THE DESCENT INTO HELL 75-Si
Opinions of the Fathers 76-79
Growth of opinion ........ 79
The Articles ......... 80
ON THE DOCTRINE OF MITIGATIONS .... 81-89
Refrigeria . . . . . . . . . .81
Emery Sur la Mitigation des Peines des Damnh . . .82
Views of St. Augustine ....... 82
Views of St. Chrysostom ....... 83
Prudentius, Bishop Lupus, John of Damascus, Suarez, Estius 84
St. Thomas Aquinas, Theophylact, Pope Innocent III., the
Third Council of Florence 85
Bishop Mark of Ephesus, Gotteschalk, Hugo Etherianus . 86
The Schoolmen, St. Francis de Sales, Leibnitz . . .87
Bishop de Pressy, Legend of St. Brendan . . . .88
ON A DIFFERENT VIEW OF HELL 89-90
CHAPTER IV.
WAS THERE NOT A CAUSE? pp. 91-136.
Exaggerations in popular teaching . . . . 91, 92
A duty to repudiate them ....... 93
The danger involved in them ...... 93
Their prevalence ...... ... 94
What is true ......... 95
What is false ......... 96
Sin of dogmatising about things unrevealed and falsely iuf erred 96
Specimens of unwarranted teaching . . . . 97-108
St. Cyprian, Minucius Felix, St. Augustine, St. Caesarius . 97
Venerable Bede, Vision of Tundale, St. Thomas Aquinas, St.
Bonaventura, Fray Luis de Granada .... 98
Sir Thomas More, Calvin ....... 99
xii TABULAR ANALYSIS.
PAGB
St. Ignatius Loyola, Jeremy Taylor, Nieremberg, Catechismus
Romanus, St. Francis de Sales . ">i ; . . _^r~ . 100
Barrow, John Bunyan, Baxter, South . . . ~7" . 101
Thomas Boston, Dr. Young, Jonathan Edwards . . .102
Alban Butler, Whitaker, Wesley, Dean of Gloucester . . 103
Bishop Oxenden, Dr. Gardiner Spring, Mr. Spurgeon, Bon-
hour, Wesleyan Catechism ... . . . 104
Keble, John Foster. Dante s Inferno . . ,. . .105
Rusca, Drexelius, Pinamonti. . . . . . .106
Father Furniss, Wesley . . . . . . .107
Opinions of Wesley . . . . . . . .108
Evil of such unauthorised descriptions . . . . .109
1. They discredit religious truth . . . . . .109
2. They make good men despair no
3. They harden men s souls . . . . . . .no
Exultation of the blessed in the torments of the lost . .in
St. Thomas Aquinas, Peter Lombard, the German Dogmatists,
Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Hopkins . . . . .112
" To love mercy " 113
4. They sadden all life . . . . . . . . 114
5. They make men turn from God . . . . . -US
6. They cause religious intolerance and cruelty . . . .116
7. They are the chief source of infidelity . . . .117-118
They do not arouse the wicked . . . . . .119
They endanger all religion . . . . . . .120
They are unsanctioned by the ancient creeds, and not revealed
in Scripture ......... 121
" Mawkish sentimentality " . . . . . . .122
Sense of pity in man s heart ...... 123-125
Mental and physical sufferings 125
Terrible pictures of mental agony in Dr. Pusey, Cardinal
Newman .......... 126
Bishop Wilberforce 127
Mr. Moody . ....... 128
Teaching of the Holy Spirit . . . . . .129
Perversions of Scripture . . . . . . .130
Growth of a sense of pity . . . . . . . 131
Change of sentiment . . . . . . . .132
Legends of St. Christina and St. Carpus . . 133
Moral teaching of the poets .134-135
Remarks on the preceding pages 136
TABULAR ANALYSIS xiii
CHAPTER V.
THE SECOND ACCRETION TO CATHOLIC DOCTRINE THAT
THE VAST MAJORITY OF MANKIND ARE DOOMED TO END
LESS TORMENTS, pp. 137-155-
PAGE
The second accretion 137
No "matter of faith" . 138
Theologians and Church newspapers 139
The damnation of the majority commonly taught . . .140
Damnation of unbaptised infants . . . . . .141
Calvinistic opinions . . . . . . .142
Cardinal Sfondrati, Articles of 1536 142
Opinions on the damnation of the heathen, St. Francis Xavier,
Calvin, Westminster Assembly, &c. ..... 144
The Eighteenth Article, Dr. Emmons . . . . .145
The best heathens condemned . . . . . .146
Appeals from Missionaries . . . . . . .147
Are there few that be saved ? , . . . . .148
" Patrum mira consensio " 149
Cornelius a Lapide, the Elucidarium, Curio, De Amplitudine 150
Du Moulin, Recupito 151
Arguments of Recupito 152-154
Massillon, Dr. Pusey 155
CHAPTER VI.
IS THERE NO SUCH THING AS A TERMINABLE PUNISHMENT
BEYOND THE GRAVE? pp. 156-175
The third accretion . . . . . . . .156
"A state of sin" 157
" A state of grace" 158
Experiences of deathbeds ...... 159-161
Deaths of young soldiers . . . . . . .161
Deaths of schoolboys ........ 162
Dying "in a state of sin " ...... 163-166
Dr. Pusey and Dr. Newman . . . . . . .167
Dr. Pusey on the efficacy of deathbed repentance . . 167, 168
" Per una lagrimetta " . . . . . . . 169
xiv TABULAR ANALYSIS.
^ PAGE
What repentance is . . :. V.-- . . ti~ .170
The destiny of intermediate souls . M . . -~. .171
Various opinions . . , . ..... .. . . 172
The popular opinion and the true opinion . . .173
The answer reticent, but not vague . ; . . 1 74, 1 75
CHAPTER VII.
IS FUTURE RETRIBUTION NECESSARILY AND INVARIABLY
ENDLESS ? pp. 176-179.
The fourth accretion " Hell necessarily endless for all " .176
Explanation of terms . . . . . . . .177
Dr. Pusey s views accord with my own . . . . .178
Universalism . . . . . . . . . 179
CHAPTER VIII.
JEWISH ESCHATOLOGY AT THE DAWN OF THE CHRISTIAN
ERA, pp. l8o-22I.
Service rendered by Dr. Pusey . . . . . .180
My " palmary argument " : " Gehenna " did not mean a place
of torment necessarily endless . . . . . .181
Our Lord normally used Jewish words in Jewish senses . .181
Outline of Dr. Pusey s arguments . . . . .182
"What I did, and what I did not, assert ..... 183
" Gehenna " in many respects the reverse of "Hell" . . 184
It ought to be transliterated, not translated . . . .184
Souls might escape from Gehenna . . . . .185
I. THE APOCRYPHAL BOOKS . . 185-192
The Book of Enoch 186-189
Its date and want of authority . . . . . .186
Dr. Pusey s quotations irrelevant to disprove that Gehenna
could mean a normally terminable punishment . 187, 188
Jewish belief in annihilation ... . . . .189
The Fourth Book of Esdras .... .. 189-190
Its character and teaching ...... 190
The Apocalypse of Baruck . . . . . , .191
TABULAR ANALYSIS. xv
PAGE
The Psalms of Solomon . . . . . . .191
The Fourth Book of Maccabees . . . . , .192
Silence of Second Book of Maccabees . . . 192
II. THE TESTIMONY OF JOSEPHUS ... . 192-197
His account of Jewish eschatology ..... 193
An untrustworthy witness . . . . . . .194
Opinions of Abarbanel, Dr. Jost, Rabbi Adler, Hamburger . 194
Opinions of Dr. Pocock, Archbishop Usher, Mosheirn, Chasles,
Dr. Traill, concerning Josephus ..... 195
His Graecising and unscriptural phrases . . . .196
III. THE TARGUMS 197-199
Dr. Pusey s quotations do not prove his point or refute mine . 198
Two decisive quotations to show that the Targumists regarded
Gehenna as terminable . . . . . . .199
Summary of the Jewish argument, so far . . . 200
OPINIONS OF THE TALMUDISTS 201-211
Rosh Hashanah and the Tosafoth ...... 201
Baba Metzia 202
Many Talrnudic passages 203, 204
Maimonides, Albo, Abarbanel, Rabbinic legends . . . 205
Modern Jewish authorities 206, 207
Summary of Jewish opinions 208
Mildness of even the few severer Rabbis .... 209
The recognised Jewish creed 210
Demonstrated conclusions . . . . . . .211
Dr. Pusey on Rabbi Akiba 211
What Akiba may have added to the common view . .212
Impossibility of Dr. Pusey s opinion about Akiba . . .213
My statements on the subject unshaken in a single particular . 214
" Gehenna " not to be rendered by " Hell " .... 215
Asserted views of "the majority" of Christians . . 216,217
The majority are constantly mistaken in their views . . 218
Our Lord s words repeatedly misunderstood during His life . 219
And fatally and repeatedly misunderstood by the majority
during long ages in many instances ..... 220
" Obvious " meanings ... 221
xvi TABULAR ANALYSIS.
.
CHAPTER IX.
THE OPINIONS OF THE FATHERS, pp. 222-295-
PAGB
Dr. Pusey s Catena . . . ., . . . 222
Authority of the Fathers in exegesis . . . . . 223
The opinions of many of the Fathers identical with my own . 224
Sense in which they used Scriptural phrases, &c. . . . 225
Greatness of those who leaned to the more merciful view . 226
The Fathers indecisive on the subject . . . . . 227
Brief summary of Dr. Pusey s Catena .... 228-230
Its real significance much exaggerated ..... 230
Opinions of Tertullian, &c., of little value . . . 231, 232
The Apostolical Fathers 233
They differ from the popular view ..... 234
Hermas . . . . ... . . . . 234
St. Justin Martyr ....... 235-238
Two principles of interpretation ignored by Dr. Pusey . 238, 239
Views of St. Irenaeus ....... 239-242
Views of St. Clemens of Alexandria : they often lean to Uni-
versalism ......... 243-247
Arnobius believed in annihilation ...... 248
St. Athanasius ......... 248
St. Gregory of Nazianzus : he often leans to Universalism 249-252
Deep significance of this fact ...... 253
Greatness and orthodoxy of St. Gregory of Nazianzus . . 254
His saintliness and authority . . . . . .255
St. Gregory of Nyssa: he was an indisputable Univer-
salist ......... 255-259
His " oeconomy " 256
His Catechetical Oration . . . . . . .257
His Book on the Soul ........ 258
His Oration on the Dead ....... 259
His absolute orthodoxy ....... 260
Immense weight of this evidence ...... 261
Opinion of " the Church "....... 262
Diodorus of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia , . . 263
Their eminent greatness ....... 264
Their acknowledged services ...... 265
TABULAR ANALYSIS. xvii
PAGE
Theodore of Mopsuestia 266
His high authority 267
These great Fathers unfairly misrepresented and condemned . 267
Didymus of Alexandria 268
His admiration for Origen 269
Admiration of St. Athanasius for Origen . . . .270
St. Chrysostom . . . . . . . . .271
His real leanings 272
His prayers for those who died in sin 273
His "Accommodation" 274
Comparison of St. Chrysostom with Jeremy Taylor . .275
Current phrases and deliberate opinions .... 275
Dr. Young, Dr. Watts 276
Sf. Peter Chrysologus 277
Opinions of the Latin Fathers 277-295
St. Ambrose . . . 279
His views on death . 280
Bent of his mind . . 28 1
St. Jerome . . . . 2 g t
On refrigeria, &c. . . 282
His remarks on Pelagius 283
Believed that all Christians would be saved .... 284
The Synod of Diospolis 285
His current phrases and his express opinions .... 286
He often leans to hopeful views about man s future . . 287
St. Augustine 287-295
Believed in a remedial fire 288
Mildness of his tone in arguing on eschatology . . . 288
His perplexities and uncertainties 289
His incessant hesitations 290
His chief objection was to the salvability of devils . .291
His assertions 292
His imperfect knowledge of Greek 293
Extreme feebleness of his "arguments " on the subject . . 294
Milder and less dogmatic passages .... 294-295
Exaggerated estimate of his authority 295
NOTE ON "ACCOMMODATION" 296,297
xviii TABULAR ANALYSIS.
CHAPTER X.
ORIGEN, pp. 298-329.
PAGE
Greatness of Origen . . . ... . . . 298
Compared with Augustine . .; - j-v . . . . 299
His early years ....... . 300
His saintliness, and the noble error of his youth . . . 301
Bitter jealousy of Demetrius . . . . . . 302
Gross calumnies against him . . . . . . . 303
" A victim of episcopal envy " . . . . . 304
His Hexapla ......... 35
His vast services ......... 306
His unequalled greatness .... . 307
His "martyrdom" . . . . . . . . 308
Deplorable tone in which he is spoken of . . . 309
Tragedy of his lot in life and after life . . . . .310
Eulogy on, by St. Vincent of Lerin s . . . . .310
Pathetic story of him 312
His enemies, Demetrizts, Marcellns, Epiphanius . . .313
Theophilus of Alexandria, Methodius ^ Eustathius, Apollinaris 315
Methods employed to discredit him . . . . .315
His eulogists and friends, St. Gregory Thaumaturgus, Pam-
philus 316
St. Athanasius, St. Dionysius of Alexandria, St. Basil . . 317
St. Gregory of Nazianzus^ Didymus, Pierius, St. Hilary of
Poictiers . . . . . . . . . .318
John of Jemsalem, St. Gregory of Nyssa, Eusebius of Gaul,
Etisebius of Caesarea, Titus of Bostia, St. Firmilian, Si.
Victor imis . . . . . . . . .319
St. Ambrose, Rufinus, St. Jerome . . . . . .320
St. Augustine, Palladius, Isidore, Sedtili-us, Evagrizts. . .321
Theotimus of Tomi, Bishop Haymo, Socrates, Sozomen . .322
Erasmus, Bishop Huet, Cave, Baronius, Tillemont, &c. . 323
Doucin, Bishop Butler, Canon Westcott, &c. .... 324
Genius of Origen ......... 325
His many-sidedness ........ 326
Errors respecting him 327
His depth 328
End of the Age of the Greek Fathers 328
Causes of the dislike of Origen . ..... 329
TABULAR ANALYSIS. xix
CHAPTER XI.
ORIGEN AND CHURCH COUNCILS, pp. 330-348.
PAGE
Origen s " Universalism " the fragment of a great scheme . 330
His current phrases and his real teaching . . . .331
His real orthodoxy 332
The Church has never condemned simple Universalism . . 333
The four first Councils 333
Significance of their silence ....... 334
Position of even Universalists not challenged . . . 334
General Councils 335
The term " Origenism " does not necessarily or usually refer
to eschatology ......... 336
Silence of Doucin in his Histoire de F Origenisme . . . 337
What it was which "the Church" is supposed to have con
demned 337
Universalism as regards mankind never separately discussed . 338
The " wretched synod " of Diospolis 339
The condemnation of "Origen" 340
Egyptian Synods 34I
Even Epiphanius never charged Origen with false eschatology 341
Prevalence of Restorationism even in the fifth century . . 342
Disgraceful career of Theophilus of Alexandria . . . 343
At first he was an avowed Origenist ..... 344
Acknowledged baseness of his motives 345
His intrigues against St. Chrysostom 346
His conduct at Constantinople ...... 347
His disgraceful book, and his open inconsistency . . . 348
He did not challenge Origen s eschatology . . . 348
CHAPTER XII.
THE FIFTH OECUMENICAL COUNCIL, pp. 349-360.
Asserted condemnation of " Origenism " . . .349
Intrigues of Theodora 350
Letter of Justinian to Mennas .... .351
What the "Home Synod "condemned 351
Their own definition of what they meant by "that monstrous *
Restitution" 353
xx TABULAR ANALYSIS.
* PAGE
It was not even Universalism . . . . 354
The Three Chapters .- .;.-.. . |^ 355
The Fifth Oecumenical Council never discussed Origenisni " 356
Reasons for doubting whether it ever mentioned the name of
Origen . . . .... ,... ,:.-" 357>
Silence of the Acts, &c. . . .-". . .
And of contemporaries . . . .
But even if his name was mentioned the Council did not con
demn his eschatology. . . . . . .
Low authority of the Fifth Council . . . . -359
Its decision has no bearing on the question . . . . 360
CHAPTER XIII.
PRINCIPLES OF SCRIPTURE EXEGESIS, pp. 361-409.
Passages worth notice 361, 362
Preliminary remarks ........ 362
A mis-quoted text ......... 363
True axioms of interpretation ...... 364
Scripture not to be confounded with fallible inferences . . 364
False meanings attached to words ...... 364
Misuse of "texts" 365
Misinterpreted parables ........ 3^5
False inferences from " texts " and words .... 366
Gross errors deduced from Scripture ..... 367
" Rabble-charming phrases " . . . . . . . 368
Influence of the word " damnation " ..... 369
It does not exist in the Bible . . . . . -37
Influence of the word "Hell" 371
What it connotes ......... 37 1
Used for " Sheol " the under -world ..... 372
For "Hades" . 372
Used for "Tartarus" . . . . . . . . 373
Used for " Gehenna "...... . 3/3
" Gehenna " in the Old and New Testaments . . -374
True meaning of the word ....... 375
Confusion introduced by the word " Hell " . . . . 376
Its misleading character . . . . . . -377
TABULAR ANALYSIS. xxi
PACE
The word aionios . . . . . . . . .378
Its true meaning ......... 379
By itself it never means " endless "..... 379
Use of the word in Josephus, the Greek Fathers, &c. . . 380
Use by Justinian and Caesarius . . . . . .381
Dr. Theodore Clapp ........ 382
* Endlessness" might have been taught by many phrases, of
which not one is used of Gehenna ..... 383
False assertions on the subject 384
Phrases for "endlessness" are not used in this application . 385
Contrast between current, and Scriptural, expressions . . 386
Many phrases by which "endlessness" might have been
described 387, 388
Aionios in the Greek Fathers . . . . . .389
In Augustine and Jerome ....... 390
In the New Testament ....... 391-^94
Its true sense 395
In St. John and St. Paul 396-398
In other writers 399
Authorities quoted 40x3-403
In the Lexicographers ...... 403, 404
Unquenched " (asbestos) ...... 405-407
Punishment" (kolasis) ...... 407-409
; i.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE GENERAL TEACHING OF SCRIPTURE RESPECTING
FUTURE RETRIBUTION, pp. 410-443.
The nature of God 410-412
As revealed in Christ 413, 414
God s Infinitude of merciful forgiveness . . . 415-418
Unworthy arguments against " the larger hope " . . .419
The Atonement 420
The Saviour of all 421
" Will ye speak wickedly for God? " 422
* Universalism " and " Conditional Immortality " . 423-427
General glance at the eschatology of the New Testament 428-431
Sophisms refuted 431-434
xxii TABULAR ANALYSIS.
, PAGE
Reticence of the Old Testament . . . . . 435-437
Eccles. xi. 3, " The fallen tree" . ( .; ,-. .- . 437-439
Is. xxxiii. 14, " Perpetual conflagrations " . . . . 440
Is. Ixvi. 24, "Corpses, worms, and flame" ... . 440-442
Conclusion . . . .--... . . 443
CHAPTER XV.
TEACHING OF THE NEW TESTAMENT ON FUTURE
RETRIBUTION, pp. 444-480.
How texts are to be interpreted . . . . . 444, 445
"Fire" 446
Parables of Judgment ....... 447, 448
Matt. v. 22, " The Gehenna of fire " . 448-450
Matt. v. 29, 30, " Cast into Gehenna". .... 450
Mark ix. 41-50, "Gehenna, worm, and flame" . . 451-454
,, "Salt and fire" 454-456
Matt. xxv. 41-46, The sheep and the kids . . . 456-458
Mark xiv. 21, Judas 458-463
Mark iii. 29, The danger of " aeonian sin " . . . 463-465
Eschatology of St. Paul 465-468
Eschatology of the Apocalypse 468-474
Bishop Horbery s "Upwards of a hundred texts" . . 474
Terrible abuses of Scriptural misinterpretation . . 475-477
Passages of the New Testament . . . 477-480
CONCLUSION.
Statement of the Author s eschatological belief . 481-485
MERCY AND JUDGMENT.
MERCY AND JUDGMENT.
CHAPTER I.
PREFATORY AND PERSONAL.
" We know our place and our portion : to give a witness and to be
condemned ; to be ill-used and to succeed. Such is the law which God
has annexed to the promulgation of the truth : its preachers suffer, but
its cause prevails." DR. NEWMAN, Tracts for the Times, iv. p. ix.
AGAIN and again it has been asserted or implied-
even by those whose character and position should
have made them more careful in their statements
that I deny the eternity of punishment.
Once more, and once for all, I desire to render such
false witness inexcusable by saying on the very first
page of this book that I have never denied, and do
not now deny, the eternity of punishment. And, to
avoid any possible mistake, I repeat once more, that
though I understand the word eternity in a sense far
higher than can be degraded into the vulgar meaning
of endlessness, I have never even denied, and do not
now deny, even the possible endlessness of punish
ment. In proof of which, I need only refer to the
pages of my own book Eternal Hope standing as
they do unaltered from the very first.
In the month of November, 1877, during my
ordinary course of residence as a canon, I preached
a sermon in Westminster Abbey on I Peter iv. 6,
* B
2 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
" For for this cause was the Gospel preached also
to them that are dead." At that time there had
been some discussions both on the nature of Eternal
Happiness, and on the question, " Is life worth
living ? Accordingly on October 14 I had preached
on " What Heaven is " ; and on November 4 upon the
value and preciousness of human life. But since I
desire always and above all things to be truthful and
honest, it was impossible for me to attempt the refu
tation of that cynical pessimism which treats human
life as a curse and as a mistake, without entering into
the awful question of future retribution. While in com
mon with all Christians I believed that there would
be a future punishment of unrepented sin, and even
that it might continue without any revealed termina
tion so long as impenitence continued, it appeared to
me that, on that subject, many of the conceptions
constantly kept alive by current teaching were de
rived only from mistaken interpretations of isolated
texts, and were alien from the general tenor of divine
revelation. I knew it to be the popular belief, sanc
tioned by ordinary sermons, that the vast majority
of living men would pass from the sorrows, miseries,
and failures of our mortal life into inconceivable, hope
less, and everlasting agonies. I gave some specimens
of that teaching, and in order not to prejudge it, those
specimens were chosen, not from the writings of the
vulgar and the ignorant, but from the pages of great
men whom I love and reverence from Dante and
Milton, and Jeremy Taylor and Henry Smith. I
endeavoured to show, as far as could be shown in
the narrow limits of a sermon addressed to a mixed
multitude, that much which had been said on this
subject was unscriptural and untenable. In that
sermon, and in one delivered on November 18 upon
the question, " Are there few that be saved ? " it was
my object to prove that the current belief went far
beyond what was written, and tended to force upon
I.] PREFATORY AND PERSONAL. 3
men s minds a view of God s dealings with the
human race which it was almost, if not utterly, im
possible to reconcile with all that is revealed to us of
His mercy and of His justice, arid with the whole
meaning of the Gospel of Salvation.
I venture to think that such subjects should not
frequently be treated in the pulpit, because the field
of undisputed and essential truth is so large as to
supply the amplest materials for moral and spiritual
edification, without forcing us to dwell upon con
troverted questions. I have always acted upon this
conviction. During twenty-five years I have scarcely
ever done more than refer to the speculative ques
tion as to the nature and duration of future punish
ment. In six volumes l of school, university, parochial,
and cathedral sermons, the reader will scarcely find
any allusion to the controversy. I have held it suffi
cient to dwell on the certain and awful truth that,
both in this world and the next, God punishes sin ;
that without repentance sin cannot be forgiven ; that
without holiness no man shall see the Lord; that
by the death of Christ and the gift of the Spirit
the love of our Father in Heaven has provided us
with the means of redemption and given us the
grace which leads to sanctification. But there would
be no chance of religious sincerity or of spiritual
progress, if we were never to enter a protest against
the tyranny of human error when it encroaches upon
the domain of faith and teaches for doctrine the
mistakes and traditions of men. The pulpit of a
metropolitan cathedral has always been considered
1 The Fall of Man, and other Sermons ; 4th Thousand. The Witness
of History to Christ. Hulsean Lectures for 1870 ; 7th Thousand.
The Silence and Voices of God. University and other Sermons ; 6th
Thousand. In the Days of Thy Yoitth. Practical Sermons at Marl-
borough College, 1871-1876 ; 7th Thousand. Saintly Workers. Lent
Addresses at St. Andrew s, Holborn, 1879; 4th Thousand. Ephphatha ;
or The Amelioration, of the World. Westminster Abbey Sermons,
1880 ; 3rd Thousand.
B 2
4 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
a legitimate place for the treatment of questions
which are not so well suited for ordinary parochial
teaching ; nor do I see any reason why Westminster
Abbey, with its large and mingled congregations,
should not occasionally be used for purposes ana
logous to those which made the pulpit of St. Paul s
Cross so powerful in the days of the Reformation.
Those who during the last four years have heard my
sermons in the Abbey know full well that, there as
well as at St. Margaret s, in ninety-nine instances
out of a hundred, my aim is entirely practical, and
my subjects chosen from the wide realm of those
truths respecting which all Christians are agreed.
But I am not at all ashamed, nor do I in the least
regret, that, when I was naturally led to deal with
a question in which the popular theology goes far
beyond the Catholic faith, I did not hesitate to
express my strong conviction that the opinions tradi
tionally accepted by the majority of those who have
never seriously thought of them, are unwarranted
and are dangerously wrong. To believe with awful
reverence in Eternal Judgment is a very different
thing from believing in the utter distortion and per
version of the language and metaphors of Scripture
which ignorance and tradition, working hand in hand
for centuries, have degraded into what a deeply
religious modern poet has characterised as " obscene
threats of a bodily hell."
It has been laid to my charge almost as if it were
a grave fault that in those sermons I adopted a
vehement tone. Is it a sin to feel strongly and to
speak strongly ? Are the Prophets and the Psalmists
never vehement ? Is St. Paul never vehement ? Are
St. Peter and St. James and St. John never vehe
ment ? As for " adopting a vehement tone," my
reply is that I never " adopt " any tone at all, but
speak as it is given me to speak, and only use
such language as most spontaneously and naturally
l.] PREFATORY AND PERSONAL. 5
expresses the thoughts and feelings with which I write.
"Everyone," says Dr. Newman, 1 " preaches accord
ing to his frame of mind at the time of preaching " ;
and it is quite true that at the time when I preached
those sermons my feelings had been stirred to their
inmost depths. I am not in the least ashamed of the
" excitement " at which party newspapers and reviews
have sneered. I do not blush for the moral indignation
which most of what has since been written on this
subject shows to have been intensely needful. In the
ordinary course of parochial work I had stood by
deathbeds of men and women which had left on my
mind an indelible impression. I had become aware
that the minds of many of the living were hopelessly
harassed and I can use no other word devastated
by the horror with which they brooded over the fate
of the dead. The happiness of their lives was shat
tered, the peace of their souls destroyed, not by the
sense of earthly bereavement, but by the terrible
belief that brother, or son, or wife, or husband had
passed away into physical anguish and physical tor
ment, endless, and beyond all utterance excruciating.
Such thoughts did not trouble the careless or the
brutal, who might be supposed to need them. They
troubled only the tender-hearted and the sincere.
They were the direct result of the religious teaching
which they had received from their earliest years.
To the irreligious poor the common presentment of
" endless torment was a mere stumbling-block : to
the best of the religious it was a permanent misery.
The irreligious are driven to disbelieve in any punish
ment, because they have heard the punishment with
which they are threatened described in such a way
as to be utterly unbelievable ; the religious accept
these coarse pictures, and are either hardened by
them into lovelessness or crushed into despair. Phari
saism and Infidelity are the twin children of every
1 Apologia, appendix, p. 15.
6 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
form of -theology which obscures the tenderness of
revelation, and belies the love of God.
Now to me it seemed that the Gospel of the grace
of God ought to have in it at least some message of
consolation for more than that mere handful of the
bereaved who can feel sure that those whom they
love are saved ; and not for these only, but for all
whose imagination is strong enough to realise what
words mean, whose candour is sufficient to make
them face the real significance of what they profess to
maintain. For, if the common language of preachers
on these subjects be true, there seems to be no escape
from the logical conclusion that those who are saved
are few indeed. Popular teachers still continue to
argue, with no semblance of anguish or of horror,
that the majority of the millions of mankind whom
we daily see are perishing ; that they are not walk
ing in those paths which alone lead to heaven ; that,
to all human appearance, they die as they lived ;
and that, if those who have lived sinful lives, and
brought forth no fruits of amendment, and not even
given any visible indication of repentance, cannot
enter into heaven, then all but a fraction of mankind
are doomed to hell. Now to the mass of ignorant
Christians the words " to be doomed to hell have
no other meaning than to be doomed to agonies
in which sinners will burn to endless ages in torments
to which all the racks and wheels and flames of the
Inquisition as religious writers again and again have
told us are as nothing; doomed to torments which
exceed beyond all conception the deadliest agony
which the mortal body can endure on earth.
I have been sometimes gravely warned not to
attempt to be wise " above what is written." It was
precisely because I feel the wisdom of such advice
that I wished to sweep away the cruel dogmas and
ghastly fancies which, pretending to represent " what
is written," horribly distort it, add to it and take
l.j PREFATORY AND PERSONAL. ^
away from it, and entomb its pure words in inverted
pyramids of fallible inference, and by so doing furnish
sad instances of being unwise above what is written.
I obeyed the precept by pointing to the errors of
that self-styled orthodoxy by which it has been so
habitually and so grievously transgressed.
Already I observe among the better sort of those
from whose previous writings no other conclusion
than the popular one could logically have been drawn,
an anxiety to back out of these conclusions ; a
tendency to explain them away ; an effort to re
pudiate them. They are now trying to soften down
all those parts of their dogma against which the
heart and conscience of man cannot but indignantly
revolt, because we should otherwise be driven to
admit that the life which has come to men, without
their seeking, is and must be to all but the chosen
few, no blessing, but an awful, intolerable, and in
extinguishable curse. In the following pages I shall
prove, as I have proved before, that the errors which
I repudiate have, to their fullest extent, been the
teachings of a majority of preachers, and even of
theologians. It was my express object to show
that they were not the teachings of Scripture when
rightly interpreted, and not the teachings of the
Church as decided by the decrees of her four great
Councils, and by the authentic creeds and formularies
of her faith.
Before proceeding I should like to say one word
on a very common charge which has been made against
the opinions expressed in my Eternal Hope. It is that
they were " inconsistent " ; " that it was difficult to
make out what I did exactly believe" ; " that I adopted
Universalist arguments while I repudiated Univer-
salist conclusions." I reply that it was not my imme
diate aim to be constructive or positive ; I desired to
get rid of what I believed to be false, not to lay down
fresh dogmas as to what I believed to be true. It is
8 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
painful to me to have to repeat once more that the
publication of my book was forced on me by short
hand reporters who published my sermons against
my will ; and that the sermons, though. they expressed
beliefs which I had held for years, were every-day
sermons written in a few hours, not elaborate theo
logical treatises prepared during long leisure. But
further, I believe that in all arguments upon the de
tails of this solemn subject it is very desirable that no
systematic dogmas should be laid down. The Church
herself has carefully abstained from laying down
such dogmas ; she has only sketched a few great limits,
" Q,uos ultra citraque nequit consistere rectum! I accept
sincerely all that the Church of England has required
us to believe concerning hell. What I repudiate is
that which she has never required. And the reason why
neither the Catholic Church, nor the English branch
of it, has ever defined the precise beliefs which have
been taught by hundreds of individual preachers, is
because Scriptura) teaching on this subject has left
room for very wide diversities of opinion. If I gave
their due weight to what are called " Universalist
arguments, it is because they ought to have their due
weight side by side with the arguments which prevent
most Christians from entirely adopting them. And
we ought to distinguish between that which is per
missible as a hope and that which is tenable as a
doctrine. Is there any human being to whom it
would not be an infamy to confess that he did not
wish that it were true that all men might be ulti
mately saved, as it is God s will (i Tim. ii. 4) that
they should be saved ? We are taught to pray :
"That it may please Thee to have mercy upon all
men." We pray for this. Would it not cause us the
deepest joy if we could be fully persuaded in our own
minds that our prayer can be granted ? Do we wish
that any soul of man should suffer endless torments ?
If not, we are surely permitted to pay respectful
L] PREFA TOR Y AND PERSONAL. 9
attention to the arguments of those who think them
selves entitled by Scripture to believe that which we
too desire, but scarcely even dare to hope. Those
arguments may offer some relief to us even when we
cannot affirm their absolute validity. They may
cast some gleam upon a horror of great darkness,
even if they do not enable us to enjoy the bound
less day. God has given us natures disposed to love.
He has bidden us to forgive and love our enemies.
He has told us that His name is Love. " I must
believe/ said a devout and learned writer nearly 200
years ago, " that Thy grace will sooner or later super-
abound where sin hath most abounded, till I can
think a little Drop of Being, and but one remove from
Nothing, can excel in goodness that Ocean of Good
ness which hath neither shore, bottom, nor surface.
Thou art Goodness itself in the abstract, in its first
spring, in its supreme and universal form and spirit.
We must believe Thee to be infinitely good; to be
good without any measure or bound ; to be good
beyond all expression and conception of all creatures,
or we must give over thinking of Thee at all. All
the goodness which is anywhere to be found scattered
among the creatures is sent forth from Thee, the
fountain, the sea of all goodness. Into this sea of
all goodness I deliver myself and all my fellow crea
tures. Thou art Love, and canst no more cease to be
so than to be Thyself : take Thy own methods with
us, and submit us to them. Well may we do so, in
the assurance that the beginning, the way, and the
end of them all is love." 1 Is there anything wrong in
such sentiments ? Is it not well for the world that all
which can be said in their favour should be fairly and
kindly considered, even if they point to conclusions
too bright and too vague to be formulated into our
Articles of Faith ?
1 The Restoration of All Things, Jer. White, Chaplain to Oliver
Cromwell, A.D. 1712.
io MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
There "were, however, in my little volume some
expressions which, to my great surprise, -caused am
biguity in the minds of readers. When those terms
are explained in the sense in which alone I used
them, it will become even more clear than it has
already become to the minds of all candid theolo
gians, that my views are in the strictest accordance
with all that is required by the Catholic Church.
I assert fearlessly that they were, and are, in far
deeper accordance with " what is of faith," than the
current errors which they were intended to repudiate,
or the bitter assertions which have been urged in
their supposed refutation.
I. The first of these expressions was the word
"eternal." By " eternal" I never meant "endless";
by "eternity" I never meant "endlessness." I do
not exclude the connotation of endlessness from cer
tain uses of the word, but those uses are the accidents
of its meaning, not its essence. I use, and always
shall use, the word " eternal in the sense of the
word aionios, and especially in St. John s sense of that
word. By " Eternal Hope " a title not of my own
choosing I meant "hope as regards the world to
come (just as in our form of the Nicene Creed,
"eternal life is "the life of the world to come"). 1
I used this word in what I conceive to be its true
and not its vulgar sense, which I thought that I
1 This clause is not in the genuine Creed of Nicaea, in which "I
believe in the Holy Ghost," is followed by an anathema. In the
" Constantinopolitan " Creed, or Revised Creed of Jerusalem, first occurs
/cal CCOTJJ/ TOV /xeAAoi/Toy alcoves : but in the Creed of Cappadocia now
used by the Armenian Church, in the Revised Creed of Antioch, in the
Creed of Mesopotamia now used by the Nestorian Churches, and in
the Creed of Philadelphia as recited by Charisius at Ephesus, we have
ets u>V o-l6viov. Nothing then can be more clear than that " aeonian
life," in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, was regarded as the
equivalent of "the life of the age to come." Now this latter phrase
is very far indeed from a necessary implication of endlessness, for
b n*\\<av al&v is the "olam habba " of the Jews, and this future Age
is in Scripture expressly regarded as only one step towards a final con
summation (i Cor. xv. 24). "Aeon" says Theodoret (Haer. v. 6), is
T.] PREFATORY AND PERSONAL. 11
could do safely, because much of my book was de
voted to establishing that true meaning. But I have
evidently underrated the fatal force and fascination
of words long used in inaccurate senses, "which,
as a Tartar s bow, do shoot back upon the under
standing of the wisest, and mightily entangle and
pervert the judgment." In the following pages I ask
the reader to observe that though the writers whom I
quote often use the word " eternal when they mean
endless, the word never has that meaning with me.
II. On the other hand, I generally used the word
" hell in its popular, and not in its theological
sense. In current religious phraseology nothing is
more common than the phrase " to die and to go to
hell." Strictly speaking, such language is in every
case inaccurate, for " hell," in the sense of " endless
torments," as apart from the retribution of the inter
mediate state, is a condition which, in its final stage,
does not begin till the Resurrection and the Judg
ment Day. When, therefore, I spoke of " hell " not
being endless for all who incur it, I meant to indicate
the doctrine which has now once more been brought
into far greater prominence by English Churchmen
than it had been for many previous years, viz., that a
soul may pass hence into a retribution and punish
ment, which is yet not an endless hell, but is that
Intermediate State of purification which may be
metaphorically included in the term " aeonian fire."
III. Lastly, by dying " in a state of sin I meant
dying without any visible repentance and amend
ment ; in such a state of sin as so far as human
judgment is concerned would render the soul unfit
for heaven. Such being the case, I find, with deep
" an interval indicative of time. 1 " On the light thrown upon the mean
ing of the phrase by the fact that St. Gregory of Nyssa was not
unconcerned in its admission into the Creed (Nicephorus H. E. xii. 13)
I shall touch later on (p. 261). See Dr. Hort s Two Dissertations, p.
106, 138-147.
12 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
^
thankfulness, that between Dr. Pusey s views and my
own there is not a single point of difference as
regards any matters of faith ; that there was no
material difference between my views and those of
many of our most learned living bishops and theo
logians I had already been assured.
IV. Further than this, the reason for some apparent
contradictions was explained in many passages of
the book itself. It was due to what, for want of a
better word, I must call the " antinomies of Scrip
ture. By antinomies I do not mean absolute con
tradictions, but partly adopting the sense in which
Kant used the word I mean that semblance of
contradiction which results from the law of reason,
when, passing the limits of experience, we seek to
know the absolute ; I mean, in fact, truths which
(so far as Scripture is concerned) may be maintained
by opposing arguments of almost equal validity.
There are some passages of Scripture which, if under
stood in their literal meaning, seem to teach a final
restitution of all things, a final triumph of absolute
blessedness, a final immanence of God in all things. 1
There are others which, taken in their literal mean
ing, seem to point to the final annihilation of the
wicked. 2 There are again others which hold out no
definite hope of alleviation to the doom of the finally
impenitent. 3 There are others again, which seem to
point to some temporary punishment, some purifying
discipline through which men must pass, but from
which they may be saved. 4 It is in some form of
1 Luke ix. 56 ; John i. 29 ; iii. 17 ; xii. 32 ; Acts iii. 21 ; Rom. iv.
13; v. 15, 1 8, 19; xi. 26, 32; I Cor. xv. 22-28, 55; 2 Cor. v. 19;
Eph. i. 10 ; Phil. ii. 9, 10 ; Col. i. 20 ; I Tim. ii. 4 ; iv. 10 ; Tit. ii.
II ; Heb. ii. 14 ; I John ii. 2 ; iii. 8 ; Mic. vii. 9; Is. xii. i, &c.
2 Matt. iii. 12 ; v. 30; x. 28 ; Luke xiii. 15 ; xx. 18, 35 ; Acts iii.
23 ; Rom. vi. 23 ; viii. 13 ; Heb. x. 26 31 ; Rev. xx. 14 ; xxi. 8, &c.
3 Matt. xiii. 49, 50 ; xvi. 27 ; xxv. 46 ; Mark iii. 29 ; ix. 44 50 ;
Rev. xiv. 10 ; xx. 10 ; xxi. 8.
4 Matt. v. 26 ; Luke xii. 59 ; I Cor. iii. 13, 15.
I.] PREFA TOR Y AND PERSONAL. 1 3
the last aspect of the subject that I see the most
probable solution to our difficulties and perplexities.
In the doctrine of the Intermediate State, and of
such changes in the condition of the dead as are
implied in the ancient practice of prayers for
the dead; in that " probatory fire" of the day of
judgment, which the Fathers almost unanimously
deduced from I Cor. iii. 13 ; in the doctrine of
Christ s descent into hell ; in the doctrine of the
"pain of loss" as containing the essence of future
retribution ; and in all these doctrines taken in
connexion with those conclusions which we can
not but form from the infinitude of God s mercy
and the universal efficacy of Christ s Atonement,
I see the dawn of a " hope for the world to come,"
and the emancipation of the human heart from the
terrible pressure of teachings which not a few of
God s saints have found it all but impossible to
reconcile with His name of Love.
But I have never pretended to have any ready-
made rigid scholastic dogma on the subject. My
object was to repudiate what I regarded as un-
scriptural, not to attempt the impossible task of for
mulating a dogma more definite than any which the
Church has laid down as to what is true. It is
doubtless because of those very antinomies which I
have mentioned, which are perhaps inseparable from
the nature of the subject, that the Church has left
such large latitude to individual opinion.
" This alone," says Perrone, " is matter of faith,
that there is a hell." x The Church of England has
not even condemned Universalism ; she rejected the
forty-second Article, which was aimed against it ;
and she has no utterance in any of her formu
laries so distinct " as to require us to condemn as
penal the expression of hope by a clergyman that
even the ultimate pardon of the wicked, who are
1 De Deo Creatore, iii. 6, 3 (in Dr. Pusey s What is of Faith, p. 19).
14 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
condemned in the day of judgment, may be con
sonant with the will of God." 1 Knowing, there
fore, as I do, how many there are of the highest
intellect especially among the laity and among our
most eminent literary and scientific men who regard
the popular teaching respecting " endless torments
as one of their most insuperable difficulties in the
way of accepting the Christian faith, I still think it
my duty to show that those torments have been de
scribed in a manner unauthorised by Scripture, and
that their " endlessness " is not so distinctly revealed
as not to admit of being regarded in an aspect less
appalling to the heart and more reconcilable with
all which our Lord has taught us of our Father in
Heaven, than that in which it has been presented in
popular teaching.
But while, in form, this book is a reply to Dr.
Pusey, in reality my conclusions are almost identical
with his, except on minor points of history and
criticism. And though I may be met again by
refutations, triumphant only in refuting what I have
never said, I am not discouraged. The book will
at least find some serious, candid, and high-minded
readers. On these this mass of evidence will not be
without weight. That which is true makes its way in
time even into the minds of those who persuade them
selves that they have rejected it. What is said of an
1 Privy Council judgment, Wilson v. Fendall. As regards three or
four expressions in the Prayer-book, such as "everlasting damnation"
(an expression unknown to Scripture, in which no such word as " damna
tion " in its popular sense occurs), in the Litany, and "perish everlast
ingly "in the Athanasian hymn, and "eternal death" (an expression
unknown to Scripture) in the Burial Service, I may observe that : i.
the possibility of that awful doom is denied by Universalists alone,
and not by me ; and ii. those phrases can, in any case, only mean what
is meant by their Scripture equivalents ; and (iii.) they do not exclude
the sense of "extinction of being," which is, at any rate, the very anti
thesis to endless torments. There is not a single word on the subject
of endless torments in all the Thirty-nine Articles, and the forty-second
Article, which forbade Universalism, was struck out in 1562;
I.] PREFATORY AND PERSONAL. 15
individual matters nothing; but truth and justice ulti
mately prevail. " He that judgeth me is the Lord."
To Him, humbly, yet with glad and perfect confidence,
I trust the cause which I maintain. If what I have
written be condemned on earth, I say with Pascal
that what I here repudiate is condemned in heaven.
Ad tuum, D omine Jesu, tribunal appello.
CHAPTER II.
THE OPINIONS OF MANY FATHERS, SAINTS, AND
DIVINES, IN ALL AGES, HAVE BEEN MORE HOPE
FUL THAN THOSE OF THE CURRENT TEACHING.
ITT. ov /jitvToi fl&Qaffiv &i>dpwn-oi ovo^d^etv oirrcos.
2w. TroVeooj , & iTTTTia, ot eiSoVes if) ol /j.rj etSoVes ;
ITT. 01 TToAAot.
2co. etVt 8 OUTOI of eiSoTfS Ta\7}0e s, of iro\\ol ;
ITT. ou 5??Ta. PLATO, Hippias Major.
" How often in the reading of our ecclesiastical journals and contro
versial writings are we reminded of the truth of the saying, qui pauca
considerat, facile pronundat." 1 But even worse than those rash and
hasty judgments is the passion which within the last few years has
grown up for an organised system of religious suspicions. One is
tempted to believe that amongst certain divines the old rule, quilibet
praesumitur esse bonus, donee probetur esse malus, is reversed in all
cases where ecclesiastical orthodoxy is in dispute. ... It would be far
better for us if we could always remember that no theologian has a
right to give out a mere theological opinion on the doctrine of a par
ticular school as an article of the faith sanctioned by the Church. The
great scholastic theologians maintained that it was no less heretical
to declare that to be an article of faith which was not defide, than to
deny an article of faith altogether." DOLLINGER (Speech at the Munich
Congress).
IN the preface to Eternal Hope?* I singled out four
statements as forming part of the current pulpit
teaching about " Hell " in this and in many previous
ages ; and I did not shrink from stating my belief
that they were unauthorised accretions to the true
doctrine ; that they were unsupported by Scripture,
1 Eternal Hope, p. xxxii.
II.] PAST AND PRESENT OPINIONS. 17
and repugnant to reason ; that they were matters of
individual opinion, not parts of the Catholic faith.
Those four points, which I will here arrange in a
different order, were as follows :
1. That the fire of " Hell " is material, and that its
agonies are physical agonies.
2. That the doom of " everlasting damnation ): is
incurred by the vast majority of mankind.
3. That this doom is passed irreversibly at death
on all who die in a state of sin.
4. That the duration of these material torments is
necessarily endless for all who incur them.
Every one of these four opinions has been enforced
for centuries by many teachers as forming part of
the Church s teaching, as though they were infallibly
derived from the revelation of God in Scripture. It
is true that in recent times there has arisen a habit-
perhaps half unconscious of veiling them over with
misty phrases ; of letting it be assumed that they
are -held, while euphemisms are used which serve to
conceal their naked horror. This course has been
taken even by those who still profess to hold these
opinions. But the same style has been adopted by
those who would gladly repudiate them ; partly out
of the principle of " oeconomy," partly from the mental
inertia which avoids meddling with current " ortho
doxies," partly because men were afraid to express
views which, however true and sacred, would yet be
denounced by the ignorant as dangerous innovations.
But it seemed to me (as I have said), that if these four
propositions be indeed tenets of our faith, they ought
to be incessantly obtruded by all who hold them ;
nay, more, that they ought to be depicted by all,
if not as vividly, at least as unmistakably, as they
have been portrayed by such teachers as Jonathan
Edwards and Mr. Spurgeon. If any religious teacher
can really think as Mr. Spurgeon (for instance) ap
pears to think about the nature of " Hell," he is only
C
1 8 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
acting the part of a true man in preaching of Hell
as Mr. Spurgeon has preached of it. These views, I
say again, should either be held or not held. " Ay
and No too," as Shakspeare taught us, "was no good
divinity." If they are held, it is disgraceful not to
avow them. Half-heartedness in impressing doc
trines so momentous must surely be a criminal
unfaithfulness. But, on the other hand, I repeat
that " if, as I . believe, these current opinions about
Hell are not tenets of our faith, they cannot be
too honestly or too distinctly repudiated." 1
Dr. Pusey, fortunately, regarded that sentence as a
challenge to Churchmen to express their present views
on this subject, and he has replied to that challenge
in his book, What is of Faith as to Everlasting PunisJi-
inent. Although his book is an avowed answer to
mine, I find myself so entirely in accordance with
Dr. Pusey on every essential point for the appa
rent differences between us arise, as I shall easily
show, from the use of terms in different senses that
I read his Essay with unspeakable thankfulness.
With the exception to which I shall immediately
draw attention, Dr. Pusey has shown that the views
which I repudiated are no parts of Catholic doc
trine, but are, as I had said, unauthorised accretions
to it ; and that the general drift of what I had
urged is not only tenable, not only permissible, but
is in reality far nearer to the Catholic verity, far
nearer to the views of the Primitive Church, than the
opinions which have been repeated by the majority
of post-reformation writers. To show that I am not
exaggerating the amount of agreement which exists
in all essential particulars between myself and
the eminent theologian who answered my appeal, I
may quote this sentence from one of the letters
which I had the honour to receive from him : " It
is a great relief to me," he says, " that you can
1 Eternal Hope, Preface, p. xlviii.
II.] PAST AND PRESENT OPINIONS. 19
substitute the conception of a future purification [in
stead of a state of probation] for those who have
not utterly extinguished the grace of God in their
hearts. This I think woidd put you in harmony with
the whole of Christendom Now I can have no sort
of difficulty in accepting the view of a future " puri
fication," instead of " future probation," because, so
far as I can discover, I had scarcely even referred to
the idea of probation at all, and certainly had laid no
stress upon it. My sermons would never have been
written had the views now authoritatively stated as
those of the Church been the views which were gene
rally taught. The differences between Dr. Pusey and
myself are much smaller than those between him and
the popular errors which I wrote to repudiate. Dr.
Pusey has in no instance been guilty he could not be
guilty of that misinterpretation that suppressio veri
and suggestio falsi as to my views, which I find in the
criticisms of many of my reviewers. " If I had had
time," he says in the letter which I have already
quoted, " I would have re-written my book, and would
have said, You seem to me to deny nothing which 1
believe. You do not deny the eternal punishment of
souls obstinately hard and finally impenitent. I be
lieve in the eternal punishment of no other. Who they
are God alone knows. I should have been glad to
begin with what we believe in common, and so to say
there is no need to theorise about a new trial." Now
I have said already that " a new trial " is no essential
part of my view ; not directly or consciously a part of
it at all. The phrases, " a new trial," and " fresh pro
bation," are more definite than I feel entitled to em
ploy. I can heartily accept Dr. Pusey s own words
(P- J 7)j " How souls shall, in the long intermediate
state, be prepared for the vision and justice of God,
we can plainly know nothing, unless God reveal it."
It is remarkable that in writing to Dr. Plumptre,
Cardinal Newman whose theological knowledge no
C 2
20 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
one, I imagine, will venture to dispute uses almost
the same language. " It seems to me," he says, ft that
you do not deny eternal punishment ; but you aim at
withdrawing from so awful a doom vast multitudes
who have popularly been considered to fall under it.
There is nothing, I think, in the view incompatible
with the faith of Catholics. What we cannot accept
is .... that man s probation for his eternal destiny,
as well as his purification, continue after this life."
Here, then, are the testimonies of two very eminent
living theologians, one Roman, and one Anglican, that
the views which I urged (which are substantially the
same as those of my late honoured teacher, Professor
Maurice, and my friend and former teacher, Dr.
Plumptre), widely as they differ from the popular
dogmatism, differ in no perceptible degree from those
of the Universal Church. If the great Roman Catholic
theologian Perrone be right in saying, " This alone
is matter of faith, that there is a hell," that is a
doctrine which I never denied : nay, I expressly
stated my belief that there was a " hell (i.e. a
future retribution), and that I could not teach that
all would ultimately be delivered from it. Those
who were anathematising my views were anathema
tising a portion of the Catholic faith ; those who
were maintaining what I repudiated were maintain
ing human errors founded neither on Scripture nor on
the Creeds, but on the loose sand of unauthorised
inferences and perverted metaphors.
I can make this clear at once. Some part or other
of all that I repudiated is practically repudiated, and
all that I ever maintained is stated or implied, in
almost every one of the following passages. Those
who aimed their weapons at me must aim them also at
every one of the ancient Saints and Fathers, and the
modern divines, whom I shall proceed to quote, as
expressing the truths which I have always main
tained. The world and the Church may judge
II.] PAST AND PRESENT OPINIONS. 21
whether these great men are heretics in the opin
ions which I share with them, and which many,
even of my former crit cs, are now anxious to adopt.
Never in the history of any controversy have I
witnessed so rapid a transition of popular thought
through the three phases of " It is false and here
tical ; " 1 " It is very possibly true ; " and " We have
always thought so all along." 2
Here, then, are some of the utterances of Christians
of many schools, which I accept as conceding, in one
direction or other, all that is essential all that I care
for, all that I wished to maintain in that " aeonian
hope" for which I pleaded. 3 They might be almost
indefinitely multiplied, but I have referred to many
similar passages in later chapters, and I have here
purposely excluded the opinions of those who, like
Origen in ancient times and Professor Maurice in our
own, are universally known to have embraced " the
larger hope." Other opinions, also leaning to milder
views, will be found later on under various heads.
ST. CLEMENS OF ALEXANDRIA, f circ. 218. " He
saves all, but converting some by punishments, and
others who follow by their own will .... that every
knee may bend to Him, of things in heaven and
earth and under the earth." 4
1 " You cannot but have oft observed how common a practice it is
with those who either cannot dispute, or begin to be tired with it, to
make short work with their adversaries by calling them heretics."
BISHOP RUST, A Short Account of Ong,:n (The Phenix, vol. i. p. 61).
2 What Perrone says of Purgatory expresses exactly what I have said
of future punishment : " Ornnia quae ad locum, tempus, poenarum
naturam et acerbitatem spectant, dogma non attingunt."
3 For the present I omit all reference to the views of the earliest
Fathers, which are fully considered in pp. 234-248.
4 "Nonsolumpro nostris peccatis Dominus propitiatio est, hoc est
Fidelium, sed etiam pro toto mundo : proinde universes quidern
salvat, sed alios per svtpplicia converters, alios autem spontanea asse-
quentes voluntate ; et cum Honoris Dignitate, ut omne genu flectatur ei,
Caelestium, Terrestrium, et Infernorum ; hoc est angeli, homines, et
animae quae ante Adventum ejus de hac vita migravere temporali."
Fragm. I. Joann. (ed. Potter, p. 1009). See further, infra^\\ 243-247.
22 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP,
EUSEBIUS OF GAUL, f 371. Speaking of "those
worthy of temporal punishment," and" referring to
Matthew v. 26, he says, " In proportion to the matter
of the sin will be the lingering in the passage. In
proportion to the growth of the fault will be the dis
cipline of the discerning flame; in proportion to the
things which iniquity in its folly hath wrought will be
the severity of the wise punishment" De Epiph.
Horn. iii.
ST. AMBROSE, f 397. " Those who come not to
the first, but are reserved for the second resurrection,
shall be biirned till they fill up the times between
the first and second resurrection ; or if they should
not have fulfilled them, shall remain longer in
punishment." *
ST. AUGUSTINE, f 430." When the resurrection
of the dead takes place, there will not be wanting
some to whom, after the punishments which the
spirits of the dead suffer, pity may grant that they
be not sent into eternal fire." 2
" Purge me in this life, and make me such that
there may be no further need for the amending
fire." 3
ST. PAULINUS OF NOLA, f 431. "That which
the flame has not burnt, but proved, will be rewarded
with a perpetual reward. He who hath done things
which should be burned shall suffer loss, but shall
himself escape svtfe out of the fires. Yet, wretched
1 In Ps. i. 54. For the views of St. Ambrose, see infra, pp. 278 fg. ;
and see De Bono Mortis, p. 28 ; De Fide Resurrect, p. 33.
2 " Sicut etiam facta resurrectione mortuorurn, non deerunt quibus
post poenas, quas patiuntur spiritus mortuorum, impertiatur misericordia,
ut in ignem non mittantur aeternani." De Civ. Dei, xxi. 22.
3 "In hac vita purges me et talem me reddas cui jam emendatorio igne
opus non sit." In Ps. xxxvii.
On the views of St. Augustine, see infra, pp. 287^. ; and compare,
"The carnal who are to be saved by fire."- De Civ. Dei, xvi. 24.
" In these judgments there will be some purifying judgments for some."
c. julian. vi. 15.
II.] PAST Ai\D PRESENT OPINIONS. 23
with the marks of his scathed body, he shall keep
his life, not his glory." 1
ST. METHODIUS, 3rd cent. " The world shall be
set on fire in order to purification and renewal. . . .
The Scriptures usually call destruction the turning to
the better at some future time." De Resurrect, viii.
THEODORET, "THE BLESSED," f 458. "For the
Lord, who loves man, punishes medicinally that He
may check the course of impiety." Horn, in Ezech.
vi. 6.
SIBYLLINE BOOKS. " To them [the good] God
shall grant to save mankind. . . . For gathering each
from unwearied flame, removing them elsewhere,
He shall send them, for His people s sake, to a life
different and aeonian to immortals." Orac. ii. 331.
ST. ISIDORE, \ 633. " When the Lord says,
Neither in this world nor in the world to come, He
shows that, for some, sins are there to be forgiven"
JOHANNES SCOTUS ERIGENA, f 883. " This, how
ever, we say, not that nature will be happy in all,
but that in all it will be set free from death and
o
misery.
THEOPHYLACT, f 1071. "Jesus did not say, Fear
Him who, after He hath killed, casteth into Gehenna,
but * hath power to cast into Gehenna. For the
sinners who die are not always cast into Gehenna ;
1 " Qui concremanda gesserit, darnnum feret, sed ipse salvus evolabit
ignibus." Paraphr. Ps. i.
2 De Off. Eccl. 18. " Demonstrat quibusdam illic diinittenda pec-
cata."
3 De Divisione Naturae, v. 3. As Origen was one of the greatest,
if not the greatest, in natural genius of all the Fathers, so Johannes
Scotus Erigena was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of all the
schoolmen. He was a man who towered above the heads of all his
contemporaries. As the fifth book of his De Divisione is in reality a pro
found and subtle argument for the universal restoration of mankind, I
would have given some ^extracts if space had permitted. He used
language which sounds like the ordinary view, but completely explains
away its significance, and says that only the phantasiae of evil will be
eternal in individual consciences. (De Div. Nat, v. 31.) He calls it
absurd to think that Christ only saved a fraction of mankind, v. 27.
24 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
but it remains in the power of God also to pardon.
He doth not, therefore, always, after He hath killed,
cast into Gehenna, but hath power to cast." Theoph.
in Luc. xii. 5.
ST. ANSELM, f 1109. "It is not just that God
should altogether suffer to perish His creature which
He hath made/ l
" God demands from no sinner more than he owes;
but since no one can pay as much as he owes, Christ
alone paid for all more than the debt due." 2
ST. THOMAS AQUINAS, f 1274. Referring to
Ps. Ixxvi. 8, which (like all the other passages
which seem to open large hopes of God s mercy
in the world to come) he explains away, he still
says, " This is understood of pity making some
relaxation, not of pity which entirely sets free, even
if it be extended to the damned. Whence David
does not say, He will restrain His pity from, but
1 in anger, because punishment will not be entirely
taken away, but even while punishment itself continues ^
mercy will work by diminishing it" Summa Theol.
Suppl. Pt. iii. Qu. xcix. Art. 3.
LUTHER, f 1546. " God forbid that I should limit
the time for acquiring faith to the present life. In
the depths of the divine mercy there may be oppor
tunity to win it in the future state."- Letter to Hansen
von Rechenberg, 1523. (Luther s Brief e, ii. 454.)
COELIUS SECUNDUS CURIO, f 1569, Professor of
Theology at Basle. "Whatever God wishes, that is
1 Cur De^ls Homo, ii. 4. The chapter is so remarkable that I here
append it almost entire. " ANS. Ex his est facile cognoscere quoniam
aut hoc de humana natura perficiet Deus quod incepit, aut in vanum
fecit tarn sublimem naturam ad tantum bonum. At si nihil pretiosius
agnoscitur Deus fecisse quam rationalem creaturaui ad gaudendum de
se, value alicnum est ab Eo ut ullam rationalem creaturam fenitus
perire sinat. Bos. Non potest aliter putare cor rationale."
2 " Deus non exigit ab ullo peccatore plus quam debet." Compare
the remark of Bishop Butler, that "Every one shall be equitably dealt
with." "Every merciful allowance shall be made, and no more
required of any one than might have been equitably expected of him."
Analogy, ii. 6.
II.] PAST AND PRESENT OPINIONS. 25
right and lawful to Him, and since He wishes to be
called rich in goodness and mercy, it follows that
He wishes to pour forth His goodness and pity on
the most, and not upon a few. Otherwise, why does
He wish to be called Father of Mercy and God of
all consolation ? and envious are all who wish so
great a good to belong to a few only." De Ampli-
ttidine Beati Regni, libri duo qiLibus demonstratur
mtmerum Salvandomm majorem multo futurum quam
reproborum. (At p. 25 he attributes the opinion of
the fewness of the saved to the devil.) 1
VALENTIN WEIGEL (t 1588) an orthodox mystic,
inclined to Curio s position.
SUAREZ, f 1617. Whether any one may be
delivered from hell is a disputed point, and one which
does not pertain to faith." De Peccatis, Disp. vii. 3.
SIMON EPISCOPIUS, f 1643. " Quomodo autem
Deus poenam hanc sensus, sive dolorem hunc aeter-
num inflicturus est Ipsi relinquendum est. Sufficit
enim si dicamus Deum justissimum et sapientissi-
mum judicem neminem puniturum praeter aut supra
modum. In assignando mo do Aeternitans fruatur
suo quisque judicio"
DENIS PETAU (PETAVIUS) f 1652. " De hac
damnatorum saltern hominum respiratione nihil
adhuc certi decretum est ab ecclesia ; ut propterea
non temere tamquam absurda sit explodenda sanctis-
simorum Patrum hsec opinio, quamvis a communi
sensu Catholicorum hoc tempore sit aliena." De
Angelis, iii. ad fin.
1 Curio was an Italian Reformer. His book is written in a tone of
sincere piety, but is not a treatise of much force. Although we are now
told that the doctrine that the majority are lost is no doctrine which the
Church requires, Curio was generally abused and persecuted for his
book. A certain Bishop Vergerius, a man apparently of questionable
antecedents, accused him to the senate of Basle for teaching that men
might be saved without Christ. It was easy for him to prove that
the charge was false. See his defence in Schelhorn s Amoenitates
Liierariat, xii. 592-627.
26 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
X
BISHOP JEREMY TAYLOR, f 1667. " I observe
that the primitive doctors were very willing to
believe that the mercy of God would find out
a period to the torment of accursed souls which
should be nothing but eternal destruction, called by
the Scripture the second death/ . . . Concerning this
doctrine of theirs, so severe, and yet so moderated
(which he attributes to Justin Martyr and Irenaeus),
" there is less to be objected than against the sup
posed fancy of Origen ; for it is a strange considera
tion to suppose an eternal torment to those to whom
it was never threatened, to those who never heard of
Christ .... to people surprised in a single crime,
to those that die young in their natural follies and
foolish lusts, to them that in a sudden gaiety and
excessive joy, to all alike ; to all infinite and eternal,
even to unwarned people ; and that this should be
inflicted by God, who infinitely loves His creatures,
who died for them, who pardons easily, and pities
readily, and excuses much, and delights in our being
saved, and would not have us die. . . ."
" It is certain that God s mercies are infinite, and
it is also certain that the matter of eternal torments
cannot truly be understood ; and when the school
men go about to reconcile the divine justice to that
severity, and consider why God punishes eternally
a temporal sin or a state of evil, they speak variously
and uncertainly and unsatisfyingly." Sermon on
Christ s Advent to Judgment. (Works, iv. 43.) 1
DR. HENRY MORE, 1688. " The sovereign of
these [divine attributes] was His goodness, the sum-
mity and flower, as I may so speak, of the Divinity r
and that particularly whereby the souls of men
became divine. . . . The measure of providence is
the divine goodness, which has no bounds but itself,
which is infinite. . . . As much as the light exceeds
the shadows, so much do the regions of happiness
1 On the views of Bishop Jeremy Taylor, see infra, p. 275.
II.] PAST AND PRESENT OPINIONS. 27
exceed those of sin and misery." ... " But this is
a marvel of marvels to me, that the goodness of God,
being infinite, the effects thereof should be so narrow
and finite as men commonly conceit ; if there be no
incapacity of the things themselves that thus straitens
them. That one such share of the divine goodness
should be active, but that the infinite remainder
thereof, as I may so speak, silent and unactive, is a
riddle, a miracle that does infinitely amaze me/
Divine Dialogues, pp. 479, 515.
RALPH CUDWORTH, \ 1688. After arguing that
" no man can endure the pain of sense eternally," and
that " material fire can prey only on the body/ he
adds, " For i you have recourse unto supernatural
means, and miracles, to conserve it, then I see no
reason why God may not as well change the course
of nature, and work a miracle for man s salvation as
well as for his destruction." MSS. on Future Punish
ment (Theological Review, April, 1878).
BISHOP RUST, 1661, author of De Veritate, and
successor of Bishop Jeremy Taylor, whose funeral
sermon he preached :
" Therefore we may be assured there are such
reserves in God s most wise and gracious providence
as will both vindicate His sovereign goodness and
wisdom from all just disparagement, and take such
course with and so dispose of all His creatures as
they shall never be in such a condition which, all
things considered, will be more eligible than never
to have been.
<{ For certainly if He had cast His eyes to all
possible conditions they [His creatures] might after
wards fall into, and seen this never-to-be-ended doom
of intolerable pain and anguish of body and mind,
the infinite compassionateness of His blessed nature
would scarcely have given so cheerful an approbation
to the works of His hands.
" I leave you to judge whether the whole subject-
28 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
%
matter in this periodical doom, the nature of that
fire and its fuel, the power of a spirit incorporate,
be not such as to ensure that it will be shorter than
some men do ; who, having got easy ways of assuring
themselves it shall not be their portion, do as little pity
those calamitous souls whose lot it may be, as they
darkly fancy God Himself does." " Letter concerning
the Opinions of Origen." The Phenix, i. p. 828.
BISHOP BURNET, f 1699. " Instead of stretching
the severity of justice by an inference, we may rather
venture to stretch the mercy of God, since that is the
attribute which of all others is most magnificently
spoken of in the Scriptures ; so that we ought to think
of it in the largest and most comprehensive manner."
On Art. XVIII.
SPENER, j- 1705. This learned and holy leader of
the Pietists expressed a hope that there would be
" better times for the lost in the distant future.
Schrockk, viii. 292.
DR. WHITE, f 1/12. Fellow of Trinity College,
Cambridge, Preacher to the Council of State,
Domestic Chaplain to Oliver Cromwell. 1
" As sin and death were not brought in at first,
so it is certain that they shall not be the end ; for
grace is the beginning of all, and the end must be
grace also." Restitution of All Things, p. 245.
SIR ISAAC NEWTON, f 1723. "The degree and
the duration of the torments of these degenerate and
anti-Christian people should be no other than that
which would be approved of by those angels who had
1 This learned and pious divine was so disturbed by his inability to
reconcile the ordinary teaching about endless torments with the goodness
and love of God, that he fell into a dangerous and almost fatal sickness.
" But in ft, at the worst, he had a beam of divine grace darted upon his
intellect with a sudden warm and lively impression, which gave him
immediately a new set of thoughts concerning God and His works, and
the way of His dealing with His offending creatures. . . . And upon
this he presently recovered." The account was given by himself to his
publisher, John Denis, who mentions it in the preface to the edition of
1779.
II.] PAST AND PRESENT OPINIONS. 29
ever laboured for their salvation, and that Lamb who
had redeemed them with His most precious blood."
On Rev. xiv. 10, 1 1.
BISHOP BUTLER, f 1752. "Virtue .... is mili
tant here, but it may combat with greater advantage
hereafter There may be scenes in eternity
lasting enough, and in every way adapted to afford
it a sufficient sphere of action. . . . And .... suppose
all this advantageous tendency of virtue to become
effect amongst one or more orders of vicious creatures
in any distant scene or period throughout the universal
kingdom of God ; this happy effect of virtue would
have a tendency, by way of example, and possibly in
other ways, to amend those of them who are capable
of amendment and being recovered to a just sense of
virtue" Analogy, i. 13.
"All shadow of injustice, and indeed all harsh
appearances in the various economy of Providence,
would be lost if we would keep in mind that every
merciful allowance shall be made, and no more
required of any one than what might have been
equitably expected/ Analogy, ii. 6.
"Our whole nature leads us to ascribe all moral
perfection to God, and to deny all imperfection of
Him. . . . And from hence we conclude that virtue
must be the happiness and vice the misery of every
creature, and that regularity and order and right cannot
but prevail finally in a universe under His govern
ment." Analogy, Introd.
MGR. DE PRESSY, Bishop of Boulogne, 1790 (an
eminent theologian). This passage (Matt xxv. 46),
and another in Scripture (Matt. viii. 12, " Non dixit
Christus ibi erit fletus perpetuus"\ " etant susceptible
de plusieurs sens, il convient, ce semble, de les inter
preter dans le sens le moins rigide, le plus favorable,
le plus conforme a cet autre texte sacre" sentite de.
Domino in bonitate, et a la principe du droit odia
restringenda ampliandt favores"
30 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
ARCHBISHOP WAKE, f 1737. " It may, with
much more agreement to the text (Matt. xii. 32),
follow that all men, be their sins what they may,
shall have grace of repentance whereby they may
be pardoned in the world to come, the blasphemer
against the Holy Ghost alone excepted." Discourse
of Purgatory, p. 2O 1(He adds that the Jews certainly
believed that, in the world to come, " some sins not
elsewhere remissible might be forgiven.")
DR. ISAAC WATTS, t 1/48- " There is not one
place of Scripture where the word death, as it was
first threatened in the law of innocency, necessarily
signifies a certain miserable immortality of the soul
either to Adam, the actual sinner, or to his pos
terity." The Ruin and Decay of Mankind, Ques
tion xi.
J. A. EMERY, Superior of St. Sulpice (an eminent
theologian), 1796. " Peut-on trouver mauvais que
nous rappelions des opinions innocentes qui vont a
nous faire exalter la mise"ricorde de Dieu et a favoriser
notre compassion pour ceux de nos freres qui ont eu
le ma-lheur de mourir dans la disgrace de Dieu."
Sur la Mitigation des Peines des Damnes.
DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON, f 1784. " The generality
of mankind are neither so obstinately wicked as
to deserve everlasting punishment, nor so good
as to merit being admitted into the society of the
blessed spirits ; and God is therefore graciously
pleased to allow a middle state, where they may be
purified by a certain degree of suffering." " Some of
the texts of Scripture on these subjects are, as you
observe, indeed strong, but they may admit of a
mitigated interpretation."
MACKNIGHT, t 1800. " Nevertheless, whether an
end is to be put to their misery, and at what period,
and in what manner it is to be ended, is not revealed,
and rests with God alone to determine."
SCHLEIERMACHER, t 1834. " Through the force
II,] PAST AND PRESENT OPINIONS. 31
of the Redemption a universal restoration of souls
will follow." Glaubenslehre, 163.
DR. CHALMERS, -f- 1847. " There may be some
mysterious conveyance, there necessarily must, as we
believe, an egress be found for God s goodness to the
sinner ; but towards the sin there is nought in God
but the most unsparing and implacable warfare."
On Matt. viii. n.
PERRONE, 1835. "All agree in saying that it is
too violent to admit at once into heaven all those
who only repented of their past evil life at the end,
and who indulged too much in the sensualities of
this life, since nothing defiled enters there ; also it
is too harsh to assign all such to eternal torments."
De Deo Creatore,p. 119, n. 7. (Comp. Dr. Newman,
Development, p. 388.)
F. W. ROBERTSON, f 1853. "He is gone. . . .
Why should we have wished him to remain a little
longer? Better surely as it is. And as to the eternal
question .... we know of him all that we can ever
know of any one removed beyond the veil which
shelters the unseen from the pryings of curiosity
that he is in the hands of the wise and loving.
Spirit has mingled with Spirit. A child more or
less loving has gone home. Unloved by his Father ?
Believe it who may, that will not I." Memoirs.
"In bodily awful intolerable torture we believe no
longer. At the idea of a bodily hell we have learned
to smile." Sermons, i. 133.
DEAN ALFORD, -f 1871. "The inference every
intelligent reader will draw from the fact [of Christ
preaching to the once-disobedient dead] : it is not
purgatory ; it is not universal restitution ; but it is one
which throws blessed light on one of the darkest enigmas
of divine justice : the cases where the final doom
seems infinitely out of proportion to the act which has
incurred it. And .... it would be presumption in
us to limit the occurrence or the efficacy of this
32 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
preaching. . . . Who shall say that the blessed act
was confined to them ?" On I Peter iil 19.
CANON KINGSLEY, \ 1875. "Can these dark
dogmas be true of a Father who bids us be perfect
as He is, in that He sends His sun to shine on the
evil and the good, and His rain on the just and
unjust ? Or of a Son who so loved the world that
He died to save the world, and surely not in vain ?
" These questions . . . educated men and women
of all classes and denominations- orthodox, be it
remembered, as well as unorthodox are asking, and
will ask more and more until they receive an answer.
And if we of the clergy cannot give them an answer
which accords with their conscience and reason, if we
tell them that the words of Scripture and the integral
doctrines of Christianity demand the same notions of
moral retribution as were current in the days when
men racked criminals, burned heretics alive, and be
lieved that every Mussulman whom they slaughtered
in a crusade went straight to endless torments,
then evil times will come both for the clergy and the
Christian religion for many a year henceforth."
Water of Life, p. 71.
REV. DR. GUTHRIE, f 1873. "My belief is that in
the end there will be a vastly larger number saved
than we have any conception of. What sort of earthly
government would that be where more than half the
subjects were in prison? I cannot believe that the
government of God will be like that." Life, p. 773.
DEAN MlLMAN, f 1868. "To the eternity (end
lessness) of hell torments there is and ever must be
notwithstanding the peremptory decree of dogmatic
theology, and the reverential dread in many minds of
tampering with what seems to be the language of the
New Testament a tacit repugnance." History of
Latin Christianity, vi. 253,
II.] PAST AND PRESENT OPINIONS. 33
To these testimonies of good men and great
theologians most of them of unquestioned ortho
doxy of many ages down to the present day, I add
the testimonies of a few out of very many eminent
living divines who have spoken on these subjects
in accents very different from those of the popular
theology.
DR. PUSEY. " But their minds may be more dis
posed to believe in a preparation of souls by which
.... they may cast off their slough and, amid
whatever process of purifying it may please God to
employ, and after whatever time, be admitted to the
Beatific Vision of the All Holy God." What is of
Faith, &c. p. 121.
REV. DR. LITTLEDALE. " The answer which the
popular theology has been tendering for centuries past
will not be accepted much longer. ... I disclaim any
desire to uphold that theology, which I have never
aided in propagating. . . . The popular theology is a
very ineffective deterrent from sin. . . . The Scriptures
of the New Testament contain two parallel and often
seemingly contradictory sets of statements as to the
last things .... one of which does make for the
popular theology, and another which more than
implies a full restoration and the final victory of good
over evil. . . . An attempt was made to procure
a formal condemnation of Origen s doctrines on this
head .... but the effort failed, and the question
remains an open one to this day. . . . There is great
significance in the fact that in the simplest of our
symbols, the Apostles Creed, and in the most uni^
versal of them, the Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan, we
are called on to express our belief in the life, but
not in the death, to come. 1 . . . This view [that of
1 "And although the Athanasian hymn may bbvi ously be cited
adversely, it is to be noticed that it restricts itself in its closing verses to
the citation of die exact words of Scripture, and does not undertake to
gloss them for us." ///.
D
34 MERCY AND JUDGMENT.
endless torments ] puts God on a moral level with
the devisers of the most savagely malignant revenge
known to history the deed known in Italy as la
gran vendetta. . . . The horror with which we read
of such a crime ought to make us all careful lest we
should give our assent to the teaching which predi
cates it, only on an infinitely vaster scale, of the just
and merciful God." Contemporary Review, 1878.
REV. H. B. WILSON. " The mode, extent, and
duration of future punishments were open questions
in the primitive Church, and the words everlasting
fire [i.e. aionion pur] and similar expressions were
employed by persons who formed very different and
even opposite conceptions as to the nature of it."
Speech, p. 104.
CARDINAL NEWMAN. " It seems to me that you
do not deny eternal punishment, but you aim at
withdrawing from so awful a doom vast multitudes
who have popularly been considered to fall under it,
and to substitute for it in their case a purgatorial
punishment extending (as in the case of the antedilu
vians) through long ages ; at the same time avoiding
the word purgatory, because of its associations.
There is nothing, I think, in this view incompatible
with the faith of Catholics" Letter to Dr. Plumptre,
July 26, 1871, Contemporary Review.
BISHOP MARTENSEN OF SEELAND, 1870. "As
no soul leaves this present existence in a fully
complete and prepared state, we must suppose that
there is an Intermediate State, a realm of progressive
development, in which souls are prepared and matured
for the last judgment. . . . The intermediate state, in a
purely spiritual sense, must be a purgatory deter
mined for the purifying of the soul." Christliche
Dogmatik, 276, on Der Mittelzustand in Todtenreich.
REV. J. LLEWELLYN DAVIES. " Whether there is
such a thing as an ultimate extremity of eternal
death/ who shall say? What we are now concerned
II.] PAST AND PRESENT OPINIONS. 35
with is this, that the dissolution of the body is no
where spoken of as the beginning or as the fixing of
this state. It belongs to this life, in which escape
and forgiveness are possible, as well as to the next. "
Forgiveness after Death, p. 6.
BISHOP FORBES OF BRECHIN, 1868. "The
deep instincts of humanity, combined of pity
and of justice, demand a belief in some punish
ment, but deprecate eternal punishment in the case
of many who go out of this world ; there such
teaching as has been cited from the Early Church
comes in to our aid. Nay, not such as these poor
outcasts only, whom men have most in their eyes and
their minds, because their sins are more tangible and
coarse, but and even yet more than these rich and
educated men and women who have more light than
they, yet who, to outward appearance, live mere
natural lives, immersed in worldliness, yet not alto
gether, it is hoped, separated from God, are, as they
are, seemingly ripe neither for heaven nor for hell."
On the Articles, ii. 343.
<: The true doctrine of which the opinion condemned
in Article XXII. is an exaggeration and excess, is
founded on the tenderest and deepest sympathies of
our common human nature. Mankind will not endure
the thought that, at the moment of death, all concern
for those loved ones who are riven from us by death
comes to an end. Nay, we go so far as to say that
. . . . though death puts an end to each man s
probation, so far as he is concerned, yet the Infinite
Love pursues the soul beyond the grave, and there has
dealings with it" On the Articles, ii. 311.
BISHOP MOORHOUSE OF MELBOURNE. "The
4 1st and 42nd Articles (against Millenarians and
Universalism) were withdrawn because the Church,
knowing that men like Justin Martyr, Irenaeus,
and Tertullian were Millenarians, and men like
Origen, Clemens of Alexandria, and Gregory of
D 2
36 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
Nyssa were Universalists, refused to jdogmatise on
such questions. From these facts it appears to me
that we are entitled to draw three important con
clusions : First, we are at liberty to think and teach
about the future of the wicked as we believe that
Holy Scripture teaches us. Secondly, varying in
terpretations are not only allowable, but inevitable,
upon mere matters of opinion. Thirdly, if perchance
we hold the larger hope, as I will not conceal from
you that for twenty years and more I have done, we
shall yet be ready to acknowledge the obscurity
which surrounds it, and the right of any of our
brethren to think and teach differently from our
selves." Speech before Church Assembly, September
17, 1878.
DEAN CHURCH. "I should be disloyal to Him
whom I believe in as the Lord of Truth if I doubted
that honest seeking should at last find Him. Even if
it do not find Him here, man s destiny stops not at
the grave, and many, we may be sure, will know Him
there who did not know Him here."
DEAN STANLEY. " To Gregory of Nyssa, and
through him to the Council of Constantinople, the
clause which speaks of the life of the world to come
must have included the hope that the Divine justice
and mercy are not controlled by the power of evil,
that sin is not eternal, and that in that world to
come punishment will be corrective and not final,
and will be ordered by a Love and Justice, the height
and depth of which it is beyond the narrow thoughts
of man to conceive." Christian Institutions, p. 335,
REV. PROFESSOR CHALLIS, M.A., F.R.S. 1 " May
it not hence (from the phrase aionia kolasis] be
argued that, as among men the punishment of the
guilty has not for its purpose the infliction of pain
and penalty, but rather is the means employed to the
end that laws may be obeyed, so the end of divine
1 Plumian Professor of Astronomy, Cambridge.
II.] PAST AND PRESENT OPINIONS. 37
punishment is for correction, and for giving effect to
and establishing the law of universal righteousness ?
Scriptural Doctrine of Immortality, p. 71.
REV. PROFESSOR PLUMPTRE, D.D. " Does this
imply that repentance, and therefore pardon, may
come in the state that follows death ? We know not,
and ask questions that we cannot answer ; but the
words at least check the harsh dogmatic answer in
the negative. If one sin only is excluded from for
giveness in that coming age the darkness behind the
veil is lit up with at least a gleam of hope." On
Matt. xii. 32 (in Bishop Ellicott s Commentary],
ARCHDEACON REICHEL, D.D. "With this as
surance [that Christ is the propitiation for the sins
of the whole world], and with the hope that it
holds out in prospect ; with this converging testi
mony of three of the apostles, men so different,
and yet all coinciding on this point, let us console
ourselves .... looking forward to that final stage
in the divine government when death itself shall be
abolished .... and when, God being All in All, the
whole creation shall rest on the never-ending fruition
of the divine." Sermon in St. Patrick j, June 28, 1877.
GuiLLAUME MONOD. " L entendez-vous, chre-
tiens ? Le Juge du monde est 1 Agneau qui porte le
peche du monde ; sa colere c est la colere de TAgneau.
Que nous faut-il de plus ? O mon ame, sois tranquille
et attends en paix le jour des vengeances eternelles.
C est le jour de Christ, et ce sont les vengeances de
Christ. C est done un jour de salut^ et ce sont des
vengeances d amour. Juge du monde parais et frappe
tes ennemis ; ils tomberont a tes pieds, aneantis,
aneantis par I amour ; et a leur place il ne se trouvera
plus que des chretiens pleurant sur leurs crimes et
sur tes douleurs, et repetant avec tout 1 univers : Dieu
est amour." Le jfugement dernier, p. 28.
REV. PROFESSOR J. B. MAYOR. " It is impossible
for one who has learnt that the end of punishment,
38 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
when it passes beyond the elementary stage of self-
preservation, is not revenge, but reformation, to believe
that divine punishment can be conducted on lower
principles than men have attained to ; it is impos
sible for one who has learnt that goodness cannot be
happy in presence of the vice and misery of others,
except in so far as it may hope to convert the vicious
and to comfort the miserable ; it is impossible for such
a one to believe in the happiness of heaven co-exist
ing with the sin and misery of hell." Contemporary
Review, vol. xxxii. 1878.
" CHURCH AND WORLD," i. 246 (a book presented
by Bishop Wilberforce to Convocation in 1866).
" The Church has never in any way indicated for
how many, or for how few, eternal punishment may
be reserved ; and the doctrine of purgatory, or rather
any doctrine of purgatory, covers an indefinite portion
of the ground on which the subject can be discussed.
It was first brought before me by the death of a
school girl about twelve years old. . . . There was
nothing about her indicating any devotion of the
soul to God, yet the notion that she was gone to
endless torment was utterly inadmissible. . . . Re
united Christendom will one day, no doubt, define
the doctrine more categorically, and probably the
legitimate development of the truth contained in
Our Lord s descent into hell will furnish -a solution to
all difficulties."
A. J. BERESFORD-HOPE, M. A. , M.P.--" All reason,
all experience, all Scripture, unite in the teaching
that the Divine work of teaching goes on behind as
well as before the veil." Contemporary Review^ vol.
xxxii. 1878.
REV. T. GRIFFITH, Prebendary of St. Paul s.
After quoting Is. xxv. 6, Ixv. 17-25, Hos. xiii. 14,
Rom. viii. 26, i Cor. xv. 25, 53, Eph. i. 9, Col. i. 20,
he adds, " All things are perfect in their type. But
they shall be carried on at last into perfect harmony
II.] PAST AND PRESENT OPINIONS. 39
with their original idea. The evil, therefore, which
now marks them is subordinate to their ultimate per-
fectionments. And then cometh the end ; when the
Son shall have subdued all things to the Father ;
when He shall have put down all opposing rule and
authority and power ; when He shall have negatived
the negatives, and reconciled the antagonism through
which things travel onwards to their ultimate affirma
tion and harmony; when the whole scheme of the
Father for all His creatures shall reach its consum
mation, and God Himself be all in all."- -Funda
mentals, p. 212.
These passages, I say, represent all for which I
have pleaded, and sometimes even more. They are
taken from very different writers, and from writers who,
even on this subject, probably differed very widely from
each other. This only renders them more valuable
as showing the great common basis of Eternal Hope
that is of Hope for a future World by which they
were all at least so far animated that the utterance
of their hearts at their best and loftiest moments in
some instances even led them to say more than they
would have always ventured to formulate in their
systematic creeds. I quote their authority, not as
proving the truth of the views which they have
expressed, but only as proving that those views may
be held, and in all ages have been held, not only in
abditis fidei but openly, by great teachers and faithful
Christians. I do not think that one of the passages
which I have quoted accords with the crude tenets of
the popular theology.
I might even produce an array of very great and
eminent authorities Saints and Fathers and Bishops
and Archbishops arid eminent Divines who have gone
very much farther than I have done, and have pleaded
for far more definite results, some of them indicating
40 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
the ultimate extinction of the wicked, some implying
a belief in the ultimate deliverance of" all.
Again I repeat I am not a Universalist. If I could
see in Scripture, or in any source of divine teaching,
grounds sufficiently decisive to authorise my conscience
to embrace that blessed hope for all, I would embrace
it with all my heart, and with unspeakable gratitude.
Any man who would not do so any man who would
wisk that any should perish, were it possible to save
them must have a mind utterly alien from that of
Him whose mercy endureth for ever whose tender
mercies are over all His works who loveth not the
death of a sinner who willeth all men to be saved
and to come to a knowledge of the truth who while
we were yet sinners sent His Son to die for us. Yet
however intensely a good and holy man would grasp at
such a hope however fiend-like must be the nature
of that theologian who would not so grasp it, could
he see it to be permissible 1 yet, while I reverently
cherish every word and sentence of Scripture which seems
to open to all some distant gleam of possible deliver
ance ; while I cling to the hope that the restitution
of all things, and the aeon wherein, as Scripture
tells us, God shall be " all things in all," may have a
wider meaning than men have thought, yet, out of
reverence for those other words of Scripture which
seem to throw uncertainty on such an expectation ;
and also out of perplexity respecting the present
existence of misery and evil ; and further out of
inability to judge of the possible power of resistance
in man s free will ; and lastly out of willingness to
respect the preponderant opinion of Christian
divines, I have never been able to say, even in my
most secret thoughts, that I believe that every single
1 " He is not a Christian, he is not a man, he hath put off the
tenderness and bowels of a man, he hath lost humanity itself, he hath
not so much charity as Dives expressed in hell, that cannot readily cry
out, This is good news if it be true. " JER. WHITE, Restoration of
All Things^ p. 9.
II.] PAST AND PRESENT OPINIONS. 41
soul of man will ultimately be saved. The Church
has never in any Catholic Creed categorically con
demned that view ; nor has she ever excluded from
her pale those who have held it or leaned to it ; nor
(as I shall try to prove) has she ever repudiated it
in any oecumenical decree. Far be it from me, then,
to echo the fierce invectives of those who, unlike St.
Augustine, have raved rather than written against
these "our party of pity." I cannot embrace the
hopes of the Universalists ; but I am not called upon
to utter a fervid Amen if others like to hurl against
them either the Damnamus of Augsburg or the
Anathema of Trent. For consider these utterances
few out of many which I might adduce of men who
held the positions of pillars of the Church, and who
in all ages have asked, uncondemned, for mitigations
far larger than those for which I have asked of the
" terrible decree " of popular Calvinism, or of its partial
survival in the current teaching.
ST. GREGORY OF NYSSA, f 395- Among other
passages to the same effect, he speaks of Christ
by His Incarnation " freeing both mankind from
their wickedness, and healing the very inventor of
wickedness," i.e. the devil. 1
" For it is necessary that at some time the evil
should be removed utterly and entirely from the
realm of being. . . . For since by its very nature
evil cannot exist apart from free choice, when all
free choice becomes in the power of God, shall not
evil advance to utter abolition, so that no receptacle
for it at all be left ? "Dial, de Anim. et Resurrect?
L Orat. Catechet. 26. r6v re &v6pwTrov rrjs Ka/c/a? eAevflepw;/ al avrbv
r}>v TTJS KaKias evperty lw/j.vos. For further remarks on his teaching,
see infra, pp. 255-262.
J XPV y&P Tfd-VT"n Ka\ ira.vTws e^cupeOrivai TTOTC rb KaKbv e/c rot; OVTOS. . . .
^TtSi7 yctp e|w rrjs Trpoaipfffews }] Kaitia. e?i/at (pvcriv OVK %et, Sraj/ iraffa.
irpoaipfffts fv rip 0e<2 yevrjrai et s TravreA^ oLtpaVKT^v TJ Kaicia /U.TJ %p7j<ret
T(JJ ^TjSei/ ai>T7}s airoXeKbOrivai 8oxeToj> ; -De Anim. et Resiirrtct.
ii. 66l.)
42 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP,
Since, however, it is necessary that the stains
which have been implanted into the soul from sin,
should be taken away by some process of healing,
therefore in the present life the medicine of virtue is
applied to it for the healing of such wounds ; but if
it remains unhealed, the healing is reserved in the life
beyond Orat. Catech^
ST. GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS, f 389. " Perhaps
there they [who go their own way, not Christ s]
shall be baptised with fire, the last baptism, and more
laborious, and more enduring, which devoureth what
is coarse like hay, and consumeth the lightness of
all evil." Orat. xxxix. I. 2
" I know also of a fire, not cleansing, but also
punishing; whether that fire of Sodom which God
raineth on all sinners, or that which was reserved for
the devil and his angels, or that which goeth before
the face of the Lord, and which burns up His
enemies, and that which is more formidable than
these, which is joined with the sleepless tortures,
which is not quenched, but is unending throughout
eternity with the wicked. For all these belong to
destructive power, unless any one wishes to under
stand them too in a milder way, and worthily of
Him who punisheth" Orat. xl. 3
ras ^(pveias e| ajAapriuf /ojAiSas 8ia TIVOS
larpeias Qaipedyvai TOVTOV IrcKCV ei/ /j.ev rf) Trapouary o>rj rb TTJS aperTjs
<pa.pfj.aKov els depaTreiav rtav TOIOVTWV TrpoTere^Tj TpavftdToev, ct Se dOtpd-
TreuTOS jtteVei ez/ rtp /J.CT& raura /3ta> TCtyueuerai rj Oepaireia. Or. Catechet.
8. (Of p. ii. 4930
1 Dr. Pusey says that the allusion to I Cor. iii. 13, and so to tem
porary punishment, is manifest ; but Chrysostom, Jerome, Photius,
Theophylact, &c., understood the passage of the fires of hell. See
Petav. /. c.
3 O?5a Kal irvp ou Ka.Oapr SJpLov a\\a KoXaffr-^piov e^re Kal ^,oSo/j.LriK6v
K.r.\. irdvTa yap ravra a^az/KrTi/fJjs eVri Suvo^iews 6t /XT] rep (ptXov KO.V-
ravQa voeTv TOVTO <pi\a,i/Opctnr<jTepoi/ Kal rot) KO\O.OVTOS e7ra|ia>y. Both
the Benedictine editors and Dr. Pusey (p. 212), try to explain away the
obvious expression of a possible hope involved in these last words ; but
Petavius frankly says (iii. 7> J 4) that "it is manifest that in this place
St. Gregory is speaking of the punishments of the damned, and doubted
IL] PAST AND PRESENT OPINIONS. 43
" VERY MANY " (NONNULLI IMMO QUAMPLURIMI).
St. Augustine, while meeting them with arguments
singularly inconclusive, admits that " some, nay, very
many, with human feelings compassionate the eter
nal punishment of the damned, and their continual
torments without intermission, and so believe not
that it will take place not indeed in the way of
opposing themselves to the divine Scriptures, but by
softening, according to their own feelings, all the
hard sayings, and by turning into a more gentle
meaning such things in them as they think to be
said rather to excite terror than as though true.
For * God forgetteth not, they say, to be gracious,
neither will He in His anger shut up His tender
mercies." [After trying to explain away the force
of this text, St. Augustine adds] " But they may
judge, if this pleases them, that the pains of the
damned are at certain intervals of time in some
measure mitigated -" Enchiridion, c. in.
ST. JEROME, j- 420. " As we believe that the tor
ments of the devil, and of all demons, and of the
impious who have said in their heart that there is no
God, are eternal, so of sinners, and of the impious
who are still Christians, whose works are to be proved
and purged in the fire, we think that the judge s sen
tence will be moderate and mingled with clemency."
In. Is. 1
<l If however Origen denies that reasonable crea
tures are to be destroyed, and attributes penitence to
whether they would be eternal, or rather to be estimated in accordance
with the mercy of God, so as at some time to be terminated." And
this language is very remarkable, because if this last sentence had not
been added the passage would have been always quoted as a most
decisive proof that this eminently great Father and theologian held,
without any modification, the severest form of the doctrine of endless
torments. For the views of the Gregories, see infra, pp. 249-262.
1 " Sic peccatorum atque impiorum et tamen Christianorum quorum
opera in igne probanda sunt atque purganda, moderatam arbitrarnur et
mixtam clementiae sententiam judicis." Jfr. in Jin. comment, in
Esaiam.
44 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
the devil, what is that to us, who say that the devil
and his servants, and the impious, perish eternally,
and that Christians, if they have been overtaken
by deathy are to be saved after punishments ? "
In Pelag. 1
ST. MARTIN, f 397 (QUOTED BY SULPICIUS
SEVERUS, De Vita B. Martini, p. 488, ed. 1647).-
Addressing the devil, St. Martin is reported to have
said, "If thou thyself, O wretched one, wouldst desist
from the persecution of man, and wouldst even now
repent of thy deeds when the Day of Judgment is
very near, I, with true assurance in the Lord, would
promise to thee the pity of Christ."
[This is an anticipation by centuries of Burns s
famous
" Oh, wad ye taV a thocht and men !
Ye aiblins might I dinna ken
Still hae a stake 1
except that the mediaeval saint speaks with far more
confidence than the Ayrshire ploughman.]
PETER LOMBARD, \ 1160. " That some sins are
remitted after this life, Christ shows in the Gospel
(Matt. xii. 32). Whence it may be understood, as
holy doctors teach, that some sins are pardoned in
the future. . . . But in that cleansing fire some are
purged more slowly, some more speedily, according as
they have loved those perishing things less or more
Those who build gold, silver, precious stones,
are secure from either fire : not only from that eternal
fire which will torture the impious for ever, but even
from that fire of emendation in which some will
be purged who are to be saved." Sentent. iv. diet.
xxi. A.B.
During the middle ages the hopes afforded by the
doctrine of Purgatory sufficed, amid " the deep
slumber of decided opinions," to make men tolerate
1 Hieron. In Pelag. i. On the Views of St. Jerome, see further,
infra, pp. 281-287.
II.] PAST AND PRESENT OPINIONS. 45
the lurid pictures of " Hell," as Dante, for instance,
paints them. Yet both St. Thomas Aquinas and
Durandus show us that, even in their day, absolute
Universalism was not unknown. It was the opinion of
the school of Gilbert of Poictiers (St. Thos. Aqu. Sent.
iv. 45, 2) and " aliquorum juristarum " (Durandus).
ARCHBISHOP TILLOTSON, f 1694. "It can in
no sense be said to agree with the justice of God to
punish temporary crimes with eternal punishments,
because if justice preserves a proportion between
offences, between temporal sins and eternal punish
ments, there can be no manner of proportion. And
if it be so hard to reconcile this with the justice of
God, it will be much more to explain how it can
possibly consist with that infinite mercy and goodness
which we so much ascribe to Him." -Semi. xxv. 1
RICHARD COFFIN, f 1655. "God hath declared in
Scripture, both by the mouths of the prophets and
apostles, the salvation of all men, without respect of
persons (i Tim. ii. 4-6). Thus we may say, Lord,
who hath resisted Thy will ? Let Thy will be done.
Paul says that as by one man death came to all, so
by One life and salvation to all ; else Christ were
not sufficient to save all that Adam lost." TrutJis
Testimony.
J. ALFORD, M.A., FELLOW OF ORIEL, 1644.-
The title of the book was The Church Triumphant,
a comfortable treatise of the amplitude and largeness of
Christ s kingdom ; wherein is proved by Scripture and
Reason that the number of tJie damned is inferior to
that of the elect.
GERARD WINSTANLEY, f 1669. " He will dwell
in the whole creation in time, and so deliver all
mankind out of their fall." Mystery of God, p. 9.
1 His view was that God reserves a right to withdraw His own
threatenings, as very remarkably in Jonah iv. 1 1 ; and all the
more because His promises also are understood quite conditionally.
Num. xiv. 34 ; i Sam. ii. 30.
46 MERC Y AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
R. STAFFORD, f 1693. u With righteousness
shall He judge the. world, and, the people with equity
(Ps. Ixxxix. 9). Now equity is a mild thing which
doth state, moderate, and adjust a matter. And then
after all God will reserve mercy even after judgment
and condemnation ; for that is its proper place
(Is. Ivii. 1 8, Rom. xi. 32)." Some Thoughts of the
Life to Come.
BISHOP STILLINGFLEET, f 1699. " Comminations
do only speak the delictum poenae and the necessary
obligation to punishment ; but therein God doth not
bind Himself as in absolute promises: the reason is
because commination confers no right to any which
absolute promises do, and therefore God is not bound
to necessary performance of what He threatens."
Ol. Sacr. i. 222.
REV. DR. THOMAS BURNET (MASTER OF THE
CHARTERHOUSE, AUTHOR OF THE Theory of the
Earth), -\ 1715. "Several things have occurred to
me ... by which I am sensible that others have
been persuaded, as well as myself, that God neither
wills nor can endure the perpetual affliction and tor
ment of His own creatures." De Statu Mortuorum,
p. 343.
DISSERTATION ON FUTURE PUNISHMENTS (printed
with Barrow s Sermons and Fragments in 1834).
" It has never been well resolved to the satisfaction
of human understanding how such temporal offences
as are committed by men in this world under so many
temptations and infirmities of nature . . . should be
justly punishable with an eternity of extreme tor
ments, which is a severity of justice far above all
severity of cruelty in the worst of men. . . . The
doctrine has so plain an appearance of repugnancy
to the essential goodness of God, and is by human
reason so hardly reconcilable thereto, that it is not
to be accepted on less terms than plain demonstra
tion from Scripture." [This treatise, Whether the
II.] PAST AND PRESENT OPINIONS. 4?
damned after the last judgment shall live in ever
lasting torments, or be utterly destroyed, in which
the author accepts the latter alternative is not
Barrow s, and he was unconvinced by it; but in the
margin he calls it " admodum ingeniosus, dilucidus,
et candidus."]
DR. DODDRIDGE, f 1751. "We cannot pretend to
decide a priori, or previous to the event, so far as to
say that the punishments of hell must and will be
certainly eternal." Theolog. Lect. prop. I and 3.
BENGEL, ( 1752. " Ut sit Deus omnia in omnibus.
Significatur hie novum quiddam sed idem summum
et pererme. Omnia (adeoque omnes] sine ulla interpel-
latione, nulla creatura obstante, nullo hoste obtur-
bante, erunt subordinata Filio, Filius Patri. Hoc
reXo? est, hie finis, et apex." Gnomon, p. 760.
BISHOP NEWTON, -f- 1761. "Nothing is more con-
trarient to the divine nature and attributes than for
God to bestow existence on any beings whose destiny
He foreknows must terminate in wretchedness with
out recovery." Dissert, on the Final State of Man.
WILLIAM LAW, 1766 (AUTHOR OF THE Serious
Call], " As for the purification of all human nature
either in this world or some after ages, I fully believe
it." Letters, p. 175.
" Every number of destroyed sinners must, through
the all-working, all-redeeming love of God, which
never ceaseth, come at last to know that they had
lost, and have found again, such a God of love as
this."
REV. CAPEL BERROW, M.A., RECTOR OF Ros-
SINGTON, 1772. " The endless misery of the majority
cannot be made reconcilable with any one attribute
of the Deity whatever." Theolog. Dissert, p. n.
J. A. EBERHARD, 1778, PROFESSOR OF PHILO
SOPHY AT HALLE. "Punishment, being an evil,
cannot be employed by a good Being unless for ends
whose goodness is greater than the evils, and which
48 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
could not be obtained without inflicting them. God
punishes not for the common good only, but also for
the reform of the sufferer, which being accomplished,
punishment has no further use." Neue Apologie der
Sokrates.
ARCHDEACON PALEY, -f- 1805. At college he
proposed as a thesis to be supported, " Aeternitas
poenarum contradicit divinis attributis" The Master
of his college, Dr. Thomas, Dean of Ely, took
alarm, and by the advice of Bishop Watson he in
serted into the thesis the word non. Yet the books
which he praises and the expressions which he uses,
show that he differed from the popular theology, and
he ends his Natural Theology by bidding us all to
await death " under a firm and settled persuasion
that, living and dying, we are God s ; that life is passed
in His constant presence ; that death resigns us to
His merciful dispensations." He also says, " It has
been said that it can never be a just economy of
Providence to admit one part of mankind into heaven
and condemn the other to hell, since there must be
very little to choose between the worst man who is
received into heaven and the worst man who is ex
cluded. And how know we, it might be answered,
but that there may be as little to choose in their
conditions ? -Moral Philosophy, i. 7.
REV. DR. HEY (NORRISIAN PROFESSOR OF DIVI
NITY, CAMBRIDGE), f l8l 5- He expresses a hope
" that all men will be happy ultimately, when punish
ment has done its work in reforming principles and
conduct" (Lectures, iii. 154). And again, " The mind
of man seeketh for some resource, and finds one only
in conceiving that some temporary punishment after
death may purify the soul from its moral pollution,
and make it at last acceptable to a Deity infinitely
pure."
DR. JOHN YOUNG (AUTHOR OF Creator and Crea
tion}. " With great reverence I venture to express the
II.] PAST AND PRESENT OPINIONS. 49
conviction that if the Great Being foreknew ... that
eternal misery, conscious suffering, would be the doom
of even a single creature, it is incredible that He
would have given existence to that creature." He
calls such a notion as " endless conscious suffering
" inconceivable and unendurable by any sound and
sane conscience."
DR. CHEYNE, f 1742. "Some individuals may be
delivered sooner, some later, according as their expia
tion and purification is perfected ; and at last the
whole system and all its inhabitants must naturally
and necessarily, but harmoniously and analogically,
and according to general laws, undergo some great
and general crise, and an universal gaol-delivery will be
brought about, but when and how this will be accom
plished is beyond conjecture." Discourses, p. 27.
BISHOP EWING, f 1873. "With me this final
victory [of good over evil] is not a matter of specula
tion at all, but of absolute faith ; and to disbelieve
it would be for me to cease altogether either to trust
or to worship God."
PROF. REUSS. " If the highest glory consists in
being all in all, it is plain that it would be a flaw in
the perfection of God were He anything less than
this ; it would be a detraction from His glory if in
some, and those the greater number of mankind, He
should be nothing. In religion, conscience, no less
than the logical sense, protests against any such
imperfection in God and in the system." The ologie
Chretienne, ii. 239.
CANON WESTCOTT, D.D. " And I, if I be lifted
up, will draw all men unto Me (John xii. 32). All
men : the phrase must not be limited i-n any way.
It cannot mean merely Gentiles as well as Jews/
or the elect, or all who believe. We must receive
it as it stands (Rom. v. 18, viii. 32 ; 2 Cor. v. 15 ;
Eph. i. 10 ; i Tim. ii. 6 ; Heb. ii. 9, 6 ; I John ii. 2).
The remarkable reading all things (jravra, Vulg.
E
So MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
^t
omnia) points to a still wider application of Redemp
tion (Col. i. 20)." Speaker s Commentary, New Test.
ii. 183.
REV. S. MlNTON, M.A. "We reject that tradi
tion of man which has obscured the glory of Christ,
reduced to an unmeaning form the doctrine that
God is Love, produced a frightful amount of infidelity,
robbed the Law of its terrors by making it threaten
sinners with what they are sure will never be exe
cuted, incalculably weakened the saving power of the
Gospel, and damaged the believer s whole spiritual
constitution by putting upon it an unnatural strain
that God never intended it to bear." Unworthy of
Eternal Life, p. 29.
REV. PREBENDARY CONSTABLE, M. A. " The
foundation of this theory J! [that future punishment
consisted of eternal life spent in eternal pain] " was
a mere fancy, that which gave continuity to its parts
was but a rope of sand." Future Punishment, p. 9.
Such views are by no means confined to theologians
of the Romish and Anglican Churches. They have
been openly held, and are still held, in one form or
other by some of the most learned and eloquent
divines of Nonconformist communities.
Thus, among the Baptists, the REV. S. Cox, Editor
of the Expositor and of the Expositor s Notebook,
writes in his keen and able book, Salvator Mundi :
" The main object of this book is to encourage
those who * faintly trust the larger hope to commit
themselves to it wholly and fearlessly, by showing
them that they have ample warrant for it in the
Scriptures of the New Testament."
Again, the REV. J. BALDWIN BROWN, who recently
was President of the Independent Conference :
"And now that we are emerging from the terrible
xi.] PAST AND PRESENT OPINIONS. 51
shadow of the doctrine, we look with a shudder, and
ask ourselves how was it possible that Christian men
should believe it, and should connect such unutterable
horrors with the administration of a Being who has
given to us in Calvary the measure of His love."
Contemp. Rev. i. p. 162.
The REV. R. W. DALE of Birmingham, the vigorous
and thoughtful leader of the Independents in that
town, says : " The traditional theory of the endless
ness of sin and of suffering has lost its authority. . . .
The appeal to fear is being silently dropped. Augus
tine said that it very seldom or never happens that a
man comes to believe in Christ except under the in
fluence of terror. This sweeping statement ... is
flagrantly inconsistent with all that we know of the
rise of Christian faith and hope in the souls of men
in our own times." Preface to Dr. Petavel, p. 7.
REV. T. P. FORSYTH, M.A., another able and elo
quent Congregationalist, says : u Punish a man for his
sins, that is just : punish him for ages. . . that may be
just : but make no end of punishing him for that sin,
reduce him from a man to a devil, let him become for
ever vile, that is not just. The only justice to a sinner
in a case like our human one is mercy, is to make his
punishment finite according to his works . . . and of
such a nature as not simply to torment the man, but
to drive him back to the way of God."
The REV. EDWARD WHITE, the devout and
thoughtful author of Life in Christ, writes : " It is
vain to deny that the honest belief of misery to last
through Eternity upon all the unsaved . . . endan
gers the faith of every thoughtful Christian who
accepts it." Life in Christ , p. 463.
The REV. HENRY ALLON, D.D., writes : " It does
not follow, however, that finality of moral condition
implies unending being or unending consciousness of
retribution. There is no moral necessity to suppose
this, while both the finality and the symbolism are
E 2
52 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
^
such as would probably find their adequate interpre
tation in the simple idea of finality the ending of
sin and of sinful being : whether by the natural cessa
tion of the latter which seems the most plausible or
by other processes, we are not told." Contemporary
Review}-
Once again, similar views are expressed, often
extending into Universalism and Conditional Im
mortality, by .an ever-increasing number of theo
logians and pastors in the Reformed Churches of
Europe, and also among the Roman Catholics, to
whom however the belief in Purgatory has supplied a
sensible mitigation of the full horrors of our popular
theology.
Thus M. Guillaume Monod, the venerable brother
of Adolphe Monod, has for twenty years preached
that all men would be saved. 2 Pere Ravignan (f 1858),
one of the most eloquent preachers in France,
advocated views in accordance with my own, and
said that they predominate even in the Society
of Jesus. The leading preacher in the French
Protestant Church has adopted similar opinions.
That the view of "conditional immortality" is now
almost universally prominent among the members
of that Church, was clearly shown in their synod
at Marseilles in October, 1880. Dr. Ernest Petavel
advocates the immortality of the blessed alone.
The theological faculty of Neuchatel teaches in
their text-book of instruction that " the condition
of a portion of the lost will finally become toler
able." Neander, Tholuck, Ritschl, Hase, Schulz,
Gess, Olshausen, Rothe, Reuss, Bishop Martensen, 3 are
1 Many other names, as for instance that of Dr. Parker, might be
added.
2 See an extract from one of his sermons, supra, p. 37.
3 For Professors Schulz of Gottingen, and Gess of Breslau, see Byse s
French translation of Mr. White s Life in Christ, pp. xviii. and xx.
For the views of Ravignan see his Conferences, ii. 521, and Allies
"Journal in France, p. 279.
II.] PAST AND PRESENT OPINIONS. 53
but a few out of many who have seen and maintained
the absolute necessity of supplementing by the views
of earlier Christian ages the crude negations of the
Reformation Eschatology. Dr. Carl Nitzsch, the
well-known author of the System of Christian Doc
trine, says, "The idea of eternal damnation and
punishment is in so far a necessary one that there
cannot be in eternity any forced holiness of the
personal being, or any blessed unholiness. On the
other hand there is no foundation for assuming that
the truth of God s Word and the kingdom of God
itself need the existence of beings everlastingly
condemned, or that God should maintain the ex
istence of a personal being in eternity in order to
deprive him ,of the possibility of eternal holiness
and blessedness." System, p. 219.
Whether any of the great writers whom I have
quoted, living or dead, may have desired their
words to be understood with any modifications, I
cannot tell. I only say that these passages, many of
them from divines of unimpeachable orthodoxy, and
deeply reverenced both in the English, Roman, and
other churches, have not hesitated, in these passages
at any rate, to express a hope which is often even
wider and more universal than that for which I
argued. Saints and theologians have repudiated
all that I repudiated, and have claimed far more
than I saw my way to claim in the way of hope for
suffering men.
I will now adduce a few other passages which
express that belief in the final annihilation of the
i
wicked which is generally known by the name of
" Conditional Immortality." This, again, is a view
which I cannot accept. I believe, as the Church in
all ages with few exceptions seems to have believed,
that the soul of man is endowed by God with
54 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
^fi
immortality. It would indeed as a matter of choice
be infinitely less terrible to suppose that extinction
rather than that endless torment will be the fate of
the obstinately wicked; and I fully admit that the
literal and inferential meaning of many Scriptural
passages seems at first sight to point in the direction
of this opinion. I will not here enter into any" dis
cussion of it, because it lies apart from the view with
which I am directly concerned. For it must be borne
in mind that I have never professed to be writing a
systematic treatise on Eschatology, but have only
tried to separate from Christian eschatology the human
additions and inventions by which it is defaced, and
to show that it has been surrounded by elements
of hopelessness and horror which are not sanctioned
by the teaching of Scripture or of the Church. Now
the " Annihilationists" hold that the soul is not
immortal, and that the agonies of retribution will
end for all, because extinction of being will be the
fate of the finally impenitent. I, on the other hand,
believe that the soul is by the will of God immortal,
and have never denied the possibility of even an end
less and a hopeless alienation from the peace of God.
But without accepting their positive conclusion, I
agree with many of their negative results. Believ
ing that much of the popular eschatology is founded
on misinterpretation, I feel confirmed in that opinion
by seeing how many devout, able, and earnest men
have come to the same conclusion, and are unable
to accept as Scriptural the " hell " of the Revivalist.
The following then are a few passages out of
many in which Christian writers imply, or seem to
imply, the final annihilation of the wicked, a belief
which, though uncatholic, has been held by many
eminent thinkers, and is now maintained by many
thousands of Christians. The fact that so many
hold it unchallenged in the bosom of various Chris
tian Churches shows at any rate that the evidence
II.] PAST AND PRESENT OPINIONS. 55
for the popular views of endless torments is not so
decisive as to enable any Christian body to demand
a belief in them as a part of its necessary faith.
Letter to DlOGNETUS. [Early in 2nd Century.]
"Thou shalt fear what is truly death, which is
reserved for those condemned to the aeonian fire,
which shall afflict those committed to it till the
end " (pe^pi reXov 9). Cap. x.
ST. JUSTIN MARTYR, f 167. "The righteous,
being worthy to appear before God, shall not die any
more, and the evil shall be punished so long as it shall
please God that they exist and be punished." Dial,
ciim Tryph. c. 5. 1
ARNOBIUS, ( circ. 303. " This is man s real death
this which leaves nothing behind."
JOHN LOCKE, f 1 74- " By death some men
understand endless torments in hell-fire. But it seems
a strange way of understanding a law which requires
the plainest and directest words that by death should
be meant eternal life in misery. Can any one be
supposed to intend by a law which says, For felony
thou shalt surely die/ not that he should lose his
life, but be kept alive in exquisite and perpetual
torments ? "
ARCHBISHOP NEWCOME, f 1800. "Whatever
sentiments thinking men, intimately acquainted with
the Scriptures, entertain on this subject, whether
that God will for ever inflict a positive punishment on
the wicked ; or that after a punishment exactly pro
portioned to their offence He will annihilate them ;
or that a privation of being by fire will be the mode
of everlasting destruction with which He will punish
them, revelation is express that their punishment
will be dreadful, and coeval with their existence."
Character of Christ.
WHITBY, f 1726. " This fire may be called eternal,
not that the bodies of the wicked shall be for ever
1 See infra, pp. 235-238.
56 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
burning in it, and never be consumed by it, since this
cannot be done without a constant miracle, but be
cause it shall so entirely Consume their bodies as
that they shall never subsist again, but shall perish
and be destroyed for ever by it" On 2 T/iess.
(Comment, on the Epistles, p. 391, Ed. 1700.)
DR. ISAAC WATTS, j- 1748. --"Who can say
whether the word death might be fairly construed
to extend to the utter destruction of the . . . life of
the soul, as well as of the body ? " World to Come.
S. T. COLERIDGE, j- 1834. "I am confident that
the doctrine (of Conditional Immortality) would be
a far stronger motive than the present ; for no man
will believe eternal misery of himself, but millions
would admit that if they did not mend their lives
they would be undeserving of living for ever."
OLSHAUSEN, f 1839. "The Bible knows nothing
of the modern dogma of the immortality of the soul
... on the contrary, God is called there He who
alone hath immortality."
DR. C. J. NITZSCH, f 1844. "The soul, being
dependent on the Creator, does not possess immor
tality. As sin increases the soul faces destruction in
hell and its death. Matt. x. 28 ; Rev. xx. 15."
System of Christian Doctrine^ 122.
ARCHBISHOP WHATELY, t 1863. " As the effect
of worms or fire is not to preserve the body they prey
upon, but to destroy and put an end to it, it would
follow, if the correspondence hold good, that the fire,
figuratively so-called, which is prepared for the con
demned, is something that is really to destroy and
put an end to them, and is called everlasting and
unquenchable to denote that they are not to be saved
under it, but that their destruction is to be final."
Lectures on a Future State.
DR. R. ROTHE, f J 870. "Only one conclusion
remains. We are obliged to admit that the sufferings
endured in hell by the reprobate will in reality end,
II.] PAST AND PRESENT OPINIONS. 57
but that the end will consist in the destruction of the
guilty. This idea is very ancient in the Church. . .
This opinion alone seems capable of satisfying all
the conditions. It has nothing to fear from contem
porary philosophy, for men have ceased to maintain
that the human soul possesses a natural immortality."
Dogmatik, iii. 158.
DR. THOMSON, ARCHBISHOP OF YORK. " Life to
the godless must be the beginning of destruction,
since nothing but God and that which pleases Him
can permanently exist." Bampton Lectures, p. 56.
Here then I have collected upwards of one hun
dred passages from writers of all ages many of
them of the highest eminence who have lived and
died in full communion with the Catholic Church,
and who yet use language more or less entirely
irreconcilable with the popular theology. And yet
numerous as these passages are they do not repre
sent a tithe of those which might have been ad
duced. Subsequent chapters will, however, prove
still more convincingly that even the Fathers and
the Schoolmen held doctrines more tenable and
more merciful than those which too many of our
modern preachers have inculcated " teaching for
doctrine the commandments of men. 1
1 On p. 24, I have given rather the sense than the words of Luther.
He says : " Das ware wohl ein ander Frag, ob Gott etlichen im Sterhen
oder nach dent Sterben, den Glauben koimt geben, und also durch den
Glauben konnt selig machen ? Wer wollt darin zweifeln, dass er das
thun kunne ? "
CHAPTER III.
ON PURGATORY; THE DESCENT OF CHRIST INTO
HELL ; PRAYERS FOR THE DEAD ; MITIGATIONS ;
AND THE MILDER ASPECT OF FUTURE RETRI
BUTION.
" And these two pains, so counter and so keen,
The longing for Him whom thou seest not,
The shame of self at thought of seeing Him,
Shall be thy keenest, sharpest purgatory."
NEWMAN, Dream of Gerontius.
One has in one s darkness and limitation a trembling faith, and
can at least, with the voices, say Wir heissen etich hoffenj if it be the
will of the Highest." CARLYLE S Reminiscences, ii. 48.
THUS far then we see that, owing to the dark veil
which hangs between us and the future life, and
owing to the dim character of God s revelation
respecting its details, all the following views as
well as many others slightly differing from them in
minor points, have been taught by Christians within
the pale of the Catholic Church :
That the vast majority of mankind will be lost.
-CALVIN, and the popular theology.
That all men will at last be saved. 1 ORIGEN,
and Universalists in all ages.
1 " Qui salvus fit per ignem salvus fit, ut, si quid forte de specie
plumbi habuerit admixtum, id ignis decoquat et resolvat, ut efficiantui
omnes aurum purum." ORIG. Horn. VI. in Exod.
CHAP. HI.] ON PURGATORY, ETC. 59
That all Christians will at last be saved. 1 ST.
JEROME, and many in his day.
That all who died within the pale of the Catholic
Church would be saved. Many in the Fifth century.
That the wicked will be finally annihilated. Many
in the early Church and in modern days.
That God has indeed threatened endless punish
ments, but only conditionally, and in such a way
that He may not carry out the threat.- -TlLLOTSON,
&c.
That the condition of the saved will pass by
indistinguishable degrees into the condition of the
lost. PALEY, &c.
That there is an intermediate state of preparation
and purification in which sinful and imperfect souls
may be prepared for heaven. The FATHERS gene
rally, and many modern theologians.
That the condition of the lost, even when endless, is
not incompatible with a resignation ~ and penitence
almost akin to happiness.
That there is no intermediate state, but that, in
the words of the Westminster Confession, " souls
neither die nor sleep, but go immediately to heaven
or hell." 2
That the judgment which punishes the sins may
yet preserve all that is not sinful in the sinner,
saving the workman, burning the works.
That between death and the resurrection there is a
psychopannychia in other words, a sleep of the soul
so long as it remains in its bodiless condition, to be
re-awakened at the resurrection for final judgment.
Different from all these is the distinctive creed of
the Roman Church. Their doctrine is that all who
die in a state of grace, and yet in a state unfit for
heaven, will be purified in a purgatorial fire. Among
their divines as among all divines there have been
1 See Jer. Comment, in Is. in fin. ; supra, p. 43.
2 This was also the view of Calvin, Inst. iii. 25.
60 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
many differences of opinion, but they all agree in the
general statements of the Council of -Trent and the
Creed of Pope Pius IV. The decree passed in the
twenty-fifth session of the Council- of Trent was as
follows :
" Since the decree of the Catholic Church, instructed
by the Holy Spirit out of the sacred writings and the
ancient tradition of the Fathers, hath taught in holy
Councils, and lastly in this Oecumenical Synod, that
there is a Purgatory, and that the souls detained there
are aided by the suffrages of the faithful, but most of
all in the acceptable sacrifice of the altar, this Holy
Synod enjoins all bishops diligently to endeavour that
the wholesome doctrine of Purgatory, handed down
by Holy Fathers and Sacred Councils be believed
by Christ s faithful, held, taught, and everywhere
preached."
All that is asserted in the Creed of Pope Pius IV.
is that " I constantly believe that there is a Purgatory,
and that the souls there detained are helped by the
suffrages of the faithful."
In the Catechism of the Council of Trent we find,
"There is a purgatory fire in which the souls of the
faithful, being tormented for a certain time, are ex
piated, that so a passage may be opened for them
into their eternal country, into which no defiled thing
can enter." x
The Council of Florence (A.D. 1439) decreed " that
if true penitents depart in the love of God before they
have satisfied for their sins of omission or commission
1 " Praeterea e.st purgatorius ignis quo piorum animae ad definitum
tempus cruciatae expiantur ut eis in aeternam patriam ingressus patere
possit, in quam nihil coinquinatum ingreditur." Cat. de Symbolo, Ait.
Descendit in Inferno. This, it will be observed, goes beyond the
decree of the council, because (i) it mentions "fire" ; (2) ^substitutes
cruciatae for detentae. Bellarmine, following St. Thomas Aquinas, lays
it down as the teaching of almost all their theologians that the fire of
purgatory is the same kind of fire as that of hell (De Purgat. ii. 6),
and "minimaui poenam purgatorii esse majorem maxima poena hujus
vitae."
in.] ON PURGATORY, ETC. 61
by fruits of repentance, their souls go to Purgatory to
be purged."
Now in our English Church the Twenty-second
Article speaks of "the Romish doctrine concerning
Purgatory," with other doctrines of that Church, as
" a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no
warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the
Word of God."
It becomes then a very important thing for us to
know what the English Church intended to reject in
thus -repudiating the Romish doctrine of Purgatory,
since " there is no ground for thinking that in reject
ing the popular Romish doctrine the Church of
England meant to reject all suffering after this life." 1
I should say at once that I have not the least
interest in defending what is generally known as " the
Romish doctrine of Purgatory." Just as endless con
fusion has been introduced into the thoughts of
Christians by the adoption of the word " hell : to
represent alike Sheol, 2 Hades, and Gehenna, and by
the fact that the words "hell" and "damnation 1
have come to be used in senses far darker than those
which were originally attached to them ; so too the
word "Purgatory" 3 has been mixed up by Romish
divines with a mass of untenable notions from which it
can never be entirely dissociated. Even apart from these
notions which are touched upon in the following words
"of indulgences and pardons," 4 in our Twenty-second
1 Dr. Pusey, Eirenicon, p. 197. For moderate and forcible state
ments of the doctrine see Dr. Newman s Development, p. 388; Via
Media, p. 175.
2 "In our English translation the word hell seems to speak that
that is neither warrantable by Scripture nor reason."- -LiGHTFOOT,
Disc, on the Fourth, Article of the Creed (Works, ii. 1350, ed. 1684).
"The word hell is now come to signifie only the place of torment,
but of old it signified larger, as the word Hades does." Ib. p. 1351.
3 Far more, it should be said, by individual divines as, for instance,
Bellarmine than by any conciliar decrees. The Council of Trent
expressed itself very moderately.
4 "The doctrine of purgatory is the mother of indulgences." JER.
TAYLOR, Dissuasive from Fopery^ i. ch. i.
62 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
Article, it can hardly be said that the simplest essen
tial conception of Purgatory as a place of " purifica
tion in penal fire (whether material or immaterial) for
the faithful dead," is with any distinctness revealed in
Scripture, or that it was at all recognised as an article
of faith in the earliest centuries. And yet since the
Church did not, in her articles, condemn either the
doctrine of the Intermediate State or the practice of
prayer for the dead, and since she pronounced no
opinion whatever on the probatory fire of the day of
judgment which so many of the Fathers deduced from
the words of St. Paul in I Cor. iii. I5, 1 it is clear that
the Reformers did not at any rate hold the belief
about the sleep of souls (psy chop anny chid), nor endorse
the view of Calvin, which is still the common view of
the uninstructed masses, that every soul at death
passes directly and irrevocably to hell or to heaven.
For what are the facts ?
The Twenty-second Article now runs : " The
Romish doctrine of Purgatory, &c., is a fond thing
vainly invented and grounded upon no warranty of
Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God." 2
Such is the Article of 1562. But in the Article of
1552 it stood "doctrina scholasticorum," not " doc-
trina Romanensium." 3 Now it has been fairlv
1 Archbishop Usher, after noticing this, says that the reader "may
easily discern what may be thought of the cracking Cardinal [Bellar-
mine], who would force us down that all the ancients, both Greek and
Latin, from the very time of the Apostles, did constantly teach that
there was a Purgatory, whereas eminent Romish controversialists have
themselves admitted that in ancient writers there is almost no mention
of Purgatory, especially in the Greek writers." He calls Bellarmine s
quotations "counterfeit stuff," which refers to this life, or the confla
gration of the world, or the fire prepared for the devil, &c. He finds
the first traces of a Purgatory, properly so-called, in Tertullian (who, he
says, derived it from Montanus), and in Origen.
- "Doctrina Romanensium de purgatorio, de indulgentiis, &c. res
est futilis, inaniter conficta, et nullis Scripturatum testinioniis innititur ;
immo verbo Dei contradicit."
3 Perrone says, " The Latin Church, by uniting with the Eastern, has
allowed the scholastic opinion of a material fire in purgatory ... to
Hi.] ON PURGATORY, ETC. 63
argued that the Article could not have been intended
for a categorical condemnation of the very cautious
and modified decree of the Council of Trent, because
that decree was not promulgated till December 4, 1 563,
nearly a year after this edition of the Article was
published. " The Romish doctrine of purgatory " was
probably substituted for "the doctrine of the school
authors," because it was, as Dr. Boultbee says, " more
popularly intelligible." 1 It must be admitted that
originally the doctrine condemned by our Reformers
was the doctrine as it stands in the pages of the
schoolmen, not as it is stated by the Council of Trent ;
and further, as Bishop Forbes points out, the word
Romanenses, like Romanistae, is used to represent the
extreme mediaeval party, those whom we now call
Ultramontanes. 2
Now the doctrine of the schoolmen may be de
scribed generally as the mediaeval doctrine : the doc
trine which, taking its start from the speculations of
Origen 3 in the third century, acquired distinctive shape
first in the still-wavering utterances of Augustine, 4
and then in the dialogues of St. Gregory the Great.
That the mind of St. Augustine was by no means
made up respecting this subject, I shall show clearly
farther on. Sometimes he seems to be thinking of
what is now called "purgatory" ; but sometimes rather
drop ; and the substance of the doctrine can cause no further offence if
once the gross abuses and misapprehensions are removed which have
incrusted its kernel in practice and popular belief." [If the same words
be applied to " hell," they will accurately express my own opinion.]
Theology of the Church, of England, p. 185.
! Bishop Forbes, On the Articles, ii. 301.
3 It is generally admitted that Origen was influenced by the writings
of Plato.
4 "St. Austin speaks in this whole matter very doubtfully ; he varies
often from himself ; he seems sometimes very positive only for two
states ; at other times as he asserts the last probatory fire, so he seem.-,
to think that good souls might suffer some grief in that sequestered state
before the last day upon the account of some other past sins, and that
by degrees they might arise up to their consummation." BUKNET ou
Art. xxii.
64 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
of the -purgatory at the end of the world ; and some
times only of "that grief which he imagined those
souls who had been passionately tied to the things of
this world might still retain in their place of sequester.
But all this he proposes with so much doubt and
uncertainty, as plainly shows it to have been in the
Father s time so far from an article of faith, that he
durst not affirm anything at all concerning it. . . Thus
had the Romish doctrine of purgatory no manner of
foundation in the Primitive Church." So says Arch
bishop Wake, and we need no further proof of St.
Augustine s uncertainty than his own words, " whether
it be so or not may be inquired : and possibly it may
be found so, and possibly not." 1 But by the close of
the sixth century we find Pope Gregory the First
saying, with an emphasis and plainness not known
in earlier ages, that " for some light faults we must
believe that there is before judgment a purgatorial
fire," 2
St. Gregory (( 604) flourished in days when the age
of barbarism had begun. His dialogues abound in
legends and visions, and are the chief source of the
popular notions about hell and purgatory in the middle
ages. The importance which was attached to these
valueless stories such as that of the appearance of
Paschasius to St. Germanus ; of Justus to Copiosus ;
of Vitaliana to St. Martin, of St. Severinus, &c. may
be seen from the use made of them even by so acute
a controversialist as Cardinal Bellarmine. Then, says
Archbishop Wake, " the flames of ytna and Vesuvius
were thought on purpose to have been kindled to
torment departed souls. Some were seen broiling
upon gridirons, others roasting upon spits, 3 others
1 Enchirid. c Ixix. ; see too Ixvii., Ixviii. ; Ad. Dulcit. qu. 1. ; De
Civ. Dei, xxi. 18-22.
2 Greg. Dial. iv. 30. Schrockh goes so far as to call him "Der
Erfinder des Fegefeuer s. " Kirchengesch, xvii. 332.
3 Specimens without number may be found in the Speculum Exemplo-
rum and the Legenda Aurea. Those to which I have alluded are called
HI.] ON PURGATORY, ETC. 65
shivering in the water, or choking in chimneys. The
very ways to purgatory were now discovered, one in
Sicily, another in Pozzuetto, a third nearer home in
Ireland. 1 In the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries
the opinion grew, yet even in the twelfth (A.D. 1196)
Otho Frisingensis, 2 so far from speaking dogmatic
ally, only says there are some who affirm that there
is in the lower world a purgatory, in which those who
are to be saved are either kept in darkness only, or
are purged in the fire of expiation." 3 It is to such
crude conceptions as those found in St. Gregory and
the schoolmen that the words of Archbishop Usher
apply, " For extinguishing the imaginary flames of
the Popish purgatory we need not go far to fetch
water." 4
The scholastic doctrine of purgatory may be found
reflected in the frightful Inferno of Dante ; and the
part played by the wild visions of monks and as
cetics in stereotyping the ordinary conception may be
judged by the fact that Dante 5 largely borrowed his
notions of infernal torments from the vision of Alberic
published in the twelfth century, at Monte Cassino. 6
It may also be found, though in a modified form, very
clearly delineated in the supplement to the Summa of
St. Thomas of Aquinas, and in Bellarmine De Purga-
torio? Bellarmine decides that purgatory, hell, and the
specially authentic by Bellarmine, i. ii. They are taken from Gregory
of Tours, A.D. 573; Pope Gregory, A.D. 660; Bede, A.D. 700; Peter
Damian, A.D. 1057 ; and St. Bernard, A.D. noo.
1 A full account of this will be seen in Mr. Wright s St. Patrick s
Purgatory, 1844.
1 Chronic, viii. 26. "Esse locum purgatorium . . . quidam asserunt."
3 Archbishop Wake, Discourse of Purgatory (in Gibson s Preservative^
vol. v.).
4 Archbishop Usher, Answer to a Jesuit, vi. p. 118.
5 Bellarmine, Disp. de Controv. Christianae Fidei, i. pp. 1962-2081,
ed. 1596. His definition of Purgatory is "locus quidam, in quo
tamquam in carcere post hanc vitam purgantur animae, quae in hac non
plane purgatae fuerunt."
5 See Ozanam, Les Poetes Frandscains, p. 415.
7 De> Purgatorio, ii. 6 a.\\d. passim.
F
66 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
limbus Patrum and the limbus Puerorum are all in the
centre of the earth ; argues that the -fire of purga
tory is material ; quotes the testimonies of St. Gregory
and Bede to show that the pains of purgatory are
more intense than any which we can suffer in life ; and
accepts the whole doctrine that souls in purgatory
are aided by "the sacrifice of the mass, prayers,
penances, alms, pilgrimages, and so forth." * And in
support of these views he adduces the evidence of
visions, and the authorities of St. Thomas Aquinas,
St. Bonaventura, and other schoolmen. To some at
any rate of these views the Church would not have
hesitated to apply the epithet perniciosa which stood
in the earlier Articles, but was afterwards entirely
dropped.
And yet we shall long have to deplore the fact that
the teaching of the Reformers on this subject was so
vague and negative. They were mainly occupied
with other and far different controversies. Machyn in
his diary tells us that on January 30, 1559, " dyd prech
Master Juell, the new Bishop of Salesbury, and then
he sayd playnly there was no pergatore." Would
that in preaching that there was "no pergatore" the
Reformers had told us their view of the true doctrine !
They might, with Luther, have condemned " purga
tory " as a mere " devil s mask " (mera diaboli larva},
but such a condemnation would not at all necessarily
imply any view on their part that there was no puri
fication of imperfect and sinful souls (whether penal
or probatory) beyond the grave. They condemned
" purgatory " in the lump, and such a condemnation
no more involves the view now held by most thought
ful divines, whether Protestant or Catholic, than (as I
shall show hereafter) a general condemnation of "Ori-
genism " excluded an approval even of Origen s uni-
versalism. Neumann, Schulze, Karsten, Martensen,
Dr. Pusey, and many living High Churchmen may
1 De Purgatorio, ii. 1 6.
in.] ON PURGATORY, ETC, 67
be mentioned among Protestants who accept the
belief in this modified phase of Purgatory.
Further than this, the "doctrine of Purgatory"
whether scholastic or Roman is inextricably en
tangled, with views "all dubious and disputable at
the very best" 1 about the distinction of sins mortal
and venial in their own nature ; 2 that the taking away
the guilt of sin does not suppose the taking away the
obligation to punishment ; 3 that God requires a full
exchange of penance and satisfaction, which must
regularly be paid here or hereafter, even by those
who are pardoned here ; and that the death of
Christ, His merits and satisfaction, do not procure
for us a full remission before we die, nor (as it may
happen) for a long time after. 4
" They imagine," says Hooker, " beyond all conceit
of antiquity, that when God doth remit sin, and the
punishment eternal thereunto, belonging, Hereserveth
the torments of hell-fire to be nevertheless endured
for a time, either shorter or longer, according to the
quality of men s crimes. So that by this postern
gate cometh in the whole mart of papal indulgences ;
a scorn both to God and man." 5
These assuredly are not doctrines of the English
Church, and her decisive rejection of " purgatory, in
dulgences, and pardons," is the rejection not of an
isolated opinion, but of a system- with which all these
views and details are indissolubly associated. " It was
1 Jer. Taylor, Dissuasive, i. I ; Works, vi. p. 194, ed. Heber.
2 " PurgatoriuHi pro iistantum ess-e, qui cum venialibus culpis moriun-
tur." BELLARM. De Purgat. ii. 2, following Tert. De Anima, 35 ;
Aug. De Civ. Dei, xxi. 26, "Venialia co-ncremantem ignem."
"Medium vero locum esse habentium peccata venialia." LABBEUS,
Cone. xvii. 20.
3 * Those v/ho depart this life in grace, in chanty, but nevertheless in
debted to the divine justice some pains which it deserved, are to suffer
them in the other life." BOSSUET. "Ad purgatorium deferuntur
juslorum animae obnoxiae poenis temporalibus." DENS, Theolog.
iii 347. 4 Jer. Taylor, /. c. t pp. 194, 195.
5 Eccl. Pol. iii. v. 9. See too Hooker, Serni. III.
F 2
68 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
T^
not," says Bishop Forbes, "the formulated doctrine,
but a current and corrupt practice in the" Latin Church
which is here declared to be fond and vainly in
vented. In fact the word purgatory carried with
it all these abuses. " The fire of purgatory," said the
vulgar mediaeval proverb, "boils the monk s saucepan."
But perhaps it is due to a guiding Providence that
the Church has been withheld from laying down " as
of faith " any distinct doctrine as to the state of the
dead between death and the day of judgment.
1. The ancient Fathers are nearly as unanimous in
recognising an Intermediate State l as popular teaching
is unanimous in speaking of " dying and going straight
to heaven or to hell." 2 Justin Martyr says that persons
who used such language " were not to be considered
Christians or even Jews." 3 Tertullian, Lactantius,
Origen, Hilary, Ambrose, Augustine are all perfectly
explicit on this point, and to our own Reformers it
seemed so clear that the entrance on the state of
aeonian joy or sorrow was not decided till the
resurrection, that, in the Fortieth Article of 1552,
they imply their belief in the Intermediate State by
their express condemnation of the fancy of psycho-
pannychia, or the inanition of the soul between death
and judgment.
2. The ancient Fathers also speak almost unani
mously of a fire of purgation after this life* and
1 The opinions of Origen, Tertullian, Chrysostom, the two Gregories,
Jerome, Athanasius, &c., may be seen collected in Sixtus Senensis, vi.
264; Huet, Origettiana, ii. xi. 15 ; Bellarmine, D> Sanct. Beat, i. 4.
2 Bishop Harold Browne s-ays, " I think it hardly necessary to add
more to show that on this point the opinion of the ancients is more
correct than the modern popular creeds." On the Articles, p. 86. See
many passages in Usher, I.e. pp. 120 seq.
J o L KO.I Myovffl . . ct/xa rep arroOffjcrKfiv TS $v%cis avrwv dva\a/j.f3dv-
ecrOai ets r6v ovpav6v, /x^j uiroAajSrjTe avrovs Xpicmavovs itxrirtp ou54
Iov8a(ovs. JUST. MARTYR, Dial. See too Bishop Bull, Serm. ///. ;
Works, i. p. 52 ; Pearson, Art. V. ; Dodwell, Tertullian, pp. 116 seq.
4 Origen, Ep. Rom. ad fin. ; Ambrose in Ps. xvi. 3 ; in Ps. cviii.
("omnes oportet transire per ignern"); Hilary in Ps. cxviii. 20.
in.] ON PURGATORY, ETC. 69
their sayings have been repeatedly urged by Romish
controversialists to prove the doctrine of purgatory.
But it has been sufficiently shown that the Fathers
are usually speaking of a fire at the day of judg
ment, and not of purgatory. It is asserted, says
Archbishop Wake, by almost all the Fathers of the
Primitive Church, " that all men, being raised up at
the last day, should pass through a certain probatory
fire (irvp So/a/uacrrttfoz ), in which every man should be
scorched and purified ; l and some be tormented
more, others less, according as they had lived better
or worser lives here upon earth." Yet respecting all
the details of this subject the Fathers vary in their
language, 3 and they express this opinion, as an
opinion, without laying it down as a matter of
faith. Perhaps, therefore, it was best on the whole
that, on such topics, the Church should pronounce no
dogmatic decision ; and the more so because an as
tonishing diversity of views may be proved to have
existed in all ages. Even an eminent Cardinal says,
in the eighteenth article of his book against Luther,
("judicium quo nobis est ille indefessus ignis obeundus ") ; Basil in
Is. ix. 19; Jer. in Am. vii. 4 ("cumque omnes fuerirnus in peccato, et
jacuerimus ad sententiae severitatem, miserehitur Dominus nostri ") ;
Sixtus Senensis, who quotes these and other passages, says, "Ab
horum sententiis apparent satis esse diversa quae tradunt ornnes theologi
scholastic! de igne ultimae conflagrations. " Bibl. Sanct. v. annot.
clxxi. Many similar passages are adduced by Dallaeus, De Poems et
Satisf. 387-434, and some are quoted in Tracts for the Times, No. 79.
The same notion is found among the Rabbis, who say that " even a
righteous man is conducted through hell by way of atonement for his
offences." Emek Hammelech, f. 23, 4; Malleh Aharon, f. 51, I ap.
Stehelin, i. 45.
"Diem judicii concupiscemus in quo subeunda sunt gravia ilia
expiandae a peccatis animae supplicia." HILAR. in Ps. cxviii. 3.
1 Archbishop Wake, Discourse, p. 5.
3 See Origen in Ps. xxxvi. Horn. iii. I ; in Exod. Horn. vi. 4; Lac-
tant. Instt. vii. 21 ; Greg, Naz. Or. xxxix. ; Greg. Nyss. De Mortztis ;
Hilary in Ps. cxviii. lit. Gimel. ; Aug. De Civ. Dei, xvi. 24 ; xx. 25 ;
xxi. 26 ; Enchir. Ixix., &c. Some of them held that "even Pel er and
John " (Ambrose in Ps. cxviii. Horn, xx.), even the Virgin Mary (Hilary,
I.e.) would have to pass through this fire.
70 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
" It (purgatory) was for a long time unknown ; it was
recognised late by the Universal Church ; then it was
gradually believed by some, by little, and little, partly
from Scripture, partly from revelations." 1 Though
a sort of nominal adhesion to it was given by the
eighteen Bishops of the Eastern Church at the Council
of Florence, their adhesion was summarily repudiated
by the Eastern Church in general, and the decrees of
the Council were not acknowledged. 2
Alexander Natalis 3 reduces the whole controversy
between Protestants and Roman Catholics to this,
" Whether the faith teaches that there is a state of the
dead in which they shall be expiated by temporary
punishment, and from which they may be freed
or otherwise helped by the prayers of the Church."
But the Church of England does not assent even to
this most general statement. That there is an Inter
mediate State all her best divines would admit ; and
also that prayer for the dead was an ancient and
almost universal practice ; and also that Christ de
scended into Hades in the sense that He entered into
the world of spirits ; but she has nowhere laid down
the inferences to be drawn from these premisses, but
left them as open questions to individual opinion.
Nor has she ever given the least sanction to the
strange view that even the saints of God must pass
through penal fire, and that a certain amount of
punishment is (so to speak) a quantitative equivalent
for a certain amount of sin. But I agree with Dr.
PuseyMn thinking that the Church of England has
not rejected and never meant to reject all suffering
1 Cardinal Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, Assert. Luther. Confut. 18
So too Bruys (Hist. i. 375) admits that Purgatory was "unknown to the
Apostles and original Christians." See Edgar, Variations of Popery,
P. 45 2 -
2 Archbishop Wake, as above. Usher, Annver to a Jesuit, vi. p.
131 (where passages from eminent Greek theologians are quoted). See
Jer. Taylor, Of Purgdtory, ii. 2 ; Gibbon, vi. 240, 260 (ed. Milman).
3 iv. 41. 4 Eirenicon, p. 197.
in.] ON PURGATORY, ETC. 71
after this life even for some who will ultimately be
saved.
Cardinal Wiseman is reported to have said "that
the belief that there would be suffering in the day
of judgment would satisfy the doctrine of Purgatory."
If so, many English Churchmen would find little
difficulty respecting it. They might prefer, for the
avoidance of mistakes, to call the Intermediate State,
with any purifications or retributive sufferings which
it may involve, by some other name than Purgatory,
just as many theologians of the Greek Church do ; but,
as a Greek theologian says, while they shun the name
as though it were something frightful, they believe in
different conditions of the dead in Paradise or in
" Gehenna ; " and in very varied degrees of punishment
and of blessedness ; and even that some may be in
anguish who yet hope for the Resurrection of Life; and
this practically amounts to something but little distin
guishable from a purgatorial fire. 1 And this view is
freely admitted, and has long been admitted, by
Lutheran and other Protestant divines. 2 And in
views like these I see a strong confirmation of all that
I said in Eternal Hope, and a very sensible mitiga
tion of the horrors which are preached by popular
theology.
And I find the blessedness of a similar belief in
four other doctrines or opinions which bear on the
question of the future life, and which, although they
furnish no proof of the Romish doctrine of purgatory,
do undoubtedly point inferentially to the belief of the
Church that after death some change and progressive
1 Petr. Arcudius, De Purgatorio, p. 52. 4>etryov<ri uxnrep TI
iraiov ovofj-daat irup KaQapr^ipiov Kal O/U.GOS TOTTOVS 5ia<p6povs TOV aSov . . .
Kal OVK eTTurrjs avroits KoXafeffdat oftovTai Kal /j.d\iara rovs eVi eA.iriSt
ai/acrrao ecos fays alwviov jSacrcu/t^o/ieVous . . . TOUTO odv rb Ka6ap-
iov.
See Perrone, De Deo Creators, iii. 6 (Pusey s Eirenicon, pp. 1 18, 1 19),
72 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
development is still possible in the condition of the
dead.
One of these is the admissibility of Prayers for the
Dead ; the other is the article of the- creed which says
that Christ descended into hell; a third is the doc
trine of " mitigation " ; a fourth is that which has
been boldly called " the bright side of hell."
I. As regards Prayers for the Dead it is unanimously
admitted that they existed in the Jewish Church and
were unreproved by our Lord. It is also admitted
that to pray for the dead was a very ancient custom
in the Christian Church. It is mentioned with ap
proval by Tertullian in the second century, 1 and by
Origen, Cyprian, Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory of
Nazianzus, Ambrose, Chrysostom, and others, 2 the
common opinion being that of St. Augustine, that
" The souls of the dead are relieved by the devotion
of the living." 3 It is, however, quite clear that these
prayers were considered by the majority, when they
spoke with precision, to affect the condition of none but
fat faithful dead. This is conclusively proved by Arch
bishop Usher in his Answer to a Jesuit, and has re
cently been shown again in Canon Luckock s After
Death.^ He proves that in the earliest liturgies there
is little mention of sin in these prayers for the dead,
and scarcely anything in the Fathers before St.
Jerome. After that time there was an increasing
belief that the purification of ordinary frailties and
lesser defilements after death might be furthered by
the prayers of the faithful and by the due adminis
tration of the Holy Eucharist.
In some few instances, however, we are told of
prayers offered up for acknowledged sinners, and not
merely for the more speedy resurrection or fuller
blessing of those whose eternal salvation was already
1 De Coron. Milit. 3 ; De Monogam. 10.
2 See Bishop Harold Browne, On the Articles, p. 494.
8 Aug. ad Dulcit. 4 After Death, p. 117 seq.
III.] ON PRA YERS FOR THE DEAD. 73
secured. No one who reads the numerous extracts
which may be collected from ancient liturgies can
avoid something more than a suspicion that in some
way or other the prayers for the dead were supposed
to benefit the souls of great sinners. "The expres
sions," says the Roman Catholic theologian Dieringer,
" are too strong to be applied to purgatory " ; and
Bishop Forbes says, " Perhaps it may not be an im
probable conjecture that the Church at first prayed
for #//the departed in one tenour, without discrimi
nating ; leaving it to God to hear her in whatever
way He knew for each ; and so that the prayers for
deliverance from hell related to souls on which the
particular judgment was not yet passed." l
And although these instances of prayers for grievous
sinners are rare, must it not be admitted that, if prayer
for the dead be Scriptural, it must ex vi termini be
Scriptural to pray for those of whose eternal condition
it would be impossible to be assured ? On the well-
known example of Judas Maccabeus, who, with his com
panions, seems to *have prayed for those who had died
in an act of sin, I will not dwell ; but Origen was " one
of the three of wonderful gifts of whose own salvation
the Church had misgivings"; 2 he was, we are told, con
demned when dead, and condemned when living, as
having taught heresy ; yet even Cyril would, I suppose,
have prayed for him, since he speaks "of offering
Christ for those who have fallen asleep, even though
they be sinners." Certainly St. Chrysostom in no
less than three passages uses similar expressions. 3 St.
Ambrose distinctly prayed for the Emperors Gratian
and Valentinian ; 4 could he be so very sure that they
had died in a state of final salvation ? Was Theodosius
absolutely convinced that both his parents were saved
1 On the Articles, it. 318.
What is of faith, p. u. Of these Solomon was one, and Tertul-
lian another. 8 Luckock, After Death, pp. 131-148.
4 St. Arnbr. De Obittt Valent. ad fin.
74 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
when he prayed for them so earnestly at the shrine of
St. Chrysostom P 1 We are told, quite-truly, that we
have no right to pronounce the doom of any one
however sinful his death may seem to have been.
May we not then pray for all, or rather must we not,
under these circumstances, pray for all who are dear
to us ? And would it have been permitted to pray for
them if it was impossible to do them any good ? Even
St. Augustine thought that our prayers might at least
secure for the lost a tolerabilior damnatio? Multitudes
of passages might be quoted from modern liturgies, in
which the words do not easily bear any other construc
tion than that they are a prayer that the sins of the
dead may be forgiven. The evidence of mediaeval
legends however worthless in themselves shows that
the belief in the efficacy of such prayers was widely
spread. Thus St. Gregory was popularly believed by
his prayers to have saved from hell the soul of the
Emperor Trajan, 3 and St. Dunstan the soul of King
Edwin. 4 Other legends told how Thekla, had by her
prayers saved from hell Falconilla, the daughter of
Tryphaena, and how the skull of a dead heathen priest
informed St. Honorius that the dead felt some little
consolation (jrapafjivOias fti/cpa?, John Damasc.) when
he prayed for them. These legends however idle
of course prove the popular belief. Nor was the
belief merely popular. St. Augustine himself, 5 like
many others, inferred from Matt. xii. 31, 32, that for
giveness for some sins might be obtained for the dead
by the prayers of the living.
Once again, what is the meaning of the story told
in the Acts of St. Perpetua, which some have assigned
to the authorship of Tertullian ? In a vision she see.
her brother Dinocrates in distress and darkness, he
having been guilty of some heinous fall. She prays
1 Theodoret, H. E. v. 36. 2 Aug. Enchir. ad Laurent, ex.
3 Baronius, Ann. 604, 44. * Gul. Malmesbur. ii. 50.
6 Aug. De Civ. Dd, xxi. 24.
in.] ON THE DESCENT INTO HELL. 75
for him, and then sees him in light, cleansed and re
freshed ; and St. Augustine says that he had gone
into the damnation of death, and was only liberated
through the prayer of his sister, who was about to die
for Christ. l So St. Paulinus, speaking of his brother
Delphinus, who seems, from what he says, to have
died in sin, begs St. Amandus and others to pray for
him, "that God may refresh his soul with drops of
mercy. For doubtless . . . tJie deiv of His forgiveness
also will penetrate to hell, so that when scorched in the
kindled darkness he may be refreshed with the dewy
light of His pity."
Nay more, even our Church " deeply convinced
that the general tone of the teaching of antiquity goes
beyond a mere prayer for consummation of bliss both
in body and soul, and probably extends to actual for
giveness for some sins (perhaps at the foreseen prayers
of the Church) and the mitigation of some penalties,
has formed her Burial Service on a theory of which
this doctrine is the only interpretation ; that words
of hope may be used of all but the excommunicate." 3
And in the light of all these beliefs and practices, am
I not entitled to claim that the real doctrine of the
Church on Future Retribution has never been identical
with that which so many preach in her name ?
II. Another doctrine which suggests inferences all
tending to the possibility of purification and educational
discipline being mingled with the penalty for sin
beyond the grave may be found in the article of the
Creed which says of Christ, that " He descended into
hell" 4
As regards the descent of Christ into hell, some
glimpse of the history and gradual growth of opinions
1 Aug. De Anima, i. 10. 2 Ep. xxxvi. ad Amand.
3 Bishop Forbes, On the Articles, ii. 347.
Quam devorarat improbus
Praedam refudit Tartarus
Captivitate libera
Jesum sequuntur agmina."
FULBERT, Hymn. Pasck.
;6 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
*
on this article of the faith may be gained from reading
the following passages, but I only touch on that part
of the question which bears on my present sub
ject. The reader who seeks further information may
find it abundantly in Bishop Pearson On the Creed.
ST. IGNATIUS, f 107. " He descended alone into
Hades, but He rose up from it with a multitude,
and He cleft the aeonian barrier, and broke down its
middle wall." 1
ST. JUSTIN MARTYR, f 167. And He de
scended to them (the dead) to preach to them His
salvation." 2
ST. IRENAEUS, f 202. "Christ descended to
preach even to those (who were under the earth)
His advent." 3
TERTULLIAN, t 218. "Christ did not ascend to
heaven till He descended to the lower parts of the
earth, that there He might make patriarchs and
prophets partakers of Himself." 4
HlPPOLYTUS, f 257. " Who has been manifested
as King even of those under the earth of those
under the earth, because He was numbered even
among the dead, preaching the Gospel to the souls
of the Saints." 5
ORIGEN, f 254. " Jesus descended into Hades, and
1 Ka.TT}\Qev fls aSov /J.OVQS, o.v7]\6e 5e /nera irX^dovs, Kal eo XJO e TOV dv
aluvos (ppayftiiv Kal TO u.^fforoi x.ov auTov eAucre. Ep. ad Trail. Collec
tions of the chief passages of the Fathers may be found in G. H. Voss,
Th.es. Theol. Disp., and in Dietelmair, De Descensu Ckristi ad Inferos,
1760, where the subject is clearly and fully treated, and the great diversity
of opinion respecting it made very evident.
2 Kal KcvrejSTj Trpds avrovs evayye\i(raadai avrots r& <Twri]piov avroii.
Dial, ctim Ttyph.
3 c. Haer. iv. 27.
4 "Nee ante ascendit in suMimiora coelorum quam descendit in
inferiora terrarum, ut illic Patriarchas et Prophetas compotes sui
faceret." De Anima, 55. See, too, De Resur. Carnis, 44.
^ KaTa^ovicav 6ri Kal eV ^e/cpoTs KareXoyicrBr), vayye\i^6fj.fi/os Kal rat
TS>v ayloiv tyvxds. De Antichristo, 26. In c. 45 of the same work he
says that John the Baptist preceded Christ as His forerunner in Hades
III.] ON THE DESCENT INTO HELL. 77
the Prophets before Him, and they proclaim before
hand the coming 1 of Christ." 1
"And with His soul stripped of the body He asso
ciated with souls stripped of their bodies, converting
to Himself those even of them that were willing, or
those who for reasons which He Himself knew, were
more fitted for it." 2
ST. CLEMENS OF ALEXANDRIA, | circ. 218.
" Did not the same dispensation also occur in Hades
that there also all the souls, on hearing the proclama
tion, may either manifest repentance, or that their
punishment was due to their unbelief? " 3
EUSEBIUS OF CAESAREA, f circ. 342. "Bursting
open the eternal gates of the dark abode, and opening
a way of return to life for the dead there bound in
chains of death." 4
ATHANASIUS f? 373- (The devil) " sitting by the
gates sees all the fettered beings led forth by the
courage of the Saviour." 5
GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS, t 389. - - " Until He
loosed by His blood all who groan under Tartarean
chains." 6
FIRMICIUS MATERNUS, \t 370. "The crowd of
the just was so collected by Him that the iniquity
of death miht no more have dominion over them." 7
TrjcroOs cTs aoov ytyovev Kal ol irpotyrirai Trpo avrov, Kal
rov XpitTTOtJ rr]v eirt8r)/j.iav. In I K. xxviii. 32.
2 Kal yvfj-vfj ff(a/j.aros yei 6/j.fvos tyvxfj rats yv/j.va ts
tyvxcus, GTTiffrptqHav KO-Ktivuv ra? fiov\o/j.evas irptis avr6v, % as eupa, 61
ovs TjSet auros \6yovs, eTTiTr/Setorepas. C. Ceh\ ii. p. 85.
3 ov)(l Kal tv a5ou f) avTr) yeyovev olKOVOf.ua iva /cd/ce? irdcrai al ^/uj^al
aKovaaffai rov Kypvy paras, ^ rr)V iJ-dravoiav eVSe^covrat ^ Ti)v K6\a<riis
elt/ai 5i y &v OVK tiruTTevcrai/. STROM, vi. See other passages quoted
supra, in Chap. II.
4 rols avrodi j/e/cpo?s treipais 6a.va.rov 7re7reS77ju,eVots iraXivrpoirov TTJS e
T-fiv (ar}v dvoSov TT]V iropeiav iroiov/jLevos. Demonslr. Evang. iv. 12.
5 Kadr)/j.fvos irapa ras irv\as Oeoape i Qayou.tvovs iravras rov
T^ rov 2o)T7)pos d^Speta. In Pass, et Cruc. Domini.
J fi(TOK Trai/ras Tapraptwv fjLoyedvTas v<p a faart Kv<raro
Carm. xii.
7 De Error. Prof. Rel.
78 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP
VlCTORINUS, \circ. 303.
" From the lowest depths
Tartarus poured forth its chiefs, and the blessed
fathers
Arise." 1
ST. AMBROSE, f 357- " Christ .... bursting open
the bars and gates of hell, recalled to life from the
jaws of the devil . . . souls bound in sin." 2
ST. HILARY OF POICTIERS, f circ. 367. " He
knows . . . that even to those who were in prison
and had once been unbelieving, the exhortation was
preached." 3
EPIPHANIUS, f 43- - - " To liberate the captive
Adam and his fellow captive Eve from anguish, goeth
her God, and Son." 4
ST. JEROME, t 4 2 - "From those seats of hell
no one has been freed by his own merits, but only by
the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ."
"The land of the dead, which is torn asunder and
emptied, when by the death of Christ the souls bound
in hell are set free." 5
SYNESIUS, t circ. 430.
" And descending under Tartarus. . .
And setting free from their pains
The holy choir of souls." Q
1 " A sedibus imis
Tartarus evomuit proceres, patresque beati
Consurgunt." De Chris to, Deo et Homine.
! " Christus . . . vinctas peccato ariimas . . . e diaboli faucibus
revocavit ad vitam." AMBR. De Myster. Pasch. 4.
3 "Scit . . . etiam his qui in carcere erant, et increduli quondam
fuerunt, exhortationem praedicatam fuis. e." In Ps. cxviii.
4 T6v aix^d-^&TOV A5a,u, /cat rr\v avvai-^iJiaKcarov Evav TU>V oftvv&v
\vcrai Tropeuerat 6 Qeos teal vlos avTys. //<?/. in Sepult. Christi (who
also holds that John the Baptist heralded him in Hades).
5 Jer. in Job, c. 36; in Hoseam c. 13.
6 /Caracas S VTTO rdprapov
\vcras S dirb mjficeruy
y oaiovs xopovs. Hymn IX.
in.] ON THE DESCENT INTO HELL. 79
ST. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA, f 444. - - " And
wandering down even to Hades, He has emptied the
dark, secret, invisible treasuries." 1
It would be useless to heap up the masses of later
testimonies ; but this one from Theodore of Jeru
salem, which is found in the Acts of the Second Nicene
Council, may suffice. He says that he believes in
Christ, "Who despoiled Hades, and set free those
who had been imprisoned from eternity." 2
Many other passages might be quoted to show the
prevalence of the view that Christ, by His descent into
hell, saved all who had, up to that time, died,
although St. Augustine stigmatised the view as a
heresy. Indeed some went even so far as to imagine
that Judas hanged himself for the express purpose of
gaining the advantage of this conquest over Satan
and Hades. 3
It will be seen from these passages that the Church
first grasped the meaning of Christ s descent into
hell as being something more than His suffering
and burial; then deduced from I Peter iii. 19 the
belief that He preached to those spirits in prison ;
then that He set free the faithful souls of olden
saints and patriarchs. 4 It will be seen further that a
belief gradually and riot unnaturally sprang up that
since He preached to those " who sometime were
1 /caTa<oiTT)eras 5e /ecu et s a5ou .ve/ceVw/ce 6r}cravpovs <TKOTIVOVS, diroKpv-
ipovs, dopdrous. Gtaphyr. ii. See too Hom. Pasch. xi. and Horn. vi.
(TCcri/ /VtyTO rcav TrvfVfJidrwv 6 a&Tjs.
2 T&V O STJV cntv\ev(TavTa Kal TOVS cur altavos Sfff/uLLOvs eAeuflepc&raz/Ta.
HARDUIN, iv. 142.
3 Zonaras, Ep. 56, Kal ets ^8rjv KctreAfleu eVi r<p TVX^IV e /ceTo-e Trap
aurov trtryxcop^o ewy.
4 " Our Saviour Jesus Christ at His entry into hell . . . spoiled hell,
and brought with Him from thence all the souls of those righteous and
good men which, from the fall of Adam, died in the favour of God. "
Institution of a Christian Man.
So MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
disobedient," these sinners must have benefited by
His preaching ; and this conception ripened into the
view first that some, and then that all, even of these
sinners were set free. As early as the first century it
had been inferred that, since His saints and apostles
continue His work on earth, so they too preached,
and by their preaching helped to deliver or to ame
liorate the lot of those who pass hence into a state
of punishment. If much of this doctrine rests solely
on inference, the same is equally true of no small part
of the details of scholastic theology, of which it cannot
always be said that the inference is at least merciful,
and in accordance with all which God has revealed to us
respecting His infinite compassion as the God of Love.
All that our Church defines respecting the descent into
Hades in the Third Article is that " it is to be believed
that He went down into hell." But in the Article of
1552 these words were added. "For the Body lay in
the sepulchre until His resurrection; but His ghost,
departing from Him (ab Illo emissus), was with the
ghosts that were in prison or in hell (in carcere sive
in inferno] ; and did preach to the same, as the place
of St. Peter doth testify." These words, in Dr. Hey s
opinion, were only withdrawn out of deference to the
Calvinists, who held that Christ s descent into hell
meant only the suffering for sin on earth j 1 but they
are a far more reasonable explanation of the three
passages of Scripture on which the doctrine mainly
rests than either the notion of Durandus that Christ s
descent was only one of efficacy and influence ; 2 or
that of others, that they merely refer to the burial of
Christ. 3 Keble alludes to this last opinion, but
1 Calvin, Inst. ii. 1 6, 10. " Earn mortem pertulit quae sceleribus
ab irato Deo infligitur." Beza and others maintained that He actually
endured the sufferings of the Lost.
2 Durandus in Sent. iii. dist, 22, qu. 3. See Strype s "Parker," iii.
18.
3 On this " very late" opinion see Pearson On the Creed, p. 329.
in.] ON MITIGATIONS. 81
only to reject it, in the lines of his hymn for Easter
Eve :
" Sleepst Thou indeed, or is Thy spirit fled
At large among the dead ?
Whether in Eden bowers Thy welcome voice
Wake Abraham to rejoice ;
Or in some drearier scene Thine eye controls
The thronging band of souls ;
That as Thy death won earth, Thine agony
Might set the shadowy world from sin and sorrow free." 1
III. But besides the gleam of light which is thrown
upon the dark future of the lost by inferences which
mercifully and naturally suggest themselves from
these three doctrines the Intermediate State of
preparation and purification ; the permissibility of
Prayers for the Dead ; and the Descent of Christ into
Hades there is yet a fourth consideration of im
portance even more direct : I mean the belief in the
possibility of some future Mitigations of the pains of
the lost (refrigeria*\ and especially of the "pain of
sense," which has always been (even apart from
Purgatory) permitted in the Catholic Church.
This position was maintained, with great ability
and unanswerable demonstration, by Pere Emery, the
superior of St. Sulpice, and Grand Vicar, in his theo
logical lectures at Lyons. Emery, who died in 1811,
was a man not only of high position and of great
courage, but also of profound theological learning.
The Emperor Napoleon had a sincere respect for him,
and in one of his conversations with him, as we are told
by Cardinal Fesch, had touched on the doctrine of
endless torment as a great difficulty. Jimery asked
if he would like to hear him read his lecture on the
The doctrine is mainly built on Eph. iv. 9; I Pet. iii. 19; Acts
ii. 26.
3 Salvian. Avar. iii. II, "guttam refrigerii"
G
g 2 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
subject. Napoleon eagerly accepted the offer, and
remarked repeatedly, " Trh bien, trh bien." It is how
ever more to the purpose that, although the Dominican
order is the most jealous of all about orthodox)^ the
Dominican Sibylla at Venice took the same view, and
Emery s book was admitted into the Dominican
Library of the Minerva at Rome. It is still more
remarkable that although Emery did not acknowledge
his work during his lifetime, the Abbe Carle, in his
book on the Catholic doctrine of the future (Du
Dogme catholique sur I Enfer, Paris, 1840), prints
the dissertation of Emery Sur la Mitigation des Peines
des damnes^ at full length, and with the entire ap
proval of the high authorities whom he consulted on
the subject. Further than this, neither Emery s book
nor the Abbe Carle s has ever been censured by the
Congregation of the Index. This learned and high-
minded theologian has treated the subject so wisely
and fully as materially to abridge my labour on
this important head, which, so far as I know, has
scarcely been so much as touched upon by English
theologians.
i. In St. Augustine s remarks on Psalm cv. (written
A.D. 416), he denies any "mitigation of the pains of the
lost (quis audeat dicer e ? . . . quis audacter dixerit ?),
because Dives could not get a drop of water to cool
his tongue : a view of the passage which, like so
many adopted by St. Augustine, belongs to an obso
lete style of exegesis ; unduly presses an incidental
detail of the framework of a parable ; and obviously
is wholly beside the mark, since Dives is not in " hell,"
but in Hades. What was impossible at that moment
might by no means be impossible for ever. He how
ever puts off all discussion of the subject till some
other opportunity. 2 But wavering on this subject of
1 It was published anonymously with the Pensees de Leibnitz* 1804
and suppressed by the author.
2 " Sed de hac re diligentius disserendum est." In Ps. cv.
in.] ON MITIGATIONS. 83
Eschatology, as he did again and again he says in
his Enchiridion * that there are propitiations for those
who are not very bad, and that though for the very
bad there are no means of aid, yet for the moderately
bad (i.e. for the vast majority), though they be in
hell, the sacrifices of the altar were advantageous to
secure " either complete remission, or at least a more
endurable damnation." The last words, as Petavius
and Emery both argue, show that he is here speaking
of "hell," and not of purgatory. Further on, com
menting upon the text, " God will not forget to pity,"
he says, " Let them suppose, if it pleases them, that
the pains of the lost are, at certain intervals, mitigated
.... so that in His anger He still does not withhold
His compassions, not by ending, but by alleviating,
or giving a rest amid their torments." 2 Albertus Mag
nus, followed by many schoolmen, would again con
fine this remark to purgatory, but there can be no
doubt that Sixtus of Siena 3 is right in saying that
Augustine ultimately leaned to the theory of " miti
gation." For in his City of God (A.D. 426 or 427), in
which we possess some of his latest thoughts, he says
that if any wish to extend the expressions of the
Psalms to " the torments of the impious," by hold
ing that these pains become milder and lighter, he
has, at any rate, nothing to say against it. 4
ii. Again, often as St. Chrysostom speaks of "eternal
woes," he uses expressions in his Third Homily on the
Philippians which make both Sixtus and Petavius, as
well as mery, think that he too held the theory
1 Enchir. no, I. On his uncertainties, see infra, pp. 288-295,
supra, p. 63.
2 Poenas damnatorum certis tempomm intervallis existment, si hoc
eis placet, aliquatenus mitigari . . . ut in ira sua non tarnen contineat
miserationern suam non aetcrno finem dando, sed levamen adhibendo,
vel interponendo cruciatibus." Enchir.
3 Sixt. Sen. BibL Sanct. v. 47. " Ab hac opinione Augustinus non
omnmo abhoruisse videtur."
4 De Civ. Dei, xxi. 24. " Quod quidem non ideo confirmo, quia
noa resisto." see p. 291.
G 2
84 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
t
of mitigation." This conjecture will be greatly
supported by what I shall have to say about the views
of this great saint farther on. 1
iii. That Prudentius held the doctrine of mitigation
is certain. He writes in a celebrated passage
" Sunt et spiritibus saepe nocentibus
Poenarum celebres sub Styge feriae."
iv. Bishop Lupus argued that just as the sun warms
without enlightening the blind, so Christ, by the
merit of so great a sacrifice, might lessen the pains
of the self-blinded. 2
v. John of Damascus incontestably believed in the
doctrine of Mitigation, and thought that sinners could
even be delivered from "hell" by the prayers of saints.
Thus he tells how St. Thekla delivered her mother
Falconilla ; and Pope Gregory I. delivered the Emperor
Trajan ; and Macarius helped a certain Pagan priest..
With these valueless legends we have, as I have said,
no concern. What I am proving is that the opinion
which the Church so fully permitted cannot be other
wise than consistent with the faith once delivered to
the saints.
vi. And little as the fact is now known to those
who ignorantly maintain that it is heresy to hold
that the doom of " the lost" is not "necessarily*
final to all who incur it, nearly every one of the
great Roman Catholic theologians and the whole
body of Eastern theologians held this very view.
They gave unanimous credence to the story of
the deliverance of Trajan from "hell," and even
invented theories to account for it. Thus Suarez
says, " Whether any one may be delivered from Hell
is a disputed point, and one which does not pertain
to faith." 3 Estius even says that many might be
1 See infra, pp. 271-274, and the quotation on the title page.
2 Bibi. Pair. xv. 51.
s An vero aliquis excipiatur res controversiae est, et quae noil per-
tmet ad fidem." SUAREZ, Da Peccatis, Disp. vii. 3.
in.] ON MITIGATIONS. 85
mentioned who had been so delivered. 1 Even St.
Thomas of Aquinum could not resist the cogency
(to himself) of the legend about Trajan, and could
only say that " Trajan had not been finally doomed
to hell, but only provisionally, and that his
deliverance was granted to him as an exceptional
privilege." 2
vii. The eminent commentator Theopkylact, who was
so great an admirer of St. Chrysostom s works, says
on Luke xii. 5, that " even when men have died in
mortal sin God can remit something, and not use
His full power of casting into Gehenna." 3
viii. Again, the author of the Quaestiones ad
Antiochum, which is printed with the works of St.
Athanasius, says that even the lost will benefit by
our alms and prayers.
ix. It is a remarkable fact that the great Pope
Innocent III., when consulted on this very point by
the Archbishop of Lyons, left it an open question
(tua discretio investigef] whether Masses might not
benefit those of the lost who were only " mode
rately bad." The attempt to get over thig opinion
which, as Bellarmine observes, " torments many"
(multos torquere solet] by saying that it only refers
to Purgatory, is strangely futile ; for that the souls
in Purgatory were benefited by prayers and alms,
was not regarded by any Roman Catholic as an
open question at all, but one which was absolutely
settled in the affirmative from very early days. 4
x. The Third Council of Florence (1438) expressly
admitted that this doctrine of mitigation might be
held without any blame. 5
L Est. in Sentent. iv ; Disp. xlvi. 241.
"Aliasunt quae lege communi accidunt, et alia quae singulariter
ex privilegio aliquibus conceduntur." ST. THOM. AQ.
J See supra, p. 23, infra, p. 92.
"Ce pape," says Emery, "supposait . . qu on pouvait, sans blesser
la foi, croire ce qu on voulait sur cette matiere." ABBE CARLE,
P- 4 6 - & Mansi, xxxi. 488.
86 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
xi. At this Council the Greek Bishop Mark,
Metropolitan of Ephesus, made two speeches as to
the views of the Greek Church on this subject, and
quoted a passage of St. Basil to prove that he held
it. 1 Father Lequien in his edition of John of
Damascus selects Bishop Mark as a representative
theologian of the Greek Church, and Syropulus 2 in
his History of the Council of Florence says that
Bishop Mark s speech was approved by the Emperor
Palaeologus, and his learned theological assessors.
Leo Allatius, in his account of the Greek ecclesi
astical writers, says that they defend with tenacity
(mordicus] the merciful opinion that the lost are
refreshed by the prayers of saints, and sometimes
even delivered by their aid. 3 They maintain this
opinion on three grounds the pity of God ; the
opinions of the Fathers ; and the legends about the
Emperor Trajan and Theophilus.
xii. To return to the Latin Church : the famous
monk Gotteschalk wrote to the Bishops of France in
the ninth century that they should urge the people to
pray expressly, not only for those in purgatory, but
for the lost, that God would even a little alleviate
(mitiget et laeviget] their pains. 4
xiii. Hugo Etherianus, one of the most learned
theologians of the twelfth century, wrote his treatise
On the Return of Souls from Hell, at the request of
the clergy. 6 In the thirteenth and following chapters
a Christian soul in hell begs the prayers of the living,
and says that even those who die in mortal sin can
be assisted and even delivered. The lost soul bids
1 The passage is in a homily attributed to Basil, which is used in the
paschal office of the Greek Church, in which he prays to Christ t>hat
by His merits the pains of the lost may be alleviated. CARLE, p. 409.
J Syropulus, Hist. Cone. Florent. Sess. v. cap. 14.
3 " Quibus (precibus) et recreantur et aliquando etiam a poenis liber-
antur." LEO ALLATIUS, De. Libr. Eccles. Graec. ii. 117.
4 This appears from the answer of Amolon, Archbishop of Lyons,
Bibl. Patr*.-x.iv. 335.
5 Bibl. Patr. xxii. It was not published till 1540.
in.] ON MITIGA TIONS. 87
men pray for the lost, " that they may suffer a more
endurable damnation, or gain a complete remission."
Hugo, besides the usual legends, adduces that of
Herman, Bishop of Capua, who delivered the soul
of the Deacon Paschasius from a troop of devils.
xiv. This view of " mitigation was held by
Peter Lombard?- by Praepositivus? by St. Thomas
Aquinas? by our great Bishop, Robert Grostetef
by Townely? by Gilbert, Bishop of Poic tiers, by the
great Chancellor, ^ean Gerson (probably in part
author of the Imitatio Christi}, 6 by Pope Benedict
XIV., 1 by St. Bonaventura, by the Scotists, and even
by Bossuet* and by Petau?
xv. Coming down to later times, St. Francis de
Sales, writing on Psalm Ixxix. 10, quotes with
approval the version of the old poet Desportes : -
" Vous n avez oublie la bonte de votre ame,
Non pas meme en jetant les damnes dans les flamrnes,
De 1 eternel en enfer ; emmi [parmi] votre fureur,
Vous n avez su garder [empecher] votre sainte douceur,
De repandre les traits de sa compassion,
Emmi ses justes coups de la punition."
xvi. Leibnitz argued that the pains of the lost
might be constantly diminished, yet never quite re
moved, just as the asymptote never quite touches the
circle. In this he gave more accurate expression to
1 Sent. iv. Disp. 45. " Mediocriter malis suffragantur ad poenae
mitagationem."
2 Summa Theol.xw. (not published). " Fortasse queunt viventium
merita in aliquo perditorum laxare supplicia."
3 He says on Ps. Ixxvi. " Hoc intelligitur de misericordia aliquid
relaxante." 4 See Sixt. Sen. Bibl. vi. 48.
5 De Eucharistia, ii. 8. He says that great theologians had thought
" reproborum tormenta in inferis leniri posse."
6 Gerson, in a sermon before the king, argued from the case of Dives
that the damned could at least rejoice in the salvation, of their living
friends. Opp. iv. 634.
7 He quotes with approval a prayer, " Fusis precibus imploremus ut
Ejus indulgentia illuc defuncti liberentur a Tartaro."
8 See Emery, in Carle, p. 435. 9 De Angelis, iii. 8.
88 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
a notion of Gilbert, Bishop of Poictiers, who argued
from the infinite divisibility of lines. 1
xvii. Lastly, Emery attaches great importance to a
remarkable pastoral issued by a holy and learned
Bishop of Boulogne, Mgr. de Pressy, in 1790, in
which he devotes a long passage to the refutation of
all objections to the doctrine of " mitigation," and
concludes by saying that, since the opinion is not
contrary either to Scripture or to reason, it may
serve to remove in the minds of unbelievers " the
scandal of the cruelty which they attribute to the
dogma of eternal pains."
It is remarkable that throughout his treatise M.
mery does not so much as once allude to the word
refrigeria, the " refreshments " of the lost, in which
some of the Fathers believed. How universally it
was supposed that such " times of refreshment " were
granted to the damned may be seen in the famous
mediaeval legend of St. Brendan, which Mr. Matthew
Arnold has put into such exquisite verse. On an
iceberg in the Northern Sea the saint catches sight of
a miserable figure, in which he recognises the " traitor
Judas out of hell." Judas cries out
" One moment wait, thou holy man !
On earth my crime, my death, they knew ;
My name is under all men s ban ;
Be told them of my respite too."
Because of his one good deed the giving of a
cloak to a poor leper at Joppa
" Once every year, when carols wake
On earth the Christian s night s repose,
Arising from the sinner s lake,
I journey to these healing snows.*
The notion that the lost not merely remained im
penitent in a sinful state, but went on sinning in hell
is a refinement of superfluous horror left for the
1 Leibnitz, Theodicee t 92.
in.] ON A MILDER VIEW OF HELL. 89
pious tenderness of modern Calvinists, and absolutely
alien from, nay, contradictory to, the teachings of
Scripture. It is a mere figment of human inference,
which makes more terrible, and not less terrible,
the theory which it was invented to support.
IV. It only remains to mention yet another of the
views wherewith the heart of the pitiful has striven
to alleviate the frightfulness of erring fancies. It is
the conception of what the late F. W. Faber calls
"the bright side of hell." Cardinal Newman, in his
Dream of Gerontius, represents the pains of purgatory
as almost a bliss :
" In the willing agony
He plunges and is blest. "
The Bishop of Belley, a friend of St. Francis de
Sales, applies the same conception even to hell.
He imagines the damned, not as a modern Catechism
describes them, " cursing, roaring, and blaspheming
God," but joining in unanimous hymns in honour of
that Mercy in consequence of which they are not
consumed. The notion is probably founded on such
texts as Philippians ii. 10. I do not know whether Mr.
E. H. Bickersteth ever read the views of this Roman
Catholic Bishop, but he, too, in his striking poem,
"Yesterday, To-day, and For Ever," represents "hell"
as almost a holy, and therefore almost a happy place.
Some passages in the De Bono Mortis of St. Ambrose
might lead us to think that he also leaned to the
same view. Throughout his cautious language we
trace the opinion that even for sinners the world
beyond the grave is less painful than the retribution
which falls on them in their earthly life.
No one, I think, can read this chapter without
arriving at the conclusion that views far more
90 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP. in.
tolerable, infinitely less repulsive than those of cur
rent sermons views analogous to or identical with
my own have in all ages been not only permissible,
but common in the Church. In the doctrine of an
Intermediate State with its possible purgational and
probatory fire ; in the permitted practice of prayer for
the Dead; in the revealed fact of Christ s Descent
into Hades ; in the belief that Mitigations would be
granted to the lost ; finally, in a more spiritual and
less abhorrent conception of the condition of lost
souls, the Catholic Church has granted comfort and
hope to those who find a stumbling-block in the
remorselessness of human fancies.
CHAPTER IV.
WAS THERE NOT A CAUSE ?
6 Ttfks aXriddiav &$i]s 6 rov /iox^Tjpoi? fiios fcrr\v, b ahdarcap,
tia.Ka.p.va. ios, Kal ird.ffa.is &pais evoxos. PHILO.
"Patiturque suos inens conscia manes." AUSON.
" Pure love is the only eternal fire." MAD. DE LA MOTTE GUYON.
I WILL now proceed to take in succession the four
points which I challenged as accretions to the Scriptural
and Catholic doctrine of future retribution. It is ad
mitted by Dr. Pusey, and by all of those who have
recently written and spoken on the subject with any
knowledge or authority, that as to three of these I
was perfectly right; that three of these are accretions;
that they are not matters of faith. They have been
repeated chiefly by the least competent of theologians
and preachers with that arrogant tone of infallibility
which, in all ages, theologians and preachers have been
too much tempted to adopt ; but they are matters of
mere opinion of opinion not binding upon any one ;
of opinion not more intrinsically authoritative than
many other opinions of writers who have shown
themselves eminently fallible, and often wholly in the
wrong.
First, then, I denied any necessary validity to the
opinion that the fire of hell is corporeal, that its
92 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
\
tortures are physical tortures. I said that I rejected
the belief in the " physical torments," the material
agonies, the sapiens ignis of eternal punishment."
The words sapiens ignis were quoted from Minucius
Felix, who, in a revolting passage in which many
have followed him, spoke of the fire of hell as a con
scious fire which at once " burns and renews, feeds on
and nourishes the limbs." l
Dr. Pusey at once and frankly concedes my point.
Whatever may be his own personal belief, he says,
respecting bodily torments, that " neither the Church
nor any portion of it has so laid down any doctrine
in regard to them as to make the acceptance of them
an integral part of the doctrine itself"; and again,
"with regard to the nature of the sufferings, nothing
is matter of faith." He quotes passages to this effect
from St. Jerome, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, St.
John Damascene, and Theophylact (A.D. 1077). He
therefore not only admits all I asked for, but sup-
ports it. I was fully aware when I wrote that this
notion of a bodily hell was not any part of the Ca
tholic faith. Petavius has collected the passages of
the Fathers which speak of the pains of future punish
ment as being mental, and for the sake of those
readers who may like to read them in the original, I
will record them in the note. 2 "As to the place,
manner, and kind of these sufferings," says Alban
Butler, " nothing has been defined by the Church ;
and all who except against this doctrine on account
of the circumstance of a material fire, quarrel about
1 Minuc. Felix, Octav. 35 ,
2 Petavius (De Angelis, Theol. Dogma, iii. v. 8; Opp. v. p. 103,
ed. Antw.) has adduced the following among others : ovx V\IKQV (rb
jrvp) olov TO Trap T)iuv oA\ olov etSenj 6 Qeo y. JOHN DAMASC. 2/cwA7]|
5e Kal Trvp KoXd^ovra TOVS dvQpwirovs rj avveiSrja is scrriv e/ccurTou Ka\
}) fJLfil/J. n TWV TrpaxfleWcoi eV T fiic? Tovrcp al(rxpv. THEOPHYL.
"Tormenta quae Scriptura sancta peccatoribus comminatur, non ponit
(Origenes) in suppliciis sed in conscientia peccatorum." JER. Ep. lix.
ad Aditum ; cf. Apol. ii. in Rufinum. " Neque corporalium stridor
aliquis dentium, neque ignis aliquis perpetuus flammarum corporalium,
iv.J WAS THERE NOT A CAUSE? 93
a mere scholastic question, in which a person is at
liberty to choose either side." x But if this be so, some
perhaps may say that it was needless for me to
speak. If theologians, alike ancient and modern,
have denied that any one need believe in a bodily
hell ; if, as Alethinus says in his notes on Petavius, it
is wiser to leave the question an open one, because it
is not to be decided from Scripture, and there is no
apostolic tradition or new revelation on the subject ;
if, as Petavius frankly admits, the Church has never
laid down any decree on the subject in any Council
or Synod why was it necessary for me to plead so
strongly that Christians should be emancipated from
such teaching ?
i. For two reasons. First, because, as I have
shown, this form of the doctrine, beyond all others,
is so revolting and abhorrent to the human mind
that the insistence in a belief on it is the main cause
of the scepticism of thousands. It is a huge, a
horrible, and a needless stumbling-block in the path
of Christianity. It scandalises Christ s little ones.
It offends the childhood of the world. It repels and
overthrows those instincts of the human heart which
are sweetest and most divine. It has arisen solely
from the abuse, exaggeration, and misinterpretation of
metaphors ; and has been founded upon the exposi
tion of all parts alike of the Bible by those who, from
stereotyped prejudices, or from the want of literary
training, and especially from their complete ignorance
of the modes of Eastern expression, refuse to weigh
the meanings of words, or to interpret language by
the ordinary laws of historic criticism. Thousands of
neque vermis est corporalis, sed ... si quis non decoquat peccata sua
. . . igne aduretur proprio et suis vermibus consumetur." AMBROSE,
in Luc. xiv. So too Greg. Nyss. DeAnima, p. 662 ; Macarius, Horn.
i. De Vis. Ezech. 51. (On the other side are Basil, Jerome, Lactan-
tius, Isidore.) So too Metrophanes Tritopulus, Confess. 20, and see
Acts of Council of Florence (Harduin, ix. 19).
1 Lives of the Saints, Nov. 2.
94 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
Western teachers have first taken metaphors literally,
and then have forced them into the most extravagant
inferences. I conceive that I have, by God s blessing,
been enabled to render some service to the Church by
helping many to see that, though they may believe
in a material " hell : if they will, they have no right
to enforce such a belief on others, because the Church
does not require it, and in teaching it they are teach
ing for doctrine the inferences and interpretations of
fallible men.
2. But secondly, it was my duty to repudiate any
necessity for believing in this material fire, because
although it is, confessedly, not a matter of faith, it
yet has been the commonest opinion of Christians ;
and because it has been taught for ages, and is still
taught as though it were a certain truth. In other
words, men have fiercely declared that we must, at
the peril of our salvation, understand literally that
which is obviously metaphorical. 1
To prove the first point I need add nothing to
the testimonies which I have quoted from those who
have admitted that it is this form of the doctrine
which, more than any other, has made them sceptics
or infidels. 2 I need only appeal further to the ex
perience of all who have mingled in the society of
literary and scientific men, and who are aware that
it is not the doctrine of a future punishment for sin,
but the doctrine of endless bodily torments, which
has had the chief influence in driving many of them
to the rejection of Christianity.
To prove the second point it might perhaps be
sufficient to quote Dr. Pusey s own admission (p. 23)
that the fire of hell has been understood to be
material fire " almost universally by Christians."
Petavius says " that the fire of hell, in which
they are tormented, is corporeal and material,
" Inter Latinos certissimum est ignem esse corporeum." FABER,
Disfiut. ii. 453. 2 See Eternal Hope, Exc. v., and infra, p. 120
IV.] W AS THERE NOT A CAUSE? 95
all living Theologians, nay more, all Christians, are
agreed " ] ; and he adds that, though the Church has
never enjoined that doctrine, there were some who
asserted that it was a matter of faith.
It is clear therefore that I was by no means fighting
with shadows ; and, however painful, it is positively
necessary to show this once more. It is necessary
once more to show that there was just cause openly
to repudiate those hideous pictures which are due to
the unlicensed revelling of human imagination, and
not to the Word of God. Against the pain, even the
eternal pain, of loss against the certain truth that we
shall receive according to our works against Christ s
revelation that there will, in the life to come, be
degrees of punishment, light or heavy, in proportion
to the degrees of guilt that these punishments will
come by the working of natural laws, the penalty being
the natural result of the sin, not the arbitrary infliction
of external agony that a soul may possibly, even for
ever, by its own act and its own will, shut itself out
from the presence of God, and be unreclaimed even
by the bitter taste of the fruit of its own doings ;
these are doctrines neither unjust nor unmerciful, nor
is there anything in them which revolts and maddens
the conscience and the instincts of mankind. And
these alone are the doctrines of Scripture, though
they are often expressed in the metaphors of which
all languages and pre-eminently the literatures and
languages of Semitic nations are full. .
But that souls are to be plunged into a material
fire, miraculously created or kept aflame, and to be
" Ceterum uti corporeum, et materia constantem esse inferorum
ignem quo utique ill! torquentur, Theologi hodie ornnes, immo et
Christian! consentiunt, ita nullo Ecclesiae decreto adhuc obsignatum
yidetur ut recte Vasquezius observat : neque enim ulla in synodo sancitum
illud est ; etsi nonnulli rem esse fidei pronuntiant." DeAngelis, iii. v. 7.
This was the opinion in his day, but now the German Catholic Klee,
in his Dogmatik (ii. 429), says of the fire of purgatory that " Igno
rance only or malice (to make room fur irony) can think of common
r 9) J
fire.
96 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
tormented with excruciating physical pangs during
I billions of ages for every second of sin, while saints
i and angels rejoice at their sufferings these are the
assertions which I wish to hear authoritatively repudi
ated, and which I myself repudiate with abhorrence.
At present they are half asserted and half believed
by some ; and multitudes, especially of the poor and
ignorant, who neither assert nor believe them, yet
suppose that they are a part of the doctrines of the
Church, and in consequence look with incredulity
on many other truths which are indeed matters of
Christian Faith.
It has been said of late that these pictures and
descriptions come only from a few writers, and those
only the most passionate and the most vulgar. It
has been said and in this I heartily agree that the
doctrine of the Church ought not to be judged by
pulpit diatribes. It has been said that to quote them
is only to " disfigure my pages." That they " disfigure
my pages" no one can feel more than I do ; for some
of them fill me with shame and horror. Many times I
have considered whether I might not, consistently with
duty, exclude them, for to quote them is a real self-
sacrifice. But it is painfully necessary to show what
it is that men claiming all the infallibility of authorised
teachers have taught as revelations of God. It is not
true that few only have propounded such teachings.
Such passages may be adduced from thousands of
writers of every class, both Romanist and Protestant,
both Anglican and Nonconformist, and in every age
from the third century to the nineteenth. It is
right that once more, and I hope finally r , specimens
of them should be presented as warnings against
a style of appeal so fatally unwarranted. I will not
quote again the famous and horrible passage of
Tertullian, but I will ask the reader to meditate over
the following excerpts, and to remember that they
are specimens of the teaching which, throughout
iv.j WAS THERE NOT A CAUSE? 97
long and dreary centuries, has afflicted Christian
souls. It is now admitted that I was right in chal
lenging them ; that they are not parts of the Christian
Faith. But if so, was it not a rash and an evil thing
that for centuries they should have been taught as
though they were ? x
That such passages are scarcely to be found in
any of the earlier Fathers is quite true, and is a
significant and valuable fact. They confined them
selves almost exclusively to vague and general meta
phors. They did not dream, as a rule, of giving rqins
to the imagination in describing the torments of the
damned. Even in the fierce Tertullian such a de*
scription is very exceptional. Take however these
passages from one or two of the Fathers :
ST. CYPRIAN, f 258. "The wretched bodies of
the condemned shall simmer and blaze in those living
fires."
MlNUCIUS FELIX, fl. 230. " Nor to these torments
will there be any measure or termination. There the
sentient fire burns limbs and renews them, feeds on
them and nourishes them." Octav. xxxv. 2
ST. AUGUSTINE, f 430. "That fire is more
deadly than any which man can suffer in this life."
ST. CAESARIUS OF ARLES, t 54 2 - Speaking even
of Purgatory, he writes of it in these terms :
" A person may say I am not much concerned how
long I stay in purgatory, provided I may come to
1 "We are no longer compelled to conceive of a God possessing
two different natures on earth tender and beneficent, even repaying
man s ingratitude and wickedness by His mercies, but beyond the tomb
unmoved by the endless torture and excruciating pain of His enemies.
We read with horror the stories of the Inquisition, of the Emperor
Montezuma broiled on a gridiron over a slow fire, of the men tortured
and driven mad by drops of water falling day and night upon their
foreheads ; but what are these agonies of a few days or hours, hideous
and revolting as they are, in comparison with a scorching fire, which,
after millions of ages, shall only have begun its work ?" DR. ERNEST
PETAVEL, The Struggle for Eternal Life, p. 47
2 On this -jrvp ffwtypoi ovi see Clem. Alex. Prutrept. p. 35 ; Jer. in Dan.
iii. ; Tert. Adv. Gnost. 3; Paulin. Ep. ad Saver. 9. See p. 455.
H
98 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
eternal life. Let no one reason thus. Purgatory
fire will be more dreadful than whatever torments
can be seen, imagined, or endured in this world.
He who is afraid now to put his finger into the fire,
does he not fear lest he be then all buried in torments
for a long time ?" Horn. i. p. 5.
More passages from the Fathers might be added,
but as might have been expected, it is in later ages
in ages when it was firmly believed that volcanoes
were the vent-mouths of Hell, and their sound the
roaring of the damned that these descriptions and
allusions become more common, until indeed they
constituted the main cause of that ghastly terror
which prevailed among the ignorant masses in the
Mediaeval Church. They date mainly from the dia
logues of Gregory the Great at the close of the sixth
century.
VENERABLE BEDE, f 735, H. E. \\\. 19. v. 22.
VISION OF TuNDALE, f II49- " On lit dans la
vision de Tundale. E per tolz lors membres autres
yssian bestias serpenticos que avaient caps ardens
et bex agusatz de fer," &c. MAURY, Legendes du
Moyen Age, p. 152.
ST. THOMAS AQUINAS, f 1274. "The same fire"
(which he decides to be material) " torments the
damned in hell and the just in purgatory. . . . The
least pain in purgatory exceeds the greatest in this
life." Summa Theol. Suppl. qu. 100, act. 2, n. 3.
[I might add very many such passages, e.g., from
the visions of Enus and Thurcal in Matthew Paris.]
ST. BONAVENTURA, f 1274. " One damned soul,
if he came into the world, would suffice to infect the
entire of it."
FRAY Luis DE GRANADA, f 1588. " There will
the condemned in cruel rage and despair turn their
fury against God and themselves, gnawing their flesh
with their mouth, breaking their teeth with gnashing,
furiously tearing themselves with their nails, and
iv.] WAS THERE NOT A CAUSE? 99
everlastingly blaspheming against the judge. . . . Oh
wretched tongues that will speak no word save blas
phemy ! Oh miserable ears that will hear no sound
but groans ! Oh unhappy eyes that will see nothing
but agonies ! Oh tortured bodies that will have no
refreshment but flames. . . . We are terrified when
we hear of executioners scourging men, disjointing
them, dismembering, tearing them in pieces, burning
them with plates of red-hot metal. But these things
are but a jest, a shadow compared with the torments
of the next life." Sermons, i. 72. (Translated by
Rev. Orby Shipley.)
SIR THOMAS MORE, f 1535. (Speaking only of
Purgatory.) " If ye pity the blind, there is none so
blind as we, which are here in the dark save for sights
unpleasant and loathsome. If ye pity the lame, there
is none so lame as we, that can neither creep one foot
out of the fire, nor have one hand at liberty to defend
our face from the flame. Finally, if ye pity any man
in pain, never knew ye pain comparable to ours, whose
fire as far passeth in heat all other fires that ever burned
on earth as the hottest of all that passed a feigned fire
painted on a wall. If ever ye lay sick, bethink you then
what a long night we sely souls endure that lie sleep
less, restless, burning and broiling in the dark fire one
long night or many years together. You walk per-
adventure and totter in sickness ; we lie bound to
brands, and cannot lift up our heads. . . . Your
keepers do you great ease ; our keepers are such as
God keep you from cruel, doomed spirites, odious,
envious, and hateful, despiteous enemies and dispite-
ful tormentors, and their company more terrible and
grievous to be in than is the pain itself; and the
intolerable torment that they do us, wherewith from
top to toe they cease not continually to tear us."
Supplication of Souls.
CALVIN, t 1564. "For ever harassed by a dreadful
tempest, they shall feel themselves torn asunder by an
H 2
ioo MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
angry God, and broken by the weight of His hand,
and transfixed and penetrated by mortal Stings,
terrified by the thunderbolt of God. So that- to sink
into any gulf would be more tolerable than to stand
for a moment in these terrors."
ST. IGNATIUS LOYOLA, f 1548. "Let us fancy
we see hell, and imagine what is worst to behold
a horrible cavern full of black flames. Sulphur,
devils, dragons, fire, swords, arrows, and innumerable
damned who roar in despair. Imagine the worst you
can, and then say, All this is nothing compared to
hell. ... In that voracious subterranean cavern all
the filth of the world is collected and inclosed, without
exhalation or air, which must produce a most foetid
pestilence. . . . The sight is tormented by frightful
devils ; a holy religious saw at death two so monstrous
and ugly devils, that he cried out that rather than see
them again he would walk till the day of judgment
on fire of sulphur and melted metal." Spiritual
Exercises^ Medit. xii. (This is one of the commonest
books of Roman Catholic devotion.)
JEREMY TAYLOR, t 1667. " This temporal fire is
but a painted fire in respect of that penetrating and
real fire in hell."
NlEREMBERG, f 1658. " We are amazed at the
inhumanity of Phalaris, who roasted men in his brazen
bull ; this was joy in respect of the fire of hell,
which penetrates the very entrails without consuming
them." Pains of Hell}
CATECHISMUS ROMANUS. Hell is described as
" Teterrimus et obscurissimus career, ubi perpetuo et
inextinguibli igne damnatorum animae simul cum
immundis spiritibus torquentur."
ST. FRANCIS DE SALES, f 1622. " Represent to
1 This is a passage from Contemplations of the State of Man, often
attributed to Jeremy Taylor (as by Mr. Alger, p. 514, and Mr. Lecky,
European Morals, ii. 239), but proved by Archdeacon Churton to be a
compilation trom Nieremberg, a Spanish Jesuit.
iv.] WAS THERE NOT A CAUSE f 101
yourself a dark city all burning and stinking with fire
and brimstone. The damned are in the depth of hell
within this woful city, where they suffer unspeakable
torments in all their senses and members. Consider
above all the eternity of their pains, which above all
things makes hell intolerable." Garden of the Soul.
BARROW, f 1677. "Our bodies will be afflicted
continually by a sulphureous flame, piercing the
inmost sinews."
JOHN BUNYAN, f 1688. "Their bodies will be
raised from the dead as vessels for the soul vessels
of wrath. The soul will breathe hell-fire, and smoke
and coal will seem to hang upon its burning lips, yea
the face, eyes, and ears will seem to be chimneys and
vents for the flame, and the smoke of the burning,
which God, by His breath, hath kindled therein, and
upon, them, which will be held one in another, to the
great torment and distress of each other." Works,
ii. 136.
BAXTER, f 1691. "Is it an intolerable thing to
burn part of thy body by holding it in the fire ?
What then will it be to suffer ten thousand times
more for ever in hell ?" Saints Rest.
SOUTH, t 1716. "Every lash which God then
gives the sinner shall be with a scorpion ; every pain
which He inflicts shall be more eager than appetite,
more cruel than revenge ; every faculty both of soul
and body shall have its distinct property, and peculiar
torment applied to it, and be directly struck there
where it has the quickest, the sharpest, and the
tenderest sense of any painful impression. . . . But
I shall use no other argument to evince the greatness
of their torment but only this, that the devil shall
be the instrument of their execution. And surely a
mortal enemy will be a dreadful executioner ; and the
punishment which an infinite justice inflicts by the
hands of implacable malice must needs be intolerable."
Sermons, vii. 143.
102 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
THOMAS BOSTON, f 1732. " God will hold sinners
with one hand over the pit of hell, while He torments
them with the other." Fourfold State.
YOUNG, f 1765.
" How bright my prospect shines ! how glorious thine !
A trembling world and a devouring God !
Earth but the shambles of Omnipotence !
JONATHAN EDWARDS, t 1758. " Here all judges
have a mixture of mercy, but the wrath of God will
be poured out upon the wicked without mixture.
Imagine yourself to be cast into a fiery oven . . . and
imagine also that your body were to lie there for
a quarter of an hour, full of fire, as full within and
without as a bright coal fire, all the while full of quick
sense : what horror would you feel at the entrance
of such a furnace ? Oh ! then how would your heart
sink if you knew that after millions and millions of
ages your torment would be no nearer to an end
than ever it was. But your torment in hell will be
immensely greater than this illustration represents."
Works, vol. iii. 260.
" The pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the
furnace is now hot, ready to receive the wicked :
the flames do now rage and glow. The God that
holds you over the pit of hell, much in the same way
as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect,
abhors you and is dreadfully provoked. . . . He will
trample them beneath His feet with inexpressible
fierceness ; He will crush their blood out, and will
make it fly, so that it will sprinkle His garment and
stain all His raiment." Works, vii. 499.
" You cannot stand before an infuriated tiger even ;
what then will you do when God rushes against you
in all His wrath ? " Sinners in the Hands of an
A ngry God. l
1 Let it not be said that religious teachers have long repented of
unconscious blasphemies like these, for this very sermon has been lately
printed and circulated as a tract, to the delight of all who love to watch
the spread of infidelity.
iv.] WAS THERE NOT A CAUSE? 103
ALBAN BUTLER, f 1773. " Do we think that God
can find torments in nature sufficient to satisfy His
provoked vengeance ? No, no ; He creates new instru
ments more violent, pains utterly inconceivable to us.
A soul for one venial sin shall suffer more than all
the pains of distemper, the most violent colics, gout,
and stone joined in complication, more than all the
most cruel torments undergone by malefactors, or
invented by the most barbarous tyrants, more than
all the tortures of the martyrs summed up together.
This is the idea which the Fathers give us [even?]
of Purgatory. And how long souls may have to
suffer there we know not." Lives of the Saints,
November 2.
JOHN WHITAKER, \ 1783. "The bodies of the
damned will all be salted with fire, so tempered and
prepared as to burn the more fiercely, and yet never
consume." Sermon on Death, Judgment, and Eternity.
JOHN WESLEY, f I 79 l - " Is it not common to
say to a child, Put your finger in that candle, can
you bear it even for one minute ? How then will you
bear Hell-fire ? Surely it would be torment enough
to have the flesh burnt off from only one finger; what
then will it be to have the whole body plunged into
a lake of fire, burning with brimstone ? }> -Sermon 73.
DEAN OF GLOUCESTER. "There is the cup of
trembling and of wrath. Your hands must take it,
your mouth must drink it. But you can never drain
it. There is no last drop. Infinite vengeance ever
fills it to the brim. Eternal wrath is ever bringing
more. What is the curse ? It is the endless accumu
lation of all the miseries which God s resources can
command and God s power can inflict. It is the fiery
torrent from the lake of fire. It is pain which can
not be keener, despair which cannot be blacker, and
anguish which cannot be more bitter. It is eternity
in the oneness of all torment." Christ is all !
BISHOP OXENDEN LATE METROPOLITAN OF
104 MERC Y AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
CANADA. " For ever ! torments for ever ! lost for
ever ! it would be difficult to measure the waters of the
sea ; but it is impossible to reckon the ages of a bound
less eternity. After millions of years it will only be
begun. God s wrath in hell will be always wrath to
come. Few are so tossed in this world but they
have some rest. There are few tempests without
some lull between the storm. But there is no pause
in that storm which falls upon the inhabitants of
hell." Great Truths.
DR. GARDINER SPRING." When the omnipotent
and angry God, who has access to all the avenues of
distress in the corporeal frame, and all the inlets to
agony in the intellectual constitution, undertakes to
punish, He will convince the universe that He does
not gird Himself for the work of retribution in vain. "
REV. C. H. SPURGEON. "When thou diest thy
soul will be tormented alone ; that will be a hell for
it : but at the day of judgment thy body will join
thy soul, and then thou wilt have twin-hells, thy soul
sweating drops of blood, and thy body suffused with
agony. In fire exactly like that which we have on
earth thy body will lie, asbestos-like, for ever uncon-
sumed, all thy veins roads for the feet of Pain to
travel on, every nerve a string on which the Devil shall
for ever play his diabolical tune of hell s unutterable
lament ! " Sermon on the Resurrection of the Dead.
BONHOUR. " These unhappy children of wrath not
only suffer during eternity, but they suffer eternity
during each moment of their existence. Eternity is
engraven on the flames which torment them
O tormenting thought ! O miserable condition ! to
burn for ever ! to weep for ever ! to rage for ever ! "
Meditations, translated for English Roman Catholics.
CATECHISM OF THE WESLEYAN METHODISTS. 1
" What sort of place is hell ?
1 These words have (I am told) been struck out of the Catechism
since this book was written ; and this is a sign of the tinus.
iv.] WAS THERE NOT A CAUSE ? 105
" Hell is a dark and bottomless pit full of fire and
brimstone.
" How will the wicked be punished there ?
" The wicked will be punished in hell by having 1
their bodies tormented with fire, and their souls by a
sense of the wrath of God.
" How long will their torments last ?
" The torments of hell will last for ever and ever." 1
KEBLE.
" Salted with fire, they seem to show
How spirits lost in endless woe
May undecaying live. 3
Oh, sickening thought ! yet hold it fast."
The Christian Year.
^ JOHN FOSTER, f 1843." It is infinitely beyond the
highest archangel s faculty to apprehend a thousandth
part of the horror of the doom to eternal damnation." 3
But it is when these awful and horrible conceptions
have been actually painted and designed when, the
loathly agonies of Dante s Inferno have been illus
trated by the sculptor s chisel or the artist s brush,-
when the sluggish imagination of men and women
has been goaded well-nigh to religious monomania
These sentences have very recently been modified.
? It is needless to say that the allusion is to Mark ix. 49, and that this
mysterious passage, in which the true reading seems to be almost irre
coverable, may have a very different meaning. It may indicate that the
fire, like salt, is meant to preserve and purify; and if so, the expression
points to a cleansing discipline, a baptism of fire. "Salt," our Lord
adds, "is good." Would He have attached such an epithet to so horrible
a fancy as the sapiens ignis of Tertullian and Lactantius, which Keble
here reproduces and truly calls " sickening " ? See infra, p. 455.
And this fact made this eminent and holy man say, with all
reverence, that he was unable to reconcile such views with the divine
goodness. I read with pleasure in the Record newspaper (October 20,
1880), that, "in regard to the pictures of physical horror which many
morbid imaginations have delighted to draw of the world of torment,
going far even beyond the terrible words of our Lord Himself, and
indulging in individual pictures of agony to which the Bible gives no
authority, and on which no human mind has, in its agony, any right to
Iwell, the answer given [by Dr. Pusey] is sound and useful. "
io6 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
by paintings like that of Orcagna, by bas-reliefs like
those on the doors of mediseval abbeys, by such
illuminations as those in the missals of the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries, by woodcuts of such abhorrent
atrocity as those in the De Inferno of Antonio Rusca,
the Infernus career of Drexelius, the Inferno aperto
of Pinamonti, it is then that these wanton excesses
of the imagination assume the aspect of a deadly
blasphemy against Him whose name is Love. The
woodcuts of Pinamonti are before me. Even to look
at them seems to leave on a mind filled with faith
in God s Fatherhood the effect of a sin which needs
an immediate lustration. Certainly after seeing them
we can scarcely refrain from the question which one
has asked, " What crimes of men can merit the
endless tortures here set forth except the crime of
conceiving such tortures, and ascribing the malice
of their infliction to an all-wise and holy God ? " To
overthrow a belief in such horrors and such blas
phemies is to overthrow a belief which is the worst
enemy of the Faith, and which is the immediate parent
of atheism, of wretchlessness, and of despair.
The date of Pinamonti s book is 1688. It might
have been hoped that it was no longer the custom
now, as it was in the middle ages, "to stain the
imagination of children by ghastly pictures of
future misery, to imprint upon the virgin mind
atrocious images." l But alas, it is but quite recently
that Father Furniss has written and Messrs. Duffy
have published, such ghastly tracts as " The Sight of
Hell," " The Terrible Judgment and The Bad Child,"
" The Book of the Dying," &c., and these books
are published by authority. What then is still the
permitted teaching of Roman Catholic priests ? I
hardly like to copy, even by way of specimen, such
revolting horrors, horrors which I believe must be
as revolting to the love of God as to all that is loving,
1 Lecky, European Morals ; ii. 237.
iv.] WAS THERE NOT A CAUSE f 107
merciful, and tender in the soul of man. Let one
or two very brief passages out of many pages
suffice.
"When a child commits a mortal sin its soul is
not thrown into a den of lions, but it is thrown into
a den of devils. These devils are a million times
more cruel and frightful than lions, and tigers, and
serpents, and adders, and scorpions, and toads, and
spiders, and all kinds of venomous and stinging
creatures."
A child is condemned to hell. "It sees thousands
and millions [of devils] on every side coming round
it On they come more swiftly than the wind,
like hungry dogs would come to a bone Now
the foremost ranks of the devils are near at hand, close
to the child. They are hissing at it, spitting fire and
venom upon it. They stretch out their great claws
of red-hot fire to get hold of the child."
If these be set down as the coarse ravings of a
vulgar imagination, we are met by the two sad and
startling words, that they are all taught to children,
and disseminated among children, fermifsu superiorum.
And the sermons of Jonathan Edwards, which put
the same fancies into words, are still reprinted and
sold as cheap tracts in England and America. And
to show that I have not misrepresented the ordinary
views need I go further than the teachings of JOHN
WESLEY, of which I have already quoted one speci
men, and some of which still form the standard of the
Wesleyan Methodists ? In Sermon 1 5 he says that
the wicked " will gnaw their tongues for anguish and
pain ; they will curse God and look upwards. There
the dogs of hell, pride, malice, revenge, rage, horror,
despair, continually devour them." And in Sermon
73, " Consider that all these torments of body and
soul are without intermission. Be their suffering
ever so extreme, be their pain ever so intense, there
is no possibility of their fainting away, no, not for one
io8 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
moment. . . . They are all eye, all ear, all sense.
Every instant of their duration it may be said of their
whole frame that they are
Trembling alive all o er,
And smart and agcnise at every pore.
And of this duration there is no end. . . . Neither
the pain of body nor of soul is any nearer an end
than it was millions of ages ago." 1 And similar views
of Hell are in the Catechism which is taught to young
children.
But if these be the teachings which are common
to this day, and if the Church has never and nowhere
1 It was perhaps a consequence of their pledge to teach endless
punishment that of the seventeen authors chiefly eminent divines who
reviewed my Eternal Hope in the Contemporary Review (1878), almost
the only two who even approximately held to the popular view were
two Wesleyans. But signs are not wanting that some Wesleyan ministers
are beginning to groan under the yoke. It was on this ground that the
Rev. W. Impey, Chairman and Superintendent of the Graham s Town
District, South Africa, and for forty uninterrupted years a missionary
in their connexion, was obliged to leave them in 1878. I do not be
lieve that one-twentieth part of our English clergy could hone.-tly say
they accept the teaching of these passages which I have quoted. There
is not one single word which resembles them in all our Thirty-nine
Articles, and 1 feel convinced from Wesley s own reasonings on other
subjects that he would have given up these views had he been living
now. For (i) he, like Paley, believed in numberless degrees of
future rewards and punishments, which went far to remove the sharp
distinction between "lost" and "saved "(see Hunt, Rel. Thought in
England, iii. 291). (2) He rejected Calvinism on grounds of a priori
morality, saying that "if such a doctrine could be found in Scripture
it would be a sure proof that we had mistaken the meaning of Scrip
ture." (3) He argued that you could not expound the doctrine of some
texts, "more or fewer, it matters not," which were " contrary to the
whole scope and tenor of Scripture." " Whatever that Scripture
proves," he said, " it can never prove this. Whatever its true meaning,
this can not be its true meaning. Fo you ask, "what is its true meaning
then? If I ?ay, I know not, you have gained nothing, for there are
many Scriptures, the true sense whereof neither you nor I shall know
till death is swallowed up in victory. But this I know, better it were to
say it had no sense at all than to say it had such a sense as this. . .
Let it mean what it will, it cannot mean that the Judge of all the world
is unjust. No Scripture can mean that God is not Love, or that His
mercy is not over all His works."
iv.] WAS THERE NOT A CAUSE? 109
required an acceptance of such teachings, I ask, Are
they a part of the Christian religion, or are they not ?
And if they are not, that answer should be very
clearly and authoritatively given. Respecting what
I said, therefore, in repudiation of such accretions to
the doctrine of future judgment, I ask, Was there not
a cause ? And I submit that such passages, and
myriads more, are to be utterly and unsparingly
reprobated ; that, however innocently intended, they
are instances of a use of the imagination which no
thing in Scripture sanctions; that they are teachings
which hinder the cause of Christianity ; which invest
with the sanctity of doctrine the dreams of men ;
which needlessly agonise the hearts of the compas
sionate and merciful ; which have no higher warrant
than a total misappreciation of Oriental phraseology
accepted in a sense which was never intended. I
submit further that such teaching is worse than in
effectual to further the cause of God by waking the
terrors of those whom it should most affect. For
they disbelieve it, and, in consequence, reject with
it that Scriptural doctrine of just retribution which
God intended as one of His provisions against the
fascination of seductive sins.
And, unauthorised as these descriptions of hell-
torments certainly are, false as I believe most of
them to be, have they done no harm to humanity ?
To me it seems that they have done deadly harm.
I. In the first place they have made it very difficult
for multitudes to accept any part of a religion which
comes to them enveloped in such a lurid glare. They
have raised in many faithful minds an almost insuper
able difficulty in accepting the real revelation as to
the world beyond the grave. They have created the
perfect fear which casts out all love. " The incre
dibility of this doctrine," says the author of the
Dissertation on Future Punishment printed with the
Sermons of Barrow, " hath made some persons
1 10 MERC Y AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
desperately doubt the whole truth of that religion
whereof this is supposed to be a fundamental article ;
which shows it to be a great scandal to human
reason." 1
2. Again, they have made good men despair of
humanity, despair of life. God said to man, "Be
fruitful and multiply " ; but if these doctrines be true,
they make this the most cruel of all commands, 2 and
the animals are transcendently happier, and have a
lot to be unspeakably envied by millions of mankind.
Bunyan may well say, " I blessed the condition of the
dog or toad, because they had no soul to perish under
the everlasting weight of hell." " I fancy," said the
pious and able Henry Rogers, " I should not grieve if
the whole race of mankind died in its fourth year.
As far as we can see, I do not know that it would be
a thing much to be lamented." Thus, the belief in
these false representations has driven holy Christian
men to conclusions differing but little from those of
the most advanced and infidel materialism, which
declares the existence of mankind to be a miserable
mistake. It makes a Christian apologist admit with
a sigh that he can but faintly oppose even the
most despairing and blasphemous of the conclusions
of a Schopenhauer.
3. Again, they have had a most hardening effect
upon the souls of men, making many of them ready
to rejoice in the anguish and ruin of their fellow
1 "No one who even dips into current literature can help perceiving
that this is one of the main causes of the alienation from Christianity of
the educated mind." CJmrch Quarterly Review.
2 " O voice once heard
Delightfully, Increase and multiply !
Now death to hear ! for what can we increase
Or multiply but woe, crime, penury? "
MILTON, Paradise Lost.
And Young sings
" Father of mercies, why from silent earth
Didst Thou awake and curse me into birth ?
Call into being a reverse of Thee,
And animate a clod with misery ? "
IV.] WAS THERE NOT A CAUSE? in
men. It is still a common thing for men hardened
by the spirit of theological hatred to speak with
complacency of the future retribution of those who
differ from them. I have traced this feeling in not
a few letters and pamphlets and religious newspapers.
Grey-headed clergymen have declared in the pulpit
that they feel it right deliberately to cherish a feeling
of resentment and indignation against those who
have been led to place a deeper trust than they
themselves have done in the endless Love of God.
Not long ago the Bishop of St. Andrews wrote a
letter to the Courant on the question of war. Next
day he received the following post-card : " Your letter
... is quite a scandal. . . . Why you make Chris
tian people rejoice that there is in God s providence
a place of retribution reserved for workers of evil
like you" That " horrible caricature of the Gospel
by the preacher whom Dr. Guthrie heard declare
" that he had a bad opinion of those who did not
rejoice that God s enemies were destroyed without
remedy," is by no means extinct or even rare. It
was once a commonplace of theology that " the joys
of the blessed were to be deepened and sharpened
by constant contrast with the sufferings of the
damned." 1 Here, for instance, is the assertion of no
less a theologian than St. Thomas of Aquinum :
" That the saints may enjoy their beatitude more
thoroughly, and give more abundant thanks to God
for it (ut beatitudo sanctorum magis eis complaceat
et de ea liberiores gratias Deo agant}, a perfect sight
of the punishment of the damned is granted to them."
Summa iii. Suppl. Qu. 93, i.
So too Peter Lombard, the Master of the Sentences,
" Therefore the elect shall go forth to see the
1 One of its ultimate sources may have been the fourth book of
Esdras (Bensley, Missing Fragments, p. 67); another, a monstrous
perversion and misinterpretation of an intense Apocalyptic metaphor,
which has no connexion with the matter.
ii2 MERCY AND JUDGMENT, [CHAP.
torments of the impious, seeing which they will not
be grieved, but will be satiated with joy (non dolore
efficientur, sed laetitia satiabuntur), at the sight of the
unutterable calamity of the impious.-" x
It is not wonderful that hosts of minor theologians
should have repeated a sentiment for which they had
such high authority.
Thus the German theologians of the " dogmatic
epoch all accept it. Luther, to the question whether
the Blessed will not be saddened by seeing their
nearest and dearest (conjunctissimos] tortured, an
swers, "Not the least in the world"; and Gerhard
says that " the Blessed will see their friends and rela
tions among the damned as often as they like (gtwties
cunque voluerint !}, but without the least compassion."
" The view of the misery of the damned," said
7 onathan Edwards, " will double the ardour of the love
and gratitude of the saints in heaven." 2 Boldicke,
in his Versuch einer Theodicee, argued that eternal
torments proved the beneficence of the Deity, because
they would so greatly heighten the happiness of the
elect ! 3 Andrew Welwood speaks of the saints as
" overjoyed in beholding the vengeance of God," and
their beholding of the smoke of the torment of the
wicked as "a passing delectation."
" This display of the divine character," said
Samuel Hopkins, " will be most entertaining to all
who love God, will give them the highest and most
ineffable pleasure. Should the fire of this eternal
punishment cease, it would in a great measure obscure
the light of heaven, and put an end to a great part
of the happiness and glory of the blessed." " The
door of mercy will be shut," said Newcome in his
Catechetical Sermons, " and all bowels of compassion
1 Sentent. iv. 50, ad Jin. 2 Works, vol. iv. Serm. xiii.
3 It is to me perfectly astonishing that writers (like one in the Church
Quarterly Rfvir^v} can continue to repeat such conventional nonsense as
that if there were no endless Hell there could be no God and no
Love.
iv.] WAS THERE NOT A CAUSE? 113
denied, by God, who will laugh at their destruction ;
by angels and saints, who will rejoice when they see
the vengeance ; by their fellow-sufferer the devil, and
the damned rejoicing over their misery."
What is this but to attribute to saints and angels
that delight and exultation in the spectacle of horror,
defeat, and anguish, which one would have thought
more worthy of the hearts of fiends ? l Nero and
Caligula were regarded as exceptional monsters
because they liked to look on for a few moments at
the tortures of their victims, and Phalaris as a prodigy
of detestable wickedness because he loved to hear
them howl in his brazen bull ; but in these writings of
Christian men the howlings of the lost are described
as a part of the very music of heaven, and their anguish
unutterable and inconceivable, not for a time, but for
ever, is set forth as giving a fresh thrill of bliss to the
beatitude of heaven. God has said that one of the
three things which He alone requires of us is " to
love mercy." Will any honest man who is not entirely
sophisticated by system say that such language as
this is accordant with a love of mercy ? Our Lord
said, " Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain
mercy." Is that beatitude to be obsolete in heaven ?
Does God cease there to be the God who declareth
His Almighty power most chiefly in showing mercy
and pity ?
" Is Heaven so high
That pity cannot breathe its air ?
Its happy eyes for ever dry,
Its holy lips without a prayer ?
My God ! my God ! if thither led,
By Thy free grace unmerited,
No palm or crown be mine, but let me keep
A heart that still can feel, and eyes that still can weep !"
We leave it to the disciple of Mohammed, lying on his coueh of
sensuality, to look down with cruel delight upon a scene of unutterable
and endless misery. Koran> Ixxxiii." CONSTABLE, Future Punish
ment, p. 42.
I
1 14 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
^
4. But these are, not by any means the only evils
caused by trying to claim the sanction -of revelation
for the most inhuman and unwarrantable errors and
misinterpretations of men.
They make sad the hearts which God has not
made sad. " While I read such things," said the
great Johannes Scotus Erigena 1 the greatest and
acutest of all the schoolmen " I waver in amaze
ment, and I totter smitten with the utmost horror." 2
It is said that Jonathan Edwards himself who has
been one of the worst offenders in this direction,
Jonathan Edwards, the descendants of whose own
congregation (as I am informed by his successor)
cannot now read or listen to what he said without
indignant astonishment Jonathan Edwards, whose
congregation used to listen to him with groans, and
tears, and sighs, and beating of the breast, in sheer
horror at his representations, was himself filled with
lively anguish at the pictures of hell-torments which
he conceived it to be his duty to set forth. " I sink
under the weight of this subject," exclaimed Saurin
in his famous Sermon on Hell, " and I find in the
thought a mortal poison which diffuseth itself into
every period of my life, rendering society tiresome,
nourishment insipid, pleasure disgustful, and life itself
a cruel bitter." " In the distress and anguish of my
spirit," writes the excellent Albert Barries, " I con
fess I see not one ray to disclose to me why man
should suffer to all eternity. I have never seen a
particle of light thrown on these subjects that has
given a moment s ease to my tortured mind. It is all
dark dark dark to my soul, and I cannot disguise
it." " Far be it from us," said John Foster, "to make
light of the demerit of sin. But endless punishment
I admit my inability (I would say it reverently) to admit
this belief together with a belief in the Divine Goodness
- the belief that God is Love, that * His tender
1 Floruit A.D. 858. 2 De Dlv. Nat. v. 87.
IV.] WAS THERE NOT A CAUSE? 115
mercies are over all His works/ : " The same
Gospel," says Isaac Taylor, "which penetrates our
souls with warm emotions dispersive of selfishness,
tempts us often to wish that itself were not true, or
that it had not taught us so to feel." 2 " Oh, Dr.
Emmons, Dr. Emmons/ shrieked a woman on
hearing a sermon of that terrible divine, "has God
then no pity at all ? " 3
5. Again, they have filled the hearts of thou
sands, perhaps of millions, with defiant, and ignoble
thoughts of God. 4 Here, for instance, are the words
of a true and noble-hearted woman, one of the most
devout and self-sacrificing women whom this age, or
any age, has seen. " Is it not a simple impertinence,"
says Miss Florence Nightingale, " for preachers and
schoolmasters, literally ex cathedra, to be always in
culcating .... what they call the commands of God ....
and often representing Him as worse than a devil ?
Alas ! for mankind might easily answer I cannot
love because I am ordered. Least of all can I love
One who seems only to make me miserable here to
torture me hereafter. Show me that He is lovable,
and I shall love Him without being told. But does
any preacher show us this ? He may say that God
is Love, but he shows Him to be hate, worse than
any hate of man. As the Persian poet says, If God
punishes me for doing evil by doing me evil, how is He
better than I ? * And it is hard to answer. For certainly
1 John Foster, On Futiire Punishment.
2 Restoration of Belief, p. 367.
3 It is out a natural Nemesis on such teaching that the site of Dr.
Emmons church is now covered by one of the largest Universalist
churches in America.
4 "Pisistratus was once advised to put to death a youth who had
aspired to his daughter s love ; but he ordered him to be set at liberty.
For," said he, if I punish those who love my daughter, what can I
do to those who hate her? Our modern religion," says Professor
David Swing of Chicago, "should learn a lesson here ; for if we talk
about God as Jonathan Edwards did, there is no form of cruelty left to
ascribe to Satan."
2
1 16 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
the worst man would hardly torture his enemy, if he
could, for ever. All good men would save others if
they could." There is more, and stronger. I do not
of course, endorse all that she says ; but is it not an
" awful responsibility to teach in a manner which
leads such a woman to use such words as these ?
6. But, further, these pictures of hell, these human
additions to and fancies concerning the future state
of retribution, have been the chief cause of religious
persecution. It is the opinion of a modern critic that
the two words in the Vulgate " et ardent" u and
they are burned" spoken actually of dead boughs,
and metaphorically of the state of souls so long as
they are severed from Christ kindled all the infamous
fires of the Inquisition. It was these doctrines which
made men think that they did God service by thrust
ing martyrs to gasp out their souls in the flames of
Toledo and of Smithfield. " As the souls of heretics
arc hereafter to be eternally burning in hell," such
was the reasoning of Queen Mary Tudor in defence
of her awful persecution, " there can be nothing
more proper than for me to imitate the Divine
Vengeance by burning them on earth." l
The popular belief in the inconceivable brutalities,
which (as they were told) went on in hell, made men
indifferent to the guilt and shame of inflicting torments
on the bodies of their fellow men. The feeling comes
out repeatedly in the Twelfth Meditation of the
Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. He imagines
that a king, while asleep, has been stung by a
scorpion, and the scorpion is "cut, crushed, trampled,
burnt to ashes ; all is nothing to satisfy for that great
crime. The sinner is a most vile worm. . . . By sinning
1 " The burning of heretics had also a semblance of everlasting burning
to which they adjudged their souls, as well as their bodies were co-
demned to the fire ; but with this signal difference that they could 1 find
no effectual way to oblige God to execute their sentences, as they con
trived against the civil magistrate." Burnet, Hist, of the Reformation,.
i. 58 (ed. Pocock. See also vol. li.
IV.] AN A WFUL RESPONSIBILITY. 1 1 7
he acted in a hostile manner to God. What punishment
shall be given him in hell to repair this great outrage ?
Flames, swords, devils ? All is little, all is nothing."
He then proceeds to tell us that the assassin of
William, Prince of Orange, was hung up by the ends
of his thumbs with 100 Ib. of lead attached to his
toes ; then beaten with iron rods ; then he had needles
driven under his nails and skin ; the next day his hairs
were pulled out one by one ; he was exposed to a slow
fire, impaled, and during this agony his hand burnt
with plates of iron ; and he adds, " If such pain was
adjudged to him who had presumed to wound a prince,
what torments could be given in hell to him who
outraged and crucified God ? "
7. And besides all this there is overwhelming proof
that the degrading falsehoods embodied in these un
warrantable accretions to the faith are the most
fruitful source of infidelity. If it involve an " awful
responsibility " to try to restore the true faith on this
subject, it involves a far more awful responsibility to
preach the popular error. " All who teach it," says
one, " are morally responsible for the atheism, suicide,
madness, and gloom thereby produced." They are
preaching inferences, and indulging in descriptions,
which tend to array against them and against religion
much that is noblest and most Christlike in the heart
of man. There is nothing in which Secularists so
much delight as in attempts to buttress up the current
views of endless vengeance in such forms as those
which I have denounced. They know that a religion
which identifies itself with evil and fallible inferences
dishonouring to the nature of God, and false to the
drift of His revelation, can never retain its hold on
the heart of man. The Church is no longer guilty of
the unwisdom which once enlisted so many of her
teachers against the advance of science, but she will
suffer reveises yet more deadly if she continues to
represent her doctrines of the future life in forms
ii8 MERCY AND JUDGMENT [CHAP.
\
which are the mere inventions of scholasticizing
theology, and which outrage the noblest instincts of
mankind.
Mankind will humbly admit the cogency of the
proof that there is a future retribution for sin, and
that the retribution will continue as long as the soul
continues to live in guilty selfishness to hate the
good and love the evil. But mankind recognises a
divine element in the teaching by which all that is
noblest in its own feelings is being led more and
more to detest all disproportionate vengeance and all
aimless cruelty. Not long ago a Roman Catholic
Archbishop in a Paris conference advised his clergy
to avoid preaching upon hell. " This question,"
he said, "will rather repel men s minds from the faith
than win them to accept it." 1 He showed a wise
insight into the human heart. The passages which
I adduced from sceptical writers in Eternal Hope
sufficiently prove that the popular errors concern
ing hell, and the revolting manner in which it has
been preached, are the stronghold of modern ir-
religion. Such views have imperilled a thousand
souls for every one which they have startled and
aroused. Mankin, will not reject the doctrine of a just
and certain punishment ; they will adore the Justice
which only punishes in the desire to purify and save ;
but they can never worship a God who is presented
to them in a guise entirely alien from the whole tenor
of His revelations, with no excuse beyond the un
reasoning perversion of a few isolated phrases. They
will give their hearts to a Heavenly Father, awful in
the holiness of a merciful, because remedial, seve
rity ; they cannot give their hearts to One who is in
vested by loveless religionism with the attributes of
a more relentless Moloch. " They think," as Mr.
Fowle says, " that hell [I should say the vulgar and
1 Mgr. Chal- ndon, Archbishop of Aix.
iv.] DOCTRINE OF ENDLESS TORMENTS. 119
unwarranted misrepresentations of hell] is fatal to all
religion." *
But then it is said you need the doctrine to arouse
the wicked. That was the argument of St. Chrysostom,
of St. Augustine, of St. Jerome, and it even misled
Origen into an unfaithful " ceconomy." But it is an
argument wholly mistaken ; and it is even immoral to
regard the supposed usefulness of the doctrine, and
not its truth. Any falsehood must be injurious, and
those falsehoods are most injurious which distort an
underlying truth. But the notion that the vulgar
errors about hell the false additions to the teachings
of Scripture respecting it are " useful," is belied by
all experience. It has been asserted by those who
well know what they are saying, that the kind of Hell
which has been described to them is " the standing
joke of the multitude." "As to the worldly whom
you hope to arouse by it," says Mr. Minton, 2 " I
doubt if there is a single doctrine that has any
thing like its power to lull them to sleep." " The
dogma of hell," says the Rev. Rudolph Suffield,
after wide experience as Apostolic Missionary in
England and Ireland, :c did no moral or spiritual
good, but rather the reverse. ... It frightened,
nay tortured, innocent young women and virtuous
boys. It never (except in the rarest cases) deterred
from the commission of sin. It caused unceasing
mental and moral difficulties, lowered the idea of
God, and drove devout persons from the God of
hell to Mary. It always influenced the wrong people,
and in a wrong way, and caused infidelity to some,
temptations to others, and misery without virtue to
most." Men will believe with trembling the salutary
truth that, neither in this world nor in the next,
will the wicked go unpunished ; they simply will not
believe the unscriptural horrors which I have quoted,
1 Rev. T. Fowle, An Essay on the Ri^ht Translation of alu>t> t
p. 4. * The Way Everlasting, p. 73.
. 120 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
For centuries the coarse human enginery of such
unwarranted fancies has been tried in vain. 1
A few passages will suffice to prove that the false
and unscriptural hell of revivalists is the chief
hindrance to the spread of religion.
" The sceptic believes in his heart that there is a
God, and the wicked shall be punished ; but he
crushes the idea of divine justice in his soul, be
cause he has always been taught to associate it
with raging flames and endless cruelties, which
would soften the heart of a tiger, and make stones
weep over the fate of the lost." AUG. CALLET,
L Enfer, p. 340.
" Compared with this, every other objection to
Christianity sinks into insignificance/ J. S. MILL,
Autobiography, p. 41 ; Three Essays, p. 114.
" L Eglise Romaine s est porte le dernier coup :
elle a consomme son suicide le jour ou elle a fait
Dieu implacable et la damnation eternelle." GEORGE
SAND, Spiridion, p. 302.
" If this be the logical result of accepting theories,
better believe in no God at all." LESLIE STEPHEN,
English Thought in Eighteenth Century.
" The incredibility of this doctrine hath made some
persons desperately doubt the truth of the whole
body of that religion, whereof this is supposed to
be a fundamental article, which shows it to be a
great scandal to human reason." Future Punishment
(printed with Barrow s works).
Of those who really believed that such passages
as I have quoted represented the revelation of God,
" I cease to wonder," says the great French preacher,
Saurin, " that the fear of hell has made some mad,
and others melancholy." "The world would be
1 "Give some tract about hell fire to one of the wild boys in a
large town, and instead of being startled by it, he will laugh at it as
something frightfully ridiculous." DR. NEWMAN, Grammar of Assent,
p. 453. He adds that the doctrine only angers the multitude and
makes them blaspheme.
iv.] WAS THERE NOT A CAUSE? 121
one vast madhouse," says the American scholar,
Hallsted, 1 " if a realising and continued pressure
of such a belief was present." "Such a belief, if
realised," says Archer Butler, "would scorch and
wither up the powers of man." But for this very
reason these pictures are rejected by the instinct of
mankind, and all belief is undermined because they
cannot accept the adjuncts of human invention by
which it has been defaced.
Such, then, are some of the consequences which
result from engrafting upon religion the accretions
which it does not own. If they were really sup
ported by Scripture the Church would have insisted
on them, whereas she has not, by a single decree,
or by a single article in her ancient Creeds, so
much as sanctioned them. If they could certainly
be deduced from Scripture there would not have
been the immense divergence of opinion respecting
the state of the dead, which has not only existed in
all ages, but been permitted and recognised. If all
the pages and volumes about never-ending agonies
had been an expression of revealed truth, it would
not be possible for such a multitude of earnest and
holy men, deeply convinced of the inspiration of
Scripture, to have arrived at the doctrine of condi
tional immortality ; nor would it have been possible
(to take but one instance out of hundreds) for a man
so learned and so holy as Dr. Isaac Watts, " the flower
of Nonconformist orthodoxy," to have said, " We go
beyond what we are authorised to do when we say
that the punishment of the wicked will be as long as
the duration of God," and that he could not recall a
single passage in Scripture which proved that the
second death meant duration in endless torments.
But I have been charged again and again with
" mawkish sentimentality ): because my soul revolts
at the thought of these material horrors. It does so,
1 Theology of the Bible, p. 326.
122 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
not as some of these writers have so charitably
supposed, because I am " bribed " to believe in their
mitigation by my personal dread of them ; nor, again,
because I think physical horrors -necessarily worse
than mental ones; but because such scenes and
pictures of hell as those to which I have alluded
could never be the natural consequence of a sinful
life, 1 but could only result from what theologians
represent as " the implacable vengeance * of God,
to whom by virtue of snatching out of Scripture
a phrase here and there, regardless of its due meaning
and perspective they are not afraid to attribute an
intensity and a permanence of cruel wrath, such as
would be thought inconceivable in the vilest of wicked
men. For the world has been unanimous in regard
ing the prolongation of needless suffering, together
with a refinement in the application of torture, as
the last worst phase of degradation in a Nabis or
Caligula ; and this feeling of horror is deepest in
souls trained in the love of God, and in the tender
precepts of the Sermon on the Mount. But such
souls see no difficulty in believing that the moral
penalty of sin, when un repented of, is to shut us out
from God s presence ; that the punishment of sin is
the congruous result of its own working ; that we
receive hereafter according to our deeds, and reap
as we have sown.
" Mawkish sentimentality " the phrase so applied
is deeply instructive ! It reveals the depth of that
abyss of selfishness and unreality which yawns in the
1 I was sorry that Dr. Salmon (Cont. Rev. xxxii. p. 1 86) should talk
** of the different ways in which mental and physical pain impress my
imagination." He says that I can contemplate "with moderate uneasi
ness the sinner suffering from the agonies of remorse or the pain of loss ;
but that he should endure any pain of sense is a thought too dreadful to
entertain." Yes, but why "too dreadful"? Because to my mind it
; would degrade the conception of God. Sin might produce mental
remorse by a natural and beneficent law ; material fire and material
worms, to burn and gnaw for ever, could only be created by awful
vengeance.
iv.] UNIVERSALITY OF PITY. 123
heart of the loveless religionist. It shows what can
be the influence of an unworthy dogma, no less than
of an immoral life, in that
" It hardens all within
And petrifies the feeling."
1. Let me try to illustrate the real significance of
the phrase. Mr. Alger tells us how the proprietor of
a great foundry in Germany, while he was talking one
day to a workman who was feeding the furnace, acci
dentally stepped back, and fell headlong into a vat of
glowing, molten iron. The thought of that awful end
horrifies the imagination. I do not envy the man
who can even read of it without a thrill of pity, or
shudder of sympathetic horror. Yet he truly adds,
" Multiply the individual instance by unnumbered
millions, stretch the agony to temporal infinity, and
we confront the orthodox idea of hell." x
He may well add that if an all-powerful despot
could stretch but one man on the rack for fifty
years, and everybody, day and night, could hear his
shrieks, the whole human race, though themselves
blessed with all happiness, would, from Spitzbergen
to Tierra del Fuego, rise as one man to go and im
plore mercy for that single offender ; and that through
all the spaces of heaven, from Sirius to Alcyone,
would tingle a cry of pity and of horror for that one
sufferer s sake.
2. Three years ago one or two poor Welsh miners
and a boy were suddenly cut off in their retreat from
the explosion of firedamp in a colliery. After a little
time it was discovered that they w^re yet alive, and
the heart of all England was bowed like the heart of
one man, as morning after morning we read of the
heroic efforts by which their rescue was attempted.
And if all England had had but one arm, that arm
would have been wielded with all its might to hew at
1 Doctrines of a Future Life, lofh ed. pref.
1 24 MERC Y AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
the barrier which separated those J>oor prisoners
from life and light. And when at last they were
drawn up out of the darkness, weak, and faint, and
pale, and half dead, first there was a hush of awful
pity, and then the whole of the vast rude multitude
burst as with one touch of sympathy into sobs and
tears of joy for the rescue of those poor men, because
they had been saved from darkness and hunger which
at the longest, would have killed them in a day or two.
And such peril can touch the hearts of a nation with
trembling sympathy, and yet (oh God of mercy !) it
is a mawkish sentimentality to feel pity for the un
utterable and endless torture of which Christian
teachers have written so calmly and elaborately as
certain to be the fate of countless millions of our
brother souls in hell !
3. A few years ago a youth named George Ebers
was caught in the rapids above Niagara, and his boat
was dashed to pieces on a rock just over the awful cata
ract. He saved himself by clutching the rock; and
for hours together tens of thousands of spectators
stood upon the shore, while every effort that thought
or skill could suggest was made to save him. And
there was not one of those spectators who did not feel
a profound agitation, an almost breathless compassion
for that poor boy. And when at last a raft was con
veyed within reach of him, and he sprang forward
and missed it, and was carried in their sight over the
horrible precipice, one groan of agony was wrung
from thousands of lips and hearts. Can the death
the probably painless and instantaneous death of
one poor fisher lad thus wring with compassion the
souls of a multitude, and is it to be set down to a
" mawkish sentimentality " if we are unable to think,
without a -weight of horror, of the millions who (as
we are told) are suffering and are yet to suffer, and
of the myriads who are daily being sent to suffer,
an unendurable and unending torment ?
iv.] UNIVERSALITY OF PITY. 125
4. Once more : Two years ago an attempt was made
to assassinate the Emperor of Germany. He was not
very seriously wounded, but he is an old man, and it
was known that the nervous shock might endanger
his life, and that the chief condition of his safety was
perfect quiet. Myriads of men and women were
eager from hour to hour to know the chances of life or
o
death, and thousands assembled hour by hour in the
great square before his palace in Berlin. And because
they knew the need that the old man should rest undis
turbed, those thousands hushed even a murmur. They
stood there in deepest silence waiting for tidings.
There must have been many among them who were
men of rough nature, and yet the thought of their Em
peror s illness was enough to strike pity into all those
hearts, and to fill them with considerate tendernesSc
Shall the chance multitudes of a city be thus swayed
by thoughtful regard for the living, and shall it be for
bidden us to be overwhelmed with pity when we are
told of the inconceivable torments of millions of the
dead, and among them it may be of some whom we
have loved ; who, imperfect as they were (it may be)
and sinful even to the last, and having been cut off
with no time for repentance, in the very midst of their
ordinary lives, are doomed by the common voice of
religious teaching to endless anguish, and yet were not
daring rebels against God, and were very kind, and
loving, and true to us ?
And as regards the difference between mental and
physical anguish, let those try to estimate it who can,
I for one am not inclined to say that the former, though
so unlike in kind, may not be even less easy to endure
than the other. In his great Sistine picture of the
"Last Judgment," the genius of Michael Angelo has
subtly indicated this terrible truth. A fiend is
dragging down a lost soul into the abyss, and has
126 MERCY AND JUDGMENT [CHAP.
.
driven his fangs into the fleshy part of jthe leg. But
the lost soul is wholly unconscious of the anguish.
It is looking upwards at the wrathful avenging Figure
in the clouds, conscious not of physical agony but
only of spiritual loss.
Yet even as regards that worm which, as Theophy-
lact says, 1 is the conscience of each, and that fire
which is the burning memory of unrepented and un-
forgiven sins, I think it unwise for theological writers
to give the reins to their imagination.
Take these three pictures by contemporary divines
of the mental agonies of hell.
DR. PUSEY. "Apart from all those terrific physical
miseries of which our Lord speaks . . . the society of
the damned were misery unutterable. Gather in one
in your mind an assembly of all those men and women,
from whom, whether in history or in fiction, your
memory most shrinks ; gather in mind all which is
most loathsome, most revolting. Conceive the fierce
fiery eyes of hate, spite, frenzied rage were fixed on
thee, looking thee through and through with hate
. . . hear those yells of blaspheming concentrated
hate as they echo along the lurid vault of hell ; every
one hating every one." Parochial Sermons.
CARDINAL NEWMAN. " O terrible moment for the
soul . . . when the Judge speaks and consigns it to
the jailers till it shall pay the endless debt which lies
against it. Impossible 1 I a lost soul ? I separated
from hope and from peace for ever ? It is not I of
whom the Judge so spake ! There is a mistake some
where ! Christ, Saviour, hold my hand one minute to
explain it ; my name is Demas , I am but Demas, not
Judas . . . What 1 eternal pain for me ? Impossible !
It shall not be so ! And the poor soul struggles and
wrestles in the grasp of the mighty demon which has
hold of it, and whose every touch is torment. Oh,
atrocious ! it shrieks in agony, and in anger too, as if
* See supra, p. 92.
iv.] PHYSICAL AND MENTAL TORMENTS. 127
the very keenness of the infliction were a proof of its
injustice. A second and a third, I can bear no more !
Stop, horrible fiend ! give over ! I am a man, and not
such as thou ! I am not food for thee and sport for
thee ! I have been taught religion ; I have had a con
science ; I have a cultivated mind ; I am well versed
in science and art, I am a philosopher, or a poet, or a
hero. Nay, I have received the grace of the Redeem
er; I have attended the sacraments for years; I have
been a Catholic from a child ; I died in communion
with the Church ; nothing, nothing which I have ever
been, which I have ever seen, bears any resemblance to
thee, and to the flame and stench which exhale from
thee ; so I defy thee, and abjure thee, O enemy of man !
Alas ! poor soul ! and whilst it thus fights with that
destiny which it has brought upon itself, and those
companions which it has chosen, the man s name per
haps is solemnly chanted forth . . . among his friends
on earth. Men . . . appeal to his authority quote his
words write his history. So comprehensive a mind,
never was his equal in society. So great a benefactor
to his kind, his philosophy so profound. Oh vanity !
vanity of vanities ! all is vanity ! What profiteth it ?
what profiteth it ? his soul is in hell, oh ye children
of men ! While thus ye speak his soul is in the
beginnings of those torments in which his body will
soon have part, and which will never die." l
BISHOP WlLBERFORCE. " In her short life " (he
was speaking of a little schoolgirl) " she had not
seldom played truant, had told some lies, had been
obstinate and disobedient ; now she had to bid fare
well to heaven and hope, to her parents, her brother,
and her sisters. What was her agony of grief that
she would never again look on their faces. . . . Hence
forth she must dwell among beings on whom there is no
check or restraint. The worst of men are there, with
* Sermon on Neglect of Divine Calls and Warnings. See too
sermons on The Individuality of the Soul.
1 28 MERC Y AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
*
every spark of human feeling extinguished, without
any care to moderate the fury of their desperate
rage."
This latter passage exactly resembles one from
Mr. Moody s sermon on hell, who in speaking of the
way in which a " young lady " would be shocked if on
her way home she were accosted by a drunken man,
goes on to say, that if she does not "find Christ,"
" libertines, and drunkards, and murderers will be
her endless companions in hell," describing a hell of
brutal anarchy and chaotic riot. Thus do extremes
meet, and the great bishop uses language as unwar
ranted by Scripture as the revivalist. But I am told
on very high authority that before he died, Bishop
Wilberforcc, like other great and learned bishops
whom I could name, had come to repudiate all such
treatment of the subject, and to lean his heart to
the larger hope which is preached by his distin
guished son. 1
Now no one will deny that these pictures of hell
are less revolting, more refined, than the " Tartarean
drench " with which other writers have steeped their
pages. Nor will any one be surprised that this is the
case. And yet, in all these fierce fiery eyes, and
blaspheming yells, and lurid vaults, and mutual
hatreds, and mighty demons, and brutal rioting
drunkards, and unchecked debauchees, whose every
touch is torment, have we not language which differs
widely from the language of Scripture ? Are not both
passages full of conceptions which either find no direct
warrant in the Word of God, or are, at the best, only
an expansion of metaphors which are not so expanded
in Scripture, and are themselves capable, in many
instances, of a widely different interpretation ?
1 On similarly high authority I am told the same thing of the late
eminent American Bishop Mcllvaine.
IV.] IS PITY DIVINE? 129
lt I believe in the Holy Ghost," is one of the articles
of the Apostles Creed ; and surely we may believe
that the Holy Ghost is still teaching- us teaching
nations as well as individual men, teaching us to in
terpret Scripture by nature, and by history, and by
science, and by experience, and by the wider thoughts
of men. And Christ said, " Lo I am with you alway,
even unto the end of the world." Is He not then
with nations, with mankind, no less than with indivi
dual men ? Is Toleration a divine duty ? Is He or
is He not revealing Himself in the human heart, in
the human conscience, in the human intellect, in the
common chanties, the common justice, and the com
mon humanities of life? Is it true, as the Emperor
Maximilian said, that " to offer violence to the con
science is to assail the very citadel of heaven ? Is it
always, and under all circumstances, a sin to put men
to death, or to inflict anguish upon them for their con
scientious opinions ? Were the deeds of the Inqui
sition justifiable or unjustifiable ? Were the fires of
Smithfield a glory to those who kindled them, or a
shame ? If intolerance and religious persecution be
crimes, how long have we learnt the lesson ? And is
the spirit which has taught these lessons to us a
divine or a deceiving spirit ? But if we have learnt
these lessons, is it not a certain fact that the main
difficulty in learning them arose from theological in
terpretations of Scripture ; and that the main obstacle
to their acceptance was found in the sense put on
half-a-dozen Scripture texts ? If the Church and the
world were unanimously wrong in interpreting these
if their primd facie sense has been proved not to be
their real sense ; if, whatever be their real sense, we
see that, at any rate, God has now taught us the
sacred duty of tolerance ought not divines to learn
that, in their fancied certainty in explaining Scripture
they are liable to the danger of most deadly misinter
pretation ? How often, when Churchmen have used
K
130 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
texts to support tyranny, and maintain slavery, and
oppose science, and justify assassination, and sanction
massacres, and murder poor old women as witches, and
kindle the flames of persecution, how often might the
indignant world have exclaimed :
" Foul shame and scorn be on ye all,
Who turn the good to evil ;
Who steal the Bible from the Lord,
And give it to the devil.
" Than garbled text and parchment law
I own a statute higher ;
And God is true were every book
And every man a liar. "
Nothing has more shaken men s faith in that holy
Book than this most erroneous and unwarranted
parade of " Scriptural " support for doctrines fatal
to the progress, or abhorrent to the moral sense of
mankind. Then shall the Scriptures do all their full
and blessed work for the heart of men, when an
ignorant literalism has ceased to teach that texts
are to be interpreted "as if they had been written
yesterday," and that the daring hyperboles of Semitic
poetry, and the vague generalities of Semitic meta
phor scattered here and there, amid many of a
very different significance, over the literature of a
thousand years are susceptible of no meaning except
such as they derived from the rules of modern
grammar and Western thought.
Again, WHO has taught us the lesson of pity ?
There can be no question that the sense of pity for
human sufferings, of sympathy for human wrongs, of
solidarity with all who are in pain or sorrow, has been
developed in this age to an extent not known at any
previous period of the world s history.
It is an historic fact that this age is pre-eminently
a merciful age : an age which feels a sense of horror
for all needless anguish, a sense of indignation against
all who inflict it, or who have no compassion for those
iv.] GROWTH OF A SENSE OF PITY. 131
on whom it falls. We could not tolerate for a
moment the infliction of the tortures which were daily
inflicted in past centuries, which are still daily inflicted
in barbarous and heathen lands. The foul dungeons,
and awful implements of the dark ages dungeons
which were then habitually filled with prisoners, im
plements with which the human body was then con
stantly wrenched and torn make our blood freeze
with horror. 1 Were it known in these days that even
the most atrocious malefactor had been stretched on
the rack or broken on the wheel, the prison in
which such a deed was done would be stormed and
burnt to ashes to-morrow by the honest fury of the
multitude. We have abolished not only the rack and
the pillory, but even the treadmill and the stocks.
Public opinion can now but barely tolerate that
punishment of the lash, even for the most atrocious
outrages, which in the days of our fathers was an
every-day incident of naval and military life, and was
then the penalty of the most venial offences. Whence
have we learnt this sense of pity ? Is it a shame to
us or an honour ? and does it show growth or
degeneracy in the knowledge of God s will to man ?
And if it be a divine thing, is there any human being
who can doubt that it is this sense of pity, and of
mercy, and of brotherhood, which has worked more
powerfully than any other cause to make men recon
sider, whether by their unwarranted amplifications of
Scripture, and their fallible inferences from it, they
had not attributed to God that which would be
humanly speaking impossible to reconcile with all
that He Himself has taught us about Himself in His
own Word, and still more in the life and death and
passion of the Son whom He sent to die for us ?
Is it not a sense of pity is it not faith in God as a
1 The reader may be reminded of the punishment of John of Leyden
and (two centuries later) of Damiens. For the treatment of the Ana
baptist leaders see Karl Hase, Neue Propheten. See supra, p. 117.
K 2
132 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP
God of love is .it not a conviction that " Mercy
boasteth over Judgment " which would make most
modern congregations reject with horror the sermons
which were once heard from Puritan and mediaeval
pulpits, and utterly refuse to sing such hymns as,
" His nostrils breathe out fiery streams,
And from His awful tongue
A sovereign voice divides the flames,
And thunder rolls along.
* Think, oh ! my soul, the dreadful day,
When this incensed God
Shall rend the sky, and burn the sea,
And fling His wrath abroad.
" Tempests of angry fire shall roll
To blast the rebel worm,
And beat upon his naked soul
In one eternal storm."
How many of our readers are there who would not
blush with hot shame if they were invited to " praise
God by singing " such words as those ? Yet is not
the feeling which rejects such utterances the very same
feeling which has made life more tender and more
tolerable than it dias been in any previous epoch- of.
the world ? And does not the feeling come as all
the world s amelioration has come from entering
more deeply into the heart of Christ ?
And yet, though this universal sense of pity be
among us, a feeling almost of yesterday ; though
even women would once tolerate to be present at
scenes of cruelty to men and animals which would
stir us to a passion of indignation ; though they
calmly sanctioned institutions of the most horrible
cruelty ; yet even in ages when cruelty was common
when the value of human life was lightly esteemed
when no man could live exempt from the possi
bility of torture, at the very thought of which our
blood curdles the sense of pity did wake again and
again to modify or to repudiate what men had
taught respecting hell.
Take these two legends of the middle ages as
iv.] ST. CHRISTINA AND ST. CARPUS. 133
instances. It is said that St. Christina, a Virgin, 1
was suffered to pass (like Dante) through hell, purga
tory, and paradise. In God s presence she was then
allowed to choose whether she would stay in heaven
or return to earth in order to aid the souls in purga
tory by her penitence and prayers. She chose to
return, and angels conveyed her soul back to her
body, which then arose from its coffin. Her pity for
even temporary sufferers was strong enough to make
her give up the joys of heaven.
Again, we are told in the works of the pseudo-
Dionysius, that St. Carpus after his martyrdom in the
reign of Decius, saw the Lord Christ surrounded by
angels in the clouds, while at the bottom of a gulf
below, he saw the heathen who had despised His
preaching, and who were being beaten by demons
with whips and serpents, and pushed into the flames.
Carpus was about to curse them ; but having lifted
up his eyes, he saw the Saviour stretching forth His
hands to these miserable ones, and saying, " Carpus,
it is I whom thou wouldst smite ; for I am still ready
to suffer for men." 2
And why is it that whole nations of Christendom
have embraced a passionate Mariolatry ? Is it not
mainly because they naturally turn to the heart of. a
human Mother, because they feel convinced that in it
must reign a pity, which popular teaching has made
them despair of finding in Him who has never been
really represented to them as the God of love ? Is
it not, as Roman Catholic priests have told us, be
cause they naturally turn to her whom they regard as
the saver from purgatory, rather than to Him of whom
human ignorance has taught them to think mainly
as the God of hell ?
What were the thoughts which lay deep in the
hearts of those who dreamt these legends ? Perhaps
Bollandist, Acta Sanctorum, Aug. 21.
2 Dionys. Areop. Ep. vii. See Ozanam, Poetes Franciscains, p, 426.
134 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
the modern poets may help to interpret them. For
the poets are they who feel most, and whose feelings
are very deep and true, and who have been ever
among the best teachers of mankind .
" The wish, that of the living whole
No life may fail beyond the grave.
Derives it not from what we have
The likest God within the soul ? "
So sings the great poet who, more perhaps than any
living man, has taught us, not at any rate to be afraid
of the wish and hope even if it can never amount
to a tenet of faith
" That somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood ;
" That nothing walks with aimless feet ;
That not one life shall be destroy d,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete :
" That not a worm is cloven in vain ;
That not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivel d in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another s gain.
" Behold, we know not anything ;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last far off at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring."
It is the same thought which gives such tenderness
and passion and fiery yearning to so many verses of
the great American poet, John Greenleaf Wbittier
" For awed by Sinai s mount of Law,
The trembling faith alone sufficed,
That through its cloud and flame he saw
The sweet sad face of Christ.
" And listening with his forehead bowed,
Heard the Divine compassion fill
The pauses of the thunder-cloud
With whispers small and still."
And to take but one other instance, we find the
same thought very prominent in the pages of the
iv.] THE POETS. 135
learned clergyman who is the author of Olrig Grange
and other very striking poems.
" * Should I be nearer Christ, she said,
* By pitying less
The sinful living or woful dead
In their helplessness ? *
And the angels all were silent.
" Should I be liker Christ were I
To love no more
The loved, who in their anguish lie
Outside the door ?
And the angels all were silent.
" Did He not hang on the cursed tree,
And bear its shame ?
And clasp to His heart, for love of me,
My guilt and blame ?
And the angels all were silent.
" The Lord Himself stood by the gate,
And heard her speak
Those tender words compassionate,
GenUe and meek ;
And the angels all were silent.
" Now pity is the touch of God
In human hearts,
And from that way He ever trod
He ne er departs ;
And the angels all were silent. "
I will not quote any more of the poem. It is bolder
than anything which I dare, or have it granted me,
to endorse ; but of this I feel sure that the pity which
breathes through it, if it be not the voice of the multi
tude of teachers, is yet the deepest voice of the loving
human soul.
But when the reader has thought of what men
have said, and how theologians have written, in
century after century, about " this rain-storm of
agonised drops of immortality to feed and freshen
the quenchless fires of damnation " ; when he
has seen the proofs of the extent to which these
descriptions have alienated men s hearts from God
and from Christ ; when he has asked himself whether
he really believes the assertions of those passages,
136 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP. iv.
^j,
knowing what it is that he believes ; when he learns
that such statements are now declared, on the highest
authority, to be " opinions " only, and not matter of
faith ; when he is made acquainted, perhaps for the
first time, with the historic fact that the Church has
never, either in her earliest or her latest ages,
required a belief in these material horrors which
yet have been, and perhaps until a few years ago
still were, the common opinion of Christians : let
him ask whether the charge of " coarse and violently-
coloured rhetoric " was to be brought against me, when
I endeavoured to show that in a material fire and a
material agony no Christian is required to believe, or
whether that charge lies rather at the door of those
who have obscured the brightness of God s image
in the hearts of men by the ignorance of a fallible
exegesis which rejected the whole tenor of that
revelation which tells us that " God is Love/ while
it based its system of Eschatology on the sand of
metaphorical expressions of which it had never under
stood the true significance, and of which it terribly
exaggerated the right perspective ? If I spoke to
repudiate the material horrors of Dante and Jeremy
Taylor, and modern preachers, together with those
frightful woodcuts of Pinamonti, which, with many
like them, are still enormously circulated in Roman
Catholic countries, was there not a cause ? It is
said that St. Bernard, having seen a vision of hell,
never laughed again. Without having seen such -a
place, even in vision, it would be strange if a real
intelligential belief of all that men have written
respecting it would not drive all laughter from the
hearts of all good and merciful men for ever. But
since such things are not of faith
What can we do o er whom the unbeholden
Hangs in a light wherewith we -dare not cope ?
What but look sunward, and with faces golden,
Speak to each other softly of a hope? "
CHAPTER V.
THE SECOND ACCRETION TO CATHOLIC DOCTRINE
THAT THE VAST MAJORITY OF MANKIND ARE
DOOMED TO ENDLESS TORMENTS.
"iDn 3"1. " The Lord of Pity inclines to Pity."
Proverb of the School of Hillel.
" How should Grace
One living gem disown,
One pearly mote, one diamond small,
One sparkle of the unearthly light?
Go where the waters fall
Sheer from the mountain s height
They rush and roar, they whirl and leap,
Not wilder drives the wintry storm,
Yet a strong law they keep,
Strange powers their course inform
Yet in dim caves they softly blend
In dreams of mortals vmespied :
One in their awful end,
One their unfailing Guide." KEBLE.
t PASS to the second point.
I repudiated as an accretion to the faith of Chris
tians, and as forming no true or essential part of it,
the belief " that the doom of everlasting damnation
is incurred by the vast majority of mankind."
Those who assert this assert their own " opinion/
They may suppose that they have the strongest
grounds for that opinion, but they have no right
to try and enforce it upon others as a matter of
138 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
*
faith. Yet this has been done by theologians both
dead and living, times without number.
I should have thought that the very first command
to Adam and to Noah, and the similar command to
Jacob, and the promise to Abraham that, as a special
blessing, his seed should be as the sand of the sea for
multitude, would alone be sufficient to show that it
is utterly alien from God s purpose that Satan, and
not the Heavenly Father, should win the vast mass
of human souls. If the popular views be true, the
multiplication of the human race is an unmitigated
evil, for it serves mainly to people with agonising
myriads an endless hell. If the popular views be
true if most souls are lost then to bring human
beings into the world can be little short of a selfish
crime ^
" Matters of faith " are those truths to which the
Church demands assent from all who belong to
her communion. Other doctrines are left open as
matters of opinion, respecting which she requires no
unanimity.
Now I was of course aware that the doom of the
majority to endless torment was not a matter of
faith. I knew that it could not be deduced from
Scripture, and that it was no necessary part of the
belief of Christians.
I am now told on all sides, even by evangelical
newspapers, that in repudiating this popular accretion,
in declaring that it was a mere individual opinion,
and that it ought not to be required of any man to
be believed, I was perfectly correct. Dr. Pusey
says that this belief in the perdition of the mass of
mankind "has no solid foundation whatever" ^
1 Adam to Eve
" Childless thou art, childless remain ; so Death
Shall be deceived his glut, and with us two
Be forced to satisfy his ravenous maw."
Par. Lost, x. 989.
2 What is of Faith, p. 6.
V.] WILL THE MAJORITY BE LOST? 139
" You aim," says Cardinal Newman in a letter to
Dr. Plumptre, " at withdrawing from so awful a doom
vast multitudes who have popularly been considered
to fall into it .... There is nothing, I think, in the
view incompatible with the faith of Catholics."
We are told that among Roman Catholics this was
also the view of the late Dr. Faber, of Lacordaire, of
Pere Ravignan, of Pere Gratry, of many members of
the religious orders. So learned a theologian as Mr. H.
N. Oxenham avows it as his own belief, as also does
such a Protestant writer as Dr. Angus. Nay more, I
now find the clearest traces of a strong leaning to it in
quarters so diverse as the newspapers which circulate
widely among the English clergy the Guardian, the
Record, and the Church Times. Thus I read in the
Record newspaper (October 20, 1880) this remarkable
sentence. After saying that the complete remedy for
my "agonised despair" lies in the distinction between
" justification and sanctifi cation," and " a clear mental
grip of the completed atonement of Christ " doctrines
respecting which I may perhaps appeal to my Life
of St. Paul, to prove that I have stated and defended
my own absolute belief in them more fully than ever
the Record has done it adds," What human being can
tell whether, even in a dying moment, the sinner may
not have grasped the Saviour ? No doubt we are
taught that in the present dispensation the saved are a
small number compared with the lost ; but Scripture
affords ample grounds for believing that it will not be
always thus, and that ultimately the saved number of
Adam s race will outnumber the lost to a degree
beyond all calculation. The tenderest heart that ever
beat in human breast is cold and hard compared to
the living heart of the Lord Jesus Christ, and of Him
we are assured that He shall see of the travail of His
soul, and shall be satisfied." I read such words in
such a quarter with deep thankfulness. The Guardian
(August II, 1880) writes: " We agree with Dr. Farrai
MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
that Dr. Puseyhas in this volume given a very serious
correction to much of what is popular theology and
teaching." But, it truly adds, " the old warnings
against trusting to a skin-deep or a deathbed re
pentance will not be less necessary when we are told,
and told with truth, that we must not despair of souls
even when we are ignorant of their hopes of grace, and
that there is no ground for believing that the majority
of mankind are lost."
Was I then fighting with shadows ? I ask again,
for what I said had I no cause ?
I had this cause, that the damnation of the vast
majority of mankind has been the normal teaching
of theologians in every age since the earliest. But
the consent of the many, if it be unreasonable and
unscriptural, what is it but ancient error ? 1
It is true that in no Synod, in no Council, by no
decree has the Church ever required this belief.
It is also true, as Dr. Pusey says, that there are
very few individual souls respecting whose salvation
the Church of God has ventured openly to express
a doubt. 2 " The Church," says the learned and
saintly Ozanam, "has inscribed thousands of names
in the catalogue of saints, she has never pronounced
the damnation of a single individual " with the
exception, as he adds in a note, of Judas Iscariot.
Yet I assert, and I shall prove, that the Christian
writings of every age abound in assertions that the
few only will be saved. Even in some of the so-called
"answers" to my sermons, the difficulty was only
met by the argument that " the majority of mankind
die in infancy, and therefore that the majority of
mankind would be saved " ! It is not worth while
to argue with writers who take refuge in quibbles.
1 "Multorum consensus aut vetus consuetude si ralione aut sacrorum
auctoritate librorum caveat quid aliud quam vetus error est?" CURIO,
De Amplitud. Btati K egni, p. 25.
2 W halts of Faith, p. 1 1.
v.] UNBAPTISED INFANTS. 141
By the "majority of mankind " I mean, as all serious
writers have meant, the majority of those who have
attained to years of discretion. But by using such
an argument these writers imply their belief, and
it is still the common opinion of those who claim
to be " orthodox " too often at the expense of
" speaking deceitfully for God " l that most men
" perish " ; and by this they mean that most men
pass after death into a life of endless torments. 2
They have not only held this, but further, that the
vast majority of Christians also pass after death into
endless torments. 3
i. Of the case of unbaptised Infants I will say very
little. Their " damnation " is graciously asserted to
be " of a very slight character." Still what has been
the opinion of most Christian writers since the days
of St. Augustine about them ?
Their damnation was affirmed by the second canon
of the Council of Carthage. 4
At the Synod of Diospolis, A.D. 415, it was made
one of the seven express charges against Pelagius
that he had taught " that infants dying unbaptised
enjoy eternal life, though they do not enter the
Kingdom of Heaven." 5
" It can be lightly said," says St. Augustine, " that
infants, passing out of the body without baptism, will
1 Job xiii. 7. " Will ye speak wickedly for God ? and talk deceit
fully for Him?"
2 It is simply a modern reaction, caused by the growth of pity and
humanity in the hearts of men, which, as M. Charles de Remusat said,
" has so greatly widened the conditions of salvation, that the doctrine
of the few that are saved is now replaced by that of the few that are
lost." C. DE REMUSAT, Rev. des Deux Mondes, June 15, 1865.
3 I say after death, because such writers either (with the Catechism of
Westminster divines) deny the existence of an Intermediate State at
all, or hold it in such a way as to render it meaningless.
4 Ad. 412, Labbaeus Condi, ii. 1510.
6 "Quoniam infantes etiam, si non baptizentur, non habeant
vitam aeternam." MARIUS MERCATOR, Commonit. i. ; Gieseler,
i. 374.
H2 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
be in a damnation the mildest of all." 1 He con
demned the notion of a limbus infantum, urging that
there was no middle place. Any one who was not
with Christ could not, he said, be anywhere except
with the devil. 2
Dante sees the spirits of unbaptised infants in the
first circle of the Inferno, where they live in desire of
seeing God, but without hope. 3
The damnation of infants was an acknowledged doc
trine of Calvinism. When George Keith impugned
the doctrine, Cotton Mather, and other Boston
ministers wrote a treatise against him (A.D. 1690),
and expressly maintained the reprobation of infants
if unbaptised. 4
It was also the all but universal opinion among
Roman Catholics. In 1696 Cardinal Sfondrati wrote a
treatise to show that, though not admitted to heaven,
unbaptised infants would hereafter be supremely
happy. 5 But no less a person than the great Bossuet
made a complaint to Innocent XII. requesting him
1 Aug. De Pec cat. i. 16 ; Enchir. 93. " Mitissima sane poena eorum
erit," &c. See Pet. Lombard, Sentent. //. Dist. xxxiii. e.
2 De Peccat. i. 28 ; Hagenbach, Hist, of Doctr. i. 390.
3 Inferno, iv. 28-43 (quoted in Eternal Hope, p. 65).
4 For abundant evidence, see Andrew Norton, Tracts concerning
Christianity, pp. 179-197; and see Calvin, Tract. Theol. Opp. viii. 644.
5 The title of this book, which 1 have consulted, was Coelest. Sfon-
dratus, Nodus praedestinationis ex S. Litteris, &c. dissolutus. Accedit
Appendix sive Litterae Parvulorum sine Baptismo mortuorum, scriptae
e limbis ad snae qnietis perturbatores. The Cardinal was a man of saintly
character and tender heart, and his book was posthumous. He dwelt
in it throughout on the infinite love of God, His will to save man
("Deum serio, impensissime, et quantum in se efficaciter, omnium,
hominum salutem velle"), His necessary love to His creatures, &c.
A full account of his book will be found in Ada Eruditorum, 1697, pp.
281-293. It created an alarm in the religious world, as so many other of
the best books have done, and was answered in a crowd of eager pam
phlets, written by archbishops, bishops, monks, &c., all proving that he
was "inconsistent "and heretical. In \\\t Acta Eruditorum for 1701 (pp.
65-68), I read that one of these answers adduced one hundred and two
erroneous propositions from this book, written to defend, from Scripture
and the Fathers, the love of God! Tot tamque pertinacibus adver-
sariis impetitum est scriptum illud, concordiae causa editurn, ut omnlno
v.] UNBAPTISED INFANTS. 143
to condemn the book 1 ; and numbers of writers
rushed into the field to anathematize its doctrines.
In 1770 a reply was written by Ignazio Bianchi
with the express object of demonstrating that infants
dying without baptism or martyrdom could not be
saved.
Need we even go beyond the pale of our own
Church to see what was the general opinion ?
The Rubric at the end of our Baptismal Service
says that " children which are baptized, dying before
they commit actual sin, are undoubtedly saved " ;
but in the " Articles to establish Christian Quietness,"
in 1536, we find the words, "Infants, dying in their
infancy, shall undoubtedly be saved thereby [i.e.
by baptism], " and else not" In his book on Regene
ration in Baptism? Bishop Bethell admits that it was
the common opinion of the ancient Christians that
unbaptized children were not saved.
" It is only during the last forty years," says Mr.
E. White, " as we learn from Mr. Logan s Words of
Comfort for Bereaved Parents, that the Scottish
Churches have ventured to repudiate the old blas
phemy against God s justice and goodness involved
in the doctrine of the everlasting woe of non-elect
infants. Formerly Scottish parents seem to have
believed that their dead babes had probably fallen
into the burning hands of some invisible Moloch.
A more fiendish dogma than this is inconceivable-
the consummation of theological hardness of heart." s
2. But passing over this question, since most reason
able men excluded the notion of anguish from this
adversis astris natum videatur." Act. Erud. 1701, p. 65. The Pope,
however, did not condemn it. It was said of Pope Innocent XII. " II
papa non e teologo, e jurista," and happily the sense and manliness of
Christian statesmen has, not seldom, saved the Church from the pitiless
aberrations of professed theologians.
1 The Abbe Le Dieu, in his Memoir of Bossuet, says that he
occupied much time, during his last years, in answering Sfondrati s
book. 2 P. xiv. a Life in Christ, p. 326.
144 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
damnation of infants, except perhaps those Calvin-
ists who spoke about " infants an ell long crawling
on the floor of hell " what have been the prevalent
opinions (2) as to the salvation of the Heathen, who,
even alone, form the vast majority of mankind?
St. Francis Xavier wrote, in 1552, " One of the
things that most pains and torments these Japanese
is that we teach them that the prison of hell is irre
vocably shut. For they grieve over the fate of their
departed children, of their parents and relatives ; and
they often show their grief by their tears. So they
ask us if there is any hope .... and I am obliged to
answer that there is absolutely none. The grief at this
affects and torments them wonderfully ; they almost
pine away with sorrow. ... I can hardly restrain my
tears sometimes at seeing many so dear to my heart
suffer such intense pain about a thing which is already
done with and can never be undone."
Calvin writes, "Again I ask whence it happened
that the fall of Adam involved, without remedy, in
eternal death so many nations, together with their
infant children, except because it so seemed good to
God ? A decree horrible, I confess, and yet true." l
The opinion of the Westminster Assembly of
Divines, as expressed in their Larger Catechism, is that
" they who, having never heard the Gospel, know not
Jesus Christ, and believe not in Him, cannot be saved,
be they never so diligent to frame their lives according
to the light of nature or to the law of that religion
which they profess." 2
And in the Westminster Confession of Faith they
add that to assert and maintain that the heathen
may be so saved " is very pernicious, and to be
detested." And of the non-elect they say that " God
was pleased ... to ordain them to dishonour and
wrath for their sin, to the praise of His glorious
justice"!
Institutes, ill 23, 7. 3 Ans. to Qu. 90.
v.J THE HE A THEN. 145
This must be carefully distinguished from the dog
matic statement of our own Eighteenth Article, of
which the meaning is very different, though some of the
words are the same. It is needless to say that though
its words, like those of the Reformatio Legum, 1 look as
if they imperatively exclude all hope for the heathen,
no reasonable being now takes them in that sense.
The man who says that Socrates and Marcus Aurelius
and Epictetus are inevitably doomed to endless tor
ments puts himself out of court as one who is beyond
the reach of reason or of charity. They, no less
than we, may be saved, not indeed by their profession
or their morality, but by Him whom they knew not
in His outward manifestation. " God is no respecter
of persons, but in every nation He that feareth God
and worketh righteousness is accepted of Him."
But this opinion, that the heathen all. perish, has
continued to this day. The well-known Dr. Nathanael
Emmons, writing on "the hopeless state of the
heathen," maintains that " all the heathen will finally
perish " ; 2 and a little farther on makes the awful
assertion, which assigns to everlasting perdition all
Arminians, and all Roman Catholics, and the vast
majority of Churchmen and divines in all Churches,
that " it is absolutely necessary to approve of the
doctrine of reprobation in order to be saved." And
even in 1857 Enoch Pond, alluding to the future
state of the heathen, writes that " the great body
of the adult heathen . . . will lose their souls for
ever." 3
Indeed it seems superfluous to pause over the proof
that the everlasting damnation of the heathen has
" Horrible and vain is the audacity of those who contend that men
may hope for salvation in every religion and sect which they may
profess." Reform. Legum.
^ 2 Emmons, Works, vi. 284-297. Foggini begins his book De Pau-
citate Salvandorum, with the remark that no one can possibly be saved
out of the bosom of the Catholic Church.
3 See Alger, p. 959.
L
146 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
been the common opinion in the Churcli. 1 when we
find that whole treatises have been written to over
throw the common opinion as to the damnation of even
the purest and the most illustrious of them. Thus
there are two dissertations by Engelcken (d. 1742) to
show that Pythagoras was not a proselyte, and there
fore was not saved ; in 1666 a book was written to
show that Plato was saved ; in 1487 a pamphlet by
Lambertin de Moule to show the probability that
Aristotle was saved, and another on the same subject
by Liceiti in 1645, and by Meier in 1698. 2 The
salvation of Seneca found a champion in Schoeps
(1765), and it was a common belief in the middle
ages that the Emperor Trajan had been rescued, not
from purgatory, but even from hell, by the prayers of
St. Gregory the Great. 3 Luther was thought to have
shown an exceptional boldness when he expressed
the merciful hope that " our dear God would be
merciful to Cicero, and to others like him." But
if it was only a dangerous liberalism to suppose that
two or three such heathen saints were saved, what
must have been the current opinion as to the fate of
the majority ?
Nor was it only the heathen who were thus doomed.
In the seventeenth century it was a common theme
of some Roman Catholic writers that " Protestancy
unrepented destroys salvation." It was a book
with this theme by Matthias Wilson which called forth
the famous answer of Chillingworth on the Religion of
Protestants. On the other hand the Protestant Du
Moulin was taxed with culpable laxity for admitting
that some Roman Catholics might be saved.
But to return to the heathen : the notion that they
perish has been till very recent times the avowed
1 Clem. Alex. Strom, vi. 6 takes (as might have been expected) the
milder view.
1 See Bayle, Diet. s. v. "Aristotle."
3 See Bayle, s. v. " Trajan " ; Mrs. Jameson, Sacr. and Legendary
Arts, i. 321 ; supra, pp. 84-86.
v.] THE HEATHEN. 147
argument of many who, most justly and righteously,
but with a rash statement of the ground of their appeals
have urged on the Christian Church the sacred duty
of missions. Mr. Alger has quoted such statements
as these. 1 An American missionary to China said, in
a public address on his return, " Fifty thousand a day
go down to the fire that is not quenched . . . should
you not think at least once a day of the fifty thousand
who on that day sink to the doom of the lost ?
Again, the American Board of Missions say in their
appeal, " Within the last thirty years a whole genera
tion of five hundred millions have gone down to
eternal death " ; and again in their tract on " The Great
Motive to Missionary Effort," "the heathen. . .are
expressly doomed to perdition. Six hundred millions
of deathless souls on the brink of hell ! What a
spectacle ! >: Again, " The most popular preacher in
England has recently asked his fellow-believers, Can
we go to our beds and sleep while China, India, Japan,
and other nations are being damned ?
If I said that the awful fiery doom of the vast
mass of mankind was an accretion to what the Church
requires us to believe, was there not a cause ?
3. But now, without specially considering the case of
Infants, or of the Heathen, let us see what has been
the ordinary view of the Church on the general
question whether many or few are saved.
It may be objected, we have no right even to ask
such a question. It may be so. Nevertheless it has
been put in all ages. When the disciples asked an
analogous question to our Lord, He .declined to
give any answer, and only bade them each to " strive
to enter in at the strait gate, which many shall seek
to enter in and shall not be able." 3 And on
another occasion He said, " Enter ye in at the strait
gate," since the majority were passing through the
1 Doctrine of a Ftrfure State, p. 544.
8 Id. pref. p. iv. 3 Luke xiii. 24.
L 2
148 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
wide gate, and walking in the broad way. 1 But that
He was speaking of this life, and this one primarily if
not exclusively, appears from this, that the question of
the disciples was not, " Are there few that be saved ? "
but "Are there few who are in the way of salvation ?"
And the fact that " few are now walking in that
road must be compatible with His own words that
" many shall come from the east and west, and shall
sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the
kingdom of Heaven," even though " the children of
the kingdom " shall be cast out. The " salvation " to
which the disciples referred in their question, and our
Lord in His answer, was not that of the future eternity,
but that of participation in the blessings of the
Messianic kingdom.
If it had been necessary to interpret our Lord s
words in the sense that the majority of mankind
would perish, the Church would have drawn that
conclusion from them. But she has not done so ;
she has not required of any of her children any
such belief; and in all the Burial Services of all
her communions has been led by a holy instinct
or a divine inspiration to utter over the bodies of
those whom she commits to the dust the language
of an inextinguishable hope.
Yet it was necessary for me to repudiate as not
being of faith a conclusion which so many of all
schools are now as anxious as myself to repudiate,
because the opinion has not only been again and again
asserted, but is even now forced upon Christian people
as though it were an article of the Christian creed.
A few passages, chosen from the writings of great
teachers in different ages, will suffice to show that
the doom of the majority to endless torment has been
a common theme for Christian teaching.
As to the opinion of the Fathers, it may be gathered
from the collection of their testimonies by Foggini in
1 Matt. vii. 13.
v.] DOOM OF THE MAJORITY. 149
1759, the very title of whose book was " the wonderful
agreement (tnira consensio) of the Fathers as to the
fewness of the adult faithful who could be saved." 1
Estius, a very high authority/ said that "there was
not one Father that had held a different opinion." 2
St. Chrysostom in his Twenty-fourth Homily on the
Acts, preaching at Antioch, said, " How many, think
you, are there in our city who will be saved ? It is a ter
rible truth which I am about to utter, but yet I will
utter it. Among so many thousands a hundred cannot
be found who will be saved, and even about them I
doubt." Now Antioch was the third city of the Em
pire, the city in which disciples were first called Chris
tians, and it must have contained some five hundred
thousand inhabitants. What then in St. Chrysostom s
opinion was the proportion between the saved and the
lost ? It was (if we press his words) that perhaps one
in each five thousand might be saved !
Writing on the " great multitude which no man
could number (Rev. vii. 9), Cornelius a Lapide,
the eminent commentator, says, " From what has
1 Foggini, who died in 1783, was Librarian of the Vatican. His book,
of which with difficulty I procured a copy after these pages were
written, is very disappointing. The title is Patrum ecdesiae de pauci-
tate adultorum fiddium Salvandorum si cum reprobandis fidelibus
conferantur, mira consensio asserta et demonstrata. He quotes none of
the authorities here adduced, except the one from St. Chrysostom. He
quotes many passages, and among them some from Origen and Gregory
of Nazianzus (who both leaned to Universalism !). But in almost
every passage the argument consists merely of an appeal to Matt. xx.
16, xxii. 14. "Many are called, but few chosen," or the "broad and
narrow way," Matt. vii. 13, Luke xiii. 23, 24. But obviously
these texts are misinterpreted. They apply to present facts (ol
<rci)6[j.voi), and neither exclude the possibility of repentance, nor
decide the ultimate issues of the future. By declining to answer
the question of the disciples, the Lord rebuked all self-righteous
eschatologies, and furnished the strongest contrast to the language
of 2 Esdras ix. 15-16. "There are many more of those that perish
than of those which shall be saved ; like as a wave is greater than a
drop." Though but few of the "called" be, in the highest sense
" chosen, "they may yet enjoy the blessing and peace of God in a lower
degree, and may even become themselves " the chosen" in due time.
1 Est. M. Sent., Lib. I, Dist. 40. The remark is not true
1 50 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
X
been said we may estimate that in .-the end of
the world the total number of all. the saints and
elect who have ever lived anywhere in any age will
make up some hundred millions : the number of the
reprobate will however be far greater, which will
come to not only hundreds, but even thousands of
millions. For often out of a thousand men, nay even
out of ten thousand, scarcely one is saved *
Cornelius says elsewhere that " a crowd of men
sink daily to Tartarus as dense as the falling
snows." 2
In the Elucidarium, often printed with St. Anselm s
works, the Disciple asks : " Quid sentis de militibus ? "
and the answer is, " Pauci Boni. . . Quam spem habent
mercatores ? M. Parvam. . . Quid sentis de variis
artificibus ? M. Paene omnes pereunt. . . Habent
spem joculatores ? M. Nulltm? and so on. The
only persons to whom wider hope is allowed, are
husbandmen, infants, and idiots! De variis laicorum
statibus. E lucid, ii. 17.
In 1554 Curio published a once famous book,
De Amplitiidine Beati Regni, in which he maintained
the salvability of the heathen, and that the saved
would in number exceed the lost. But "the doctrine
was deemed so dangerous that the Senate of Basle
refused to allow him to publish the work, and the
first edition was printed surreptitiously." 3 The book
caused him much trouble and persecution ; and all
his hopeful estimates were indignantly rejected by
Recupito in his Sacrarium (1620), and by Vicars in
his Pusillus Grex (1627).
1 " Reproborum vero longe major erit turba, quae plures non tantum
centenos, sed et mtllenos milliones efficiet, saepe enim ex inille hominibus,
immo ex decem millibus, vix una salvatur." CORN. LAPIDE, in Apoc.
vii. 9.
2 " Quam densi hieme flocci nivis cadunt ex acre, tarn densa hominum
turba ^quotidie descendit ad Tartara." Id. on Num. xiv. 36. Foggini
quotes the defence of a similar opinion by St. Nilus Calaber, p. 88.
;l Scbelhorn, Amoen. Lit. xii. 592-627. See references to sermons in
Darwin s Cyclop, on Matt. xx. 16, xxii. 14.
v.] WILL THE MAJORITY PERISH? 151
Du Moulin, a History Professor at Oxford, pub
lished a book in 1680 on the Number of the Elect > of
which part of the title was " proving plainly from
Scripture " and let us observe in passing what a
most astonishing variety of doctrines, utterly irre
concilable with each other, are, in the opinions of
their propounders, " proved plainly from Scripture
" that not one in a hundred thousand (nay, pro
bably not one in a million), from Adam down to our
time, shall be saved." Yet not even Du Moulin went
sufficiently far for some of his readers. They taxed
him with the crime of not having excluded all Papists
from salvation, and he apologised for his laxity by the
magnanimous remark that " he would not condemn
St. Bernard to hell for having believed Purgatory." 1
I have before me the curious book of Recupito, De
Numero Praedestinatorum et Reproborum (Paris, 1664),
of which I found a copy in the Archbishop s library
at Lambeth. In the first chapter he argues that the
number of the elect is fixed and definite. In the
second he quotes the view of those who held that
the number of the lost did not exceed that of the
saved. He does not stop to argue the question
generally. He at once assumes as an axiom that
for 6,000 years none but Jews could have been saved,
and that now none could be possibly saved outside
the pale of the Church ; so that countless millions of
Mohammedans, Gentiles, and heretics are calmly
disposed of with the oracular remark that " their
damnation is certain." The question thus reduces
itself to * the faithful." Counting baptised infants,
he admits that, of Christians, perhaps the majority may
be saved, and so confines the question to the adult
faithful. In favour of the salvation of the greater
number of the adult faithful, he refers to the Rosa
Aurea of Sylvester ; to Lorinus on Ps. Ixxxviii. 14,
and to Fr. Luarius, De Praedestinatione, lib. v., and
1 See Professor Abbot, Appendix to Alger, p. 956.
152 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
*
to the strange texts which they seem to have applied
to this conclusion. He then quotes John Damascene,
and alludes to the notions that redeemed men would
take the place of the " third part of the angels " who
had fallen ; that most women are saved ; that many
who have sinned repent, and that God is full of com
passion. He adduces the sentence of Tertullian, " If
the majority perish, how is the perfect goodness de
fended which, in that case, for the most part, is
inefficient, yielding to perdition, sharing with destruc
tion ? Then he speaks of the physical size of the
place of torment, being apparently as much puzzled
as William of Auvergne 1 was to know " how hell
could hold all the damned, since the number of the
lost is to be so excessive." Recupito, however, at once
gives his opinion that these arguments as well as that
from the efficacy of the blood of Christ, and from the
innumerable number of the martyrs, do not lend any
probability to the opinion, which, he says, is " better
suited to our desires than to the truth." 2
Accordingly he proceeds to quote a host of theo
logians in favour of the opinion that most men are
doomed to perdition : namely, Lyranus, Maldonatus,
Cajetan, Bellarmine, Fasolus, Aluarez, Ruiz, Smising,
Drexel, Lorinus, Molina, Thomas Aquinas, and
Abulensis, setting aside the remark of Vasquez,
that it is a point on which we cannot be certain,
because "to God alone is known the number of
His elect"
He proceeds to prove this thesis to his own satis
faction, i. From Scripture quoting Is. ii. 4, xxii.,
xxv., I Cor. ix., x., and some twelve other passages,
of which the great majority are as irrelevant as they
could possibly be. He also argues, if argument it
1 "Qualiter infernus capiet omnes damnatos." GUL. ALVERN.
De Retrib. Sanctorum, i. (See Hist. Lit. de la France, xviii.
370-)
2 " Accommodata cupiditati magis quam veritati, optando potius
exitu quam sperando." RECUPITQ, De Num. Praed. p. 8.
v.] WILL THE MAJORITY BE LOST? 153
may be called, from the fact that only two of the
first generation of Israelites entered Canaan ; from
the 144,000 only of Rev. vii. 4; 1 from the eight souls
only saved from the Deluge ; from the shape of the
ark ; from the burning of Sodom ; from the salvation
of Rahab alone in Jericho ; from the 300 of Gideon ;
from the fact that only one was healed at the Pool of
Bethesda ; from the fact that out of sixty wives,
eighty concubines, and numberless others, Solomon
only loved one and so forth. The bare enumera
tion of these, and the argument derived from them,
will at least serve to show how hollow and how
fantastic not to say preposterous were most of
the bases on which this awful superstructure of
ignorant and perverted inference was supposed to
rest.
He next adduces the opinion of the Fathers, and
quotes in his favour St. Chrysostom, St. Ambrose,
St. Augustine, and St. Gregory. Then he tells us,
from the Abbot Nilus, a revelation to St. Simeon
Stylites that scarcely one soul was saved out of
10,000, and the vision of a bishop, referred to by
Trithemius in his Ckronicon, about A.D. 1160, in which
a hermit appeared to him, and said that at the hour
of his death 3,000 others had died, and the only one
saved among them was St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and
three who went to purgatory. He further adduces
another vision of a preacher who says that 60,000
stood with him before God s bar, and all except three
were condemned to hell ; and yet another of a Pari
sian master, who appeared to his bishop, announcing
that he had been damned, and added that "so many
souls were daily thrust down to hell that he could
scarcely believe there were so many men in the
It is needless to point out the futility of this argument. It tells
the other way. Being a thousand multiplied by the square of twelve,
it is simply meant as a symbol of an absolutely consummate number,
not to speak of the "innumerable multitude" in verse 9.
1 54 MERC Y AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
world." Indeed he asked if the world still existed ?
For he had seen so many tumbling info the abyss
that he thought that none could remain alive.
He proceeds, in the fifth chapter, to show the
reasonableness (!) of his view from the difficulty of the
means of salvation in consequence of vicious habits ;
of the hatred and fraud of demons ; from the vast
multitude of demons, each human being having one
set apart for himself; from their persecutions ; from
the strictness of the final judgment ; from death
bed scenes ; from the Archangel s balance of sins and
virtues ; from the prevalence of self-love ; from the
frequency of backsliding ; and (among yet other
reasons) because good priests are so few, and therefore
that, a fortiori, most ordinary men will perish. 1
And so the book proceeds, and the author grinds
out his hard theological dogma questioning the
validity of any deathbed repentance, minimizing any
grain of comfort from the case of the penitent thief, and
cheapening away all counter arguments : and, as is so
common a phenomenon with all books of this kind,
doing all this without a sigh, without one expression
of pity for the lost ; without seeming to realize the
hideous fate to which he is dooming his brethren for
whom Christ died ; calmly and cheerfully hugging his
own plank of fancied security amid the flaming deluge,
and not thinking it worth while to waste one word of
regret that the whole object of the Atonement should
thus be frustrated, and that God should thus glean
but a few ears out of the beaten, blighted, mildewed
harvest of the world !
It is needless to prove that this has continued to
be the popular opinion. It is very rarely that in
1 Jer. Ep. ad Damasum. " Ecce mundus undique fervet sacerdotibus ;
et tamen tam sunt rarissimi sacerdotes ut vix e centum bonus reperiatur
unus." St. Chrysostom says that "he thought that not many priests
would be saved" (Horn. iii. in Act. Ap.). St. Pachomius said the same
of monks (Vit. S. Pachom. by Dionysius Exig. c. 45). Comp. Bellarmine,
De gemitu Cclumbae, ii. 6.
v.] WILL THE MAJORITY BE LOST? 155
common religious literature I have found even a trace
of any other. Dr. Pusey and Mr. Oxenham seem to
fancy that the opinion is in some way connected with
Calvinism. Alas ! it is centuries older than Calvinism ;
it is immensely wider than the limits of Calvinistic
Churches. Massillon, who wrote the terrible sermon
Sur le petit Nombredes his, was no Calvinist, nor were
multitudes of those divines whose sermons on the
"little flock" may be found enumerated in Darling s
Cyclopedia. Nay, there is a terrible sermon of Dr.
Pusey s own, <c On the Fewness of the Saved," in the
first volume of his Parochial Sermons? and it will, I
think, be difficult for any one who reads it to arrive
at any other conclusion than this that the saved are
in the opinion of the writer only a minority of a
minority out of a minority.
How it is that Dr. Pusey can still hold out a
possible hope for suffering humanity we shall see in
the next chapter ; only let me say now that if all
the terrible conjectures here recorded were indeed
matters of faith, how could any one think of the
race of man without either hard defiance, or agonies
of despair? How could he brazen his heart to think
with calm indifference, with revolting self-congratula
tion, of this awful mass of life doomed to welter
hereafter in the hopeless and unendurable abyss ?
Even a heathen could exclaim
" Sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt."
1 Pusey, Paroch. Sermons, i. I2J.
CHAPTER VI.
IS THERE NO SUCH THING AS A TERMINABLE
PUNISHMENT BEYOND THE GRAVE ?
" Proficiscere, anima Christiana, de hoc mundo ! "
" Go forth upon thy journey, Christian soul !
Go from this world ! go in the name of God ! "
NEWMAN, Dream of Gerontius.
" Sanabiles fecit nationes terrae." Wisd. i. 14.
I NOW come to the third point respecting which 1
wished an answer as to whether it was, or was not, a
mere popular accretion to the doctrine of the Ca
tholic Church respecting future retribution, namely,
that it is a doom passed irreversibly at the moment
of death on all who die in a state of sin." The
clause has been misunderstood, because I had not
thought it necessary to define the phrase. By "a
state of sin," I meant a state in which there have
been no visible fruits of repentance. My question
meant, " Is it a matter of faith that there is no dis
ciplinary or purgatorial condition in the Intermediate
State through which sinful and erring souls, who
have not visibly repented, may still be reached by
the grace of God ? "
In the only sense which I attached to these words,
Dr. Pusey agrees with me ; he does not hold, he
CKAP. vi.] TERMINABLE RETRIBUTION. 157
declares that the Catholic Church does not hold, and
that it has never held, the doctrine which I repudiate,
if by " state of sin," I only mean such a state as excludes
any visible presence of God s grace in the heart. 1
In point of fact the entire scope of his argument
points (except in one particular which is outside the
subject) to conclusions which are exactly analogous
with my own. If (as I have already said in a letter
to the Guardian] he holds that most men do not die
in a state of such sin as excludes them for ever from
the presence of God, and also that some purification
of imperfect souls is possible in the world to come,
he holds all that I ask. All that I ever desired in
this matter was the liberation of men s minds from
fearful and fallible inferences as to the future, which
I believe to be unwarranted by the voice of God
whether in Scripture or in the heart of man.
Dr. Pusey, in his Eirenicon (p. 192), speaks about
"a soul which here has had no longings for God,
even if the man himself should die in a state of
grace " : but no popular teaching which I have ever
heard would (apart from some visible repentance)
have admitted that such a soul would still die
" in a state of grace." The Romish doctrine of
purgatory has only seemed to many minds a
more merciful doctrine than that of the popular
teaching because it does admit an ultimate hope
for grievously imperfect souls. " As if," says Dr.
Pusey, "the English Church held that any whom
the Roman Church assigns to purgatory would be
cast into hell ! " I reply, as regards the English
Church, No ! but as regards the only logical inference
to be drawn from the diatribes of hundreds of her
p
teachers, yes ! I answer further that over con
siderable portions of Roman Catholic countries
1 Dr. Pusey would, I suppose, say that an irreversible doom is passed ;
but that the doom may be to a terminable, and purifying punishment ;
a view which does not differ very materially from my own.
) 58 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
it is believed that the notion of purgatory has all
but superseded that of hell.
If I had seen that there was any possibility of
ambiguity in my words, I would have said that what
I believe to be no part of Catholic truth was the
notion that the doom to endless torments is passed
irreversibly at death on all who have not attained to
a visible state of grace, i.e. who are not yet sanctified,
not yet even approximately victorious over manifold
temptations.
The particular phrase which I used was due to
the intense impression once made on my mind by a
remark of Jeremy Taylor, that "A state of sin cannot
be a state of grace."
I think that this explanation will make my mean
ing clear. I did not wish to deny that it is " a
matter of faith " that they who are utterly repro
bate, who have utterly extinguished all the grace
of God in their hearts (if such there be in this
world), would pass from earth to an irreparable
loss. I did not even mean as a multitude of
passages in my sermons were surely sufficient to
prove that a man s ultimate destiny is not decided
at death so far as the results of his earthly life
are concerned. But what I did mean was the doc
trine that men do not pass direct from life to hell
or to heaven, but to a place in which God s merciful
dealings with them are not yet necessarily finished ;
where His mercy may still reach them in the form,
if not of probation (for on that subject I have never
dogmatized), yet of preparation. That there is this
progressive development of the Divine work of grace
in the soul is expressly stated by St. Paul in the
passage, " That he who hath begun a good work in
you will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ."
St. Paul is there speaking to the members of an
entire Church ; no doubt he regards them all as
being ideally God s saints ; but he does so with the
vi.] TERMINABLE RETRIBUTION. 159
full knowledge that multitudes fell grievously, and
even terribly, short of that ideal. And here comes
in the truth that, as even saints are not perfect, but
are still sinners, so even sinners are very rarely
perhaps never fixed, finished, and incurable in sin,
when seized by their mortal sickness. If there is
no such thing as a perfectly good man, so it may
be doubted whether there be such a thing as a per
fectly and irredeemably bad man. By the time that
the great Day of Judgment has come there will be,
in some form, as the tremendous imagery of Scripture
leads us to believe, some division of mankind into
good and bad sheep on the right, and kids (epifyia) on
the left ; but ere that day has come, and in Hades,
there must have been many a change before it is
easy to distinguish between the best of the evil and
the lowest of the good.
I think that a few instances will illustrate my
meaning.
I. During the last few years, in my work as a paro
chial clergyman, I have been called to stand by many
death-beds, and to direct and solace so far as man
can do so the last thoughts of those who are passing
away from earthly things, and who have thought
but little of any other.
Those scenes have left on my mind the deep con
viction that a death-bed very rarely makes any
observable difference in the general habit of mind
of the dying. What happens most frequently is that
physical weakness or mental unconsciousness come
on, before either the sufferers or those about them
distinctly recognize that the summons has gone forth.
They think that they shall " pull through it this
time," as I have often been told by those who had
hardly a day to live. Often the end comes on very
rapidly, before the perilous, or at least before the
hopeless, character of the disease has been realised.
Often, again, death is so slow in its approach that
160 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
there always remains a hope in the mind of the sick
person that he or she may yet have many days to
live. And very frequently I find the strongest possible
disinclination to speak of religious subjects, or the
habit of fencing off all approach to anything like a
heart-searching intercourse, either by silence, or by
monosyllabic answers, or by vague generalities, or by
a transparent effort to change the subject, and that
too even when the sufferer is perfectly aware that his
life has been openly sinful, and that the end is near.
It is rarely indeed that the sick do not welcome the
prayer offered for them at their bedsides, or that they
are disinclined to listen to the passage from the
Holy Book ; and sometimes, even when they have
not been communicants for years, the desire is re
newed in them, to receive once more the Sacrament
of the Lord s Supper. But how have these men
and women often been living up to the last day,
and week, and month, or year of their active life ?
Not -always, not perhaps very often, as flagrant
criminals in the world s sight, but yet how far from
even the lowest Christian standard. 1 I will not take
the very common case of drunkards, or of those who
have been dishonest, or blasphemers, or unclean ; but
how often is it the case that the dying person has
been utterly careless and indifferent ; not praying for
himself, or hardly ever praying ; not attending, or
scarcely ever attending, the House of God ; not re
ceiving the Sacrament of the Lord s Supper ; not
living, and not earnestly trying to live, in the love and
fear of God, or in any high fulfilment of the duty to
our neighbour; guilty of sins of impurity, of ignorance,
and even of malice. Yet they have not been wholly
bad. They have been perhaps kind fathers ; they
have been perhaps, on the whole, faithful husbands ;
they have been trustworthy, perhaps, in the main task
committed to them. Even the worst of them have
ommitted to them. Even the worst of them h
1 " Rari quippe boni."--Juv. Sat. xiii. 26 ; AUSON. Id. xvi. I,
2.
vi.] WILL THE MAJORITY BE LOST? 161
shown some redeeming quality ; some eyes have wept
for them tears of sincere regret. But many even of
the best of them cannot be said to have fulfilled any
one of the deepest obligations of the religious life.
Not one, even of their friends, would have dreamt
of speaking of them as " religious," or as " godly,"
or even as " good Christian men. And, so far as I
have seen, they die, in nine cases out of ten, exactly
as they have lived. In general they show no vital
sign of sorrow for sin, no consciousness even of their
own guilt in God s sight, no sense of their utter
neglect of many sacred duties, no faith in Christ, no
dread whatever of appearing before the judgment
seat of God absolutely nothing of that state of
mind which we have been taught to regard as the
sign of true repentance. And so they pass away. 1
And if the cedar of Paradise is shaken, what shall
happen to the desert reed ? 2
2. Or take another case. In these our recent wars,
as in all our wars, many young soldiers and officers
have been killed. Among these have been some
whom I have known well ; and of these some have
differed in no way from multitudes of their fellows.
They have lived the ordinary life of men similarly
circumstanced. Gallant they have been, and generous,
and faithful to their military duties, and intensely
dear to their friends and families ; and often they
have met their death as brave men should, facing
the enemy, or trying to relieve the wounded or the
1 Dr. Pusey (Eirenicon, p. 196), in answer to Mr. Wilson s difficulty
about those who die in ignorance, like thousands of the London
poor," asks, " Who ever said or suggested that they would necessarily be
lost? " And in his What is of Faith he ranks them with the heathen,
and calls London "in all probability one of the largest heathen cities in
the world." It is an easy solution of the difficulty : but I, who have
seen many die in the lowest and poorest ranks of London life, know
that most of them have, at some time or other of their lives, been under
religious instruction ; they are anything but heathen in absence of mere
knowledge of the main facts of the Christian religion.
2 St. Gregory Magn.
M
162 MERC Y AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP
^
imperilled. And some of them have been but youths,
and their country thinks of them with -pity and with
pride. But had you asked them five minutes before
the sword-blow or the musket-shot stretched them
on the sod, whether they had lived holy, or even
religious, or even serious lives, or even lives free from
grave faults and sins, even as men reckon sins, some
of them would have been the first to say No. And,
in the course of that providence which orders the life
and death of man, these frank and gallant youths
are
" Cut off even in the blossom of their . c -in,
Unhousel d, disappointed, unanel d ;
No reckoning made, but sent to their account
With all their imperfections on their head."
What is the common teaching respecting such as
these ? Is it that all who live thus go straight to
heaven ? Will any one say without shrinking will
not any one blush for very shame to say that
they pass from hence to an endless hell ? And
yet have we not heard from earliest childhood
the teaching, "a filo vita, a vita mors, a morte pendet
aeternitas " ?
3. Take another case. I have stood, not once or
twice only, by the bedside of dying boys. And often,
in their case too, unconsciousness and death have
come on suddenly and unexpectedly; and without
so -much as a suspicion that there has been need on
their part for any special preparation they have been
called into the presence of God. They have differed
in no respect from other boys. They have gone
away from the life of boys as the lives of boys are at
our public schools. And in some cases it would have
been wholly untrue to say that they were religious
boys, or that their lives had been in any sense holy
lives, or that their sins had not been like the sins of
their fellows, or that they had lived in the spirit of
prayer, or that they had been unselfish, or keenly
vi.] WILL THE MAJORITY BE LOST? 163
alive to duty, or wholly obedient ; or that their
character had been free from very serious stains of
one kind or other ; or that their influence had been in
any sense markedly for good : still less would they
have been specially spoken of as servants of God or
followers of Christ. They were living, I say, in many
cases, the common life of boys of their age ; and in
the very middle of that common life whatever it
was they were, without any preparation, summoned
hence. If any ordinary boy, at any ordinary school,
suddenly touched by the finger of death, is so living
that he may be sure of to use the common phrase
" g m S straight to heaven," then these boys who
have died would have gone to heaven ; not other
wise. But will any one say that, if the daily
teaching of all religious teachers be true, ordinary
men and ordinary boys, living the ordinary life of
men and boys, are fit to go straight to heaven ?
And yet will any one dare to say as I suppose in
the middle ages men would scarcely have hesitated
to say that these, many of them with all their
faults, all their habitual faults, all their serious, un
broken faults, their faults to all human appearance
scarcely realised by themselves in their true heinous-
ness, and to all human appearance in no way repented
of will any one now dare to say that these, so
beloved, with so many good qualities, with so many
germs in them of undeveloped virtue, will be never
changed, or made better, or relieved from torment,
but will go straight hence under the irrevocable doom
to an endless hell ? 1
I know not whether teachers in general would have
said of any of these that they die " in a state of sin ";
but I did not mean by that term in a state wholly
evil. And I am very sure that many, whose lives
have been externally far more serious than those of
1 "Aeternitas est interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta posses-
sio." BOETHIUS.
M 2
164. MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
any of these, would still consider themselves so sinful,
so stained with unsubdued infirmities, "so little vic
torious over grave besetting sins, so conscious that
they had never lived and were not then living as God
would have us live, so very far off from all conscious
and vital union with Christ, that, unless the mere fact
of death make a difference, they could look to the
future with but little hope. Many especially of the
best of them would say with the unhappy Cowper
" No voice divine the storm allayed,
No light propitious shone,
When, snatched from all effectual aid,
We perished, each alone :
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he."
Not many years ago there was living a poet who
was a man of most tender, affectionate, and beautiful
character, but who was the plain truth must be
spoken a victim of drink. And though he was
never able to conquer the habit, he yet wrote of
himself on the fly-leaf of his Bible
" When I received this volume small
My days were barely seventeen,
When it was hoped I should be all
Which once, alas ! I might have been.
" And now my years are thirty-five,
And every mother hopes her lamb,
And every happy child alive,
May never be what now I am.
*
Of what men are, and why they are
So weakly, wofully beguiled,
Much have I learnt, but better far,
I know my soul is reconciled. "
Will any one stand by the grave of one who has
thus fallen, even if in this life he has never wholly
recovered, and say that he shall never inherit the
kingdom of heaven ? Without repentance, no : but
will any man say that a repentance imperfect here
vi.] WILL THE MAJORITY BE LOST? 165
a repentance not so strong as wholly to conquer the
awful physical craving may not by God s mercy be
consummated beyond the grave ?
Some, similarly situated, knowing their own weak
ness, knowing the degradation into which sin has
brought them, knowing the plague of their own
hearts, have not dared to entertain such a hope
respecting themselves. One of the greatest writers
and deepest thinkers of the last generation, enslaved
similarly by the spell of an artificial crave, said in
the depth of his self-abasement, that he could
positively welcome with rapture the doctrine that the
soul of man could cease to be. Yet will not man
kind refuse to condemn so good a man to endless
agonies ? will they not judge him more leniently than
he dared to judge himself? Will they not believe
that in this tenderness of judgment they do but
reflect the mercy of the Merciful ?
And is it then to make light of sin if we decline to
believe that such as these, though they have not shown
any visible repentance, have passed at the moment of
death to an irreversible agony ? We preach exactly
what Scripture preaches that sin is death ; that the
soul that sinneth it shall die; that we shall eat the
fruit of our works ; that both here and hereafter there
is a punishment for the violation of God s laws ; that
such punishment is inevitable ; that it works in the
form of natural consequences ; that the sinful soul
so long as it loves its sin cannot see God. But we
preach also the forgiveness of sins by the blood of
Christ ; and we believe that the seeds of true re
pentance may here be unripened, may to human
eyes be invisible, and that yet they may be brought
to perfection by God s love and mercy beyond the
grave.
Now, I spoke of deaths like these when I spoke of
dying " in a state of sin." I meant the deaths of
those who die in the very midst of that ordinary life
166 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
*>
of men in which, as we see it in all the world around
us, good and evil are not locked in deadly contest, but
are lying down flat together, side by side. And do not
let my question be met by a pretended indignation
that such questions should be asked at all. For they
have been asked a million times, and if we are to
understand the ways of our God towards us, and
towards those whom we love, we must not have two
answers to them one, an answer in terrible accord
ance with what men profess as their formal theology,
and the other the natural voice of the best feelings of
that human heart by which we live. Nor, again, let
such questionings be met by vague facing-both-ways
talk about God s " uncovenanted mercies," unless the
possibility and the reality of these " uncovenanted
mercies " be distinctly recognised as also forming
a part of our belief. Let us not go on all our lives
professing to teach one thing, and then, at the first
touch of pressure, recoiling at once from our own
conclusions. On this subject mankind will no longer
be silenced by usurped authority, nor mocked by
empty verbiage which " steers through the channel
of no meaning, between the Scylla and Charybdis
of yes and no."
Now Dr. Pusey is absolutely at one with me in
refusing to say a word as to the irreversible doom to
endless torments of those " who die in a state of sin,"
in such a sense of the words as I have here explained.
In the Contemporary Review? in language as careful
as I could make it, I stated the essence of my view
as consisting in the doctrine "that, even if, in the
short space of human life, the soul have not yet been
weaned from sin, there may be a hope of recovery, a
possibility of amendment, if not after the Last Judg
ment, yet at least in some disembodied condition
beyond the grave." I can see no perceptible differ
ence between this view and what Dr. Pusey says,
1
xxx.
vi.] WILL THE MAJORITY BE LOST? 167
that " a change in the soul, which would be short of
the change between rejecting God and accepting Him,
might be believed by any one who yet believes in the
everlasting loss of those who finally rejected Him." 1
Dr. Pusey here states his belief, which is, of course,
mine also, for it is that of the Church Catholic, that
there is an Intermediate State ; and that God s
dealings with the soul do not end with this life, but
continue during that Intermediate State. He holds
that many who die imperfect, unvictorious, undelivered
as yet from the chain of even grievous sins, do not at
death pass irreversibly to an endless state even of
loss, much less of torment but that they are prepared
for admission hereafter into life and blessedness.
But how does he arrive at this conclusion ? I will
confess that I read these pages of his book with sur
prise. He holds with Dr. Newman (and I am most
willing to accept the view), that " there are innumer
able degrees of grace and sanctity among the saved,"
and that many who " die and make no sign," may yet
" die, one and all, with the presence of God s grace,
and the earnest of eternal life, however invisible to
man, already in their hearts." 2 But to show why the
Church has never sanctioned any dogma as to the
doom of the vast majority of mankind, he dwells on
the possibility that they may have faith and repentance,
though we know it not.
" How do we or can we know," he asks, " what
souls do not die in a state of grace ? Well, I should
be deeply thankful to be permitted to believe, in
thousands of cases, that a sinner died " in a state of
grace," although no sign of it was visible ; but then
it can only be said that " a state of grace must to
human eyes look perilously like " a state of sin."
Dr. Pusey, for instance, supposes that there may be
repentance, and therefore salvation, even in the case
of one dying in the commission of a deadly sin. He
1 What is of Faith i p. 27. 2 Id. p. 12.
1 68 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
speaks of one mortally wounded in a duel ; of an
unbeliever "who had lately been inculcatnTg unbelief,
and who rose up from an adulteress bed to fall back
and die in the arms of the adulteress." 1 He speaks
of the possible repentance of Ahab, of Absalom, of
Solomon. He says that " we know not whether it
was an agony of remorse and repentance by which
Ananias died, and so was saved, though the temporal
judgment of God was irreversible." He speaks ot
the possible repentance of Nebuchadnezzar, of
Antiochus Epiphanes, " picture as he is of the Anti
christ." He speaks of some woman who was a
drunkard, a liar, a murderess, and yet to whom, though
she died on the scaffold, "God threw open the portals
of mercy for eternity." 2 He tells of the evangelical
clergyman of the very large parish of Wolverhampton,
who said that he had never repeated, in the Burial
Service, the words " as our hope is that this our
brother doth," without having some measure of hope ;
though this view of death-bed repentance" of what
God might do for the soul in these last moments, even
when it would hold communication with none but
Him " was entirely unknown to him. He quotes
Pere Ravignan as saying that " In the soul, at the
last moment of its passage, on the threshold of
eternity, there occur, doubtless, Divine mysteries
of justice, but above all, of mercy and love" ; and
he himself uses the remarkable words, " What God
does for the soul when the eye is turned up in death
and shrouded, the frame stiffened, every limb motion
less, every power of expression gone, is one of the
secrets of the Divine compassion."
I confess that I should not myself use this language ;
that I should not myself lay stress on the possibility of
the whole work of grace being thus accomplished in
the soul ras in the case of the adulterer and the
murderer in the last agonies of death. God can
1 Id. p, 12. 9 Id. p. 15.
vi.] WILL THE MAJORITY BE LOST? 169
indeed " in a short time fulfil a long time," l and
Christ, in His great mercy, has indeed given us the
record of what He said to the dying robber on the
cross ; but it is the only instance in all those long
millenniums which Scripture affords us of the efficacy
of a death-bed repentance one that we might not
despair ; one only, that we might not presume. " We
know not what God may do in one agony of loving
penitence for one who accepts His last grace in that
almost sacrament of death." 2 Men have always clung
to this hope, and have told such legends as the famous
one about
" Between the saddle and the ground
I mercy sought and mercy found."
Few passages in Dante are better known than that
in the Purgatorio, in which he makes Buonconte
narrate his death :
" I am Buonconte, once of Montefeltro.
I came, I was sore wounded in the throat,
Flying on foot, and bloodying the plain,
I lost the power of sight here, and my voice
Died with the name of Mary : on that spot
I fell, and all alone my body lay.
..
God s angel seized on me, and he of hell
Cried out, O thou of Heaven, why dost thou rob me ?
Thou claimest to bear off his part eternal,
For one small tear which rescues him from me." 3
Wisd. iv. 13. Dr. Pusey, Eirenicon, p. 193.
Purgatory, v. st. 33-35 (as translated by F. Pollok). The original is ;
" lo fui di Montefeltro, io son Buonconte.
Arrivo io forato nella gola,
Fuggendo a piede, e sanguinando il piano,
Quivi perdei la vista, e la parola,
Nel nome del Maria, fini e quivi,
Caddi, e rimasse la mia carne sola.
* * * *
L Angel di Dio mi prese, e quel d Inferno
Gridava : O tu dal ciel perch e mi privi ?
Tu te ne porte di costui 1 eterno,
Per una lagrimetta che 1 mi toglie,"
170 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
But is it not somewhat strange does it accord with
all that we have heard from childhood" about the
futility of hoping for a change at death to make
this possibility the turning-point of an argument to
show why the Church has never taught the perdition
of the majority ? Can we seriously suppose that it is
"per una lagrimetta" and one cry uttered at the last
gasp that the majority are to be saved ?
" Repentance," says Archbishop Wake, 1 " cannot
be true, except there be a true love of God, and ,an
utter detestation of sin, and a hearty contrition that
we have ever committed it, and steadfast resolution
never to fall any more into it, and then improved in
actual sincere endeavour, what in us lies, to abound
in good works, and fulfil that duty which God requires
of us."
While, then, I should be far from denying the
merciful supposition of this possible repentance in
any human being, even when there has been no true
outward sign of it, the grounds on which I should
shrink from ever conjecturing the doom of any indi
vidual sinner, would not be this possibility, but rather
the more general grounds of hope that there is an in
termediate state between death and judgment ; that
there the sinful and stained souls may be prepared for
better things ; that the " pain of loss," even of endless
loss, maybe mitigated into something like submissive
contentment ; that God s thoughts are not as our
thoughts, nor His ways as our ways ; that the Lord
will not always chide, neither keepeth He His anger
for ever ; that " He will not contend for ever, neither
will He be always wroth, for the spirit would fail before
Him, and the souls which He has made." 2
Of the destiny of the good and holy souls no
Christian has any doubt.
1 Discourse of Purgatory, p. 35. The italics are in the original.
See, too, Bishop Jeremy Taylor s sermon on The Inefficacy of a Death
bed Repentance. a Is. Ivii. 1 6.
vi.] WILL THE MAJORITY BE LOST? 171
Of the destiny of souls hideously wicked, abominably
base, abnormally depraved of the very few men who
have shown themselves to be beast-like in their
degradation, or fiend-like in their cruelty we can
say nothing. Respecting such, Hope itself must at
least be silent and lay her hand upon her lip. They
are those of whom Pagans and Christians alike spoke
as " incurable " ; 1 only, even here, Olympiodorus
the commentator upon Plato, did not shrink from
saying, that though incurable in themselves, "they
may conceivably become curable by some external
impulse." 2
Our question, however, does not concern either the
holy or the absolutely depraved. It concerns the
destiny of the vast multitude, the overwhelming
majority. They are not saint-like, but very imperfect
and sinful ; yet they are by no means wholly evil ;
by no means without sweet affections, and generous
impulses, and noble qualities. They have not loved
evil, or sold themselves to it. It might even be said
to the Evil Spirit respecting them
Und steh beschamt, wenn Du bekennen musst :
Ein guter Mensch in seinem dunkeln Drange
1st sich des rechten Weges wohl bewusst."
What shall be the fate of these intermediate
natures ? 3 They are not undefiled in the way ; they
have not walked wholly in the Law of the Lord ;
their repentance has not been perfect ; their very
tears have needed washing. They are not in such a
state that they can enter at once into the purity and
1 rovs KaraXa^avo yueVous eV rfj aviary Kcutia. ORIG. C. Cels. viii. p.
403. ol 8 &v T& fff-^ara aSi/djcroxrt Kal Sia rotavra aoiK-ij/naTa aviaroi
ytvfavrai, e/c TOVTW ra Trapa^iy^ara yiyverai Kal ovroi /u.ei/ ou/ceV
bvivavrat, are dvidroi ovres. PLAT. Gorg. 171.
2 us IrepoKtj/TjTOi <rc6bz/rai in Plat. Gorg. /. c.
J ot ptv ~av 8J|a><ri peaus /3e/3iw/ceVcu, respecting whom Plato says that
they are absolved by torments. Kal e/cel oiKovai re Kal Ka6aip6[j.ei>oi TWI>
re a5iKr]fj.dr(av 8i8<Wes SiKas aTroAiWrcu ef ris TI ^t/cjjire. EUSEB.
Praep. Evang. xi. 38.
172 MERCY AND JUDGMENT [CHAP.
peace of Heaven. . There are in them elements of
untruthfulness, and lukewarrnness, and self-seeking,
and mammon-worship, and impurity which would
cast a shadow on the streets of the New Jerusalem ;
and they have been cut off suddenly in the very
midst of their days. What will be " their own
place beyond the grave ?
a. Some perhaps will say that, since they are not of
the number of the Saints of God, since they have
not been holy men, they will first suffer, and then be
annihilated.
b. Some will say that having been born in sin, and
having died in sin, they are destined to endless ex
istence in misery of mind and body -"an existence
the duration of which would be only commencing
when it had lasted through a number of millenniums,
denoted by lines of figures as numerous as the vibra
ting beams of light which extend from all the suns
and stars of the firmament into the infinite darkness,
even if these innumerable lines of figures should be
multiplied into each other." And surely " this is a
proposition which requires for its support something
more solid than a few disputed ( texts out of the
English version, and which nothing short of absolute
demonstration ought to persuade any man to em
brace as from God." l There are thousands of men
men devout and learned men of holy and humble
heart who have declared after life-long search that
for them such demonstration is not to be found.
c. The Roman Church would answer that such
souls pass into Purgatory. They would say with the
Catechism of the Council of Trent " that there is
a purgatory fire, in which the souls of the faithful "
[and those of whom I have spoken, if they had lived
and died in the rites of the Church, would not, I
imagine, be excluded from the number of "the
faithful "] " being tormented for a certain time, are
1 Rev. E. White, Life and Death, p. 35.
vi.] WILL THE MAJORITY BE LOST? 173
expiated, that so a passage may be opened for these
into their eternal country, into which no defiled thing
can enter." Among Romish Christians it is not a
matter of faith where Purgatory is ; nor whether its
pains are material or immaterial ; nor how long souls
are there detained ; but solely whether " there is a
state of the dead, in which they shall be expiated
by / Temporary punishment, and from which they
may be freed or otherwise helped by the prayers of
the Church." l
The mass of ordinary teachers, judging by their
sermons and pamphlets, would, with terrible deli-
berateness, adopt the second of these views namely,
that such souls pass to an endless hell, and that too
without the shadow of any possible mitigation.
But what would be the answer of many English
Churchmen who can claim to speak with the authority
of competent thought and competent knowledge ?
Would it not be that though they cannot accept the
Romish doctrine of purgatory with the admixture
of all the conceptions which the word connotes 2 ;
though that doctrine is altogether too rigidly de
fined to admit of proof from revelation ; though the
" probatory fire " of which the earlier Fathers speak
is rather the fire through which it was believed that
all would pass at the Judgment Day than what
the Roman Church usually understands by the fire
of Purgatory; yet that in the Intermediate State
1 Alex. Natalis. iv. 41.
2 Romanists themselves were perfectly aware of the necessity fc-
excluding these base admixtures. The decree on the subject passed in
the twenty-fifth session of the Council of Trent expressly bids the
bishops to banish from popular discourses "the more difficult and
subtle questions, and those which do not conduce to edification, and
from which often there is no increase of piety. Moreover," it says,
" they do not permit uncertain matters, or those which have the appear
ance of falsity, to be published or handled. But those which tend to
curiosity and superstition, or savour of base gain, let them prohibit as
the scandal and offence of the faithful." It would have been well if
the spirit of these wise cautions had exercised a deeper influence
on Christian Eschatology.
174 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
the condition of the souls of all except the abso
lutely reprobate admits of progress and improve
ment. While, therefore, we are not warranted in
asserting that any fresh probation will be offered, or
that the soul will have new trial-time, we are per
mitted to hope that God s mercy may reach them
there, as it reaches many here, and that " man s
destiny ends not with the grave."
Such an answer may be called vague, but it is only
vague as on this subject the teachings of Scripture
are themselves vague. It is therefore vague only
from a feeling of humility and reverence. We do
not wish to invade the regions which for some good
purpose have been left mysterious and undefined.
I, for one, have never wished to dogmatize on points
respecting which there have been opinions so widely
differing among Christian men. Nay, it has been
my sole wish to repudiate as unwarrantable that
popular dogmatism of which I have given many
specimens, and which goes far beyond what is
warranted by the true and sober interpretation of
Scripture ; far beyond what is required by the
teaching of the Church.
It would have been better if religious teachers,
from Augustine downwards, had imitated the deep
reserve and reticence of the sacred writers, who
would not speak when God was silent. It would have
been better if St. Gregory the Great had never
entered into the descriptions and speculations re
specting Purgatory which have been subsequently
reflected in so many thousands of books and ser
mons. Even in the little which Scripture does say
respecting the state of the dead we are met by those
apparently insoluble antinomies which meet us also
in other regions of doctrine when they touch on
transcendental truth ; and these antinomies, joined
with the awful silence of the dead, which God has
not suffered to be broken during all these long
vi.] WILL THE MAJORITY BE LOST? 175
millenniums, should be sufficient to warn us not
to speak with coarse description, and rash dogma,
and unwarranted detail on a theme respecting
which the Church has said very little in her creeds
and formularies. In dealing with the state of the
dead she has confined herself to the most general
principles, and she has not attempted to come to
any rigid decision on opinions in which unanimity
is impossible. The necessary truths on which she
insists are few ; in things doubtful she has left us at
liberty ; in all things she calls for charity.
CHAPTER VII.
IS FUTURE RETRIBUTION NECESSARILY AND
INVARIABLY ENDLESS ?
" Wilt Thou not make, Eternal Source and Goal !
In Thy long years life s broken purpose whole,
And change to praise the cry of a Lost Soul ? "
WHITTIER.
I NOW pass to the fourth point.
As to the first three, I have shown that Dr. Pusey,
and with him the majority of our best divines, as
well as of Roman Catholic divines, repudiate as fully
as I have repudiated the necessity for believing as
matters of faith (i) that there is a material hell; or,
(2) that the majority of mankind must perish ; or,
(3) that no change will be possible in the condition
of the dead who may die in an imperfect frame of
mind. These points are therefore conceded, and I
have only had to remove the verbal ambiguity
attaching to one phrase ("those who die in a state
of sin").
My object has been more than gained if I have
succeeded in forcing upon the attention of the Church
that the popular teaching still prevalent is not in
accordance with true theological teaching ; that it
goes far beyond revealed truth ; that it is mixed up
with many dangerous accretions ; that it constitutes
a deadly hindrance to the spread of Christianity
among the heathen, and to its acceptance in Christian
VII.] IS THERE A TERMINABLE RETRIBUTION? 177
countries by many men of high intellect and pure
morals whom we should love to win over to the truth
in Christ.
It is different with the fourth point. I said that
" the supposition of the necessarily endless dura
tion of hell for all who incur it/ was also an
accretion to the true doctrine. On this point Dr.
Pusey takes his stand. To give up this belief would,
he says, be "to give up part of that Faith which our
Lord gave as a protection to all those who suffer for
Him sooner than give up Himself." Yet on this point
there is a difference between us so far only as this:
I do not deny that punishment may for some souls
be endless ; but I do not agree with Dr. Pusey in
thinking that this endlessness is a necessary matter
of faith.
Dr. Pusey, since he too believes in a punishment
beyond the grave which will terminate a purgatorial
punishment, repudiates this fourth accretion in
exactly the same sense as I do.
The apparent opposition between us is purely
verbal. Dr. Pusey confines the word " hell " to the
meaning " endless punishment " ; to him therefore it
would be a mere contradiction in terms to say that
"hell" could ever end. If he gives this definition to
hell, I of course agree with him. Whatever " hell
may be, I have said that the soul which never
repents to the end will suffer to the end. But since
the popular theology (to which alone I was alluding)
attaches the name "hell" to every kind of punish
ment beyond the grave, it asserts the impossibility of
any terminable and purifying punishment. I wished
to repudiate this assertion, and so does Dr. Pusey. I
meant to declare my hope that there is such a thing
as a punishment beyond the grave call it " purga
tory" or what you will which will not be endless.
The divergence of our expressions only conceals a
substantial identity in the views which we alike hold.
N
178 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
^
Dr. Pusey would say :
I. I believe that some human beings pass away
from this world under the doom to endless torments.
II. But I believe also or at any rate I admit it to
be a perfectly tenable opinion that the majority of
human beings will ultimately be saved.
III. Yet, since they die unfit for heaven, I believe
that all who die unsanctified, and but imperfectly
penitent, will pass hence into a state of punishment
in which they will be prepared and purified for the
presence of God.
Now as regards these three propositions I should
adopt much the same views, but express them in
different words, namely
I. I cannot but fear, from one or two passages of
Scripture, and from the general teaching of the
Church, and from certain facts of human experience,
that some souls may be ultimately lost ; that they
will not be admitted into the Vision and the Sabbath
of God.
II. I trust that by God s mercy, and through Christ s
redemption, the majority of mankind will be ulti
mately saved.
III. Yet, since they die unfit for heaven since they
die in a state of imperfect grace I believe that in
some way or other, before the final judgment, God s
mercy may reach them, and the benefits of Christ s
atonement be extended to them beyond the grave.
This is, and always has been, ex animo, my belief
and hope ; and, as I think my whole book showed,
this was exactly what I meant when I said that
" eternal punishment," i.e. "punishment in the life
to come," is not necessarily endless in duration to
all who incur it.
But then it was said that while I denied Uni-
versalism, many of my arguments pointed in the
direction of Universalism. I reply :
i. That though I am neither an Universalist nor an
vii.] IS THERE A TERMINABLE RETRIBUTION? 179
\ " Annihilationist," I believe that both of these views
I have at all times been held by many good and
faithful Christians ; that neither of them is positively
rejected by any formula of our Church ; that neither
of them cuts off those who hold them from the rights
of full communion ; and that both of them may be
supported by arguments from Scripture which, though
to me they are unconvincing, are not to be swept
aside as impossible or absurd.
And, ii. That, as regards Universalism, although it
cannot be held as a dogma, it is so far from being
excluded as a hope, that it represents one of the
apparent antinomies of Scripture which it was right
to indicate. Dark as is the prospect of wicked men,
awful as may seem to be their ultimate doom, it would
yet be sinful and faithless to quench every apparent
gleam of hope respecting their future lot which to
some eyes has always seemed to be dimly discernible
on the far horizon.
Would the Church for more than a thousand years
have taught us to pray an absurd and a hopeless
prayer ? Yet the Church teaches us, all our lives
long, to pray a prayer which I for one breathe more
intensely than any other from the very depths of my
heart,
" THAT IT MAY PLEASE THEE TO HAVE MERCY
UPON ALL MEN,
We bsseech Thee to Jiear us, good Lord" *
1 " I embraced in my heart all that is called man, past, present, and
future, times and nations, the dead, the damned, even Satan. I pre
sented them all to God with the warmest wishes that He would have
mercy upon all." LAVATER, ap. Alger, p. 537.
N 2
CHAPTER VIII.
JEWISH ESCHATOLOGY AT THE DAWN OF THE
CHRISTIAN ERA.
"In diesem Punkt erklaren sich die Talmudlehrer entschieden
^egen die Annahme der Ewigkeit der Hollenstrafen." HAMBURGER,
Talmudisches Wbrterbuch, s. v. "Holle."
I HAVE now shown that, so far, there is in reality
no controversy between myself and Dr. Pusey. It
seems to me, and it has seemed to many others, that
our views are essentially agreed ; and that the appa
rent rift of difference between them is simply due to
that mirage which is caused by the differing uses of
words. This agreement is to me a very deep source of
comfort and thankfulness ; and I venture once more
to offer to Dr. Pusey the expression of my gratitude
both for the service which he has rendered to the
Church by his book, and also for that Christian
courtesy of tone which has enabled me to reply to
him in friendly controversy, when it would have
been impossible for me to answer others without
stooping to a vain wrangling which I regard as un
worthy and profitless.
At this point, then, it might well seem that all the
most important part of my task is ended ; but there
still remain to be considered some collateral ques
tions of history and exegesis, which do not indeed
CH. viii.] " GEHENNA " NOT AN ENDLESS DOOM, 181
affect matters of faith, but which yet have an im
portant bearing on the problems of the future life, and
respecting which Dr. Pusey thinks that I am mistaken.
One of the most important of these is what I called
my " palmary argument," that our word r< hell " is
used in the Gospel as the rendering for Gehenna ;
that " hell " cannot necessarily mean, and ought not
to be made to mean, more than Gehenna meant ;
that in the days of our Lord Gehenna did not normally
imply an endless doom ; and that therefore " hell
ought not so far at any rate as the New Testament
is concerned to be understood of necessity to convey
that meaning.
I cannot express this position more briefly than by
saying that to a Jewish ear " Gehenna " did not mean
" a place of necessarily endless torment," and there
fore that " hell," when used as the equivalent of Ge
henna, ought not to be so defined. The word " hell,"
in its popular usage, does but blur and misrepresent
the conception of the word Gehenna, because it
stands for a complex mass of inferences which ought
not to be introduced into that compressed Jewish
metaphor for future retribution.
To this argument I still adhere, nor has Dr. Pusey
in the slightest particular overthrown it, though
conscious of its importance he has devoted no less
than fifty-six pages to its demolition. Dr. Pusey
says that I am " mistaken both in the principle I
lay down, and as to the facts bearing upon it."
I. As to the principle, he says that our Lord need
not have used religious terms in the same sense as
that which the Jews attached to them, and that
He had, when need was, to stamp their language
anew." Certainly our Lord might have done this
when need was; but when He did so He did so
avowedly, so that there should be no mistake. If,
indeed, it had been " clear from the context of our
Lord s words," that He used Gehenna in a different
182 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
sense from that in which the Jews used it, then,
indeed, my argument would fall to the ground. But
to assert that this is clear is merely to beg the ques
tion. The principle, therefore, stands intact. When
our Lord uses any technical Hebrew term and He
used many such terms, such as Pharisee, Sadducee,
Corban, Sanhedrin, Paradise, Abraham s bosom,
&c. He used them in the very same sense in
which the Jews used them. To have done other
wise would have been to render His words purposely
unintelligible.
II. But as to the facts, Dr. Pusey says that "the
Jews believed in eternal \i.e. in Dr. Pusey s usage of
the word " endless "] punishment before, or at the
time of the coming of the Lord, and called the
place of punishment Gehenna." And this Dr. Pusey
endeavours to prove :
1. From the Apocryphal Books ;
2. From Josephus ;
3. From the Targums ;
and he proceeds to argue that the doctrine of the
non-endlessness of torment in Gehenna was
i. An invention of Rabbi Akiba ; and that
ii. In this he was followed by the Talmudists in
general, and by modern Jews.
Now I think that on the threshold, before I enter
into details, one little word will give a different aspect
to this controversy. In my sermon I said " that the
Jews never did, either then or at any period, nor
mally attach to the word Gehenna that meaning of
endless torment which we attach to hell." Again, in
the Contemporary Review I said that " Gehenna did
not mean endless torment." I said that it did not
mean it but I carefully abstained from saying that
it never in any passage had such a meaning attached
to it ; and by the word " normally " I expressly
implied that the sense of " endless torment " may
1 Eternal HoJ>e s p. 8.
viii.] " GEHENNA NOT AN ENDLESS DOOM. 183
possibly in some instances have been attached to it,
but that it was not its equivalent, or its ordinary
meaning. And so far was I from the assertion that
no one had ever used the word Gehenna in the sense
of "endless torment," that if the reader will only
turn to page 211 of my Eternal Hope, he will there
find it specified that Rabbi Saadjah, in his SepJier
Ha-emunah, and that some others also of the post-
Mishnic Rabbis, though few in number had used
the word in this sense.
But let me beg the reader to observe that my
contention was not, as Dr. Pusey seems to suppose,
that no one could possibly use " Gehenna " to imply
"endless torment," but that no one had ever used it
to mean endless torment for all who incurred it : in
other words, it never meant on the lips of the Jew a
doom necessarily irreversible. Now that is a fact which
cannot for a moment be gainsaid ; and it is a fact
which proves my contention in its very fullest extent.
For that contention never was that there was no such
thing as an endless retribution, but that the belief in
retribution did not necessarily involve a belief that it
would be endless to all who might incur it. And this
I proved by showing that no Jeiv has ever understood
by Gehenna a punishment from which none who in
curred it would escape i and therefore that our Lord
unless He expressly explained that He was using the
word Gehenna in a new sense could not possibly have
attached to it the attribute of necessary endlessness.
My urgent plea for the use of " Gehenna" instead of
" hell " in our English version was exactly this : By
hell is meant, in popular language, and in the usage
even ot such theologians as Dr. Pusey, a punishment
from which none escape who ever enter it ; whereas, by
Gehenna, a Jew meant a punishment which (as far, at
any rate, as Jews were concerned) the vast majority
escaped after a brief period. The uses of the two words
hell " and " Gehenna " are therefore deeply opposed.
184 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
Gehenna means a punishment which, for Jews,
was normally, and all but invariably, terminable ;
terminable, indeed, by annihilation, if not by deliver
ance, for all but a very few of the .very worst apo
states, and possibly even for them. Hell is taken to
mean a punishment never terminable for any who
incur it ! How utterly unfit, then, is the word " hell
to serve as a rendering for the word " Gehenna " !
It is a translation which has become positively
misleading, because it connotes a totally different
order of conceptions in its most important particular,
namely, the particular of its duration-.
And what makes the rendering more painfully un
fortunate I had almost said inexcusable is, that our
Lord and the Apostles have themselves set us i\
unmistakable example as to how the word should
have been dealt with.
For Gehenna was a technical Hebrew religious term.
It was a Hebrew term, and not a Greek term. And
yet exactly because it was technical, and because no
Greek term could serve as its precise equivalent, our
Lord and the Apostles would not translate it into
Greek, but they preserved it, as it was, in its precise
technical meaning, and only transliterated it from
Hebrew letters into Greek letters ; as though He and
they meant, in the most express manner, to prevent it
from being mingled up with misleading conceptions
which were alien from it.
We have suffered grievously, and I fear shall con
tinue to suffer, by not following His divine example.
It seems to me a positive duty to transliterate from
Hebrew into English the word which our Lord would
not alter, and which He therefore transliterated from
Hebrew into Greek.
I3y neglecting that example we use a word which
always means endless, final, irremediable and to
most minds material punishment, as our substitute
for a word which, to a Jew, nearly always meant an
VIIL] " GEHENNA " NOT AN ENDLESS DOOM. 185
intermediate, a remedial, a metaphorical punishment,
and above all a punishment which was regarded as
normally terminable.
That was my argument, and it remains wholly
unshaken.
Even if Dr. Pusey had been able to bring forward
a number of passages in which Gehenna meant " end
less torment," he would have failed to prove his
point, unless he could also overthrow the proofs which
I gave, that for centuries from the days of the Mishna,
which preserves the views of many Rabbis who were
previous to, or contemporary with, our Lord, down to
our own day " Gehenna " was used by the Jews for a
punishment which a soul might incur and yet escape.
Dr. Pusey has not even attempted to do this. Has
he even succeeded in showing that the Jews before, or
during our Lord s day, used Gehenna for a punish
ment which would for any, and in any instance, be
absolutely endless ? The reader shall judge for himself.
i. He tries to prove this first of all from the
Apocryphal books.
Hastily as my book was written, I had alluded to
these books, and had given, in a single sentence, my
reasons for interpreting their evidence differently
from Dr. Pusey. Those reasons were that their evi
dence is disputable, and their date, in their present
form, uncertain, and that the Jews have never acknow
ledged their dogmatic authority. " We attach but
scant value to such compositions as the Book of
Judith, 4 Esdras, Baruch, Enoch, 4 Maccabees, and
the Psalms of Solomon," says Rabbi H. Adler, in a
letter to me on this subject. " We do not regard
these books as containing authoritative expositions of
Jewish dogmas. They are not once quoted in the
Talmud." Another learned Jew whom I consulted
says : " The Jews do not consider the Apocryphal
books as doctrinal, nor do they read them at public
worship. They were never regarded as sacred. 3
1 86 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP
" The only non-Biblical book of which any notice
was taken in the days of Hillel and ...Shammai,
and by their schools, was the Megillah Taanitk,
or Book of Fasts. The only book which is much
noticed in the Talmud is Ecclesiasticus. Indeed,
by the latter half of the third century, they were
actually classed with the Sepharim Chitzonim, or Books
of Outsiders; and it was forbidden to a Jew to have
them in his house. Nay, Rabbis Joshua ben Levi,
Chia bar Abba, and Seira treat them as books of
magic. x When I questioned the learned Rabbi Dr.
Schiller Szinessy on this subject, he replied, " The
Apocrypha has not the least authority among us
Jews, and last of all is the Book of Enoch."
A. Dr. Pusey begins with the JBook of Enoch.
I will not pause to ask whether the Book of
Enoch can be at all relied on to give us a decisive
opinion as to Jewish belief on the subject. I will not
raise the question as to its date. Dr. Pusey says that its
priority to the Christian era has only been questioned
by Volkmar, and probably because of dogmatic
and critical bias. But this is not quite the case,
Hofmann, and Weisse, and Moses Stuart, as well as
Volkmar, place the composition of the whole work
after the Christian era. Gfrorer, Liicke, and Hilgen-
feld suppose that it has been interpolated. The
latter no mean authority argues that large inter
polations were made in it as late as the second cen
tury after Christ ; and what is very important, the
Jewish historian Jost 2 does not suppose that it is
entirely Jewish. Bottcher also 8 and other eminent
1 Hamburger, J. v. Afokryphen. Origen (in Num. Horn, xxviii. 2)
says that the Jews attached no authority to the Book of Enoch.
1 Gesch. Jud. ii. 218.
3 De Inferis, i. p. 261. He says, "In confusissimis illis iisdemque
lectu dignissimis Pseud-Henochaeis, quibus etiam Noachea quaedam
immixta sunt, quae mendosa . . . quae vetustiora, quae recentia," &c.
He thinks that some of the images of future retribution are coloured by
the rumours of the overthrow of Pompeii.
viii.] THE BOOK OF ENOCH. 187
scholars think that this book in its present form be
longs, like the Sibylline oracles, to the first and second
centuries after Christ.
Waiving all this, and accepting the book as purely
representative of Jewish thought, three facts have to
be considered in the interpretation of its language :
(l) that it is highly poetic and metaphorical; (2) that
much of it is written in a spirit of fierce anathe
matizing anger against the wicked and persecutors ;
(3) that, interpreted by itself, the book explains its
own threats to mean annihilation, which is the very
antithesis of endless torment. 1
And such being the case, it would be against all
rules of criticism to press the meaning of particular
expressions. But not one of Dr. Pusey s quotations
from the book even approximately proves the only
point in question ; not one of them shows that
"Gehenna" was used of endless torments, still less
that it was not also, and normally, used of terminable
retribution.
a. The only relevant words in the first quotation
from the preface are, " Great will be the everlasting
damnation, and ye will find no pardon." But
" everlasting is a disputable rendering, and " dam
nation" is judgment; and the word Gehenna does
not occur.
/3. In the second quotation (x. 5, 6) 2 devils only and
giants are spoken of ; Gehenna is not mentioned ;
and they are to be shut up, le-olam, which is rendered
" for all eternity," but (as has been proved again
and again, and will be proved again farther on) is a
vague phrase used far more often of terminable than
of interminable periods.
1 See Enoch xc. 13 ; xcii. 1 6 (Archbishop Lawrence). Abarbanel
and Maimonides distinctly point out that this is in accordance with
Jewish idiom "annihilation" is described as "being destroyed,
condemned, slain for ever." ABARB. De Capit. Fidei, 24 ; MAIMO
NIDES, Hilchoth, Teshuba, viii. 2 ; ALLEN, Modern Judaism, ix.
8 The references are to the chapters in Dillinann s edition.
i88 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
7. In the third (xxi. 1-6) transgressing " stars " are
burned " until 10,000 worlds, the number of their
guilt, are accomplished " ; a terminable punishment}
and therefore one which tells directly against Dr.
Pusey s view ; and fallen angels are imprisoned " to
all eternity," i.e. efc tUwvaf, le-olam, as before. Nor
is there any mention of the word Gehenna.
8. In the fourth (xxvii. 15) a burning valley is
described where those " who speak unseemly words
against God " are to be judged "to eternity for ever
more. It is possible (though far from indisputable) 2
that Gehenna may here be meant ; but apart from
the absolute indecisiveness of the phrase " to aeons"
(et <? au w^a?), these are the very offenders to whom
would apply the words of our Lord in Matt. xii. 31,
32, and whose sin was analogous to that blasphemy
against the Holy Ghost which should not be for
given. But even this passage must be interpreted
on the analogy of Old Testament prophecy. It
must be compared with passages like Is. v. 14, and
cannot be proved to mean more than overwhelming
destruction such as is threatened to Sodom and
to Edom.
. In the fifth quotation (xl. 24-26) the stars, the
" seventy shepherds," and the " blinded sheep " are
cast into a fiery deep and burned. Gehenna is not
mentioned, and the retribution answers apparently
to that "annihilation " which was the conception of
Gehenna to the Jewish mind, not for all (which is my
sole point), but for the worst only of those who
incurred it. 3
It is needless to go through the other quotations
1 So the frequent ledori doroth of the Rabbis ("to generations of
generations "), the equivalent of ety TOVS aloSvas TV alwvwv of the New
Testament, meant a finite period. \V INDEX, De Vita functor a statu,
p. 170.
J See Bottcher, De Inferis, p. 262.
3 This is the inference of Bretschneider, in his Dogmatik und MoraJ.
d. apokr. Schriften, pp. 299-325 (1^05)
VIIL] THE BOOK OF ENOCH. 189
in which, similarly, Gentile kings and devils "perish
or " are destroyed," and are threatened with aeonian
judgment. The threats are limited to the grossest
offenders ; there is nothing to show that they do not
mean " annihilation " or overwhelming acts of judg
ment of which the results continue visible; there is
nothing to show that the words "eternal " and other
rhetorical expressions mean " endless," any more than
they do in so many other passages ; and lastly they
are nihil ad rem, because they do not so much as
mention Gehenna, nor even if they did, do they in
the very slightest degree affect my allegation that
Gehenna always and normally meant a retribution
terminable for some, and for the vast majority of
Jews. For the rest Enoch says, " An everlasting
judgment shall be executed, and blasphemers shall
be annihilated everywhere." 1
One such phrase as that in the Book of Enoch,
eO)? O-VVT\(T0f} TO KplfJiCL TOV attoJ/O? TWV CiltoVWV
"till the judgment of the Age of Ages be accom
plished," proves what I asserted directly and un
mistakably. And I will quote on that phrase the
remark of Windet, one of the most learned writers
who has ever touched on the subject. " However
you understand the phrase," he says, " it could not
be used unless it signified something less than endless
ness ; for completion does not accord with true
endlessness. For most Jews lay down that Gehenna,
as the Greeks do that Tartarus, is appointed not so
much for the torment as for the purification of the
most wicked" 2
B. I pass to the Fourth Book of Esdras. Here again
we are dealing with a book of uncertain date and
origin. Gfrorer, Wieseler, and Bauer assign it to the
reign of Domitian ; Liicke to the reign of Trajan ;
Enoch, xcii. 16 (Archbishop Lawrence).
~ De Vita functorum siatit, 1633. (The book is preserved in the
opusculorum, vol. iv. 1-216.)
MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
Weisse even doubts whether it is Jewish at all, and
it is generally admitted that it contains interpolations
by Christian hands. It is a gloomy book full of
thoughts of ruin and revenge. Dr. Pusey s quotation
is from the missing fragment of the book translated
by Mr. Bensley ; it is full of severity, and makes a
vague allusion to "the oven of Gehenna"; but this
" oven seems to be distinguished from the " lake
of torment," and even respecting the " lake of tor
ment : it is neither stated that its torment will be
absolutely "endless," nor that it is interminable
for all.
Further than this Dr. Pusey s quotations are shown
to be irrelevant shown to be mere rhetorical ex
pressions to which the writer himself did not attach
their strict meaning because "endless torments"
are wholly incompatible with the idea of " annihila
tion," and that is the doctrine which in various
passages this writer seems unequivocally to teach.
Thus in viii. I, 48, he says, "The Most High hath
made this world for many, but the world to come for
few. . . . Like as the husbandman s seed perisheth
if it come not up ... even so perisheth man also (if
unsaved). . . . Things present are for the present,
and things to come for such as be to come." And in
ix. 22, " Let the multitude perish, then, which was
born in vatn." The great Bentley said quite correctly
that " some of the learnedest doctors among the
Jews have esteemed it [extinction of being] the most
dreadful of all punishments, and have assigned it
for the portion of the blackest criminals of the damned
-so interpreting Tophet, Abaddon, the Valley of
Slaughter, and the like, for final extinction and
deprivation of being." 1
C. The quotations from the Apocalypse of Baruch
are equally beside the mark. They speak generally
of "perdition," and "torment," and "fire," but if the
1 Boyle Lectures, serm. L
viii.] APOCALYPSE OF BARUCH. 191
writer intended to be clear or consistent, the last
passage seems most distinctly to describe the end of
torment by annihilation. It therefore points to a
terminable, not to an interminable, retribution. In
the sole passage which mentions Gehenna it is only
named by way of passing allusion, without any
definition or description ; and when the author says
of Manasses that " in this world he was called un
godly, and at the end his dwelling was in the fire,"
the passage strongly favours what I have maintained,
for it was a persistent view of the Jews that Manasses
apostate, murderer, and blasphemer though he
was was not finally lost. Thus we find in Sanhedrin
f. 103, i. that in 2 Chron. xxxiii. 13, the words " He
was entreated of him " were sometimes read " He
digged unto him," and that this "teaches that the
Holy One, Blessed be He ! made for Manasseh as it
were a secret opening in heaven, in order to receive
him as a penitent."
D. The quotations from the Psalms of Solomon are
similarly beside the mark. They neither mention
Gehenna, nor say that future retribution is endless
(since " for ever " has no such meaning), and rather
imply than exclude the common Jewish notion of
annihilation ; they are, in fact, nothing but general
menaces to the wicked founded on the language and
imagery of the Prophets and the Psalms.
E. Lastly, the quotations from the Fourth Book of
the Maccabees are equally ineffectual to throw any
light whatever on the meaning of the word Gehenna
for this reason, among others, that they never mention
it. The book was probably written in the days of
Vespasian, and is deeply coloured by Alexandrian
influences. 1 The threats of aeonian torment are ad
dressed, not to any Jew, or to sinners in general, but
to Antiochus, the very type of Antichrist. The very
utmost they Could prove, even if " aeonian " meant
1 Gfrorer, Ph<lo. ii. 173.
192 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
endless, would be a point which I have not dis
puted, though I think it disputable, namely, that
Jews of that day may have held the possibility
of endless torments for some ; not that they held
that Gehenna was endless for all, or indeed nor
mally for any. And if we turn from the dubious
Fourth Book of Maccabees to the far more important
and valuable Second Book, in which we do, beyond
all question, find unadulterated Jewish opinion, a
remarkable light is thrown upon the views of the
Jews as to future punishment. For there, too, the
same story is told of the seven brother-martyrs, and
if there be any passage in all Jewish literature in
which we should expect to find a distinct recog
nition of endless torments, and a denunciation of
them upon the tyrant, it is this. Yet in this older
and more genuine and less purely rhetorical version
of that glorious martyrdom we do not find a single
allusion to Gehenna or its supposed endlessness.
Thus, in chapter vii. 14 we read the strongest of all
the expressions used to their persecutor by these
young heroes in their agonies : it is, " As for thee,
thou shalt have no resurrection to life," which, at the
worst, points to annihilation. Still more remarkable
is verse 36, where all that the youngest sufferer says
to Antiochus, after witnessing the horrible deaths of
his brethren, is, " For our brethren, who have now
suffered a short pain, are dead under God s covenant
of eternal life ; but thou, through the judgment of
God, shalt receive just punishment for thy pride."
"Just punishment," but not a syllable about endless
torments : a fact which seems alone sufficient to prove
that they formed no distinct part of the Jewish
belief in the days of the Maccabees, though by that
time the word Gehenna and its metaphorical usage
were already known to them.
2. Dr. Pusey proceeds to the testimony of Josephus.
I had alluded to it, but set it aside as valueless. I
viii.] JOSEPHUS. 193
did not enter into my grounds for doing so, because I
was not pretending to write an elaborate and ex
haustive treatise, but only at brief notice, to throw
together a sort of outline defence of the half-
o
obliterated truths for nine-tenths of what I urged is
now acknowledged to be truth even by those who
write against me for which I had pleaded. I did,
however, give the references to the very passages
which Dr. Pusey has quoted, and briefly stated my
reasons for paying no further attention to them.
a. In the first of those passages, 1 speaking of the
Pharisees, Josephus says that " it is their conviction
that souls have an immortal force, and that under the
earth there are judgments and punishments to those
who, in their life, have practised virtue or vice, and
that to the one is adjudged a perpetual imprisonment,
and to the others, a facility to live again."
/3. In the second passage, 2 which throws light on the
last words of the former, he says that the Pharisees
think " that every soul is indestructible, but that the
soul of the good alone passes into a different body,
and that the soul of the bad is punished with endless
punishment/ And in section xi. of the same passage
he says that the Essenes set apart for the souls of
the bad " a gloomy and wintry den, teeming with
incessant punishments."
Now in alluding to this evidence I set it aside
because I regard Josephus as an untrustworthy wit
ness. Dr. Pusey calls this an instance of "my wonted
impetuosity." It may be so, but I had reasons for
what I said, and I will now give them. My "wonted
impetuosity " has never led me to make a single state
ment for which I could not produce evidence which
seemed to me to be ample, nor have my many critfcs
been able to convict me of one demonstrable error.
a. Josephus is an untrustworthy witness, because
again and again he falsifies Jewish history, and colours
1 Jos. Antiq. xviii. I, 3. 2 Jos. B. J. ii. 8, 14.
O
194 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
4fe-
Jewish opinions, in order to please his Pagan readers.
He smooths away whatever he thought"" that they
would be inclined to ridicule, and deliberately gives
to his narrative the tone which seemed likely to make
it suit their views. In other words, he Graecises, and
he Romanises, and he philosophises, and he Caesarises.
How are we to estimate the opinion of a Jew who
could speak of the Messianic prophecies as an " am
biguous oracle," and sink so low, in a peculiarly
shameless moment, as to imply that a bourgeois
adventurer like Vespasian was the promised Messiah
of his race ? 1
b. I regard Josephus as an untrustworthy witness
concerning the religious opinions of the Jews, because
they themselves, who are surely the best judges as to
their own beliefs, think very slightingly of his asser
tions. " Josephus," says ABARBANEL, "wrote while
he was in the hands of his masters, under their eyes,
and trembling under their law."
"The representations of Josephus (Ant. xii. and
B. y. viii), are of small value," writes the Jewish
historian, DR. JOST. 2
" We attach but slight weight to Josephus," says
RABBI H. ADLER, " on matters of religious dogma.
The first clause of the passage in which he speaks
of the belief of the Pharisees betrays the untrust-
worthiness of the second. There is not the slightest
evidence to support the view that the souls of the
good only passed into another body. Such a doc
trine is not even alluded to in the Talmud."
" Josephus," says HAMBURGER, " was a weak cha
racter. The splendour of Rome utterly blinded him.
He did not possess the strength of mind to rise above
it." After his visit to Rome " he returned back to
Judaea a different man. The object of his Antiqui
ties was to set forth Judaism in a favourable light in
the eyes of the educated Gentile world, and it requires
1 Jos. 2}. y. vi. 5, 4. 2 Gesch. d. Judenthums, i. 224.
viii.] UNTRUSTWORTHINESS OF JOSEPHUS. 195
a critical eye to distinguish, in his writings, between
the false and the true.
And Christian writers have no less emphatically
rejected his testimony. "If we have not cited
Josephus," says DR. POCOCK, "it is no wonder, since
in giving the views of the sects he names respect
ing the other world, he seems to have used words
better suited to the fashions and ears of the Greeks
and Romans, than such as a scholar of the Jewish
law would understand, or deem expressive of his
meaning." l
"It is not to be disguised," says ARCHBISHOP
USHER, " that having promised to derive his materials
from the sacred records of the Hebrews, without
diminution or addition, he has done this with little
fidelity/
Alluding to his total suppression of the most
memorable sin of the desert wanderings, namely,
the worship of the golden calf, BISHOP WARBURTON
says that " this shows his artful address throughout
his whole work " ; and in a note to the treatise against
Apion he says, " This was carrying his complais
ance to the Gentiles extremely far, and he misses no
opportunity of conciliating their good will."
" Josephus," says MOSHEIM, " as is well known,
attempted to show that there was less difference be
tween the religion of the Jews and those of other
nations than people generally supposed ; in which he
very frequently exceeds all bounds."
His Antiquities, says M. CHASLES in Etudes sur le
premier temps du christianisme, " is a masterpiece of
finesse. Never was the truth falsified with a skill
more resolute, more subtle, and more deceptive."
"At the present moment," says his translator DR.
TRAILL, "no well-informed writer taking the religious
side of the argument, would think of defending the
Jewish historian, or of vouching for his affirmations."
1 Notae in Purtam Moiis, c. 6.
O 2
196 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
c. I called him .an untrustworthy witness because
his Eschatology, as well as his Messianism, is ex
pressly repudiated as of no value. 1 In the remarks
which I have quoted from him he refers to the
Greeks, and compares the views of the Essenes with
theirs. It is to please and conciliate the Greeks that
he omits the distinctly Pharisaic belief in the Resur
rection (Acts xxiii. 6, 8 ; xxiv. 15 ; 2 Mace. 7),
because the idea of the Resurrection of the body
was made a jest among the Greeks 2 (Acts xvii. 18,
32). He deliberately compares the Pharisees to the
Stoics, just as he compares the Essene Eschatology
with the fables of the Greek Tartarus.
But, waiving these objections altogether, the testi
mony of Josephus bears but very slightly on my
argument. His words, "endless durance," eipyfib?
di Sio? are unscriptural. 8 The latter word is used by
Greeks, but never in the New Testament for the future-
punishment of men ; the same remark applies still more
strongly to his evidently Greek-coloured account of
the fancies of the Essenes, for neither " incessant" nor
" vengeance," nor " den " nor " gloomy " nor " wintry
are words that find, in this connexion, any Scriptural
authorization. 4 If we accept on such authority, the
conclusion that the conception of " endless torment"
1 Hamburger, Taint. W r orterb. ii. 508. Professor Marks and others
speak to the same effect.
2 Bottcher, De hiftris, 238, 519. He says that Josephus only used
the word " Anastasis " once, and then in the sense of "overthrow." -
B. y. vi. 6, 2. Any one who will carefully read the .story of the Witch
of Endor in the Antiquities (v. xiii.) will see that the selection of words
is dictated by a desire to conform to Greek notions. Ewald (History of
the People of Israel, v. 366) speaks of his account of the sects as specially
arbitary and devoid of thorough knowledge.
3 In Jude 6 it is used poetically of the chains in which devils are
reserved for future judgment ; in Rom. i. 20 of the power of God.
4 o(/>c68r/ Krai x eI M e/ / noi/ A tu X^ I/ > y&ovTa TJ,ucopia);/ aSiaXeiirrcaj/. B.
y. ii. 8, II. The three first words do not occur at all in the New
Testament. aSiaXenrros in Rom. ix. , and 2 Tim. i. 3 (both times
within the limits of earthly life) ; TI^O LO. only in the singular, and
only once, He:>. x. 29.
vin.]. THE TARGUMS. 197
was not unknown to the Graecising Jews of that day,
this proves absolutely nothing against my assertion
that Gehenna (which Josephus does not mention) had
no such meaning normally ; and that it is entirely
indefensible to make it mean endless torment for all
who incur it. Our Lord could only have used the
word in its Jewish sense ; and for the sake of all who
love truth better than human tradition, I must again
and again insist that its Jewish sense was not that
which is now popularly attached to the word " hell."
3. The appeal to the Targums equally fails to
shake my position. As regards their date, if, as very
able critics suppose, the Targum of Onkelos belongs to
the end of the third or even to the end of the second
century, that is a date after Rabbi Akiba had (ac
cording to Dr. Pusey) altered the opinion of the Jews
from an endless to a temporal Gehenna. This would
alone prove that the mere phrases of the Targum have
not the meaning which Dr. Pusey assigns to them. 1
But what bearing have such phrases as " the second
death " in Onkelos (Deut. xxxiii. 6), and in Jonathan
(Is. xxii. 14, Ixv. 5, 6), on my position ? Dr. Deutsch
and others who knew the Targums best, wholly failed
to see in them the meaning which Dr. Pusey attaches
to them. To me it is perfectly obvious that by
"second death" they meant annihilation, which, by
their day, at any rate, if not long before, had become
a common belief among the Jews. The phrase meant
what in another place Jonathan defines it to mean
thgit "the wicked shall not live in the world to come."
It is surprising to me that Dr. Pusey should have
collected these passages from the Targums. Out of
some fourteen references every one. with a single excep
tion, is absolutely nihilad rent. They merely mention
Gehenna as a place of future punishment ; no one ever
dreamt of denying that the word might be used in
that sense. The point denied is that it meant endless
1 According to one account Onkelos was a pupil of Akiba.
1 98 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
punishment for all who incur it. But not one of these
passages except the one of which we shall speak
directly says a word directly or indirectly to imply
that the punishment was endless for any. I had already
said all that was necessary about them when I referred
to the Targumim (Eternal Hope, pp. 82, 214) and said
that in these passages " fire " and " for ever meant
just what they mean in Scripture, which is not neces
sarily either material fire or endless duration. Where
any further idea is implied it is quite distinctly that
of annihilation, not endless torment. Thus in Ps.
xxxvii. 20, Jonathan compares the punishment of the
wicked to the slaying and burning of lambs, " so
the wicked shall fall and be consumed in the smoke
of Gehenna" ; and in the Targum on Ps. cxl. 12, the
" being cast down into Gehenna " is contrasted with
"rising to life eternal"; and in that on Eccl, viii. 10, the
wicked "go to be burned in Gehenna." Now "annihi
lation" and to see anything but annihilation" in
these passages is to interpret them by Christian not
by Jewish notions is the very opposite to " endless
torments." From Mai. iv. 3 " And ye shall tread
down the wicked, for they shall be ashes under the
soles of your feet on the day that I shall prepare,
saith the Lord " the Talmudists drew the well-known
notions, found in the Rosh Hoshanah?- that, after a
terminable Gehenna, the souls of the wicked should
be consumed by fire, whose cinders wind will scatter
under the soles of the feet of the righteous.
The one passage which might be regarded as an
exception is the Targum on Is. xxxiii. 14, where
Gehenna is the name given to "aeonian burnings."
The best proof that there is no dream of endlessness
here is the fact that Isaiah is speaking of the Assyrian
invasion; and the "aeonian burnings are temporal
conflagrations. Besides this the Tophet in Gehenna,
of which the prophet speaks in xxx. 33, is the literal
1 V. infra, p. 201.
vni.J THE TARGUMS. 199
topographical Gehenna, and therefore the word in the
Targumist must in this place have the same literal
meaning. 1
So that I see no reason to alter one word of my
remark, 2 " that the Rabbinic opinion was that of
Abarbanel, that the soul would only be punished in
Gehenna for a time proportionate to the extent of its
faults, and it is in accordance with that belief, and
that of annihilation as being the second death ;
that we must interpret the passages which are some
times adduced from the Targums of Jonathan and
Onkelos and from various parts of the Book of
Enoch." 3 But since Dr. Pusey has adduced all those
entirely irrelevant passages from the Targums, I will
adduce two passages which he has not mentioned, and
which are not only entirely relevant, but absolutely
prove my whole position.
One is from the Targum of Jonathan on Is. Ixvi.
24, where the Targumist, after a common Rabbinic
method, taking the word diraon jli-rP] (" contempt ") as
though it were |V^"3 1, has this remarkable passage,
" And the wicked shall be judged in Gehenna until
the righteous say concerning them, We have seen
enough ( :!)." 4
The other passage is from the Targum on Is. xxii.
14, where (as in the Book Zohar) the second death
is explained to mean neither hell nor annihilation,
but so shifting were Jewish notions on this subject
" that which happens, when a soul, that has animated
a body a second time, separates from it. "
1 " I fully agree with you," writes Rabbi M. Adler, "that the expres
sions in the Targumirn which speak of a second death teach not
endless suffering, but annihilation. The Targum on Is. Ixvi. 24,
distinctly points to the terminability of Gehenna. The DT>|? D-Hp v of
Ts. xxxiii. 14, is a literal reproduction of the text, and may with pro
priety be rendered enduring burnings." 2 Eternal Hope, p. 213.
* Gfrb rer (Jahrb. des Hals, ii. 289, 311) fails to see the right view.
1 See White, Life in Christ, p. 172 ; Weill, iv. 292; xiii. ch. iii. i.
6 See Basnage, Hist, des jftafo, iv. 30 ad Jin.
200 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
And thus when Dr. Pusey says, that " Belief in
the eternity of future punishment is contained in the
Fourth Book of Maccabees, in the so-called Psalms
of Solomon : the second death is mentioned in the
Targums of Jonathan and Onkelos ; Josephus attests
the belief of the Pharisees and Essenes in the eternity
of punishment " I reply that slight as is the authority
of 4 Maccabees, the utmost that it indicates is what I
never denied, viz. that punishment rhetorically called
everlasting, might be the doom of some ; that the
passages quoted from the Psalms of Solomon are
wholly indecisive even as to endlessness, and that
neither they nor the others in 4 Maccabees touch
the force of my remark about Gehenna ; that the
"second death in the Targums means sometimes
annihilation, sometimes metempsychosis both of
which are incompatible with endless torments ; that
other passages in the Targums (as well as in 4 Esdras, 1
&c.) speak distinctly of terminable punishment ; lastly,
that the evidence of Josephus is, both by Jewish
and Christian testimony, perfectly worthless, because
Josephus was not an honest man.
I appeal to any candid reader, I appeal to Dr.
Pusey himself, to say whether the two passages
which I have adduced from the Targums, and espe
cially the former, do not go farther to establish the
view which I maintained, that Gehenna never normally
meant " endless torments for all who incurred it,"
than all his passages put together prove on the other
side ? " It was the opinion of the Jews," says
Archbishop Wake, a learned and perfectly im
partial witness, that "in the future life, a remission
might be had for some sins that were not otherwise
to be forgiven " 2 ; and the " future life is used, as
1 See 4 E-sdr. xiii. where the fire burn till "nothing is left but the
dust of their ashes and ibe smoke of their burning."
2 Archbishop Wake, Discourse of Purgatory, p. 18.
vni.] OPINIONS OF TALMUDISTS. 201
every one knows, both for the Messianic kingdom
and for the condition after death.
III. I now turn to Dr. Pusey s second position, that
it was Rabbi Akiba who first taught the Jews that Ge
henna was terminable by deliverance or annihilation.
But before I examine that strange allegation, let me
recapitulate and strengthen still further the strong
and decisive evidence as to the Jewish opinion on the
subject, which I adduced in Eternal Hope. If all the
following passages do not prove that Gehenna might
be terminable, there is simply no such thing as proof
at all.
First come the two loci classici of the Talmud.
The first of these, from its importance, shall be given
at length.
a. Rosh Hoshanah, f. 1 6 and f. 17. " There will be
three divisions on the Day of Judgment [observe, not
at death, but as Rashi adds, when the dead will
revive], the perfectly righteous \i.e. those whose merits
predominate, Rashi] ; the perfectly wicked [whose
demerits predominate, Rashi] ; and the intermediate
class [whose merits and demerits are evenly balanced,
Rashi]. The first will be at once inscribed and sealed
to life eternal ; the second at once to Gehenna (Dan.
xii. 2) ; the intermediate will descend into Gehenna
and keep rising and sinking (Zech. xii. 9)."
This opinion was endorsed by both the great
schools of Jewish opinion, the Shammaites and the
Hillelites, except that the latter inclining always
to leniency said that in the case of the interme
diate class mercy would incline the balance towards
acquittal, so that they would no more sink into
Gehenna.
/3. The comments of Tosafoth (additions to the
Gemara by individual Rabbis) run as follows that the
souls of the intermediate class will between death and
judgment have satisfied their sentence in Gehenna, and
therefore may be acquitted. The Talmud continues,
202 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
" Israelites and idolaters who have sinned with their
bodies will (after the Day of. Judgment) descend into
Gehenna, where they will be punished for a period of
twelve months. At the end of that period their
bodies will be annihilated and their souls consumed
by fire, whose cinders a wind will scatter under the
soles of the feet of the righteous (Mai. iv. 37). But
the minim (heretics), informers, Epicureans, &c.,
descend into Gehenna and are punished generation
on g-eneration (Is. Ixvi. 24). Gehenna shall cease, but
they shall not cease (Ps. xlix. 14), as it is said, their
substance shall wear out hell.
This passage is analogous to many which Dr.
Pusey has quoted ; but the fact that Rabbi H. Adler
says, " it does not, I think, imply endless punish
ment," accords with that of the majority of Jewish
authorities, and therefore shows that they interpreted
these Scriptural and Talmudic expressions to imply
not infinite but indefinite duration. Such is the un
questionable meaning of " generation on generation "
(Le-dor va-dor] : and it is superfluous to add that if
the Talmud taught the doctrine of endless torments,
no Rabbi would venture as they all but unanimously
do to repudiate the doctrine. Maimonides embodies
the passage verbatim in his Yad Hachezakah Hil-
choth Teshubah : yet Maimonides held the doctrine of
annihilation, not of endless torments. And are not
the Jews the best judges as to the meaning of their
own language, and the tenets of their own theology ?
They would as soon think of denying a dictum of the
Mishna as a Roman Catholic Ultramontane would
dispute the decree of an Oecumenical Council.
7. Baba Metzia, f. 58, 2. " All who go down into
Gehenna rise up again, with the exception of those
who do not rise, the adulterer, &c." It was a common
opinion of the Jews that these were annihilated, as
Maimonides thought, who explains " excision
(Kareth) in this sense. Hence in both respects the
viii.] OPINIONS OF TALMUDISTS. 203
meaning conveyed to the ear of a Jew by the word
Gehenna was not only different from, but antithetic to
the popular meaning of the word by which our trans
lators have rendered it. For as regards Jews, Gehenna
meant terminable retribution for the majority, or in
the worst cases annihilation : whereas hell means tor
ments endless and irrevocable for every single soul
that incurs them.
I will now add some thirty other Talmudic and
Jewish authorities :
Chagigah, f. 27, i. R. Shimon ben Lakish said
the fire of Gehenna has no power over transgressors
of Israel.
Eruvin,f. 19, I. Those who have incurred a tem
porary Gehenna are rescued by Abraham.
Nedarim, f. 8, 2. There is no Gehenna in the world
to come according to Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish.
Nishmath Chajim, f. 82, 2. The righteous, who
have committed some sins, quickly pass through hell.
Avoda Zara, i. Gehenna is nothing but a day in
which the impious will be burned.
Gibborim, f. 70, I, Nishmath Chajim, p. 83, I,
Jalkuth Shimeoni, f. 83, 3, &c., all say that twelve
months is the period of punishment in Gehenna.
Emek Hammelech, f. 138, 4: "The wicked stay in
Gehenna till the Resurrection, and then the Messiah,
passing through it, redeems them." The same treatise
(f. 1 6, 2), says even of the worst sinners, like those of
Sodom ; and spies who betray Jews, that they are
punished " till the time decreed is expired," and then
allowed to transmigrate.
MidrasJi Rabba, I, 30. Avoda Zara> 3. "After
the last judgment Gehenna exists no longer."
Zijoni, f. 69, 3 : " There is only a thread s thickness
between Paradise and Gehenna."
Asarah Maamaroth, f. 85, i : " There will hereafter
be no Gehenna."
Jalkuth Shimeoni, f. 46, I : Gabriel and Michael
204 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
will open the 8,000 gates of Gehenna and let out
Israelites and righteous Gentiles.
Jalkuth Chadash.L 57, i : "The righteous bring out
of Gehenna imperfect souls."
Jalkuth Koheleth : " God created Paradise and
Gehenna, that those in the one should deliver those
in the other."
Jalkuth Tehillm : " The praises of God that ascend
from Gehenna are more than those that ascend from
Paradise, for each one that is a step higher praises
God."
Rabbi Bar Nachman : " The future world (the Olam
habba) will have its Gehenna, but the last times will
have it no more."
Joreh Deah ad fin.: " As is commonly said, The
punishment of wicked Israelites in Gehenna is twelve
months. "
Rabbi Akiba, " the second Moses, the second Ezra."
" The duration of the punishment of the wicked in
Gehenna is twelve months." EdyotJi, ii. 10.
In the Othjoth, which is attributed to him, the dead
say the Amen to the Kaddish (prayer for the dead) of
Zerubbabel ; and Gabriel and Michael set them free,
through the 40,000 gates of Gehenna,
Zohar : " Noah stayed twelve months in the Ark
because the judgment of sinners lasts so long."
So too Rabbi Jose, Rabbi Jehudah, Rabbi Eliezer,
Buxtorf, s.v. D^n^ R. Kimchi on Ps. I : "Their soul
shall perish with their body in the day of death."
Bartolocci (Bill. Rabbinica, ii. 128-162), after ela
borate examination, concludes that the Jews did
not believe in a material fire, and thought that such a
fire as they did believe in would one day be put out.
R. Jacob Chayif in En Jacob : " Some, after they
have been punished in Gehenna, will perhaps be
deemed worthy of the life to come."
1 Other passages may be found quoted in Windet s learned book,
De VitA functorum statu, pp. 154-157 (1663).
VIIL] OPINIONS OF TALMUDISTS. 205
R. Menahem on Sam. xxv. 29 : " The wicked are
in chains till the time when they go out hence."
Maimonides, " the eagle of the doctors," makes Ge
henna in its worst form equivalent to Kareth, " exci
sion," and explains it not of endless torments but of
annihilation. The "future age" (Olam Habba) is
absolute universal bliss and holiness (Preface to the
Thirteen Articles of Faith).
R. Moses Almosny, in Tephillah Mosheh, says even
of the extremely wicked " If any one have sinned
much he shall be punished much ; afterwards how
ever he shall gain his rest."
Rabbi Albo gives three grades to Gehenna : I. Ge
henna for a year, and then blessedness. 2. Gehenna
for a year, and then annihilation. 3. Aeonian (which
does not necessarily mean "endless") chastisement
for none but the worst renegades. Ikkarim, iv. 30,
40. [See p. 208, n. 2.)
Midrash on Koheleth : "What is the distance be
tween Paradise and Gehenna ? According to Johanan
a wall ; according to Achaa palm-breadth ; according
to other Rabbis on ly a finger-breadth."
Rabbi Abarbanel in Miphaloth Elohim, viii. 6 :
" The soul will only be punished in Gehenna for a
time proportionate to the extent of its faults; and
then annihilated."
Many Rabbinic legends point in the same direction.
Thus, when the wicked Rabbi Acheer surnamed Ben
Zoma died, and the smoke which issued from his
grave was taken as a proof that he was in Gehenna,
Rabbi Johanan vowed that at his death he would
take Acheer by the hand and lead him to Paradise, in
sign of which the smoke should cease to issue from
the grave. It did so, and one of the mourners ex
claimed, " Even the doorkeeper of Gehenna could
not stand before thee, our Rabbi ! >:
In Sotah, f. 10, I : " We are told that at the death
of Absalom, Gehenna burst upwards at the feet of
206 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
David, who eight times exclaimed, My Son/ and
rescued him from the seven regions of Gehenna and
raised him to the world to come." 1
Rabbi Marks : " The upshot is," that the Jewish
doctrine laboured rather to adorn the future of the
good than to describe the destiny of the wicked.
Stronger than their fear of justice is their belief in the
divine mercy, He will not contend for ever, neither
will He retain His anger to eternity (Ps. ciii. 9),
which is a powerful argument against the modern
Christian doctrine of everlasting woe."
Editor of the Jewish Chronicle : " Endless torment
has never been taught by the Rabbis as a doctrine of
the Jewish Church."
Hamburger, author of the Talmudisches Worterbuch:
"As to this point, the Talmudic teachers declare
themselves distinctly against the supposition of the
endlessness of the torments of hell." Talm. Worterb.
s. v. Holle."
I will close the series with a passage from a tract
especially devoted to Gehenna namely the Masse-
keth Gehinnom which has been several times pub
lished, and lately by Dr. Jellinek in his Beth Hamine-
drash. " After all this, the Holy One, blessed be He,
hath pity upon His creatures, even as it is written,
For I will not contend for ever, neither will I be
always wroth. And these words are applied to the
case of the heathen Gentiles."
Basnage, Hist, des Juifs, iv. 32, f. 7 : "This punish
ment is not generally acknowledged to be everlasting."
Philippson, Israel. Religionslehre, ii. 255: "The
Rabbis teach no eternity of hell torments ; even the
greatest sinners were punished for generations. This
they express allegorically by saying that between
hell and paradise there is only a breadth of two
1 Stories of deliverance from Gehenna may be found in Mr. Her-
shon s Talmudic Miscellany ) pp. 305-312.
mi.] JEWISH OPINIONS. 207
fingers, so that it will be very easy for the purified
sinner to reach from the last unto the first."
Dr. Deutsch : " Of this you may be quite sure,
that there is not a word in the Talmud that lends
any support to the damnable dogma of endless tor
ment." Letter to Rev. S. Cox.
"There is no everlasting damnation according to
the Talmud. The sinner has but to repent sincerely
and the gates of everlasting bliss will spring open."
Remains, p. 53-
Chief Rabbi B. Mosse, of Avignon, has written
against the doctrine of endless torments in his journal,
La Famille de Jacob.
Chief Rabbi Michel A. Weill, after explaining
Gehenna figuratively, says, " Would there not be a
flagrant contradiction between endless torments and
the goodness of God, so magnificently celebrated in
Biblical annals ? Nothing therefore seems more incom
patible with the true Biblical tradition than an eternity
of suffering and chastisement." Le Judaisme, iv. 590.
Rabbi H. Adler : "With respect to the Rabbis of
the present day, I think it would be safe to say that
they do not teach endless retributive suffering. They
hold that it is not conceivable that a God of Mercy
and Justice would ordain infinite punishment for
finite wrong-doing." Letter to Dr. Farrar.
Rabbi Loewe says : " Olam simply signifies for a
long time. The Hebrew Scriptures do not contain
any doctrine referring to everlasting punishment"
Now, to sum up these numerous testimonies as to
what the common Jewish opinion now is, and has
been, in all centuries since Christ, they prove,
i. That, according to the opinion of the Mishna
and the Gcmara, and all the most eminent Rabbis,
Gehenna meant for the majority of Jews, if not for
all Jews, brief temporary punishment, followed by
forgiveness. 1
1 See Weill, Le Judaisms, iv. 540 624.
203 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
2. For worse offenders, long but still terminable
punishment.
3. For the worst offenders of all especially Gentile
offenders punishment followed by annihilation.
Therefore the normal meaning of Gehenna was
diametrically opposed to what is now the normal
popular meaning of hell, which is defined "as endless
torments for all who incur it." It corresponds far
more to the notion of purgatory than to that of
hell. 1
Two conspicuous Rabbis, as I pointed out, seem to
teach endless punishment, Rabbi Albo and Rabbi
Saadjah I might have added Leo of Modena and
Rabbi Menasseh but this endless punishment, even
with them, is not for all who enter Gehenna, only for
the worst. I have already given Rabbi Albo s
opinions, and even if he meant endless torments for
some, it neither helps Dr. Pusey s position, nor injures
mine, for mine is not " that no Rabbis ever thought
that Gehenna would be endless," but that " all Rabbis
alike taught that for some, if not for the majority,
Gehenna would either be terminable, or would end in
annihilation 2 ; and that if our Lord had meant by
Gehenna endless torments to all who pass into future
retribution, it is impossible to suppose that He would
1 Basnage, Hist, des Juifs, iv. 32, 9. His remark on the wavering
and self-contradictory views of some of the Rabbis will apply also to
some of the Fathers. He says, "Though it is a common maxim of
the Rabbis that there is no repentance after death, yet they bring
forth the souls out of the dark dungeon of hell. Plow can these things
that seem so contradictory be reconciled ? They do it by saying that
the God of mercy is always most inclined to compassion. They main
tain that very few Jews remain in hell."
2 Several Rabbis held that Gehinnom was the same as Kare h
("excision"), and that of this there were three grades. I. A punish
ment for twelve months, and then deliverance. 2. The same punish
ment, ended by annihilation. 3. For the worst criminals and
greatest renegades "endless woes," with a prospect and possibility, how
ever, cf God s mitigatory mercy, for which Albo referred to Ps. Ixii.
12, xcix. 8 ("Thou wast a God who forgavest them, though Thou
tookest vengeance of their inventions"), Mic. vii. 18-20, &c
vin.] OPINIONS OF THE RABBIS. 209
have used a word which normally excluded such a
meaning."
For it must be observed that even such Rabbis as
Albo arid Saadjah held no such doctrine as that
which is popularly held about hell. On the contrary,
one if not both of them taught that even without re
pentance, all but capital offenders and therefore the
majority of mankind are admitted to grace. 1 They
held, as Dr. Pusey does, that any repentance, even
the slightest velleity of repentance even at the
moment of death is an impenetrable shield against
retribution, and that
" Who with repentance is not satisfied
Is not of heaven or earth."
They interpret Job xxxiii. 23 to mean that 999
hostile testimonies before God are outweighed by one
favourable testimony 2 ; and thus they reduce almost
to zero the number of those whose doom is to be
annihilation or perdurable torment who are only
those who have not done one meritorious act, or had
one desire to repent. " So that," says Chief Rabbi
Weill, " even taken literally, endless torment loses
its terror, since it does not involve conceptions which
militate against a merciful God, whose lovingkindness
is over all His works."
And to put the last touch of certainty to all these
cumulative proofs, I refer to the authorised creed of
the Jews the fundamentals of their faith as drawn
1 See Weill, Le Judaisme^ iv. 160. No Rabbi could quite throw
overboard the Talmudic aphorism (Avoda Zara, 3), that "there is no
Gehenna in the future age." Even if with Rabbi Bar Nachman they
thought Gehenna would continue, in the Olam Habba they held that it
would disappear in the " last times " (Leadith habo). Weill, iv. 616.
2 "A man s advocates [^D^pIS " paracletes "] are repentance and
good works. And if 999 plead against him, and only one for him, he
is spared, as it is said (Job xxxiii. 23), If there be an interceding
angel, one among a thousand, to declare for man his uprightness, then
He is gracious unto him, and saith, Deliver him from going down to
the pit. " Shabbath, f. 32, I. See Walch. Rel. Streit. v. 709.
P
210 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CKAP.
up by Maimondes and by them universally accepted.
It is as silent about endless torments as are the creeds
of Christendom. In the eleventh article of this Creed
it is said and it would have been well, perhaps, if
no confession of faith had dogmatized further
"I believe with a perfect faith that the Creator
will reward those who keep His commandments, and
punish those who transgress them."
Surely any one who pretends that this overwhelm
ing mass of evidence does not prove that " Gehenna
bore to Jewish ears a meaning totally unlike that
which u Hell means to most Christian ears, must
be stereotyped in hopeless prejudice, and must be
incapable of any discrimination between truth and
falsehood. And seeing that we naturally turn to
Jews and to Jewish writings of acknowledged authority
to explain their own technical terms ; and seeing that
no writings are more authoritative with the Jews than
the Mishna and Gemara, and no Rabbis are so highly
esteemed as Rabbis Akiba, and Maimonides, and
Abarbanel ; and seeing that all the ancient authorities
are at one with the highest living authorities among
the Rabbis in saying that, in the view of their Church,
Gehenna does not now mean, and has never meant, a
doom to necessarily endless torment l ; and seeing that
our Blessed Lord always used technical Jewish words
in their technical Jewish sense unless He avowedly
gave them a different meaning I should have thought
that my point was amply proved.
What vitiates the whole of Dr. Pusey s argument,
even if it were tenable in its details, is that it is in
tended to prove a point which, so far from denying, I
expressly admitted, namely, that some Rabbis under
stood Gehenna to mean endless torments for some;
but, so far from shaking, he is obliged incidentally to
confirm, the point which I did assert, viz. that
Jewish opinion, as represented especially by the
1 See quotations and references in Eternal Hope, p. 211.
vin.] RABBI AKIBA. 211
Talmud and the voice of the Rabbis for many
centuries, admitted the terminability of Gehenna
for many, and its terminability by annihilation for
yet more.
My language, so far from being " impetuous," was
perfectly measured and scrupulously accurate on this
point. It was this
" It is demonstrable that Jews did not hold, and as
a Church they have never held, the two doctrines
which I am here declaring to be unproven, viz.
" I. The finality of the doom passed at death (by
which I mean the finality of the condition into which
the soul may pass at death).
" 2. The doctrine of torment, endless if once in
curred." *
I have proved these points from the most recognised
and least disputable sources of Jewish opinion, by
showing that as a Church they repudiate the doctrine ;
and that they teach again and again that many who
enter Gehenna pass out of it. When Dr. Pusey says
that this remark did not apply to mankind in general,
but only to the Jews, he is not strictly accurate, for
certainly many of the Rabbis (much more distinctly
than many of the Fathers) taught the deliverance
from Gehenna of all the pious of the Gentiles, and the
annihilation of the rest. Even if it were not so it would
not affect my point. Our Lord was speaking to Jews ;
and if " Gehenna " meant a punishment terminable for
nearly all Jews and many Gentiles, it had a meaning
wholly unlike that which is popularly given to " Hell."
But Dr. Pusey ingeniously argues that this opinion
was the invention of Rabbi Akiba !
To the attempted proof of this view he assigns
no less than twenty-seven pages (pp. 75-102) ; but in
all those pages I can find no approach to even the
most distant kind of proof of so strange a notion.
He may be correct in saying that Rabbi Akiba was
1 Et.rnal Hope, p. 8 1.
P 2
212 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
*
the first to define the punishment of Gehenna as only
lasting a twelvemonth, but, so far as I "can see, he
does not offer the smallest proof that Rabbi Akiba
was the first to hold that Gehenna was a punishment
not necessarily endless.
He gives us indeed some interesting particulars,
mainly quoted from Gratz, about Rabbi Akiba and
his innovations. That those particulars were not new
to me that I had long ago quoted them and many
other peculiarities of Akiba s system any one may
see who will read my articles in the Expositor on
Rabbinic Exegesis and Rabbinic Eschatology. 1 But
the innovations of Rabbi Akiba were only innovations
as to the minutiae of the Halacha. There is no
evidence to show that he altered one fundamental
doctrine of Jewish theology. No Jewish writer has
so much as dropped a hint that he modified
the main conceptions of Jewish Eschatology. By
his time authority and precedent reigned abso
lutely supreme in Jewish schools. The Rabbis
ascribe this notion of the twelve months Gehenna,
not to Akiba, but to the school of Hillel, 2 and there
fore to a period long before Akiba. The school of
Shammai also inferred from Zech. xiii. 9 ("And I
will bring the third part through the fire ") and I
Sam. ii. 6 (" The Lord bringeth down to Sheol, and
bringeth up "), that all the intermediate class of men
who are neither saintly nor depraved would keep
rising and sinking in Gehenna. To have run counter
to an established authority on matters of dogma
would have cost the teacher death or excommunica
tion. Knowing that Jewish belief on the subject of
Gehenna was fluctuating and undefined knowing
that in the Jewish as in the Christian Church much
respecting this subject was left to opinion knowing
that it was not normally understood of an endless
1 See the Expositor, yol. v. pp. 362-378 ; vii. 295-317.
2 Windet, p. 154.
VHL] RABBI AKIBA. 213
retribution for all who incurred it there would indeed
have been nothing to prevent Rabbi Akiba from fixing
twelve months as the Kmit, and assigning for that
limitation a fantastic piece of Rabbinic exegesis.
But if Dr. Pusey says that Akiba was the first to
speak of Gehenna as a terminable punishment for
any, he broaches a theory in favour of which he
has adduced absolutely nothing beyond his own
opinion, which is rejected by every learned Jew
whom I have consulted on the subject.
Since writing the above I have received a letter
from Rabbi H. Adler, in which he says " It may, I
think, be safely assumed that Rabbi Akiba would
teach no novel doctrine respecting future punishment,
but that he would only elaborate and but slightly
modify the teachings of his predecessors." Dr. Schiller
Szinessy, so well known for his Rabbinic learning,
writes even more decisively and emphatically, and
says " Rabbi Aquiba could not formulate an article
of faith any more than I could."
I have consulted many Jewish books about Jewish
opinions, written both by Jews and by Christians.
In not one of those books of any age can I find so
much as a hint of this opinion. It is not in the
Mishna, or the Gemara, or in Maimonides, or in
Zunz, or in Bartolocci, or in Basnage, or in Buxtorf,
or in Stehelin, or in Gratz, or in Jost, or in Chiarini,
or in Hamburger, or in Deutsch, or in Munk, or in
Derenbourg, or in Allen, or in Weill, or in Hershon ;
nor is there a trace of it in the works of Light-
foot, Meuschen, Schottgen, Eisenmenger, Wagenseil ;
nor again can I find it in recent Talmudic trans
lations, like those of Wiinsche and Schwab. The
reader who is content to suppose that the now
prevalent belief of the Jews as to the terminability
of Gehenna is due to Rabbi Akiba, must do so on
the isolated ipse dixit of Dr. Pusey. So far as I
am concerned, all the pages about; Rabbi Akiba
214 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
4fe
are an ignoratio elenchi they have no bearing on
the controversy. Rabbis might do as they liked about
Akiba s Gehenna of twelve months, 1 but it is a viola
tion of all probability it is a contradiction of all
that we know respecting the development of Jewish
theology to assert that it is from him that they
borrowed such a notion as that of Rabbi Chanina in
the Rosh Hosanah, who said, "All who go down to
Gehenna arise, save three (classes of persons) who
go down and do not arise."
Jewish opinion on the subject has always varied.
That it has done so was part of my " palmary
argument." It varied because Scripture had laid
down nothing definite respecting it, and because the
Jews were not so utterly ignorant of their own language
and literature as to attribute to the metaphorical
contemporary allusion " eternal burnings," in Is. xxxiii.
14, the dogmatic meaning of " endless tortures in hell
fire." Jewish opinion then was at liberty, if it chose,
to hold the doctrine of annihilation, or even of endless
torments ; but Jewish opinion never varied at all on
the only point respecting which I maintained it to be
invariable ; it never held that an entrance into
Gehenna was necessarily identical with an endless
doom.
That was my sole argument ; and I am much mis
taken if, in spite of all these pages, written in supposed
refutation of my view, Dr. Pusey will not now admit
that it is unanswerably true.
And what can it avail to go to the Koran ? No
one surely would accept that strange amalgam of
visions, theories, and traditions, Jewish, Christian, and
original, as being of the smallest authority on Jewish
opinions. Yet, so far as it is so, Dr. Pusey concedes
all I want when he says " But Mohammed has also
the Jewish belief that all go to Gehenna for a time,
1 They said " twelve months," and not "a year," because some years
have an intercalary month Ve-adar.
viii.] GEHENNA RESEMBLES PURGATORY. 215
and will be led round it, but that wrong-doers will be
left in it." In those words, "go to Gehenna for a
time " (not to dwell on the point that the majority of
those left in it are described by most Jews as an
nihilated), lies my proof that " hell " is not now, and
never was, in its popular expectation, an equivalent
for " Gehenna." Moreover, the Koran too has an
intermediate place between Paradise and Gehenna. 1
If Gehenna was used to mean for some souls a
short purgatory ; for some a long purgatory ; for some
annihilation ; and for the fewest of all (which if its
meaning at all was its rarest and most disputable
meaning) endless torments ; how can it be exclusively
interpreted in that meaning which most Jews expressly
repudiate ? how can it be rightly interpreted to mean
" endless torments " and nothing else ? How can it
be just, or reverent, or otherwise but conducive to
dangerous error, to render a word thus proved to
imply, in its most normal sense, a terminable punish
ment, by a word which, in popular usage, exclusively
means a final, endless, and irrevocable punishment ?
To do so and to continue the word in our English
version after these facts have been pointed out is to
introduce into Jewish notions the same utter confusion
as would be introduced into all Roman Catholic
theology, if, wherever the word purgatory is used, we
were to strike out purgatory and replace the word by
"hell." I fear that it will be said hereafter that to do
so with our present knowledge is a course which we
should hardly have expected from scholars so eminent
as those who compose the Revision Committee. 2
Koran, Sur. vii. See Windet, De Vita functorum sfalu, p. 164.
2 Dr. Pusey says that " Chief Rabbi Weill himself expressly acknow
ledges the traditional belief" (p. 91). Yet in the very passage which
Dr. Pusey quotes, Dr. Weill says that it is only "certain categories of
sinners " who are marked out for endless punishments, and that others are
"devoted to annihilation"; and how does he continue the passage
after the point at which Dr. Pusey stops short? He proceeds to ask
whether the "endless suffering" does not mean the annihilation of
which the Talmud sometimes speaks, or, at any rate, v. hether it does
216 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
*+-
There is one further argument which Dr. Pusey
brings into prominence in his second edition, 1 on
which, with deep reverence, I desire to add a few
words. It is briefly this that the majority of
Christians have believed that our Lord intended to
teach the future punishment of sinners to be ever
lasting, and that therefore to doubt its endlessness is
to suppose that He used words which He knew would
be misunderstood.
For myself it would be sufficient to reply that I
have never dared to teach that all will be saved ; or
that no punishment will be endless. I should apply
the term "the lost" to those only if such there can
be whose will hardens itself into utter and final re
sistance against the grace of God ; although I believe
that even for these " the pain of loss," not the "pain
of sense," may constitute the Gehenna of their "aeo-
nian fire," and that for these too there may be
that merciful mitigation, those blessed " refrigeria,"
which even St, Augustine and St. Jerome did
not deny.
But though the objection does not touch my own
opinions, I do not think the argument tenable. For
I. There have been very large exceptions to "the
not mean "infinite woes crowned by annihilation " ; and whether it is
necessary to take literally this " unpitying draconian code of the future
world. 3 Leaving these questions, he proceeds to quote Akiba s words,
" The duration of the punishment of sinners in Gehenna is for twelve
months " (Edyoth x. 2), as being of high authority, and says that even
for great criminals there are limitations of the doctrine of future retri
bution. The least velleity of repentance at the last moment is enough
to obviate the peril ; a single prescription of the law faithfully obeyed
once in the life is sufficient to avert it (Sanhedr. iii. ; Ikkarim iii. 20).
Thus the number of sinners who are thus to be doomed, " se reduit a peu
pres a zero." " Hence," he says, " that even if we interpret endless
torments literally, there is little in the doctrine either to terrify or to
weaken our sense of the universal love of God." Speaking of Gehenna
he says, " Qui ne reconnait dans ces termes 1 hyperbole prophetique ec
poetique, qui est comme le genie de la litterature sacree ? " (p. 590) ;
and Rien ne semble plus incompatible avec la vraie tradition biblique
qu une eternite de souffrance et de chatiment " (p. 590).
1 What is of Fa ; th, second edition, pp. 46-48.
viii.] OUR LORD S MEANING. 217
mass of Christians " who have thus understood the
words of our Lord. In the days of St. Augustine
there were not only " some " as he tells us but
even a very large number (quam plurimi] who " with
human feelings compassionated the eternal punish
ment of the damned, and so believed that it would
not take place." 1 St. Jerome tells us also that he
knew of " very many " (plerique] who held that even
the devil would be ultimately forgiven. 2 Those who, in
this respect, embraced the milder views of Origen,
were perhaps a majority of the then living Christians,
These Fathers argue against the full extent of such
compassionate inferences, but they no more cate
gorically condemn them than Athanasius condemned
Origen; and against the orthodoxy of the " party
of pity " in other respects they do not even breathe
a suspicion. And I suppose that there are millions
of living Universalists and believers in conditional
immortality in England and America Universalists
like Bishop Ewing of Argyll and Thomas Erskine
of Linlathen, believers in conditional immortality
like the Rev. S. Minton and the Rev. E. White
to whom it would be a most insolent slander to deny
the name of Christians, though they do not under
stand the words of our Saviour to necessitate a belief
in endless torments. Nay more, there are multitudes
and this is my own view -who, though they are
not Universalists, yet do not pretend to believe that
our Lord s words absolutely and demonstrably ex
clude an interpretation which has been adopted by
hundreds of competent, learned, and saintly thinkers
from the days of Origen to our own. It is one thing
to fear that the evidence preponderates on the whole
against the theory of Universalists, and quite another
thing to refuse to admit what is just or possible in
much of their exegesis.
1 Enchirid. 112. " Nonnulli, irnmo quam plurhii. *
2 Jer. iu Jon. iii. 6. 7.
218 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
<*
2. And Universalists, or those who believe in con
ditional immortality, interpreting our Lord s words
in the sense which they consider to be the only
admissible one, might, if this argument were of any
value, retort it with great force. They might say,
: We believe, and give you our reasons for believing,
that our Lord s words do not bear the sense which
you attach to them. If therefore He had deemed it
essential that this sense should be deduced from
them, He would have spoken (as He might have
done in scores of different phrases) in such a man
ner as could not have been misunderstood. The
fact that millions of true Christians have, honestly
and after the utmost prayer and thought and labour,
been totally unable to accept your interpretation of
them, proves, on your own premisses, that it was no
part of His will to teach your doctrine as a matter of
faith."
3. Practically the argument amounts to this: "The
interpretation of Christ s words which most Christians
have accepted must be true." Is not such an hypo
thesis refuted by the whole history of the Christian
Church ? Has the acceptance of any particular inter
pretation by the majority of any age ever been a test
of its truth ?
4. And as a matter of fact does not this whole
argument, which is summarised by Dr. Pusey in the
words, "Jesus, being God, knew how His words
would be understood," and therefore He must have
meant His words to be understood as by the
majority they have been understood is it not a
purely a priori hypothesis which crumbles to pieces
at the touch of facts ? Was not our Lord constantly,
seriously, finally misunderstood, alike by His enemies
and by His disciples, even in His own lifetime ?
Were not His literal statements evaded as being
metaphors ? Were not His metaphors misinterpreted
to be rigid facts ?
vin I OUR LORD MISUNDERSTOOD. 219
After His very first recorded words we are told that
even His mother and Joseph " understood not the
saying which He spake unto them " (Luke ii. 50).
After one of His very simplest metaphors He had
to ask almost with indignation, <f How is it that ye
do not understand ? J!
After one of His plainest prophecies we are told,
"But they understood not that saying" (Mark ix.
32) ; " and it was hid from them that they perceived
it not " (Luke ix. 45).
After another prophecy, if possible still plainer,
" They understood none of these things " (Luke xviii.
34).
After the teaching about what doth and doth not
defile a man, He complained to His apostles, " Do
not ye yet understand ?" (Matt. xv. 17.)
After the parable of the sheepfold and the shep
herd, " They understood not what things they were
which He spake unto them " (John x. 6).
After His obvious fulfilment of a plain ancient
prophecy, " These things understood not His dis
ciples at the first " (John xii. 16).
To the Jews He said, " Why do ye not understand
my speech ?" (John viii. 43.)
His whole life, His whole words, were long mis
understood even by those who loved Him best.
But if it be said that this misunderstanding
ceased with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, I
answer that undoubtedly, since then, His Church has
fully known Who He was, and why He was incarnate,
and that He died for us, and all of His work which
is necessary for the salvation of our own souls and of
the world ; but to assert that the popular sense in
which special sayings of His or of His apostles have
been understood must be their sole true sense, is to
ignore all the lessons of Christian history.
Has not the sense of hundreds of passages of
Scripture been sought by earnest investigation, as
220 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
4fe-
to the results of which there has been a difference
among Christians in all ages ? And when" there has
been this difference among able and honest inquirers,
within the limits of the Christian faith, and in questions
which have always been left open by Creeds and
Churches, is it not mere idle and irritating dogmatism
to claim unconditional and infallible finality for our
own particular conclusion ?
Are we to accept the whole doctrine of transub-
stantiation because of the words, " This is My
body"?
Are we to accept the supremacy of the Pope
because of the words, " Thou art Peter, and on this
rock will I build My Church "?
Are we to revive the ruthless trials for witchcraft,
which were the shame and terror of the Middle Ages,
because Moses said, " Thou shalt not suffer a witch
to live " ?
Are we to repeat the horrible crimes of religious
persecutions because of the words, " Compel them to
come in " ?
Are we to burn men alive for differences of opinion
because the Inquisition attached this sense to the
words " is cast forth as a branch and is burned " ?
Are we, because Christ said that He came " to give
His life a ransom for many," to believe, as the majority
of Christians seem to have believed for nearly a
thousand years, that this ransom was paid to the
devil ?
Are we to argue that slavery is an institution of
divine authority because its existence is recognised
by the apostles, and because St. Paul sent back
Onesimus to Philemon ?
Are we to accept in all its horror the entire Calvin-
istic system of reprobation because St. Paul quoted
the verse, " Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I
hated"? 1 . -. . ,- ta; >"
Rom. be. 13 ; Mai. i. 2, 3.
viii.] SCRIPTURE MISUNDERSTOOD. 221
Yet all these words have thus by " millions upon
millions been misinterpreted and misunderstood ;
and I suppose that many of these millions in thus
misunderstanding them supposed themselves to be
acting " dutifully," and taking them " in their obvious
meaning."
But here let me say that those who have been led,
as they humbly believe, by the Holy Spirit of God,
to embrace for mankind a wider hope than can be
embraced by their fellows, and who thus interpret the
words of Scripture, have a right to resent the insinuation
that they must necessarily be " unorthodox " on other
points. They have a right to despise as a slander
the hint that they deny the Incarnation, or that our
Lord was Very God. Most of all have they a right
to despise such calumnies when the work which they
have done, or humbly tried to do, for the cause of
God and of His Christ, and of their brother Christians,
and of the truth of Christianity as it is in Jesus,
ought to have rendered it impossible for any true
Christian to use so base a weapon against them.
CHAPTER IX.
THE OPINIONS OF THE FATHERS.
"Redeo ad patrum commentationes de quibus hoc summatiuo
accipe : quicquid illi dixerant, neque ex libris sacris aut ratione aJiqua
satis idonea confirmaverunt, perinde mihi erit ac si quis alius e vul^o
dixisset." MiLTON, Pro Pop. Anglic. Defens. c. iv.
" Qttanto quis altius in eruditione in antiquitate Christiana eminuit,
tanto magis spem finiendorum olim cruciatnm aluit atque defendit."
DODERLEIN, Inst. Theol. Christ, ii. 199.
[" In Christian antiquity, the more eminent and learned a man was, in
that proportion did he cherish and defend the hope that torments would
at some time end."]
DR. PUSEY, in the last hundred and fifty pages of
his book, has collected a valuable catena of opinions
from the testimonies of the martyrs and the writings
of the Fathers.
I propose to examine that catena, to show its real
significance, and to add other passages which give, as
it seems to. me, a very different aspect to the conclu
sions which some would deduce from it. And such
an examination is very important. It would not
indeed be decisive proof of any doctrine if all the
Fathers were unanimous in asserting it, unless it
could be demonstrated from Scripture. Their infer
ences from Scripture are often much more precarious
than our own, because founded on a narrower experi
ence and a less extended knowledge. I say with
Daille, " If he adduced even six hundred passages
from the Fathers, he will not thereby prove that that
is the sense of Scripture which is in reality not its
CH. ix.] FALLIBILITY OF THE FATHERS. 223
sense." 1 And if I could not endorse the somewhat
arrogant language of Milton about " the obscure and
entangled wood of Antiquity, Fathers and Councils
fighting one against another," 2 I yet think that the
authority of the Fathers in matters of exegesis, con
sidering how strange and how numerous are their
errors and their fancies, has been greatly exagge
rated. But in the following pages their testimony
is examined, not because of its intrinsic authority
though I would not speak of that with any disrespect
but merely from the evidence which it furnishes
as to the opinions of the early Christian Church.
I need enter into no controversy about the views of
the Fathers, because I have no doubt that most of
them believed as I myself am compelled to believe
that in some sense some souls will be lost ; will
suffer for ever the pain of loss ; will not attain to
everlasting felicity. If that be all which these quota
tions be intended to prove, they only establish
what I do not dispute. Further than this, there can
be no doubt that after the date of the Clementine
Recognitions, and increasingly during the close of the
third, and during the fourth and following centuries,
the abstract idea of endlessness was deliberately
faced, and from imperfect acquaintance with the
meaning and history of the word aionios, it was used
by many writers as though it was identical in
meaning with aidios, or " endless."
1 Dallaeus, De Poenis et Satis f. p. 31.
1 Milton, "Considerations Concerning Hirelings," Works, v. 384
(ed. Pickering). While I am on this subject I may refer to other
passages of Milton of the same tenor. "The Labyrinth of Councils
and Fathers, an entangl d wood which the Papist loves to fight in."
" Of True Religion," v. 406. " The knotty Africanisms, the pamper d
metafors, the intricate and involv d sentences of the Fathers, besides
the fantastick and declamatory flashes, the crosse jungling periods
which cannot but disturb and come thwart a settl d devotion worse
than the din of hells and rattles."" Of Reformation," i. 31. " The
foul^ errors, the ridiculous wresting of Scripture, the Heresies, the
vanities thick sown through the volumes of Justin Martyr," c. Id.
p. 19,
224 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
4JF-
But I am very far from sure that the absolute end
lessness of punishment was in the first three centuries
the fixed belief of all those writers whom Dr. Pusey
has quoted ; and as a matter of mere literary and
historical criticism, I think that some objections
might be urged against the validity of the evidence
which he has adduced.
If every one of these quotations necessarily bore
that meaning, they would not therefore touch any
thing which I have said. Neither Dr. Pusey nor
Mr. Oxenham, nor any other writer who has written
on this subject against Origenistic opinions, supposes
that these passages exclude the notion of deliverance
from some future retribution whether you call it
Purgatory or a probatory fire at the Day of Judg
ment. Not one, therefore, of these passages in any
way refutes that merciful alleviation of the popular
view which I aimed at bringing into prominence.
The more I study the patristic aspect of the question,
the more fully am I convinced that many of the
earliest, the best, and the greatest of the Fathers held
views very nearly identical with my own, and that
my own views are nearer to those of even the greatest
of the schoolmen not only John Scotus Erigena, but
even St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Peter Lombard
than those of the popular ignorance which too often
proclaims itself to be the only orthodoxy. From
very early days in the history of the Church, opinions,
which have been branded by many as dangerous and
false, have been proved to be the only true opinions
by that Light which reveals all things in the slow
history of their ripening.
I. It is not proven that the use of the words
"eternal destruction," "eternal fire," "eternal Ge
henna," "eternal death," "unquenchable fire, and
other similar expressions founded on Scripture, were
intended to be understood in the full sense now
attached to the word " Hell." The early Fathers
IX.] OPINIONS OF THE FATHERS. 225
used them in the same sense that Scripture does, and
there is nothing to show either that they had faced
the meaning of the word " endless or that, if the
controversy had really been brought before them
they would not gladly have accepted the merciful
interpretations which separate the doctrine of final
retribution from those accretions which have made it
so abhorrent to some of the noblest of mankind. It
is not therefore too much to say that nineteen-
twentieths of the passages adduced by Dr. Pusey
from writers of the first three, and even of the fourth,
centuries have but little weight even as against
Universalists, much less as against anything which I
have urged. They abound in Scriptural terms which
they do not define, and which may have been under
stood in what many maintain to be their true and
not their perverted and popular sense.
2. It must be borne in mind that some of the later
Fathers testify to the existence of an opinion different
from their own among multitudes of Christians who
were yet in full communion with the Church. 1
3. Those who really enter into the subject, as St.
Augustine and St. Jerome do, hold opinions far more
merciful than the present popular teaching. St.
Augustine, amid many inconsistencies, believed in
something resembling Purgatory. 2 St. Jerome at
least inclined to believe in the salvation of all
Christians. 3
1 See supra, pp. 59, 217.
"Poenae quaedarn purg atoriae in illo judicio." Civ. Dei. xx. 25.
He says it is certainly possible, " Suffragari eis pro quibus orationes
non inaniter allegantur," Serin. 172, and explains the object of such
prayers to be "ut sit plena remissio aut certe tolerabilior fiat ipsa dam-
natio." Enrhir. no. For proof of this see infra, pp. 281-295.
3 This -diversity of opinion is very remarkable. "Some of the
ancients who put their hands to this work extended the benefit of this
fiery purge unto all men in general ; others thought fit to restrain it
unto such as some way or other bore the name of Christians ; others to
such Christians only as had one time or other made profession of the
Catholic faith ; and others to such alone as did continue in that profes
sion unto their dying day."- -UsHER, Answ:r to a Jeniit, vi. p. 125.
Q
226 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
.
4. Those who. on this subject diverged the most
widely from the view now prevalent were intel
lectually and in all other respects among the best
and greatest and most authoritative of the Fathers.
Such (among others) were St. Clemens of Alexandria,
Origen, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Gregory of Nazian-
zus, and, in spite of their other errors, Theodore of
Mopsuestia and Diodorus of Tarsus. Thus three at
least of the greatest of the ancient schools of Christian
theology the schools of Alexandria, Antioch, and
Caesarea leaned on this subject to the views of Origen,
not in their details, but in their general hopefulness.
5. The more merciful opinions on some of these
subjects, though notorious, and though even by that
time they had been continually discussed, were not
condemned by the first four General Councils ; were
in the case of the two Gregories never condemned at
all ; were not (as I shall endeavour to show) distinctly
condemned (as his other errors were) even in the case
of Origen ; did not so much as come into discussion
(as is sometimes falsely asserted) at the Fifth Oecu
menical Council ; and were spoken of at first, even by
those who did not share in them, with perfect
calmness and toleration.
6. The fact that even these Origenistic Fathers
were able, with perfect honesty, to use the current
phraseology shows that such phraseology was at
least capable of a different interpretation from that
commonly put upon it.
7. Others of the Fathers as Hermas, St. Justin
Martyr, St. Irenaeus, St. Ambrose, and Arnobius-
use language of which the apparent and primd facie
meaning is not in accordance with the common views
respecting endless torments.
8. And, lastly, there is no subject on which the
Fathers speak with so little authority as this ; for
their views are to the last degree wavering, indefinite,
and inconsistent. The Romish Church claims their
ix.] UNCERTAINTY OF THE FATHERS. 227
assent to the doctrine of purgatory ; but, besides
what I have already remarked as to their meaning,
Dr. Newman says : " They do not agree with each
other, which proves they knew little more about the
matter than ourselves, whatever they might con
jecture, that they possessed no Apostolic tradition,
only at the most entertained floating notions on the
subject." The remark is only applied to purgatory, 1
but no honest reader who studies the following
pages with unbiassed mind will hesitate to extend it
further. The Benedictine editor, speaking of the
curious opinions of St. Ambrose on the state of the
dead in his De Bono Mortis, says : " What might
seem almost incredible is the uncertainty and incon
sistency of the Holy Fathers on the subject from the
very times of the Apostles down to the pontificate of
Gregory XI. and the Council of Florence, that is for
nearly the whole of fourteen centuries. For not only
do they differ one from the other, as commonly
happens in such questions not yet defined by the
Church, but they are not even consistent with them
selves." This observation also admits of wider
application than that of which its authors were at the
moment thinking. Lastly, Bishop Forbes makes the
remark that " When we turn to individual writers in
the early Church we find various statements with
regard to the condition of the souls of the departed ;
and those not only in different writers but in the very
same ; and yet some of these writers are ordinarily
so consistent that their sayings have to be recon
ciled." 2
I will raise no question as to the genuineness of
the Acts of all the Martyrs whose words Dr. Pusey
has adduced. Their expressions, in all but a few
instances, are the current ones, and there is nothing
to prove in what sense they interpreted them. What
ever may be their value, they have no bearing on
1 Tracts for the Times, Ixxix. p. 24. 2 On the Articles, ii. 320 seq.
Q 2
228 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
*.
the critical question as to the meaning of the word
" eternal " ; nor are they otherwise authoritative than
as evidence of a popular belief. On undecided
questions which do not touch matters of faith even
the most genuine and unambiguous utterances of
martyrs have no intrinsic authority. There are ques
tions on which ancient testimony is of little value.
"Ships," it has been said, "are daily chartered to
those antipodes which Augustine declared to be
unscriptural, and Lactantius impossible, and Boniface
of Metz beyond the latitude of salvation/
Now if the reader will study Dr. Pusey s catena,
omitting the names of the Fathers of whom I spoke
in clause 7, he will, I think, find that its whole
evidential force is summed up in the following
phrases :
Second Century. l
ST. IGNATIUS (f A.D. 116 [?])" Unquenchable
fire."
ST. POLYCARP (f circ. A.D. 1 66) " The perpetual
torment of eternal fire."
EP. PSEUDO-BARNABAS (circ. A.D. 120) "The
way of eternal death with punishment."
PSEUDO-CLEMENT (Ancient Homily) " Eternal
punishment"; " unquenchable fire."
THEOPHILUS OF ANTIOCH (fl. A.D. 168) "Eter
nal punishments" ; "everlasting fire."
Third Century.
TERTULLIAN- - (circ. A.D. 216) "Punishment
which continueth not for a long time but for ever."
1 I quote nothing from Tatian (circ. A.D. 150), because his language
seems to me to be very confused. Dr. Puseysays it means "a deathless
death, an immortality of ill." To ie it seems contradictory. After
denying the inherent immortality of the soul, he says, "If it knows
not the truth it dies, and is dissolved with the body, receiving death by
punishment in immortality." This looks like the doctrine of annihi
lation ; but farther on he speaks of our "receiving the painful with
immortality."
ix.] EXPRESSIONS OF THE FA THERS. 229
THEODORE OF HERACLEA (A.D. 230) (a Semi-
Arian) " Abide for ever . . . . in punishment."
APOSTOLIC CONSTITUTIONS" Eternal fire and
endless worms."
MlNUC. FELIX (fl. circ. A.D. 230) "Eternal
punishment " ; " eternal torments without either
limit or end."
ST. HlPPOLYTUS - (f A.D. 238) " Fire unquench
able and without end " ; " everlasting punishment in
unquenchable fire."
ST. CYPRIAN (f A.D. 258) "An eternal flame-
pains that never cease " (perennibus poenis).
PSEUDO-CLEMENTINE RECOGNITIONS AND HOMI
LIES (circ. A.D. 218) "Tormented for ever"; "they
endure without end the torment of eternal fire, and to
their destruction they have not the quality of mor
tality " ; " never dying, the soul can receive no end of
its misery."
LACTANTIUS (A.D. 320) "They will again be
clothed with flesh .... indestructible and abiding
for ever, that it may be able to hold out against
everlasting fire."
JULIUS FlRMICUS - - (circ. A.D. 340) " Perpetual
punishment of torments."
ST. METHODIUS (f A.D. 303)" Eternal punish
ment, from the fiery wrath of God."
EUSEBIUS (f A.D. 338) " Eternal fire."
ATHANASIUS (f A.D. 373) The sin against the
Holy Ghost unpardonable ; " none to deliver those
who in Hades are taken in their sin."
ACACIUS (A.D. 340)" Perpetual punishment."
ST. CYRIL OF JERUSALEM (f A.D. 386) "An
eternal body fitted to endure the pains of sins, that
it may burn eternally in fire."
LUCIFER OF CAGLIARI (f circ. A.D. 370)
" Quenchless fire."
ST. HILARY (f A.D. 367)--" Corporeal eternity-
destined to the fire of judgment."
230 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
ST. ZEND " Everlasting punishment."
PSEUDO-CAESARIUS 1 and ST. BASIL (f A.D. 379)
if we do not discount popular and rhetorical
phrases are decisive for endlessness. TlTUS of
Bosra (A.D. 352), ST. EPHRAEM (A.D. 370), speak
of punishment without ending; and after this epoch,
and still more after the days of St. Augustine, no
one doubts that the belief in the endlessness of some
retribution became both more definite and very
widely prevalent,
I. But, looking at these passages, an Origenist
would entirely refuse to admit that the expressions
quoted from Ignatius, Polycarp, Pseudo-Barnabas,
Theophilus of Antioch, St. Cyprian, Eusebius, Theo
dore of Heraclea, Acacius, Lucifer of Cagliari, and
Zeno, are in the least degree decisive on the question.
He would say that they merely quote the ordinary
Scripture phrases, as Origen himself did, and as all
the Origenists did, though they denied that these
phrases meant and some of them offered arguments
to show that they could not mean what they have
most commonly been explained to mean. 2 To quote
the mere phrase " eternal," in proof that an ancient
writer meant endless, is to waste time. If the use of
1 St. Caesarius (f A.D. 368) was a physician, the youngest brother of
St. Gregory of Nazianzus. He was not even bapti-ed till shortly before
his death. Dr. Pusey quotes his /)z0/t?W? as though they were indisput
ably genuine. Even if they were, the theological authority of a lay cate
chumen would not be very high. But are they ? Certainly not. Almost
every critic has given them up. St. Gregory of Nazianzus, who tells us
so much about his brother, never says that he wrote a single line ; and
it is certain that he did not (as these Dialogues say) live twenty years at
Constantinople (See Cave, Primitive Fathers, i. 284 ; Tillemont, Orig.
Art. 39). I had already quoted the passage for its important admission
that the Origenists argued for the terminability of punishment because
of the very word aionios being used. This is a point which is in no
way affected by the question of genuineness. See infra, p. 381.
1 Bishop Huet, in his Origeniana, pointed out the futility of this argu
ment (that a writer believed in "endless" because he spoke rf
" aeonian" punishment) 200 years ago. Origen, he says, used the
same language, " hae enim voce longius sed finiendum tern pus intellexit."
Ori^eniana, p. 233.
ix.] MUCH OF THE EVIDENCE INDECISIVE. 231
these expressions, especially in perfectly general and
often purely rhetorical passages, is to be held decisive,
then no one has ever been an Origenist, not even Origen
himself. Many of the passages quoted, e.g. that from
St. Athanasius, have no real bearing on the question
at issue. There is strong sense in the remark of
Petavius as regards the attempt to show that Origen
was not an Origenist because he used such expres
sions as " eternal," &c. " Nihil," he says, " hoc
genere defensionis levius est " ; and he shows that
Origen did use this language, but attached to it
an entirely different sense, believing that even after
the "eternal judgment," and after the future age,
there would be a final restoration. A sin may be
unpardonable, and may involve endless loss, with
out at all involving the agonies of endless torments
in hell.
2. On the other hand, there is no question what
ever that Tertullian, Minucius Felix, the author of
the Pseudo-Clementines, Cyril, and many of the
later writers quoted, did believe that " eternal "
meant " endless " ; but an Origenist might fairly ask,
How does their belief affect me? 1 They are writers
who are not entitled to any great respect. The first
indisputable trace of this view occurs in the fierce
pages of the Montanist Tertullian, whose " devoutly
ferocious disposition offered a fitting engine for its
propagation. It then reappears in Minucius Felix,
together with the hideous theory of which there is
1 K
Fatentur illi Deum iutendere peccatoribus contumacibus poena?
aeternas . . . sed aiunt propterea Deum jus remittendarum, si videa-
tur, poenarum, nequaquam arnisisse. Sic carceri perpetuo addicentur
rei quos postea summa potestas, si velit, liberat. Sic le/es feruntur
aeternae, quas tamen legislator abrogare potest." Theod. Altthinus
(ad Petav. /. c.). This, however, was rather the argument of later
writers, and is the one adopted by Archbishop Till otson, and by Less,
Dogm. p. 587. This argument (e.g. that a man may he condemned,
and justly, to " penal servitude for lite," and yet may, without any falsity
or injustice, be liberat*- d before death) does not, I think, occur so early
as Origen s time.
232 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
not a trace in Scripture that the fire of torment is
miraculously created to renew what it destroys, in
order that the agony may be endless. 1 It finds its
first formal elaboration in the Pseudo-Clementines, 2
malicious Ebionite fictions, written in a spirit of
intense hatred to St. Paul, whom they covertly
slander under the name of Simon Magus. 3 We
next find it in the ill-instructed layman Lactantius,
who, with other writers, begins to adopt the new
and unwarrantable theory of the body specially im
mortalised to resist the consumption of material fire.
Afterwards no doubt these theories, of which Scrip
ture says nothing, were idly repeated by multitudes
without examination and without thought. Are we
(an Origenist might ask) to accept these un-Scriptural
accretions on authority so poor and so questionable,
when the authors of them do not offer the shadow of an
argument in their favour ? Testimonies like these are
mere ciphers. Is Tertullian, who lapsed into heresy,
and Minucius Felix, a Roman lawyer of little theo
logical knowledge, and the forgers of the Clementines,
who were both heretics and slanderers, and "the
Christian Cicero," who is constantly hovering on the
verge of heresies due to imperfect training, and Cyril,
of whom one prefers to say as little as possible are
these men to be taken as authoritative interpreters
of the sense to be put upon the Scriptural expressions
of other Fathers ? Is it because of their ipse dixit that
you try to impose on my conscience human inventions
1 So, too, Lactantius, Instt. vii. 21. " Divinus ignis una eademque
vi et potentia et cremabit impios et recreabit, et quantum e corporibus
absumet tantum reponit, et sibi ipse aeternum pabulum suboiinistra-
bit." See stipra, p. 97, infra, p. 455.
2 Yet in Ps. Clem. Horn. iii. 6, \ve find, " For they cannot endure for
ever who have been impious against the one God."
3 Von Coin in Ersch u. Gruber, Encyclop. xviii. 35. "In den
Clementinen herrscht eine weit entschiedener sich aussprechende
Polemik gegen die Person und Lehre des Apostel Paulus als in den
Recognitionen."- SCHLIEMANN, Clement, p. 96, seq. ; LIGHTFOOT,
Calatians, p. 306, seq. ; STANLEY, Corinthians, p. 366, seq.
ix.] THE EARLY FATHERS. 23.
founded on false inferences and false interpretation
the " sentient fire " and the "salted body " which
my moral sense cannot but abhor ?
3. Further, it might be shown that many even of
these writers did not accept the post-Reformation
dogma of hell with no purgatorial punishment. Thus
St. Cyril of Jerusalem 1 speaks of a fire which shall
test as well as a fire which shall punish, and, like
many other Fathers, derived this view from I Cor. iii. 1 3.
Thus too Caesarius of Aries says that sinners are " to
be tormented for a long period, that they may come
to eternal life without wrinkle or spot." 2
4. Lastly, besides the indecisiveness of many of
them, let us notice that the testimonies quoted by
Dr. Pusey, as they grow in definiteness and horror
with each succeeding century, until we come at last
to the unmitigated atrocities of the Dialogues of
Gregory the Great, the Elucidarium, the writings of
Bede, and the vision of Dante, are drawn mainly
from the post-Apostolic Fathers. The silence, or
entire vagueness, or distinct counter-testimony of the
Apostolic Fathers is not without deep significance.
From the earliest of them all St. Clemens Romanus
Dr. Pusey cannot quote one relevant word. He
devotes three chapters to the Resurrection (Ep.
26-28) ; but like St. Paul, St. James, and St. John
in their Epistles, does not say a single word about the
hopeless fate of sinners, still less as to their endless
torment. 3 The one expression in the letters of the
Pseudo-Barnabas is not only indecisive, but must be
at least modified by the apparent belief in the de
struction of the wicked which seems to be indicated
by the phrase that "the day is at hand in which
all things will be destroyed along with the hopeless
wicked one," and the more so because he contrasts
1 Cyril Hieros. Catech. 15. irvp ^OKi^affTiKov ran- av
- Caesar. Arelat. Horn. viii. 3.
3 The word "judgments " in c. 27 refers to temp jral judgments.
234 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
*
the " resurrection " of the blessed with the li retribu
tion of the wicked. 1 From St. Polycarp nothing
can be quoted except the words which he is reported
to have said at his martyrdom words respecting the
genuineness and accuracy of which we can feel no
certainty whatever, and which are not decisive even
if we could.
But now look at the names which for the present
I have passed over the names of Hermas, St. Justin
Martyr, St. Irenaeus, St. Clemens of Alexandria,
Origen. Who would deny that these writers are of
incomparably higher authority than any of those
mentioned in the last paragraph ? Yet every one
of them not to mention Tatian and Arnobius has
written words which at least seem to run counter
to the theory of unending material agony, which
first makes its appearance under such questionable
sanction.
i. HERMAS, if a fanciful, was a deeply pious writer
of the first century. His famous book, The Shepherd,
is quoted as Scripture by St. Irenaeus, 2 and was read
publicly in the churches. 3 Hermas, in the Parable of
the Tower, certainly taught a possible amelioration
after death 4 ; for a possibility of " repentance," and
so of being ultimately built into the tower, is granted
to some of the rejected stones. 5 Others, again, ot
stones which have been thrown farther away, will be
built, though "in another and much inferior place,
and that only when they have been tortured, and have
completed the days of their sins." There is much
more to the same effect, both in the Visions and in
the Similitudes. In the sixteenth chapter of the
Ninth Similitude Hermas tells us of certain stones
which came out of the pit, and were applied to the
1 Ep. Barn. c. 21. 2 Adv. Haer. iv. 20, p. 253.
3 Euseb. ti. E. iii. 3, v. 8.
4 After careful study of the Pastor of Hermas this seems t:> me
almost indisputable.
5 Pastsr, Vis. iii. 2, 5. See too Simil. ix. 8.
ix.] HERMAS. 235
building of the Tower, because they had been made
"to know the name of the Son of God " by means of
" the Apostles and teachers who preached the name
of the Son of God, after falling asleep in the power
of faith of the Son of God, preached it not only to
those who \vere asleep, but themselves also gave
them the seal of the preaching." l And again, " Some
of them then descended into the water, but these
[Christ and the Apostles] descended living, and living
ascended ; but those who had died before descended
dead, but ascended living." In this passage it is
surely impossible not to see the theory, which is
again found in St. Clement of Alexandria, and to
which Bishop Butler alludes, that inferior souls may
be saved, or improved, hereafter by the agency of
superior ones. 3 This theory is not indeed to be found
in Scripture ; but it was inferred, not unnaturally,
and in very early days, from the doctrine of Christ s
descent into hell. Lastly, when Hermas says that
"non-repentance involves death/ and that "as many
as do not repent, but abide in their deeds, shall
utterly perish," he is using language which may
indeed be interpreted of "eternal condemnation,"
but which (as a matter of literary criticism) surely
cannot be proved to exclude the interpretation
which is put upon it by those whom, for brevity s
sake, we may sometimes call Annihilationists.
2. ST. JUSTIN MARTYR (fcirc. A.D. 195) repeatedly
uses the expression " eternal fire," and in one place
"the endless suffering of eternal fire," 4 and argues
Ilermns, Vis. iii. ; Simil. ix. 1 6.
Id. Past. iii. ib. See on this Clem. Alex. Strom. ii. 277 ; vi. 460.
! Butler, Analogy, i. c. 3. "This happy effect of virtue would have
a tendency by way of example, and possibly in other ways, to amend
those of them" ["vicious creatures in any distant scene or period
throughcut the universal kingdom of God"] "who are capable of
amendment." The same notion is found in the Rabbis. See the
quotation from Jalkuth Koheleth, supra, p. 204.
4 d-Trauo-Tws KoAaCeo-flcu, Apol. p. 264. It is remarkable that when the
Fathers wish (even in rhet rical or popular language) to inoicale this
236 ^ MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
(if it can be called argument) that if there be no
" eternal fire," there is no God ! I cannot see that
he necessarily meant " endless in- all its strictness,
even though he uses aidios, and contrasts "eternal
with " a period of a thousand years only." 1 Indeed,
if he be so understood, his argument becomes per
fectly senseless. It is quite intelligible to say that
" if there be no future retribution there is no God " ;
but it is nothing better than nonsense to say that
" if there be no endless torment there is no God."
And moreover Justin accepts the words which he puts
into the mouth of the " aged man by whom he was
converted, who, denying the inherent immortality of
the soul, says, " Such as are worthy to see God die
no more, but others shall undergo punishment as
long as it shall please Him that they shall exist
and be punished." 2 I must confess respectfully
as I would weigh the arguments of Mr. H. N. Oxen-
ham, and of Dr. Pusey, and of those whom they
follow that these words still seem to me to imply an
opinion on the part of St. Justin that at the end of a
certain time, defined by the will of God, the punish
ment of souls shall cease either by the cessation of
their existence or the removal of their punishment.
Such would certainly be the interpretation of the
words by any unbiased reader reading them for the
conception they always have to deviate into such unscriptural phrases as
dTraiWcos, &c. See Apol. lii. Ixi. Ixvii.
1 a.loiv(a.v K.6Xa.aiv . . d\A J ou^i x i ^- loVTar V "ffpioSov. Apol. i. p. 57-
2 al 5e Ko\dovrai, es T Uv auras KO.\ flvai /ecu K.oXa^tffQa.1 6 eos 6f\r;.
Dial. c. Try ph. p. 223. In Dial. p. 224, the old man says, " When
this union" (of soul and body) " is to be dissolved, the soul quits the
body and the man no longer exists ; so when the soul is no longer to
exist, the vital spirit departs from it, and it exists no longer" (OVK ecrriv
V tyvx?) * Tt ) "but departs thither whence it was taken." Bishop Kaye
(Just. Mart. p. 102) admits that "the former mode of expression
implies the possibility that the torments of the wicked may have an
end." Even if he be right in saying that Justin did not accept this
opinion (and certainly, if he did, his language is not quite consistent),
still the testimony to the unreproved antiquity of the opinion in the
Christian Church is important.
IX.] ANCIENT BELIEF IN "ANNIHILATION" 237
first time. Such, in point of fact, is the interpretation
put on this and other passages which I shall quote
from other Fathers, not only by such orthodox writers
as Petavius, but also by a divine of such high authority
as Huet, Bishop of Avranches. 1 It is not too much
to say that no one could have understood the pas
sages which I shall quote from Irenaeus, Ambrose,
Ambrosiater, and Jerome in any other sense, but for
the desire of getting rid of their obvious meaning.
" This idea," says Rothe, " is very ancient in the
Church. Even Hennas, Justin Martyr, and Arnobius
thought that God would annihilate the lost."
But, it is argued, St. Justin cannot mean to imply
that souls would ever cease to exist, because of his
previous words, " Souls never perish, for this would
be indeed a godsend to the wicked." 3 Surely this
argument is indecisive. St. Justin would have been
strictly consistent if he meant that they never perish
of themselves ; never perish apart from the express will
of God. And I am the more inclined to think that
this may be his meaning, because elsewhere he says
that " they only will attain to immortality who lead
holy and virtuous lives." Certainly this would be a
contradiction of the next words, that the wicked "will
be punished in aeonian fire," if aeonian necessarily
meant endless, but not otherwise. Both Mr. Oxen-
ham and Dr. Pusey believe in purgatory. Neither
of them, therefore, would, I suppose, argue that St.
Justin excludes the idea of purgatory when he says
that " others " (i.e. such as are not worthy to see God)
" shall be punished as long as it shall please God
that they shall be punished " ; for certainly they
cannot prove that " those who, at death, are un
worthy to see God," can only mean the wicked who,
at death, are doomed to hell. If, then, the latter-
words may mean a terminable punishment, why may
1 See Huet, Origeniana, p. 231 (in De!arue, Opp. Orig. iv.).
~ Dogmatik, in. 158. 3 Apol. xii. 29.
238 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
*
not the former words imply- -"if God will it"
a terminable existence ? But this, they say, is
" heresy." Be it so, if they like to call it so, for
not being an " Annihilationist " any more than I am
an "Universalist," I must leave the defence of that
view to those who hold it. But the question is not
whether or not it has been subsequently pronounced
to be " heresy," but whether it is, or is not, the plain
meaning whether he were consistent with himself or
inconsistent of St. Justin s words. That is a lite
rary and a critical question on which no mere dictum,
however severe, will be taken as decisive. 2
3. I come to ST. IRENAEUS.
Respecting his testimony, and that of all other
writers, I may here claim the application of two prin
ciples : (i) that his current phraseology must be
always interpreted by any special limitation which, in
any particular passage, he lays down respecting it ;
and (2) that the apparent meaning of a passage is
not to be set aside on the plea that it disaccords with
the meaning, real or supposed, of other passages.
(i) The first principle is surely one of common sense.
I may use common expressions which are now under
stood in a particular manner ; but if in any passage I
define or explain the sense in which I employ them,
the meaning of this definition or limitation is not to
be overruled by the supposed meaning of my general
expressions : on the contrary, they are to be explained
in accordance with it. The sense of twelve, or any
number of vague passages is to be explained by one
definite passage ; not it by them.
1 Comp. Apol. ii. 7, p. 46. "God delays the . . . dissolution of the
vorld so that evil angels and demons and men may cease to be " (^rj/cert
&CTL}.
2 When I referred in a very summary sentence of rny Sermons (p. 84)
to Justin Martyr as one of those Fathers who held a view "more or
less analogous " to Universalism, I was thinking of this passage as
iaiplying Purgatory for some, extinction for others.
ix.] ST. IRENAEUS. 239
(2) As to the second principle : If Origen was incon
sistent ; if both the two great and eloquent Gregories
were inconsistent ; if even St. Augustine elaborately
as he discusses the question is far from being rigidly
consistent 1 why may not St. Irenaeus have been in
consistent, who equalled them in goodness, but was
incomparably beneath them in power and learning?
On this subject a mind which, however feeble, yet
earnestly desires to be fair, can hardly help wavering
within certain limits. The "inconsistencies" on this
subject which have been so freely charged against
many modern writers, and against myself, simply
arise from the desire to be fair to all theories, and
from the apparent antinomies of Scripture, which
do not render it possible (to my mind) to lay down
a series of absolutely consistent and indisputable
conclusions.
Dr. Pusey again and again seems to be writing on
the assumption that it was not possible for a Father
to change his opinion, or to express, at different
times, opinions which differed widely from each other.
Few, I think, will hold him to be justified in this
assumption. Writers, both ancient and modern, are
inconsistent with themselves in their eschatological
teaching. Redepenning, in his well-known work on
Origen, rightly says that, in the early Fathers espe
cially, we find "elements entirely irreconcilable near
one another, or mixed with one another, and the
contradictions left for the most part unresolved."
Now St. Irenaeus (of course) uses the phrase
"eternal punishment," or "eternal fire," as all use
those phrases who accept the Bible ; and in one
passage he says that " the good things of God, being
eternal and endless, the privation of them also is
eternal and endless." Certainly this passage shows his
Ut enim qui semel iterumque in scribendo lapsi"* est, non enim
sequitur ubique esse lapsum." Petav. I.e. iii. 6, 12.
! Origenes, i. 90.
240 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
fc
opinion that the " pain of loss " (as we all believe) may
be eternal and endless; though if " eternal" (aionios]
meant endless (ateleutetos], then the latter word is
pure tautology. That phrase inclines me to believe
that St. Irenaeus adopted the high Johannine sense of
the word aionios, taken alone, though he added to it the
connotation of endlessness. 1 The multiplication of
such passages would not have weighed a feather in
the mind of Qrigen even as evidence, much less as
argument. He would have asked, Why should not
Irenaeus have interpreted Scriptural words in what I
believe to be their real sense, which we may well sup
pose that he knew by tradition from St. John ? " But
when we come to a definite statement, what does St.
Irenaeus say ? Commenting on the words, " prepared
for the devil and his angels," he says that it implies that
" not for man, in the first place, was prepared the eter
nal fire, but for him who beguiled man . . . However,
those too will justly receive it who, like them [Satan
and his angels], persevere in works of wickedness with
out repentance and without return." Do these words
mean only persevere until death ? If we assume that
they do, let us turn to another passage in the same
book, where St. Irenaeus again draws a contrast
between Satan and man ; he says that " God hated
Satan, but by slow degrees took pity on man.
Wherefore also He cast man out of Paradise ... not
as grudging him the Tree of Life . . . but in pity on
him that he might not last for ever as a sinner; and
that the sin which was in him might not be immortal,
and an infinite and incurable evil." Mr. Oxenham
and Dr. Pusey tell us with absolute confidence, that
these words only allude to an immortality in a sinful
1 It is needless to remark that ctTeAeuTTjrbs and Srjveiffjs, the words
U -ed by Irenaeus, are in thi*; application ansanctioned by Scripture, as
are also such phrases as direpavTos n,uwpia, alcaj/ios rmcapia (Theoph.),
<jQa.va.ra. Bacrav i(b/mt (Basil), KoAeum els direipovs otwras (Chrys.), and
others used by the later Father.-.
ix.] ST. IRENAEUS. 241
state on earth. It may be so, but I do not see why
an eaithly immortality should more necessarily have
made his sin " an infinite and incurable evil." It may
be held that St. Irenaeus meant that by eating of the
Tree of Life Adam would have obtained an inherent
immortality, in which case apart from the repentance
which was left to his own free will his sin would have
been an incurable evil ; whereas, excluded from the
Tree of Life, he might, as St. Justin says, have lived
only as long as it shall please God that he should
exist. And this would precisely accord with the
primd facie sense of the other passage, that life is not of
ourselves, nor of our own nature, but is given according
to the grace of God. " Wherefore he who shall have
preserved the gift of life, and been thankful to the
Giver, shall receive also length of days for ever and
ever. But whoso shall have cast it away, and become
unthankful to his Maker, even because he was made,
and will not recognise Him that bestoweth it, that
man deprives himself of perseverance for ever." x Of
" perseverance in happiness," says the translator ; of
" perseverance in good," says Mr. Oxenham ; " of
which St. Irenaeus says the wicked render themselves
for ever incapable." 2 In fact they interpret this passage
solely of divine life, as they interpreted the other solely
of earthly life. But Irenaeus is not talking about per
severance in good at all, but of the wicked, who have
flung away all good. Had his meaning been that
which Dr. Pusey and Mr. Oxenham attribute to him,
he would surely have said that the wicked deprive
themselves of all recovery, not of all perseverance in
what (confessedly) they have not got. Nor does Mr.
Oxenham clinch his argument by quoting from the
heading of the chapter that "souls are immortal."
Irenaeus meant (as he expressly says) that immortality
is not an inherent quality of souls, but the gift of
God ; and he therefore clearly held that He who gives
1 Iren. ii. 34, p. 169. 2 Catholic Eschatology, p. 113.
R
242 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
A*
could also take away. The gloss which they put on
the passage may be correct : but I appeal-to any un
biased arbiter to say whether it does not subject the
language to a very severe strain, and whether the other
contention is not the more obvious ? If the annihi
lation theory, which is also found in Arnobius, 1 had
not been subsequently treated as heresy, I greatly
doubt whether any one would have interpreted the
words otherwise. Bishop Jeremy Taylor and Bishop
Huet, among many other divines quite equal in learn
ing and power to Dr. Pusey, understood these pas
sages of Justin Martyr and Irenaeus without the
smallest doubt or hesitation, exactly as I have
understood them. 2 Nor can I admit that such an
explanation renders Irenaeus so inconsistent with
himself as is asserted. I referred to these passages
as clearly seeming to imply either the ultimate re
demption (from bondage), or the total destruction of
sinners. Dr. Pusey mistakes my disjunctive ; I did
not mean the two clauses to be co-extensive. I meant
that these passages of St. Irenaeus seemed to me to
imply that some sinners would have a terminable
punishment (which Dr. Pusey also believes in the
form of purgatory) ; that others would only exist
" as long as God should please." So then " endless
punishment 3 (for some) and "terminable punish
ment " (for some) are not contradictory theories ;
and Dr. Pusey is mistaken in making me say that St.
Irenaeus anywhere implied " universal restoration."
He does not do so, and I never said he did. But
though I have never leaned to the theory of annihila
tion, that does not make me at all sure that no such
thought lies in these passages of St. Justin and St.
Irenaeus. My references were thoroughly justified,
and I still adhere to the natural sense of the passages
to which I referred.
1 Arnob. Adv. Gent. ii. 14.
2 Jer. Taylor, Sermons {Works, iv. 43.) ; Huet, ubi supra.
IX.] ST. CLEMENS OF ALEXANDRIA. 243
4. Two passages are quoted in which ST. CLEMENS
OF ALEXANDRIA uses the phrases " eternal death" and
" the punishment of eternity." The former is not a
Scriptural phrase ; but (as I have said) controversially
speaking, both phrases count for absolutely nothing
until it is shown that Clemens could not have under
stood " eternal exactly as Origen understood it.
But the three passages to which I had referred are as
follows: In my Sermons speaking generally of various
Fathers I said that they taught a view " more or less
analogous " to Universalism. 1 In the Excursus (p. 157)
I said that " though Clemens does not express himself
with perfect distinctness, yet the whole drift of his
remarks proves that he could not have held an
unmitigated doctrine of endless punishment, but
only of a punishment which would necessarily cease
when its remedial object was attained," and that,
"like Origen, he seems to imply an ultimate amend
ment of every evil nature." Again and again I have
been fiercely taunted with ignorance, with excitedness,
with rhetoric, with want of precision : I am quite willing
to admit these or any other faults where they exist ;
I neither put forth nor have ever put forth, any claims
whatever, of even the humblest kind, for myself or
my writings. But here is the evidence to which I
referred in proof of what I said. Let every fair
mind judge whether I had sufficient ground for my
remarks or not.
Here then is a passage which still seems to me
" more or less analogous" to Universalism.
a. St. Clemens devotes three chapters of the first
book of the Paedagogus "to all who think that the
just is not good." They are of course much too long
to quote, but let any one read them through, and
then say that their large and merciful drift does not
tend to a wider hope for sinners than can be excluded
by his use of the two vague phrases, "everlasting
1 Eternal Hope, p. 84.
R 2
244 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
death" and "the punishment of eternity." If how
ever he has any doubt on the subject, let" him turn
to the principal work of St. Clemens, the Stromata,
where, among the many proofs which he adduces
to show that the Greeks had borrowed their wisdom
from the Hebrews, he quotes from the Comedian
Diphilus the lines "about the judgment," in which
he speaks of the two paths to Hades that of the
just and that of the impious and of the final universal
conflagration ; and then adds " and tragedy is con
cordant with these," and quotes the passage which
ends with " And then He shall save all things which
He formerly destroyed." 1
/3. It is true that St. Clemens is only quoting, but
he is quoting with approval, and he probably meant
these lines to allude to the restitution of all things.
For in an earlier passage he compares the partial
designs and energies of evil to bodily diseases " which
are guided by the general providence to a wholesome
end, even if the cause be unhealthy" : and he proceeds
to argue that it would be " the highest greatness
of divine Providence not to permit the permanence
of the useless and unprofitable evil which sprang from
voluntary apostasy ; . . . . for it is the work of divine
wisdom and virtue and power not only to do good
for this, so to speak, is the nature of God, as it is of
fire to warm and of light to illuminate, but the follow
ing especially, (namely) by means of the evils devised
by some to accomplish :>cme good and blessed end,
and to use beneficially the things that seem vile."
Further, let the reader study the second chapter of
the second book of the Stromata, on the universality
of Christ s rule and His tender love and care for men.
Finally let him consider the following passages.
Speaking of the futility of the notion that the gods
requited robbers and tyrants with good because of
their burnt offerings ; he adds
1 Strom, v. 14, 123. 2 Strom, i. 7, 86.
ix.j ST. CLEMENS OF ALEXANDRIA. 24$
" But we say that the fire sanctifies not the flesh,
but the sinful souls, meaning thereby not that all-con
suming and vulgar fire, but the intelligential fire
(<f>povifji,ov) which passeth through the soul that cometh
through the fire." (Strom, vii. 6, p. 34 ad Jin.} l
And again :
" All things have been appointed by the Lord of
all for the salvation of all, both in general and in
particular. . . Necessary discipline, by the goodness
of the great overseeing Judge, through the proximate
angels, through various previous judgments, through
the final judgments, compels even those who have
entirely despaired to repent." 2
In a fragment of his commentary on I John ii. 2,
dwelling on the death of Christ "for the whole world,"
he says, " Accordingly He saves indeed all, but by
converting some by means of punishments, but others
who follow with spontaneous will, and in accordance
with the worthiness of His honour that every knee
may be bent to Him, of celestial, terrestrial, and
infernal things, 3 that is angels, men, and souls which
before His coming passed from this temporal life." 4
Again, explaining various beatitudes, he says on
" Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be com
forted " (7rapa/c\r)0rjo-ovTai ) " For those that repented
for the evils of their previous life shall be present at
the calling ; for that is the meaning of irapcu^rfffvai.
Now the ways of the penitent are twofold, the
commoner [is] fear at what he has done, but the
more special, the soul s shame with reference to itself
arising from conscience, whether it be here or even
elsewhere, since no place is vacant of the well-doing
of God." 5
Again, speaking of punishment, he draws a very
1 On this passage see Bishop Kaye s St Clement, and Dr. Newman s
Essay on Development, p. 306.
1 Strom, vii. 7 (p. 835, ed. Potter). See Bishop Kaye s Clemens of
Alex. p. 208. 3 Phil. ii. 10.
4 Fragm. ed. Potter, p. 1,009 6 Strom, iv. 6, 37
246 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
real distinction between kolasis, which is the normal
Scripture word, and timoria (vengeance), which occurs
once only, and then of the most hopeless apostates,
in Hebrews x. 29. " Punishment," he says, " is for
the good and advantage of him who is being punished,
for it is the amendment of one who resists; but
vengeance (timoria} is a requital of evil, sent for the
interest of the avenger. Now He would not desire
to avenge Himself on us, who teaches us to pray for
those who despitefully use us." *
Once more, it is not insignificant to notice that St.
Clemens was perhaps the earliest to speak quite dis
tinctly (for the allusion of Hermas is not so clear) of
the belief that the Apostles, as well as our Lord,
preached to the dead and even to the sinful dead
in Hades, and thereby gave them at least the chance
of repentance. 2
Moreover there is another argument unnoticed
by those who vainly attempt to explain away these
passages of St. Clemens. His book called Hypo-
typoses, or " Sketches," has not come down to us, and
the history of it is obscure. But Photius tells us that
in that book he taught the doctrine of metempsy
chosis. If that be so, does it not prove that the
supposed unanimity on these subjects in the ancient
Church is very much exaggerated ? The opinions of
the Fathers differed, just as ours do, within the limits
of every tenable interpretation of phrases which they
all employed. Neither they nor we possess more
than a few general conclusions respecting a subject
which it has pleased God to reveal to us only in its
barest outline.
1 Paedag. i. 8, 70, and passim ; and compare with this passage the
merciful sentiments of Strom, vii. chapters xiii., xiv., and xvi. ; and
respecting the sole true function of punishment, Strom, vi. 38, p. 768,
ed. Potter. This view of punishment is invariably found in St. Clemens.
See Baur, Dogmengesch. i. Ji&.
2 See Strom, vi. 6. ol cv aSou Karcryej/Tey Kal eis dircoAeiai/ eavrobs
e/tSeScoK^Tes . . avrol roivvv etcrli/ ol eVaKot crai Tes TT}S deias 6uva/*s re
(J>a>j TJs. Also Strom, ii.
ix.] ST. CLEMENS OF ALEXANDRIA. 247
Lastly, there is so close an analogy between the
entire philosophic and theological views of St. Clemens
and Origen that, even apart from these proofs, there
would have been at least a strong presumption in
favour of the master having held a view which was
a keystone in the closely allied system of the pupil.
Here, then, is my evidence for what I said. Let
all fair readers judge whether both isolated passages
of this learned Father and the entire drift of his teach
ing do not point to a hope larger than that of popu
lar theology. He does not lay down any dogma of
Universalism. I never said he did. But he does use
some arguments which logically tend in that direc
tion, and are certainly not to be swept aside because
he fully admits (as we all do) a future retribution,
and in one passage uses the word aidios. "But he
is thereby referring," says Dr. Pusey, " to the fire of
the day of judgment (i Cor. iii. 13), and to Christ s
descent into hell." Be it so : the admission of those
doctrines, in the full significance which was given to
them by many of the Fathers, is all that I desire.
But his arguments point and tend and especially
the passages about punishment to which I referred, 1
but which neither Mr. Oxenham nor Dr. Pusey
notice to those views for which alone I pleaded :
-views which admit the possibility of alleviations
after death, and which are far more merciful than
the mass of popular accretions which constitute the
ordinary conceptions of an endless hell.
Reserving Origen for a separate chapter, I will
quote one passage from ARNOBIUS. If he was,
; though sincere, yet never well instructed/ 1 he may
well pair off with Tatian, or Lactantius, or Minu-
tius Felix. He says :
:< For they [certain souls] are hurled down, and
having been reduced to nothing, vanish in the frus
tration of a perpetual destruction, for they are of
1 Eternal Hope, p. 158.
248 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
H.
intermediate quality, and such as can perish if they
have not known the God of life." (Adv. Gvntes,
ii. 14.)
Can there be any reasonable doubt as to the opinion
of Arnobius ? Was it not that these souls would be
annihilated ? His opinion, it will be answered, is of
no importance. It is at least of as much importance
as those of other authors whom Dr. Pusey quotes ;
and if of no importance as authority, it will not be
denied that it is important as evidence. It appears,
then, that this Christian apologist did not hold end
less torments to be a matter of faith. Does his
opinion throw no light on the passages of Tatian,
Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus ? If so, is not the con
sensus, built so largely on mere disputable phrases, a
little weakened ? Again, I say, let all fair readers
judge.
5. That ST. ATHANASIUS believed just as we do
that some souls might " perish everlastingly," I have
little doubt ; though it could not be proved by the allu
sion to the unpardonable sin, or the reference to Matt,
xxv. 46, which Dr. Pusey adduces. But, so far as I
am aware, he alludes but once in all his writings to
Origen s eschatology, and that but obliquely, speaking
of that great and good man in a manner thoroughly
tolerant and respectful, with the epithets of "wonder
ful and most laborious." 1 Had Origen s theory of
Restoration (which it must never be forgotten was
something far more questionable than even Universal-
ism, and incomparably more dubious than the Catho
lic opinion that there is such thing as a terminable
retribution) been in the eyes of the early Church
the deadly and dangerous error which some have
supposed it to be, would Athanasius have contented
himself with one slight allusion to it accompanied by
a compliment to the author? 2 Would Origen s bitter
1 See Cave, Lives of the Primitive Fathers, i. 23.
2 De Commun. essent. 49.
ix.] ST. GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS.. 249
enemy, Epiphanius, more than a full century later,
have passed it over absolutely without mention in the list
of errors which he discovered, or imagined, or inferred
that he had discovered in the writings of Origen ?
6. We now come to ST. GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS ;
and to his teaching and that of St. Gregory of Nyssa,
I ask special attention.
In his ordinary teaching he uses the current Scrip
tural expressions and allusions, and others founded
on them, and does not always shrink even from the
popular use of the unscriptural word aidios. 1 Now
this is what Dr. Pusey chooses to call his "positive
teaching " ; and he says that it requires " that
inferences should not be drawn from others so
as to contradict these passages," because St. Gre
gory "was not one who would positively assert
what he did not certainly believe." 2 " Such passages,"
he says, " are those adduced by Petavius, according
to his wont of disparaging individual Fathers." But
Petavius has not " set down aught in malice " here.
He gives the natural interpretation to the passages,
and it is clear that the more general phrases must be
taken with reference to the more distinct assertions.
Mr. Oxenham admits that St. Gregory Nazianzen
is " inconsistent," and that he gives " hints " in the
direction of Origenism 3 ; but he says (i) that these
hints" must be interpreted by supposing that he
had not so clear a grasp of Catholic doctrine as he
would have had if he had lived after the condem
nation of Origenism ; and (2) that though he and
St. Gregory of Nyssa do give some real countenance
to the Origenist view,, "here, as in other cases, the
exception proves the rule"! I reply that (i) even
if * Origenism was condemned, I have never found
any condemnation of Origen s general hope for man-
fffSiwv di Sfws. Carm. Iamb. xix. cu Stos only in
Jude vi. (Rom. i. 20). 2 P. 211.
3 Catholic Eschatology, p. 1 14, second edition.
250 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
kind apart from .the opinions with which he mixed it
up ; and that (2) the exception in this instance proves
a good deal, whether (according to the absurd popular
phrase) it proves the rule or not.
Before proceeding, let the reader see what St.
Gregory of Nazianzus actually says :
a. At the end of his thirty-ninth oration, attacking
the Novatians for their severity, he threatens them
with a baptism of penal fire after death, and says :
" Let them, then, if they will, walk in our way and
in Christ s. If not, let them walk in their own way.
Perchance there they will be baptised with the
fire, with that last, that more laborious, and longer
baptism, which devours the substance like hay, and
consumes the lightness of all evil/ 1
Dr. Pusey says that this refers to the last-day fire
of I Cor. iii. 13, and so to temporary punishment. I
quite agree with him. There is no necessary Uni-
versalism in the passage, but it grants me all that I
have ever desired, namely, the tenability of a belief
for which, in reality, Dr. Pusey is pleading just as
much as I am, that a soul may pass into punishment
after death, and yet that punishment not be final.
The particular name given to that punishment is
surely not essential. In ordinary language, the
untenable character of which I was trying to prove,
all penal fire after death is called " hell." Dr. Pusey
argues that * hell when incurred by any soul is a
final, irreversible, and endless doom ; but if he be
lieves that there is whether at, or before, the day of
judgment a purifying and penal fire which is not
endless, he is granting the very -thing which it was
the main object of my Sermons to establish. I will
not therefore pause to dwell on the fact that the
1 ovroi fj-fv ovv ei fj.ev f3ov\oii>TO, TT)I> rj/^erepav &?ibv Kal Xpiffrov" el
Se u.i\ T^\V eavrwv iropv4ff6<ii(ra.v TVYOV e /ce? ra TTVO\ ^amricQ^aovrai.
** f t ~ 1 f \ * * Q{ *
T(p TeAet/Tcuftj pccTTTicrjUQiTi, TU> 7TnrovwTfpo} KCU fj.a.KpoTfp(i} o eo"(/iei cos
XOpT~bv T-rtv v\rjv KOI Sairava Troops KaKias Kov^>6rt] a. Orat. xxxix.
p. 690, Ben.
ix.] ST. GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS. 251
Novatians, whose case St. Gregory is speaking of,
are supposed to die in heresy, and in a way which
is not " the way of Christ " ; and that Petavius
not only understands him to be speaking of "the
lost," but asserts that he was similarly understood
by St. Chrysostom, Photius, Theophylact, Jerome,
and the Council of Florence. 1
/3. But though I differ from Petavius view about this
passage, I still think with him that St. Gregory
of Nazianzus was deeply influenced by Origenist
opinions : one who was not so would not have referred
to Universalism without the least condemnation, as
he does, at the close of his poem about his life, where
he says that God "brings the dead to another life
as partakers either of fire or of God s illuminating
light. But whether even all shall hereafter partake of
God, let it be discussed elsewhere," 2
No one, I think, would say that this last -suggestion
was here regarded as untenable much less as hereti
cal ; nor can Petavius be accused of malice in thinking
that it indicates a leaning to the view of Universal
Restoration. Especially as St. Gregory Nazianzen
has discussed the question elsewhere, so far at any
rate as to use the following very remarkable words.
After speaking of a "cleansing fire" of Christ, which
consumes what is material and evil dispositions he
adds :
" I know also a fire not purgatorial but penal,
whether that fire of Sodom which God raineth on all
sinners, mingled with brimstone and tempest ; or that
which has been prepared for the devil and his angels ;
or that v/hich goes before the face of the Lord, and
shall burn up His enemies round about ; and one
Apparet damnatorum et in alia" quam in Christ! via decedentium,
hoc est in haeresi morientium, poenas nequaquam sempiternas constitui,
tametsi longissimae sint." PETAV. De Angelis, iii. 7, 13.
2 ei e 06oD /cat aTrcwras cavtrrepov, #AAo0t /ceurfla;. Carm. Her. i.
De Vita, ad fin.
252 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
It
which is still more fearful than these, which have been
joined with the sleepless worm, a fire which is not
quenched, but is co-enduring with the wicked. For
all these things pertain to the force of destruction,
unless any one likes, even in this instance, to under
stand this more humanely and worthily of Him who
punishes." l
Now the remark of Petavius on this passage is, " It
is manifest that in this place Gregory Nazianzen
doubted about the pains of the damned, whether they
would be endless, or whether they are to be estimated
rather in accordance with the mercy of God, so as at
some time to be brought to an end." Dr. Pusey and
the Benedictine editor try to put another meaning on
it, though what meaning is far from clear. It cer
tainly means that there will be a terminable future
retribution, and therefore it supports all that I main
tained : but I believe further, that it implies, at least,
a doubt whether all retribution may not be ultimately
terminable. Let readers judge for themselves, and in
judging let them bear in mind the fact, that in two
places St. Gregory came to the belief that when Christ
descended into hell He liberated thence the souls of
all the dead. 2
7. But if they decide, as almost all theologians have
done, that St. Gregory here leans to Origenism, it does
not follow (as Dr. Pusey asserts) that he was either
inconsistent, 3 or that in his popular addresses he used
language which he did not believe. Experience may
have taught many of us to understand thoroughly his
state of mind. There is no inconsistency in using the
1 Orat. xl. p. 720, Ben.
2 Horn. xlii. 59, and more distinctly in Carm. xii., which I have
quoted, supra, p. 77. For the catena of opinions on this subject, see
supra, pp. 76-79.
3 There is more apparent inconsistency in such expressions as yur^e
uTrep VVKTO. Tavr-r}v eoTi ris tcdQapais, Orat. 32 in Pasch. and in Orat. 15,
T\V(K.O. Ko\dfffci>s Kaipbs ov KaQdprrews : but there he is, I suppose, alluding
to the doom beyond the judgment day.
IX.] ST. GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS. 253
terms which are usually understood to imply a certain
doctrine, in a sense less rigid than that in which they
are usually interpreted. There is no inconsistency in
cherishing, or in sometimes leaning to, a hope which
goes beyond anything which we venture formally to
teach. There is no hypocrisy, but very much the
reverse, in declaring our belief in the possibility that
God may show a larger mercy than we are able to
announce as a distinctly revealed truth. And this is
exactly what this great Father did. In not saying more
he may have been influenced by that principle of
" oeconomy which other Fathers distinctly avow l ;
or he may have been diffident as to his own judg
ment ; or he may have shrunk from stirring up fresh
controversies. Be that as it may, the fact remains
that he indicated his opinion that the universal hope
of Origen, so far from being a heresy, pointed possibly
to a blessed truth.
8. And if so, surely the force of this fact has been
overlooked and underrated ! For St. Gregory of Nazi-
anzus was no ordinary man. He was no mere Arnobius
or Lactantius. Poet, orator, theologian ; a man as
great theologically as he was personally winning 2 ;
saluted by pre-eminence with the title of " The Theo-
gian " ; the sole " man whom the Church has suffered to
share that title with the Evangelist St. John " 3 ; in his
day the acknowledged and leading champion of the
orthodox faith as to the Trinity, and the Divine Hu
manity of Christ ; the reviver of the dead and heretical
Church in Constantinople ; summoned by the unani
mous voice of the orthodox to the patriarchate ;
Perhaps Neander goes too far in saying (Ch. Hist. iv. 213, 2,
English translation), "that the Orientals, according to their theory of
oeconomy, allowed themselves many liberties, not to be reconciled
with the strict laws of veracity."
* Newman, Hist. Ess. ii. 81.
Tpnyopiov 8e Tovr6 (baaiy Sxnrfp tiov TTJV QeoXoyiav. . . . &eo\6yov
avrov tcuptT&&gt;s TrpoeLirovcn^s p.6vov TT^S rasv iri(nS>v E/c/cATjo tas, /J.ETO. r&v
vi6v TT)S fipoj/T-ijs rov TtpuTov fleoAcfyof . PHILOTH. Lncom. (apad Cave,
/. c. ii. 336).
254 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
president of that Second Oecumenical Council to
which is due the acceptance of the present form of
the Nicene Creed, and at which were present more,
saints and confessors than have ever met in any
council ; the most learned and the most eloquent bishop
in one of the most learned ages of the Church 1 ; whom
St. Basil called a vessel of election, a deep well, a
mouth of Christ 2 ; whom Rufinus calls "incomparable
in life and doctrine " s : such was St. Gregory Nazian-
zen by position. And his character was worthy of his
position ; worthy of one who was the life-long friend
of St, Basil ; whose life had been twice preserved
almost by miracle ; who had lived so many years as a
solitary and as an ascetic; who even when he sate on
the throne of the great and wealthy Metropolitan See,
preserved his mean dress and humble demeanour, and
divided his rich revenues among the poor : a man so
eminent and so good, and so looked up to by the
very leaders of his generation, that it was the pride of
St. Jerome s life to have sat in youth at his feet. 4 This
certainly is not the man whose opinion on such a
subject can be casually set aside as a mere careless
aberration into an indisputable heresy. Virtuous as
he was from his earliest youth never yielding obedi
ence to any law but the supreme law of duty, a man
too pure for a turbulent and ambitious city, a man to
whose tender and poetic soul the least scruple becomes
a remorse, a man of unblemished purity and boundless
charity, whose mistakes rose only from the simplicity
which hoped that others were as simple-hearted as
himself, one could not say of him, as modern theolo
gians, with such true theological meekness, delight to
say of those who love mercy, that he was bribed to
get rid of the doctrine of endless torments by his
1 Tillemont. 2 Basil, Ep. cxli.
3 Rufinus, Prolog, in Opp. Naz.
4 " A happiness wherein he glories at every turn."- CAVE, Prim.
Fathers, ii. 295 (JER. Ep. ad Nepot., Catal. in Greg. Naz. c.).
ix.] ST. GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS. 255
personal dread of it ! For Gregory of Nazianzus
deserved the honour of sainthood if any man has ever
done, being, as he was, one of the bravest men in an
age of confessors, one of the holiest men in an age of
saints. His opinion may have been mistaken, or his
hope may be untenable as a doctrine ; but certainly
if it was this hope taken alone, which " the Church
condemned so severely as some would have us believe
in the case of Origen, the very same hope passed
wholJy uncensured in the great Patriarch of Con
stantinople. Appealing, uncontradicted even by his
worst enemies, to the firmness of his faith and the
purity of his doctrines, and preserving even to hoar
hairs the charm, candour, and the inexperience of
boyhood, he withdrew without a pang from the
cabals of Constantinople to the shadow of his an
cestral trees near the quiet town of Nazianzus, and
died as purely as he had lived. And Gregory is a
canonised Saint of the Church of God, while amid the
sounds of many anathemas the great and noble Origen,
a man far more learned and no less holy, is all but
assigned by name to everlasting damnation ! Such
is earthly justice, and such is ecclesiastical charity !
" Ille crucem sceleris pretium tulit, hie diadema" 1
7. And the case is even stronger with ST. GREGORY
OF NYSSA. In the first place the fact that his opinions
are expressed quite indisputably, throws no small light
on the less decisive though hardly mistakable expres
sions of St. Clemens and St. Gregory of Nazianzus. For
the hypothesis of interpolation suggested in his Ano-
theuton by Germanus, Patriarch of Constantinople, in
the eighth century, is, as Petavius admits, quite vain,
and has been abandoned as hopeless by every honest
scholar. It belongs, as Neander 2 says, to " the worst
1 Ample materials for the life of St. Gregory Nazianzen are preserved
in his own poems and orations, and the reader will find a beautiful
sketch of him in the fifth and sixth volumes of M. de Broglie s L Eglise
et F Empire Romain. 2 Ck. Hist. iv. 451.
256 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP
examples of an arbitrary caprice, regardless of honesty,"
and all the more so because he maintains the doctrine
of Origen " with the greatest logical ability and
acuteness in works written expressly for that purpose." 1
He uses, of course, in general allusions such terms
as " quenchless fire " and " endlessness," and when Dr.
Pusey argues that in his" clear and explicit teaching >:
he shows that he must have believed in an endless
hell, and therefore that he cannot have hinted at
Universalism, or that if he did he was not an honest
man, I must beg. entirely to differ from him. The
passages which Dr. Pusey quotes are by no means
"clear and explicit 1 for the meaning which he gives
to them ; the passages which I shall quote are " clear
and explicit " for a hope even larger than I am able
to accept. Dr. Pusey minimises them as being mere
" mists of Origenism which floated over his own imagi
native mind, or that of his sister St. Macrina, to whom
he owed so much." 2 But there is nothing misty about
them ; they are singularly lucid ; they belong to whole
trains of reasoning ; they form part of a distinct
system ; and they contradict, not what he himself says,
but what Dr. Pusey interprets him as saying. I agree
most heartily with Dr. Pusey that to believe one
thing and teach another is not honest ; but he is by
far too profound a patristic scholar not to be aware of
passages in which the Fathers avowedly dwelt on se
vere doctrines because they considered them " useful,"
and avowedly abstained from dwelling on their real
opinions respecting doctrines because they thought
them " dangerous." Nor again did I say that St.
Gregory meant only to give hints fywvavra (rvvzioicriv :
what I said was, that passages in his writings, and
those of other Fathers, are (pcavavra avverolcnv, i.e. that
their meaning is clear to those who have the right
1 He instances the comment on I Cor. xv. 28 (Lib. Catech. 8 and
35), the De Anima, and the tract on the early death of children.
- What is of Faith, p. 215.
ix.]
ST. GREGORY OF NYSSA.
257
clue to their interpretation, even when they might be
misinterpreted by others.
But the views of St. Gregory of Nyssa are not
merely to be inferred. Any one who will study the
following passages will see that they are stated with
the most unflinching precision.
a. Thus in the Catechetical Oration, speaking of
the Incarnation, he says that thereby our Lord was
" benefiting not only him who was lost by means of
these things (i.e. man), but even him who wrought
this destruction against us (i.e. the devil) " ; and he
adds that "when death approaches to life> and dark
ness to light, and the corruptible to the incorruptible,
the inferior is done away with, and reduced to non-
existence, and the thing purged is benefited, just as
the dross is purged from gold by fire." And he then
continues in these remarkable words
" In the same way in the long circuits of time,
when the evil of nature which is now mingled and
implanted in them has been taken away, whensoever
the restoration to their old condition of the things
which now lie in wickedness takes place, there will be
a unanimous thanksgiving from the whole creation,
both of those who have been punished in the puri
fication, and of those who have not at all needed
purification." 1
And as though to remove all possible doubt as to
his meaning, he speaks farther on of the Incarna
tion as " Both liberating man from his wickedness,
and healing the very inventor of wickedness (i.e,
the devil)." 2
1 Orat. Catechet. 26. Hard rbv avr bv rpo-rrov TCUJ fj.a.Kpous Tr
Tos rov KO.KOV rrjs (pixTfcas rov vvv auTrns Kara/j-ixdevros Kal
eTreiSav f) ets TO dfi^aiov aTro/coTacrrtKris ruv vvv tv
yevrjrat, d{j.6(pci}vos evxapicrria Trapoi Trao-rjs etrrat rrjs Ksricrews
ruv cv rfj KaQdpcrsi /ceKoAacrjueVcoj/ KOI r&i/ /j.-r)Se rrjv ap%V e
-
2 TJC re &vdp<t)irov TTJS Kaftms i
. Id. ib.
Kal avT*bv T}>V T^S kaicta*
258 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
<y^
/3. And again, in the same book, nine chapters
further on, he says that men who have died cmbap-
tised and impenitent may be saved by fire reverting
to the metaphor of purged gold. " Since then there
is a cleansing power in fire and in water, they who
washed away from themselves the filth of wickedness
by means of the mystic water, need not the other
kind of things that cleanse. But they who have been
uninitiated into this purification are necessarily purified
by the fire," l
7. He expresses the same views in his book on the
soul and the resurrection. The history of this book
is interesting. The great Basil, the Metropolitan
of Caesarea, was dead, and all Asia was plunged in
mourning. Even Jews and Pagans bewailed his
death. What then must have been the feelings of
his younger brother, St. Gregory of Nyssa, as he
carried the news to their sainted sister, Macrina, to
whom both he and Basil, humanly speaking, owed
their souls ? She was living in deep retirement at
the head of a community of virgins, and, as he told
her the sad event, the young Bishop was overwhelmed
with a grief which it seemed as if even the consola-
lations of religion could hardly dispel. The sister
sustained the fainting soul of the brother. She
poured forth such lofty and holy thoughts on the
future destiny of man, that St. Gregory thought it his
duty to record and perpetuate them. 2 He did so in
this treatise, and it stands in the front rank among
his extant works.
This then is the sentiment which he attributes to
St. Macrina. Referring to St. Paul s prophecy (i Cor.
xv. 28) of " the day when God would be " all things in
all" (nravra ev Traaiv), she says that in this passage
" The Word seems to her to lay down the doctrine
of the perfect obliteration of wickedness, for if God
1 Id, c. 35, ad fin. ~ St. Greg. Naz. Or. xliii. 86.
ix.j ST. GREGORY OF NYSSA. 259
shall be in all things that are, obviously wickedness
shall not be in them." 1
8. And in the same book, speaking on Phil, ii., the
saint says that St. Paul means that angels, men, and
demons will all bow the knee in the name of Jesus,
" Signifying this in that passage, that when evil has
been obliterated in the long circuits of the aeons,
nothing shall be left outside the limits of good, but
even from them shall be unanimously uttered the
confession of the Lordship of Christ." 2
e. Again, in the oration about the dead, he says
that patriarchs, apostles, and men who preferred a
virtuous to a sensual and material enjoyment are
purged here on earth, but that the rest fling off their
propensity to that which is earthly in the cleansing
fire. 3
Thus then this eminently great and orthodox
Father deliberately argued that God, the Fountain of
Good, created rational beings to be receptacles (ayyela)
of good ; that evil is the disturbance of harmony
between the soul and its destination, which is to re
ceive godlike life ; that "reward " and " punishment "
are inadequate terms arising out of the disturbance of
this harmony ; that all punishments are means of
purification ordained by Divine Love to restore fallen
man ; that God would not have permitted the existence
of evil unless He had foreseen that, in the end, all
rational beings would attain to blessed fellowship with
Himself. I am far from arguing that these views
are irrefragable ; I only say that they were undoubt
edly held by St. Gregory of Nyssa. 4
1 ev TOUT (f 5e (AOL So/eel TOV Trai>7\rj TYJS KaKias o.<^avi(rfJL<Jv ^ojf.Lari^iv
& \6yos, el ycip eu iraaiv TO?? ovffiv 6 ejs CCTTCU ^ /co/aa S^AaS?; owe
rai eV rots olffiv. /?<? Anim. et Kesurrect. Of>p. i. 8^2, ed. Paris.
2 Id : ib \
T&V 8e \onrSjv Sid. TTJS ets vcrrfpov dywyris iv rip Ka6apfflca irvpl
o$a\6vT(av ri}v -jrp&s T^V v\t}v irpofnrddeiav. De Mortuis Orat.
p. 635. See supra, pp. 41, 42.
It would he superfluous to quote further passages, equally strong
or stronger, but the reader may consult the works of St. Gregory (ed.
S 2
260 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
^ . .- . -
Germanus might well admit that these passages
could have but one meaning ; and Petavius may well
ask "Potuitne quidquam apertius ex Origenis opinione
ilia disputari ? " l It would indeed require an elaborate
and not very honest ingenuity to explain these pas
sages away. It will be needless to refer to passages
in his tract " On the Early Death of Children/ or in
his other various works and sermons. Those here
quoted are sufficiently decisive.
And as Dr. Plumptre has pointed out, it is most
significant that St. Gregory enumerates these opinions
without the least apparent consciousness that he is
thus " deviating into the byepaths of new and strange
opinions." I imagine that such a charge would have
greatly surprised him. " He claims to be taking his
stand on the doctrines of the Church in thus teach
ing, with as much confidence as when he is ex
pounding the mysteries of the Divine nature as set
forth in the creed of Nicaea." 2
What then becomes, let me ask once more, of the
somewhat unworthy insinuation, repeated by one after
another of the writers on this question, that Christians
who embrace the larger hope must necessarily be
unorthodox as to the divinity of Christ ? Dr. Caze-
nove tells us and he is rapturously quoted by a
host of followers eager to seize any weapon against
a dogma which they repudiate that he has " not
been able to discover a single impugner of the dogma
of eternal punishment who is consistent in his denial,
and at the same time orthodox." So then it seems
that the orthodoxy of St. Gregory of Nazianzus and
Paris, 1615), i. 99, 100, 844, 853 (v. et Tune ipse Filius, &&gt;c. t ad fin.) ;
ii. 493, 533, 654, 66 1, 691, 1,067, in all of which passages the whole
train of reasoning, and not merely a few isolated words, point in this
direction. See too Dallaeus, De Poenis et Satisfactionibm, 37 2 377 >
Huet s Origeniana, lib. ii. qu. ix. De Proemiis et Poenis ; Sixtus
Senensis, I.e. ; Neander, iv. 456, &c.
1 De An shells, iii. 7, 4.
8 Diet, of Christian Btog. s. v. Eschatology.
ix.] THE TWO GREGORIES. 261
St. Gregory of Nyssa was saved solely because they
were "inconsistent"! That they contradict them
selves I deny ; and it will take stronger hands than
those of the writers who praise Dr. Cazenove s re
mark to brand with heresy respecting the Trinity and
the Incarnation the names of the two great Fathers
the greatest of their day the one called pre
eminently "the Theologian," the other " the Father
of Fathers" the brother of Basil, the heir of his
thoughts and of his fame whose writings were ap
pealed to for centuries afterwards as the chief bulwark
of the Nicene faith.
Let honest men, let those who prefer truth to in
genuity, judge this question afresh in the light of
the facts which I have now proved. To confine my
self at present to three names only : ST. MACRINA,
Saint and Virgin, to whom the Church owes no
little of the career of her great brothers ; ST.
GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS, the Patriarch, and the
President of the Second Oecumenical Council ;
ST. GREGORY OF NYSSA, the Confessor for the
Faith, to whose authority was mainly due the
introduction of the new clauses into the Nicene
Creed, 1 and to whose writings the Council of
Ephesus appealed as containing the strongest ar
guments against Arian heresy, 2 expressed, quite
openly, a doctrine or a hope on the subject of the
final restoration of mankind which is not distinguish
able from that of Origen. For expressing this hope,
or this doctrine, they were never abused, never at
tacked, never censured, never so much as challenged.
They lived, and they died, and they have continued
in the odour of sanctity. They are recognised as
Saints and Fathers to this day. The Church history
S) xii. 13, ad fin., says that he wrote them; but this
seems to be a mistake, for they are found before his time. See
Swaiuson, Nicene and Apostles Creed, pp. 94 seq.; Hort, Two Disserta
tions, p. 107 ; Stanley, Christian Institutions, p. 331.
Tillemont, Mem. Eccl. ix. 601.
262 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
^.
of their century is filled with their names and their
eulogies. We are inheritors of the faith of~ which
they were the most conspicuous champions. No men
did more for the recognition by the Church of the
Divinity and Personality of the Holy Spirit. And
yet we are asked to believe that Origen was con
demned and anathematised because more than a
century earlier he expressed the very same opinion
which they openly repeated without so much as a
whisper of disapproval on the part of their contem
poraries !
Credat Judaeus non ego ! The opinion for which
even Origen was condemned (except by individual
writers), was not his hope for the ultimate restoration
of mankind, but only for a far wider and far more
questionable scheme, in which this hope was but an
accidental element.
And, to my mind, these facts entirely destroy all
semblance of credibility for the opinion that the
Church, speaking authoritatively, ever was either
decisive or unanimous in its condemnation of that
single point of Origen s opinion which may be
described as " the larger hope." The express words
of these Fathers outweigh scores of vague repeated
traditional expressions of other Fathers of whom
the majority had not a tittle of their learning or
their weight, and whose expressions, for the most
part, neither decide nor were meant to decide
anything whatever as to the point at issue. Com
pared with the Cappadocian theologians many of
those to whom Dr. Pusey refers were but " off-hand
dogmatists." l
8. Nor amid the purely general, and often
quite irrelevant utterances the mere repetition of
Scripture metaphors to be found in comparatively
unimportant writers like St. Andrew of Caesarea
and St. Macarius of Egypt (both of whom speak
xfo -oi Scxyuaricrrcu. GREG. Nvss.
ix.] DIODORUS AND THEODORE. 263
of milder and severer punishments), St. Serapion,
Paphnutius, Serenus, Moyses, &c. can I at all
assent to the sweeping aside the evidence of such
truly great men and profound thinkers as DlODORUS
OF TARSUS and THEODORE OF MOPSUESTIA, as
though it were of no importance. 1 That evidence
may be seen in Assemanni, Bibliotheca Orientalis
(iii. 323-324), as preserved by Salomo, Metropolitan
of Bassora, A.D. 1222. Theodore of Mopsuestia
argued for the restoration of the wicked from
Matt. v. 26, inferring that the time might come
when the debt might be paid to the uttermost
farthing, and from Luke xii. 47, 48, inferring that " few
stripes " must mean terminable stripes. Diodorus
argued from the nature of punishment, the belief
that God s mercy to the evil would inflict less
than their deserts, as His mercy to the good gave
them more than theirs ; and from the difficulty of
supposing that immortality would be prolonged
solely for the sake of inflicting torments. 2 Dr. Pusey
calls these arguments " commonplace." They do not
seem to me one-tenth part so commonplace as the
counter-arguments of St. Augustine and others ; and
certainly neither Diodorus nor Theodore were com
monplace men. OVK etVo? rov ao<pov av&pa \7]pelv.
"Wise men," says Plato, "do not usually talk non
sense." That the two writers " use different arguments
and have different theories/ seems to me to tell for,
rather than against, their views. It shows that the
question was unsettled ; that the truth struck
them from different points of view ; that they
did not idly repeat each other ; and that there are
manifold regions of thought from which arguments in
support of God s mercy may be drawn.
1 There is little direct evidence as to the opinions on this subject of
Theodoret and Didymus of Alexandria, but there is reason to believe
that they adopted the view of Origen.
These views were shared by many eminent Nestorian Bishops.
Assemanni, Bibl. Orient, iii. 323, iv. 204.
264 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
^,
I called them " great teachers," "on the authority,"
says Dr. Pusey, " of Gieseler." I certainly referred
to Gieseler, but I do not know why I needed his
authority in particular. I might, for the matter of
that, have referred, for high encomiums, on one or
both of them, to St. Athanasius, St. Basil, St. Chry-
sostom, St. Epiphanius, Facundus of Hermiane, and
St. Jerome. I might have applied the same epithet
to them on the authority of Neander, 1 who calls
them " venerated teachers of the Syrian Church " ;
and Diodorus " distinguished " ; and Theodore
" sagacious and original " ; and of Dr. Hort, who
speaks of Diodorus as " probably the greatest theo
logian, Gregory of Nyssa excepted, who took part in
the Council of Constantinople " ; or even of Mosheim, 2
who calls Theodore " a remarkable and eminent man,
and one of the most learned of his time."
Or again, if I wanted such surety for my words,
I might have called them great teachers on the
authority of Dorner, who says : " Theodore of Mop-
suestia was the crown and climax of the school of
Antioch. The compass of his learning, his acuteness,
and we must suppose also the force of his personal
character, conjoined with his labours through many
years as a teacher both of churches and of young and
able disciples, and as a prolific writer, gained for him
the title of The Master of the East. He laboured
on uninterruptedly to his death in A.D. 427, and was
regarded with an appreciation the more widely ex
tended, as he was the first Oriental theologian of his
time." 3 But surely it is somewhat late in the day to
be taken to task for giving the name of " great
teachers to two of the most illustrious founders of
the best and most fruitful method of sacred exegesis
that method which was the special glory of the
1 Neander, Ch. Hist. iv. 10, 285, &c.
* Mosheim, Cent. v. pt. ii. c. i. 3 ; Hort, Two Dissert. 125.
3 Dorner, Person of Christ, i. 50.
ix.] DIODORUS OF TARSUS. 265
school of Antioch ! Nor is it a very worthy proceeding
though it has always been and still is very common
to depreciate the knowledge and greatness of teachers
simply because they hold some opinions which may
happen to differ from our own. I confess that this
cavalier way of cheapening great names is somewhat
painful to me. It was not always so that these two
holy and learned bishops were spoken of; it was not
till their names were mixed up with the imbroglio
of schemes fo.stered and agitated by the turbulent
and haughty Cyril. The Syrian Church looked up
to them as fathers and teachers. The good Bishop
Meletius wrote of " the apostolic faith which we have
received from the great Theodore." 1 And in an edict
of the orthodox Theodosius, after the second great
Oecumenical Council, he said that the Catholic
bishops would be recognised by being those who, in
the East, were in communion with Diodorus of
Tarsus. 2
Diodorus, Bishop of Tarsus, friend and corre
spondent of St. Basil, master of St. Chrysostom, who
pronounced his eulogy, was one of the most eminent
teachers of his age. He spent the greater part of his
life in combating the heathens, Jews, and heretics of
all denominations. He was a vigorous defender of
the Nicene Creed, and the loss of his works is due
to the Arians. He introduced responses into the
services of the Church. He ended in universal
honour a blameless and fruitful life, after having,
as Theodoret said, 3 saved the bark of the Church
1 Ep. 152.
Cod. Theod. xvi. t. i, L (De Broglie, v. 4.53.) "My argument
was this. If I, who knew my own innocence, was so blackened
by party prejudice, perhaps those high rulers and those servants of
the Church in the many ages which intervened between the early
Nicene times and the present, who were laden with such grievous
accusations, were innocent also, and the re-flexion seemed to make me
tender towards those great names of the past to whom weaknesses or
crimes were imputed." NEWMAN, Apologia, p. 18.
8 Theodoret, H. E. v. 4.
266 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
ft
from being submerged under the waves of mis
belief. 1
Theodorus of Mopsuestia did. more than any
man who ever lived to rescue the Church from that
abuse of the allegorising system of Origen, which
would, sooner or later, have been absolutely fatal to
all sound exegesis, and would have made the Bible
an unintelligible sphinx, of which the utterances were
twisted hither, and thither at each man s will. He
was perhaps the greatest of all the exegetes of his
time, and he died in undisturbed communion with
the Catholic Church, of which he had been a bishop
for thirty-six years. 2 He died in A.D. 429. It was
not till A.D. 553 that the by no means universally
accepted edict of the Fifth Council condemned him
as a heretic.
Yet Theodore of Mopsuestia is now put aside
as " the impious," "who was condemned for a whole
miscellany of heresies by the Fifth General Coun
cil " 3 ; and we are told by Dr. Pusey that the two
were " patriarchs of those who denied the Incar
nation. " Is it not somewhat strange that a man who
is thus recklessly asserted to have " denied the Incar
nation is said to have converted from Arianism a
large part of the population of his diocese ?
May we not quote once more the complaint of
Facundus and of Domitian of Ancyra, that, under
pretence of condemning the dogmas of Origen, many
are rushing into the condemnation of most holy and
most glorious teachers, and indeed of all the saints
who had lived before or after him ? 4 Even Cyril the
bitter and unscrupulous Cyril who (like Evagrius) 5
did not hesitate to condemn to hell the unhappy
Nestorius whom he had goaded to misery and
1 See Chrysostom, Laus Diodori. Facundus Hermian. Defens.
Trittm Capit. iv. 2. Socrates, H. E. vi. 13. Sozoruen, //. E. vii. 2.
2 See Photius, Cod. 81. 3 Oxenham, Cath. Esch. p. 115.
4 Facundus Hermian. iv. 4, p. 62. 5 Evagr. //. E. i. 7,
ix.j THEODORE OF MOPSUESTIA. 267
ruin, yet said of Theodore that " he had gone to
God." 1
Of the " Fifth General Council ?; I shall have some
thing to say hereafter, and I shall show the grounds on
which alike the genuineness and the validity of some of
its asserted decisions may well be questioned. Nor do I
consider it in the least degree fair to say that Theodore
and Diodorus questioned the Incarnation, 2 a charge
due either to the ignorant malice or misunderstanding
of their enemies. Meanwhile I claim the authority of
these two great Bishops, to whom in their lifetime,
and long afterwards, the Church looked up with the
profoundest veneration, as showing that in their day,
at any rate, the doctrine even of Universalism had
never been authoritatively condemned ; and that, up
to this time, and far on in the fifth century, there
existed none of that unbroken unanimity on the
subject which is now asserted. Mr. Swete, in his
valuable edition of parts of his Commentaries t says
that " every accession to our knowledge of him adds
strength to the conviction that he was entirely un
conscious of deviating from the doctrine of the
Catholic Church." 3
9. And as for the condemnation of these two
Fathers, even supposing it to have been honourably
obtained, even supposing that their Nestorianism was
* eTrel 8e a7re57?/r>7<re irpos eov, Cyril, Opp. p. 2OO. Cyril himself is
condemned to a place of punishment by Theodoret in his letter (not
improbably genuine) to the Patriarch of Antioch, on Cyril s death ;
but Theodoret seems to have believed in the efficacy of prayers even
for the wicked, for he adds, "May it be so ordered by your prayers
that he may obtain mercy and forgiveness, and that the unmeasured grace
of God may prevail over his wickedness." Canon Luckock in his After
Dea h has not noticed this passage.
J See Harduin, iii. 107.
3 " His eschatology is meant to be a safeguard against Apollinarian-
ism ; his sympathy with Pelagius arises from a dread of fatalism ; his
rejection of much of the prophetic and typical import of the Holy
Scriptures is due to an excessive jealousy for their literal truths. Of
all that the Church declared to be of the faith, he was the staunch
defender."- SWETE, Theod. Mopsuestia, Introduction.
268 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
^t
not capable of explanation, or modification, or retrac
tation, had they been heard in their own favour, instead
of being- accused long after they had been laid in
honoured graves, yet may we not say with the
learned and pious Cave, that " Nothing can be more
true and modest than what St. Hierom observed in
such cases, J that it s great rashness and irreverence
presently to charge the ancients with heresie for a
few obnoxious expressions, since it may be they
erred with a simple and honest mind, or wrote them
in another sense ... or they took less heed and care
to deliver their minds with the utmost accuracy and
exactness, while as yet men of perverse minds had
not sown their tares nor disturbed the Church with
the clamour of their disputation, nor infected men s
minds with their poisonous and corrupt opinions." 2
I have no sympathy with the views of Nestorius ; I
accept ex animo the word " indivisibly (aStatperw?)
by which the Council of Ephesus condemned his<
error ; but the less said about Cyril and the conduct
of the Council of Ephesus the better ; and it must
not be forgotten that " Nestorius s offers of accommo
dation were refused, his explanation not read, his
submission rejected, and he himself condemned un
heard." 3 Luther was not the first, nor will he be the
last, to think that the differences between " Nestorius
personally and the Council which condemned him
were mainly verbal," and that " the blame of the
controversy is to be charged upon the turbulent
spirit of Cyril and his personal aversion to the
Patriarch of Constantinople." 4
10. Passing on to DlDYMUS OF ALEXANDRIA
(t A.D. 396), not one of the passages which Dr.
Pusey quotes contains anything more decisive than
the current Scriptural terms which all alike used,
1 Jer. adv. Rufin. ii. p. 219.
2 Life of St. Gregory Thaumaturgus, ad Jin. (Apost. Fathers), i.
p. 281. 3 See Assemanni, Bibl. Orient, iii. p. 210.
4 Mosheim, Cent. v. ii. c. 5.
IX.] DIDYMUS OF ALEXANDRIA. 269
whether they were Origenists or not. I content myself
with the perfectly unbiased opinions of Neander and
Gieseler, 1 of whom the former says that Didymus
formed himself on the writings of Origen, and
defended his authority, and had adopted his whole
system, except in matters which were supposed to
touch on questions of our Lord s nature ; and
Gieseler that he "was known as an Origenist." 2
St. Jerome, ardently as he admired this all-accom
plished blind scholar, does not conceal this fact. 3 I
add further, as against the asserted unanimity . of
the Church on this subject, the weighty remark of
Gieseler, that "the belief in the inalienable capability
of improvement in all rational beings, and the limited
duration of future punishment, was so general even
in the West and among the opponents of Origen,
that, whatever may be said of its not having risen
without the influence of Origen s school, it had be
come entirely independent of his system." St. Jerome
not only shows in his own writings how wide on
these subjects was the permitted variety of opinions, 4
but he expressly reckons the " repromiss tones futurorum
quomodo debeant accipi" among things that were still
unsettled. 5
ii. It would be useless to proceed with the Greek
Fathers. While not denying that some of them
believed in " endless retribution," I think that I have
proved, as clearly as anything can be proved, that
their suppposed unanimity in this view is a mere
fiction, and that those who openly dissented from
it going therein farther than I have done were
some of the ablest and best and most learned
Neander, iv. 455, 459 ; Gieseler, i. 361, English translation.
2 Gieseler refers to Liicke, Quaest. Didymianae, p. 9. On the services
of this great scholar, see Guerike, De Schol. Alexandr. pp. 69-80.
3 Jer. adv. Rufin, ii. p. 409 ; iii. p. 463 (Opp. iv).
4 Jer. on Gal. v. 22, " Nullam rationahilium creaturarum perire
perpetuo," and on Eph. iv. 16, and Ambrosiaster on Eph. iii. 10.
5 Proaem in lib. xviii. in Isaiam.
270 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
^,
among them. I will only add one word respecting
St. Athanasius and St. Chrysostom.
12. Considering the extent of the writings of ST.
ATHANASIUS and the fact that Origen s opinions
on universal restoration were so universally known
and so widely adopted, I think that his all but total
silence on the subject is an additional proof that in
his day that particular opinion was not viewed so
unfavourably as has been asserted. If the opinion
were so dangerous and so untenable as its impugners
assert, how is it that St. Athanasius has so little, and
that so purely general, to say on the other side? The
passages which Dr. Pusey quotes are not in the
smallest degree decisive. They only refer to vague
Scriptural expressions, and are quite consistent with
a belief in some form of ultimate deliverance for all,
at any rate except the very worst. I said that "he
only speaks with oblique and kindly disapproval of
Origen s opinion on the restitution." This Dr. Pusey
flatly contradicts: the reader shall judge. So far
from treating Origen as an abominable heretic, I
believe that he only thrice alludes to him in all his
writings. In two of these passages he gives him a
complimentary epithet, calling him in one "the
indefatigable," in the other "the marvellous and
indefatigable." 1 In one he expressly defends Origen
from the attempts of Arians to claim him on their
side, and quotes him to prove that the Son is co-
eternal and co-essential with the Father. In a third
passage he alludes, as Cave says, "obliquely" in a
few kindly passing words to his view of restoration. 2
That view he rejects, but not in the tone of one who
viewed it with indignation, and not as one who wished
to brand it as a heresy. The more I look into the
1 Def. Nic. vi. 27.
2 De Communi Essent. Patris et Fit. et Sp . Sancti, 49. The same
passage occurs in Quaesf. ad Antioch, Ixxii. Stephen Gobar, who knew
the works of St. Athanasius well, says that in several places he had
spoken favourably of Origen, and that he constantly studied his works.
ix.] ST. CHRYSOSTOM. 271
history and writings of those times the more firmly
am I convinced that Neander is right in saying that
the doctrine of final restitution, taken alone, never
was regarded as heretical, or as untenable within the
limits of the faith, until the furious attacks on Origen
two centuries after his death led men to mix up this
opinion, which I still believe and maintain was never
condemned by any general council, with others of his
opinions which were so condemned. Such is the opinion
of Neander. And in spite of the asserted unanimity
of the Church on the subject I have shown (i) that
the views of Origen were held by large multitudes
both in the East and in the West ; (2) that they were
defended by Church Fathers of the most splendid
reputation without any injury to their canonisation
or their character for orthodoxy; (3) that they found
champions in some of the deepest thinkers and ablest
writers of the three greatest theological schools the
school of Alexandria, the school of Antioch, and the
school of Cappadocia.
13. To ST. CHRYSOSTOM and his opinions on this
subject Dr. Fusey devotes nearly seventeen pages. 1
It was needless to do so ; for every one would admit
that St. Chrysostom again and again uses the ordinary
language about future punishment. He preached in
the corrupt, wicked cities of Antioch and Constanti
nople, and came into contact with many who, from
idle motives and amid frivolous lives,, with no earnest
ness of opinion and no depth of conviction, adopted
some of the widespread views that no Christian
would be doomed to hell, or that hell is nothing but a
threat of temporary punishment. Both these views
St. Chrysostom rejected, as most Christians do, and as
T myself do ; and rejecting them it was right that
he should most earnestly and emphatically warn those
who thus flattered themselves into a life of wicked
ness. No warnings could be too strong for such,
1 Whaf is of Faith, pp. 243-260.
272 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
It
and I have been even censured for the way in which,
in the very volume which is now under consideration,
I tried to impress such warnings on all my hearers.
Yet I greatly doubt whether St. Chrysostom, even
in his strongest passages, means to brand as un
orthodox even the Universalism of Origen, much less
any hope less large. By far the majority of the
passages quoted are as indecisive as the others on
which I have commented ; they might have been
used equally well by Origen, or by St. Gregory of
Nyssa. They are large metaphorical Scriptural ex
pressions, with which the great orator is not pro
fessing to deal philosophically or critically. Now St.
Chrysostom was a pupil of Diodorus of Tarsus,
and must therefore have been familiar with that
one opinion about final restoration which was
accepted even by those who in other exegetical
matters were, the ablest opponents of Origen. Does
St. Chrysostom ever say one word in disapproval of
Diodorus ? Does he ever distinctly formulate the
arguments of the Universalists, and show why he
considered them to be untenable ? He constantly
rebukes and most justly those who " deny hell " ;
but I find very little in him which excludes the
possibility of a belief in a modified Origenism ; and
no single word that excludes any view which I have
advocated. I therefore attach very great importance
to the fact that in the Thirty-ninth Homily on the
First Epistle to the Corinthians he mentions the view
of those who believe in the final extinction of evil
without a word of refutation and without a word of
disapproval.
In considering this let it be remembered (i) not
only (as I have said) that St. Chrysostom was the pupil
and panegyrist of one who on this point was a distinct
Origenist; (2) that though the charge of Origenism
brought against him at the Synod of the Oak was
absurd, yet it may have been grounded on some
ix.] ST. CHRYSOSTOM. 273
supposed leaning to this particular view of Origen s ;
(3) that he gave a cordial protection to the "tall
brothers" and the Origenist monks ; and (4) that he
is the writer of one of the very few passages which
sanction prayers for those who died in wilful sin.
Speaking of those who lived all their lives at random,
in luxury and wantonness, of whom it might even be
said that "it were good for them not to have been
born," he says : " Shall we not then wail for this man ?
Shall we not endeavour to snatch him out of his
perils ? For it is possible, if we will, that his punish
ment become light to him. If then we should offer
on his behalf continual prayers, if we should give
alms, even though he be unworthy, God will forgive
our importunity." 1 In two other places 2 he speaks
of doing what we can to procure some consolation
(Trafta^vOiav} for a dead sinner. Canon Luckock, who
quotes these passages, can see nothing " in them to
weaken the force of the writer s apparent conviction"
though introduced with qualifications and some
doubt "that a life of sin did not place the sinner
wholly beyond the influence of our prayers." 3
And besides all this, it must not be forgotten that
when Epiphanius had been goaded by the intrigues
of Theophilus of Alexandria to call a local synod for
the condemnation of Origen, and to take the decrees
of this synod with him to Constantinople, St.
Chrysostom refused to subscribe them, and sent
Epiphanius back to his see with what Bishop Rust
calls a "gentle snubbing" for his pragmatical med
dling because he thought it "very hard and unequal,
and not according to the manner of ecclesiastical
TOVTOV ovv ov 0pf]vf](roij.fv , ov irei/)a<rcfyie0a rv KivSij/wv e|apTra<raj ;
e<rri yap e<rrlv tuv de\oo/ji.ev Ko\><pT}v a\>r<f yivtaQai Tr\v K6\affu/. In Act.
Ap. Horn. xxi. 3.
In Joann. Horn. Ixi. 4 ; in Ep. I ad Cor. Horn. xli. 4.
1 After Death, p. 140. He adds, and the remark illustrates much
have said, "St. Chrysostom certainly lays himself open to a
charge of inconsistency."
274 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
*.
^
censures, that a person of so great learning and piety,
who had been so serviceable to the Church, who lived
two hundred years before, whose books no council had
condemned, should now be condemned by a small
packed synod of his professed enemies." 1
And here I must respectfully protest against Dr.
Pusey s remark that I imputed to St. Chrysostom
"accommodation, i,e. that he did not believe what
he said." " Accommodation," in the sense in which
the Fathers believed in its expediency, simply meant
that they sometimes dwelt on doctrines which they
thought useful, 2 and which were commonly accepted,
without entering into any controversy about them ;
without definitely stating their own views ; without
entering into details ; without saying all in public
which they thought themselves at liberty to say in
private ; without feeling bound to distinguish be
tween what they expressed in ordinary phrases and
the hopes which they might privately entertain that
some of those phrases were capable of a meaning
less sweeping and less exclusive than they conveyed
to ordinary hearers. 3 I do not support their views
on this subject ; but that such were their views is
undeniable. St. Chrysostom himself constantly refers
to the thought, " What is more profitable than the
fear of hell ? and yet even in the very heat and
passion of his rhetoric on the subject very little
escapes him which can be regarded as a distinct and
decisive repudiation of the views even of Origen,
much less of those who believed in some form of
temporary penal " fire." 4
Let us take the case of an orator analogous in
many respects to St. Chrysostom Bishop Jeremy
1 Bishop Rust, in The Phoenix, i. p. 10.
5 See Windet, De Statu Vita fund. p. 189.
8 Athanasius speaks of Dionysius as writing, /car oiKovo/j.lav t " oeco-
nomically," " or with reference to certain persons addressed , or objects
contemplated." Newman, Arians, ii. 44, n.
4 See note on Accommodation, " at end of chapter.
IX.] BISHOP JEREM Y TA YLOR. 275
Taylor. There are many variations of doctrine in
his different works ; but it would be very harsh to
say of these that in some instances " he must have
taught what he did not believe," or that "he could
not have taught this if he were an honest man." We
must take his opinions as we find them, consistent
or not. Allowance must be made in the cases of
such men for differences of mood, for rhetorical am
plitude, for power of imagination, for inexactitude
of language, for growth of opinions. Now from the
writings of Bishop Jeremy Taylor, and above all
from his Second Sermon on the Advent to Judgment,
may be gathered some of the most frightful passages
ever written in description of the horrors of hell ; and
yet it is clear that those agglomerations of horrible
torments in which he revels can only be regarded as
" bubbles, and flashes, and electrical apparitions from
the magic caldron of a fervid and ebullient fancy,
constantly fuelled by an unexampled opulence of
language." * For in a manner exactly analogous
to that of St. Chrysostom he alludes, without dis
approval or refutation, to the apparent belief of St.
Irenaeus and St. Justin Martyr in "conditional
immortality " ; and to the fact that the word ever
lasting only means " to the end of its proper period " ;
and to the argument that, " though the fire is ever
lasting, not all that enters into it is everlasting." *
And there are sufficient grounds to sanction Cole
ridge s remark that, in spite of all his " Tartarean
drench of descriptions, he probably held to the
view of the annihilation of the wicked, at least in
abditis fidei*
I will take two other instances to show that the
use of current phrases does not necessarily show a
man s unalterable opinion, and must not be taken
1 Coleridge. z Works, viii. 43.
5 See my sermon on Bishop Jeremy Taylor in Masters of Englis*
Theology, pp. 175-211.
T 2
276 . MERC Y AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
to explain away his obvious leanings to another
view.
One is the case of the poet Dr. Edward Young,
author of the Night Thoughts. No one has revelled
more than he has done in descriptions of an endless
hell, and yet in such lines as
" Ah, Mercy, Mercy, art thou dead above ?
Is Love extinguished in the Source of Love ? "
as well as in many other passages of his poems,
his leanings are obvious ; and it is known that he
greatly admired and heartily recommended the works
and sentiments of men who had earnestly pleaded for
a wider hope. (See his Moral Letters^)
The instance of Dr. Watts " the flower of Non
conformist orthodoxy" is still more remarkable.
His hymns have had no small share in spreading
and fixing the popular accretions to Christian faith ;
and I suppose that there are chapels where men and
women still "praise God by singing "
" There is a dreadful hell,
And everlasting pains,
Where sinners must with devils dwell,
In darkness, fire, and chains."
And yet it is certain that Dr. Watts did not hold, in
its ordinary sense, the doctrine of " everlasting pains,"
but held both the possibility of repentance after
death, and of the extinction of sentient existence.
One passage has already been quoted on p. 30, and
another, infra, p4Oi. Here is yet another:
" Whenever such a criminal in hell shall be found
making such a sincere and mournful address to the
righteous and merciful Judge of all, I cannot think
that a God of perfect equity and rich mercy will
continue such a creature under His vengeance, but
rather that the perfection of God will contrive a way
to escape, though God has not given us here any
revelation or discovery of such special grace as this."
ix.] ST. PETER CHRYSOLOGUS. 277
Now no one will say that the pious writer was not
a thoroughly honest man ; and yet he clearly uses
language which, literally taken, is not in accordance
with the more thoughtful and deliberate expression
of his opinions. Will any man of competent culture
deny that his real opinion is to be deduced from
the expression of his distinct thoughts when they
seem to correct and abandon the popular phraseology ?
If I do not follow Dr. Pusey farther through his
catena, it is only because enough has been said. But
the instances which I have examined are not the
only ones in which I could show that the Fathers
from whom he quotes used other language on the
same subject, and that they were therefore either
" inconsistent," or else that the terms which he quotes
from them are capable of a different interpretation.
By way of a single specimen take ST. PETER CHRY
SOLOGUS (t A.D. 450). He says in one place (Serin. 60,
De Symbolo) that " there is, after the resurrection,
no end either of good or of ill." Yet in another
(Serm. 123), speaking of the "great gulf," he says,
"those who have been assigned to penal custody in
hell cannot be transferred to the rest of the saints,
unless, having been already redeemed by the grace
of Christ, they be freed from this hopelessness by
the intercession of the Holy Church. So that what
the sentence denies them, the Church may obtain,
and grace bestow." I do not see what meaning can
be assigned to this passage, except that of the possi
bility that God may be pleased not to carry out to
the full His own threatenings the view, in fact,
which is not unfrequently alluded to by the Fathers,
but is usually associated in modern days with the
honoured name of Archbishop Tillotson.
II. A much briefer examination of the opinions of
the Latin Fathers will here suffice. Every one admits
that Origenism in general, and Origen s hope for a
final restoration of the wicked in particular, was much
278 ^ MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
less prevalent in the West than in the East ; and that
after St. Augustine s day, amid ever-deepening corrup
tions of religious truth, this hope was to a considerable
extent extinguished. It was extinguished, both be
cause men accepted the authority of St. Augustine
weak as his arguments on this subject are, and
wavering as is his language and also because they
assumed (as I believe erroneously) that this opinion
of Origen had been condemned with his other
opinions by some Conciliar decree. But this dis
semination of the popular view would not have
been either so rapid or so complete had it not
been that the gradual distinctness acquired by the
notion of " purgatory" rendered the notion of "hell 1
less immediately and overwhelmingly horrible to the
imagination of Christian men. 1
And yet many of my previous remarks about the
abatements which must be made from the asserted
evidence as to the opinions of the Greeks, apply
with scarcely less force to the passages quoted from
the Latins. 2 I shall, however, content myself with
considering the opinions of three great Fathers St.
Ambrose, St. Augustine, and St. Jerome ; and I shall
be much surprised if every really candid reader
does not admit that, though they all three reject
Universal ism (as I do myself), they neither held
those current errors which I have repudiated, nor
do they treat even Universalism as a recognised or
dangerous heresy.
I. As regards ST. AMBROSE I will merely ask the
reader to study with unbiased mind the following
passages :
a. " For the devil and his ministers will not be
1 "The doctrine of Purgatory was brought home to the minds of
the people as a portion or form of penance due to post-baptismal sin."
Newman, Es. on Development, p. 388.
2 Even Tertullian, fierce as he usually is, says "that a moderate
fault shall there [in the next world] be atoned for by a dday of resur
rection." De Anima, 38.
ix.] ST. AMBROSE. 279
scourged. The punishment is separated, where the
fault also is different. ... If human decision works
this result ): [namely, the obtaining of pity, and the
not hopeless exclusion from the possibility of re
pentance], "how much more must that of Christ
be awaited by all ? The judgment of the devil is
delayed that he may be ever a criminal in punish
ment, ever bound in the chain of his wickedness,
that he may undergo for ever the judgment of his
own conscience. So then that Dives in the Gospel,
although a sinner, is pressed witJi penal agonies that
he may escape the sooner. But the devil is shown
not as yet to have come to judgment," &C. 1
The passage must be considered with its whole
context. Petavius argues from it that it was the
opinion of St. Ambrose that the punishment of the
devil was put off because it was to be endless, but
that the punishments of men were inflicted imme
diately after death, " because they ought to be
moderated and limited by pity." Referring to this
passage of St. Ambrose, I had said that, though in
other passages he uses the ordinary language, he
here distinctly states the doctrine of universal re
stitution. Dr. Pusey thinks it enough to reply that
"he distinctly states the contrary." 2 Certainly St.
Ambrose was speaking only of men, but so was I.
I had declined to enter into the question about devils;
and in repeating that, in this passage, St. Ambrose
does distinctly imply the restitution of all men, I
find that Petavius says the same thing. The reader
at any rate has the materials wherewith to judge for
himself.
Further, if the passage be not of an Universalist
tendency as regards mankind, it is all the more in
favour of my own views. For Dr. Pusey can only
Ideo Dives iile in Evangelio, licet peccator, poenalibus torquetur
aerumnis, ut citius possit evadere." ST. AMBR. in Ps. cxviii. ad vs. I.
1 What is of Faith,, p. 109.
280 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
n.
set aside the Saint s evidence by saying, " It is no
where laid down that Dives is in the place of the
lost." Therefore, since St. Ambrose had no manner
of doubt that Dives was not lost, Dr. Pusey must
either concede to me the full weight of this Father s
opinion, or must give up the tenability of the argu
ments about this parable and the " great gulf fixed "
on which the popular notions about the lost are
mainly built.
/3. The other passage to which I referred was the
well-known one in his remarks on Ps. xxxvi., where
St. Ambrose says : " Although we shall not be
burned up, yet we shall be burned."
And again : " I shall burn till the lead melts
away. If no silver be found in me, alas ! I shall
be plunged down into the lowest pit, or consumed
entire as the stubble." 1
7. And again, speaking of I Cor. iii. 15, he says:
" Whence it is gathered that the man is saved in
part, condemned in part."
These three latter passages do not indeed convey
the doctrine or hope of a final restoration of all, but,
as Dr. Pusey says, they " contrast the temporal suffer
ing in the Day of Judgment with the eternal." They
therefore express the belief, which popular opinion
ignores or denies, that many may have to pass
through punishment hereafter, and yet may be saved.
But that was the very opinion which I have main
tained in my Eternal Hope, and which I am main
taining now.
8. There is a still more remarkable statement in
the Saint s comment on Psalm i. " Those," he says,
" who do not come to the first, but are reserved for
the second resurrection, shall be burned until they
fill up the times between the first and second resur
rection, or, should they not have done so, will remain
longer in punishment
1 St. Ambr. in Ps. cxviii. Serm. XX.
3X .] ST. AMBROSE. 281
e. And I am justified in saying that the whole
tone and bent of the mind of St. Ambrose were
on the side of trust in God s mercy and pity. Thus
he denies altogether, in one passage, any pain of
sense. 1 In the treatise on the Blessing of Death he
again and again expresses the thought that even to
sinners death is a boon, not a curse ; because the
punishment beyond the grave is less to be dreaded
than the state of sin in this life. Two quotations
will suffice :
" For," he says, if the guilty die " who have been
unwilling to leave the path of sin, even against
their will they still gain, not of nature but of fault,
that they may sin no more." The argument of the
whole passage is that " even for sinners death is
better than life."
f. And again he says (c. 7) that " Death is not
bitter, but to the sinner it is bitter ; and yet life is
more bitter than death ; for it is a deadlier thing to
live in sin than to die in sin ; because the sinner as
long as he lives increases his sin ; if he dies he ceases
to sin."
77. Once more let the reader study the book of St.
Ambrose on Penitence, and he will be able to judge
whether this saint would have sympathised most
with what I have said or with the crude horrors of
the popular Calvinism. 2 On that side would have
been Novatian the schismatic and Pelagius the here-
siarch ; on my side some of the very best, greatest,
and most orthodox of the Fathers.
2. ST. JEROME S language varies greatly. He is
not a consistent writer. But the following passages
prove this much at any rate (i) that even in his
1 " Ergo neque corporalium stridor aliquis dentium, neque ignis
aliquis perpetuus flammarum corporalium, neque vermis est corporalis."
-AMBROS. in Luc. vii. 14.
2 O. S. " Quos Christus ad salutem redemit, eos Novatianus damnat
ad mortem. Quibus Christus dicit . . . discite a me quia mitis sum j
Novatianu.s dicit Immitis sum." De Poenit. i. 2.
282 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
day the Church had not arrived at any fixed dogma
respecting the state of the dead ;. and (2) that the
hopes concerning those who died in a state unfit for
heaven were larger and more merciful than those which
popular theology has until very recently admitted.
a. Thus after admitting (an important fact) that
many in his day held that all punishment would
some day be ended, and that there would be "re
freshments " (refrigeria]^ which ought now to be
hidden from those to whom fear is useful, that,
dreading punishment, they may cease from sin, he
first says that we ought to leave this to the know
ledge of God, "Who knows whom, how, and how
long He ought to judge," and adds, " And as we
believe that the torments of the devil and of all
infidels are eternal, so as to sinners and the impious 2
who are yet Christians, whose works are to be tested
and tried in the fire, we believe that the sentence of
the Judge will be moderate and mingled with pity." 3
Petavius here thinks that Jerome has in mind in
fernal and not purgatorial fires, because he is arguing
against Origenists, who thought that they would end
after many ages. If so, he here expresses his belief
that all Christians would be saved, even though they
were sinners and impious. If not, he still grants all
for which I have argued the possibility of a retribu
tion or a purification not necessarily endless beyond
the grave.
/?. In another passage, rejecting the opinion that
"in the end of the world, the devil, coming down
from his pride, will repent and be restored to his
former place, because no reasonable creature made
by God should perish," he admits that it was held
by "very many," and that they supported it by the
1 "Refrigeria quae nunc abscondenda sunt ab his quibus timor est
utilis." JER. in Is. Ixvi.
2 " Atque impiorum," omitted in one MS., probably from dogmatic
bias.
8 Jer. in Is. Ixvi. 24. See supra, p. 43.
IX.] ST. JEROME. 283
allegoric explanation of the repentant king of Nin
eveh as being the devil 1 ; and in rejecting this notion
of the saivability of the devil as dangerous, and
saying that sinners shall be cast into the same fire,
he yet takes care to dwell predominantly on the
thought, " Merciful and just is the Lord, yea, our
God is merciful." " He so spares as to judge, so
judges as to be merciful."
7. A third passage is still more remarkable, and
I ask close attention to it.
Pelagius had broadly laid down the view, which
accords as nearly as possible with what is now the
popular view, that, "In the Day of Judgment the
wicked and sinners will not be spared, but will be
burned with everlasting fire." Undoubtedly any
clergyman who now maintained this view would be
regarded as a champion of the popular " orthodoxy " ;
but the Church of that day, on the contrary, con
demned Pelagius for this very statement.
" As to your saying that in the Day of Judgment
sinners must not be spared, but must be burned up
with eternal fires/ who can tolerate it ? and that you
should preclude the mercy of God, and before the
Day of Judgment judge about the sentence of the
- Judge ; so that if He may have wished to spare the
wicked and sinners, He cannot do so because of your
prescriptions ? 2 For you say it is written in Ps. ciii.
Let sinners and the unjust fail from the earth, so
that they may not be ; and in Ps. vi. The unjust
shall be consumed, and at the same time sinners, and
those who forsake God shall be consumed. And
you do not understand that the threatening of God
sometimes means clemency, for He does not say
that they are to be burnt up with eternal fires,
; In Jon. iii. 6, 7.
Illud veto . . . ferre quis potest et interdicere te misericordiam
Dei, et ante diem judicii de sententia judicis judicare, ut si voluerit
iniquis et peccatoribus parcere, te praescribente, non possit?" - JER. in
Pelag. i.
284 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
but that they fail from the earth and cease .to be
unjust It is one thing that they should cease
from sin and injustice, and another that they should
perish for ever and be burnt up with eternal fires.
Lastly, Isaiah .... says this properly of heretics
who, leaving the right path of faith, shall be consumed
if they have not willed to return to God, whom they
have abandoned."
Then after defining that l< unjust " and " sinners "
are not the same as " impious," and that the " im
pious " shall not rise up in the judgment, being
pre-judged to perdition, whereas " sinners J: should
not perish for ever, though they should not rise in the
council of the just, Jerome adds, " If, however, Origen
says that no rational creature is to be destroyed, and
ascribes repentance to the devil, what is that to us
who say that the devil and his hosts, and all the
ungodly and transgressors perish for ever, and that
Christians if they have been overtaken (by death)
in sin, are to be saved after punishment ? " l
Petavius compares with this the similar remark
of Gilbert of Poictiers, who says on Ps. i. that " the
impious will not be judged, because they have
been judged already, but that " sinners await a
sentence which saves by fire." 2
As to this remark of Pelagius " In die judicii
iniquis et peccatoribus non esse parcendum, sed
aeternis eos ignibus exurendos " although it is so
indignantly condemned by St. Jerome, I venture to
think that if, five years ago, it had been brought
forward, without further hint, at almost any " cleri
cal society," it would at once have been accepted
as expressing the opinion of many of those present.
1 "Si autem Origenes omnes rationabiles creaturas dicit non esse
perdendas, quid ad nos qui et Diahclum et satellites ejus, omnesque
impios et praevaricatores dicimus perire perpetuo ; et Christianos, si
in peccato praeventi fuerint, salvandos esse post poenas." JER. in
Pelag. i. 28.
2 " Peccatores vero, exspectare sententiam quae salvat per ignem."
ix.] THE SYNOD OF DIOSPOLIS. 285
The Church of the fourth century was, however,
so little inclined to accept it that it was made
the subject of an express charge against the Welsh
heretic in the Synod of Diospolis, A.D. 415. The
arguments about it are excessively vague and misty,
but Pelagius, who undoubtedly used a good deal
of " accommodation and succeeded (as all admit)
in completely mystifying the minds of the good
Fathers assembled at Diospolis, " said that he only
meant his remark in the sense of Matthew xxv. 46,
and that, if any one thought otherwise, he was an
Origenist" If the synod was satisfied with this, and
yet were at first inclined to regard the statement as
heretical, their views must have been exceedingly
plastic and exceedingly ill-defined. Not only does
St. Jerome, as we have seen, indignantly reject
the dogma of Pelagius, but it is also clear from the
remarks of St. Augustine that the sentiment of
Pelagius was accused of being heretical because it
was understood as being meant to deny what the
Church accepted as a truth on the authority of I Cor.
iii. 13 namely, that some would pass through fire
and yet be saved. 1 The Synod of Diospolis, and
St. Augustine, and St. Jerome, and Dr. Pusey, are
all anxious to explain that the suspicion of the synod
respecting the " too broad " remark of Pelagius arose
not because the Fathers denied an endless hell, but
because they believed in a terminable purgatory. So
then after all this controversy it appears that they
all hold exactly what I have been so much attacked
for holding namely, that there is such a thing as
a terminable retribution beyond the grave I They
condemned in Pelagius the implied notion that there
is an endless hell beyond the grave, and that there is
no form of future retribution (e.g. no purgatory) which
is terminable. The Diospolitan bishops and Augus
tine and Jerome, and the whole Catholic Church in
1 De Gestis Pdagii, iii. 10. On this Synod, see infra, p. 339.
2^6 .MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
their day, and all Roman Catholics, and most German
Protestants, and many English Protestants, all hold
the long obliterated doctrine which I trust that I
have helped to restore to prominence in many minds,
that though some souls may be lost for ever and
ever, there is also such a thing as a terminable
retribution (call it purgatory, or the probatory fire
of the Day of Judgment, or what you will), beyond
the grave. The prevalent belief in the Church has
been for ages exactly what I said it had been namely,
that (as Dr. Pusey expresses it) there are sinners
who, when their work has been burned, shall be
saved, but so as by fire."
8. St. Jerome sometimes also indicated a view of
which glimpses are recognisable in many writers,
that what is evil in men may be burnt up without
involving their own endless destruction. " If, there
fore," he says, "any man have tares in his conscience,
these the flame will consume, these the conflagration
will devour." 1
e. And if any one will read St. Jerome s remarks
on Is. v. he will see that while the saint very decisively
rejects the salvability of devils, he invariably alters
the tone of his language when he speaks of men.
Of them he uses language which, while it sounded
like the language which had become current in his
time, was yet perfectly capable of another explana
tion. It is clear to me from this circumstance that
St. Jerome secretly, though not always consistently,
inclined to the "larger hope." In this he resembled
his adversary Rufinus, who while in his first apology
he eagerly defends himself against the charge of
believing that the devil would be saved, is far more
ambiguous in the terms he uses about men. 2 And
how little the vague terms " eternal," &c., are to be
pressed in St. Jerome appears from his use of the
term "infinite ages" twice over in a passage where
1 Jer. in Isaiam, lib. xviii. ad fin. 2 See Petav. /. c. iii. 8, II.
ix.] ST. AUGUSTINE. 287
he is actually discussing the possibility of those
" infinite ages " coming to an end. 1
f. Again, in the commentary on Amos he says,
" Therefore both Israel, and all heretics, because they
had the works of Sodom and Gomorrha, are over
thrown like Sodom and Gomorrha, that they may be
set free like a brand snatched from the burning. And
this is the meaning of the prophet s words, Sodom
shall be restored as of old, that he who by his vice
is as an inhabitant of Sodom, after the works of
Sodom have been burnt in him, may be restored to
his ancient state."
I conclude, then, with Daille an unprejudiced wit
ness, because vehemently opposed to every deviation
from the current opinion that St. Jerome leaned to
this modification of Origenist opinions, which else
where he only partially repudiates. 2 Those who
know the impassioned ferocity of Jerome s style
know how very differently he deals with this opinion
and with those which he really repudiates.
3. ST. AUGUSTINE did more than any man to settle
the popular conviction in the distinct and definite
belief that there is an endless hell. He did this far
more by his authority, which was immense, than
by his arguments, which, in the one main passage
in which he discusses the question, are singularly
In a passage quoted by Rufinus he says that the thought of possible
refrigeria of the lost should be concealed from those to whom feai is
useful, and that we must leave the quomodo and quamdiu of future
judgment to the knowledge and pity of God. Invectiv I. in Hieron.
That notion of refrigeria, "refreshments," "pauses of torment," &c.,
in hell, to which some Fathers allude, is found also in the Rabbis,
who say that the wicked have every day an hour and a half of rest at
the time of prayer, as veil as the whole Sabbath i.e. fifty-one hours
a week. Jalkuth Reubeni, f. 167, 4; Jalkttth Chadash, f. 51, I, &c.
(Stehelin, ii. 54, 56).
3 Dallaeup, De Poem s, 378. " Sunt ergo haec plane Origenica, qualia
Hieronymus non pauca in commentariis suis immiscuit, quae ipse alibi
non quid em omnino sed aliquatemus repudiat." Comp. Bellarmine,
De Purgat. ii. I.
288 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
*.
empty and feeble. 1 And yet St. Augustine himself,
dubious and tentative as his own language is, also
did more than any man to lead .the Church into a
belief in that terminable retribution that " purgatorial
fire " beyond the grave that cleansing pain, whether
in the intermediate state or at the Day of Judgment
which was my main thought in Eternal Hope?- For
" Eternal Hope" means "hope in the life to come" ;
and I meant thereby the hope that from some forms
of retribution which might fall on us beyond the
grave there was a possibility of ultimate deliverance
that there was a " remedial fire as well as an
unending doom. 3
a. He holds that there are different degrees of
suffering among the lost. 4 He admits as tenable
the opinion " that the pains of the damned are at
certain intervals of time in some measure mitigated."
He furnishes decisive evidence of the numbers of
those whom he calls " our party of compassion
(nostri misericordes}? He thinks it necessary in a
friendly spirit {pacifice) to argue against such views
as that all the baptised, 6 or all communicants, 7 or
all Christians, even if they lived ill, or all who gave
alms, would be saved, 8 showing thereby how far all
1 See them analysed in the Rev. F. N. Oxenham s Letter on Ever
lasting Punishment^ p. 79.
2 It must not be forgotten that Augustine furnishes us with the
strongest proofs of the entirely unsettled state of the question among
Catholic Christians even in his day. This is why he finds it necessary
to argue (l) against Origenists ; (2) against those who thought that all
men would be saved ; (3) or all baptised Christians ; (4) or all but
heretics ; (5) or all who remained in Catholic communion ; (6) or all
who had given alms. De Civ. Dei. xxi. 18-22 ; Enchir. 67; ad Dulcit.
21. "In his De Civitate Dei, after speaking of the fire at the judgment,
he goes on to change its position . . . and places it between death and the
resurrection ; yet still he observes his hesitating and conjectural tone."
Tracts for the Times, No. 79, p. 41. 3 See Eternal Hope, passim.
4 Enchir. c. iii. 5 De Civ. Dei, xxi. 17. 6 Id. 20.
7 Id. 19 (referring to John vi. 58).
8 Id. 22 (referring to I Cor. iii. 15 ; Eph. v. 30). " Sed qui hoc
credunt, et tamen Catholici sunt, humana quadam benevoleutia falli
videntur." Enchir. 67.
ix.] ST. AUGUSTINE. 289
Christians were from fixed opinions on these subjects.
He mentions the notion of those who thought that
God would hear the intercessions of His saints, and
so render punishment less than endless, or that He
might, as in the case of the Ninevites, withdraw His
threats. 1 He says in one place that the sacrifice of
the altar, and of alms, were propitiations for those
who were not very bad, and that even for the very
bad they might perhaps be of advantage, " either
that there may be a full remission, or certainly that
the damnation may be more endurable." 2 Writing on
Ps. Ixxvii. (" for God will not forget to be gracious "),
he argues that the wrath of God, if incompatible
with His putting an end to eternal punishment, is not
incompatible with His " applying or interposing be
tween their tortures some alleviation." 3 He argues
that our Lord s words to Judas apply only to the
worst and most impious sinners. 4 In all this he by
no means speaks with that dogmatic positiveness
about the most intricate problems of the future, and
especially of the Intermediate State, 5 which now
characterises the most ignorant of mankind. He was
far from that air of infallibility with which any rash
curate whether literate or illiterate now imagines
that he can announce ex cathedrd his own entirely
valueless opinion. Thus he says of the opinion that
the purgatorial fire will in the interval between death
and judgment burn away venial sins, " I do not
1 Id. 18. Some of his remarks in 24-28 are meant for a refutation of
these views ; but they are very much feebler than we should have
expected, and are indeed founded on assertions, or on entire misapplica
tions of Scripture. 2 Enchir. cxii.
3 "Non tamen contineat miserationes suas non aeterno supplicio
finem dando, sed levarnen adhibendo, vel interponendo cruciatibus."
AUG. /. c. See on this Petr. Lombard, Sentent. iv. 46A. " Si valde
malis detur mitigatio poenae ? "
4 " Cum hoc Deus non de quibuslibet peccatoribus, sed de fceleratis-
simis et impiissimis dixerit."- hi Julian, v. n.
See Enchir. 62 ; Exam, in Ps. Ixxx. ad Jin. \ Ps. cvii. ; Horn. iii.
ad Princip.
U
290 ^ MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
refute it, because perhaps.it is true." * And of the
slower or speedier cleansing of the faithful by fire
after this life he says, "It is not incredible, and
whether it be so or not may be considered, and either
be discovered or remain unknown." 2
/?. It is also observable that St. Augustine believed
that Christ by His descent into hell liberated the
souls even of sinners, though he introduces this
doctrine also with one of his hesitating phrases, " It is
not undeservedly believed." 3 The simple fact is that
St. Augustine vast as have been the consequences
of his opinions had very little to say which is
authoritative on the subject. Far be it from me to
ask the blunt question of Pelagius : "And what is
Augustine to me ? " (Et quis est mihi Augustinus ?) *
But he " was evidently puzzled as to the meaning of
Hades," and was so far from sharing the convictions of
every infallible modern clergyman on such subjects
as these, that, even of the dwelling of the saints in
Hades till they were thence delivered by Christ,
he only says, " hand absurde videtur" 5 and frankly
admits that the nature and meaning of the word
" eternal " is still a matter for careful investigation.
Even as to I Cor. iii. 1 5 , he says he finds it very obscure,
and would rather hear others explain it. 6 Largely
as he has moulded the eschatological opinions of
Christendom, St. Augustine himself when he treats
of them by no means shows that " unhesitating con
fidence," or that "vehement and intrepid dogmatism
which so largely helped to secure acceptance for his
1 De Civitate Dei, xxi. 20, "Non redargue, quia forsitan verum
est.
2 Ench. 69. "Incredibile non est et utrum ita sit quaeri potest et
aut inveniri aut latere."
3 " Christ! animam venisse usque ad ea loca in quibus peccatores
cruciantur ut eos solveret a tormentis quos esse salvandos . . . judicabat,
non immerito creditur." De Genes, ad lit. xii. 33, 63.
4 As reported by Orosius.
6 De Civ. Dei, xx. 15. 6 De Fide et Spe, 15, 1 6.
ix.] UNCERTAINTIES OF ST. AUGUSTINE. 291
theological conclusions. 1 " Non abhorret, quantum
arbitror a ratione veritatis " ; " Incredibile non est " ;
" Quod quidem non ideo confirmo, quoniam non
repello"; " Non immerito creditur"; "Non absurde
videtur" ; " Forsitan verum est " : such are the very
indecisive answers of the oracle on most important
points of Christian eschatology. I confess that the
impression left on my mind is that he would never
have wavered as he has done, nor decided as he has
done, if he had thoroughly realised the true meaning
of aionios of which he was not aware, because of
his imperfect knowledge of Greek.
And one more point is certainly remarkable, which
is that though he unquestionably accepted the doctrine
of endless torments for the damned, he never in a
single place tells us that the Church had specifically
condemned the hope of Origen as regards men only.
He invariably mixes up that hope as other Fathers
do with the irrelevant and to us unpractical question
of the salvability of devils, or with speculations about
cycles of existence and antenatal life. Thus in the
two passages most generally quoted to prove that
the Church had condemned Universalism, St Augus
tine says, " This the judges [at Diospolis] understood
of that which in truth the Church most worthily
detests in Origen, that they who the Lord says will
be punished with eternal punishment, and the devil
himself and his angels will after a time ... be freed
from punishment and will be united in a society of
blessedness with the saints who reign with God." 2 In
the other he rejects Origen s Universalism by simply
saying that the Church rightly rejected him (jure
reprobavit] for what ? Not for his large hope, but
for this and other things, and most of all for the
alternations of bliss and misery " ; for he adds
Origen "lost the semblance of mercy by assigning
1 See Milman s History of Christianity, ii. 276 ; Bishop Forbes,
On the Articles, ii. 334. 2 De Gestis Pelagii, iii. 10.
U 2
292 ^ MERC Y AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
to the saints true sufferings in punishment and false
bliss" -false because it was not eternally secured to
them. 1 It is therefore not fair to quote the phrase
"jure reprobamt " and " Hoc detestatur Ecclesia " of
Universalism pure and simple. The "hoc" in ques
tion was not this one point, but this one point as
a single element and that by St. Augustine s own
admission the least questionable element in a vast
mass of other opinions. And in reading these
passages we have to remark that he offers no argu-
ments whatever against Origen s "merciful opinion."
He thinks to knock it down (i) by saying that the
Church has condemned it taken in connection with
other opinions which the Church condemned more ;
and (2) by a bald dogmatic assertion respecting which
he himself elsewhere expresses great doubts that it
is against the Word of God. 2
(1) As to his first point, we should have been glad
if he had told us where the Church condemned it. It
would have been quite beside the mark to argue that
tfae Church condemned it because long after Origen
had been laid in his honoured grave, and long after
he had moulded the best thoughts of many of the
best thinkers of the Church " Origenism " (which is
a very large word indeed) was condemned, or was
supposed to have been condemned in the lump. In
deed I feel the most firm conviction that even Uni
versalism never would have been condemned as a
general hope, or a permissible opinion, if it had not
been erroneously mixed up with many other specula
tions which the Church rejected.
(2) St. Augustine quotes no text in this place to
show that such a hope is " against the Word of God
(contra recta Dei verba) ; but he doubtless had in
1 In De Haeresilus, c. 243, he speaks of the liberation of the devil,
and mixes all the notions together, e.g. " De purgatione et liberatione
ac rur.-us, post lorigum tempus, ad eadem mala, revolution e rationalis
univenae." 2 De Civ. Dei, xxi. 17.
ix.] ST. AUGUSTINE S "ARGUMENTS" 293
mind the text to which he refers so frequently, viz.
Matt. xxv. 46. Like so many of the Latin Fathers,
&c., St. Augustine erroneously supposed that aionios
necessarily meant "endless." This mistake influences
their entire view. 1 The ablest and most learned Greek
Fathers knew better ; they knew that aionios meant
"that which belongs to the future aeon," and that
"aeonian life" and " aeonian punishment" have no
other meaning than the life and the punishment of
the world to come. The endlessness of beatitude
rests on far other " texts " than this ; the endlessness
of misery for some may be the necessary deduction
from other Scriptures ; but it is nowhere indisputably
asserted; and certainly can only be inferred from this
passage by an ignorance which is unaware of, or a
prejudice which sets at defiance, the most indisputable
facts. Probably the champions of the popular view
will continue to repeat in spite of its ten-times-
demonstrated feebleness what I again call this
battered and worthless argument. St. Augustine
thought that aionios meant " endless " partly (per
haps) because his knowledge of Greek was " late-
acquired, and at the best imperfect" 2 ; but a total
ignorance of Greek, and of all things else, is no ex
cuse for the repetition of the error, in face of the
most positive demonstration. If Augustine had not
been born an African and trained as a Manichee,
nay, if he had only faced the labour of learning
Greek thoroughly a labour from which he confesses
that he had shrunk 3 the whole stream of Christian
theology might have been purer and more sweet.
Take, for instance, Augustine s direct " argument
about aion and aionios. To call it an "argument" is
an extravagant compliment, for it is a mere untenable
and self-refuted assertion. Aion, he says, does often
"Cumfalsum aliquid in principle sumserint . . . necesse est eos
in ea quae consequuntur incurrere." LACTANT. Inst. iii. 24.
2 See Tillemont, 3 Confess. i. 14.
294 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
>.
mean a limited period, but aionios always means
" endless/ This is a specimen of that asserting style
of which Augustine is a master. It instantly occurs
to him, however, that this is not primd facie true, and
indeed the two passages which he quotes (Lev. xvi.
29, 36) are sufficient to show that he is wrong. His
attempt to get rid of, and explain away, these usages,
is really beneath all refutation. It is impossible that
any moderately-educated modern reader should re
gard it as adequate. Huet admits the failure : " Quod
est literam destruere," he asks, " si hoc non est ? "
Augustine himself is so conscious of the falsity of
this piece of philological criticism, that he takes
refuge in the old assertion that torments must be
endless because bliss is endless. In such "argu
ments they may acquiesce who are content with
the impossible and obsolete philology of fourteen
centuries ago. 1
(3) And yet this seems to have been the main
consideration which swayed the hesitating conclusions
of St. Augustine. It was helped out, however, by
another no less untenable. He shut himself out
from the inferences which naturally spring from the
mercy of God by arguing that the devils will cer
tainly be condemned to endless torments. If, then,
their punishment (he argued) is consistent with God s
absolute love, so must be also the endless punishment
of men. The argument is futile on every ground, but
is sufficiently nullified by the fact that of the nature
and degree of Satanic and diabolic culpability we
know absolutely nothing. 2
I end with two passages of St. Augustine, written
it may be in his milder moods, but very instructive :
i. Speaking of Dives and Lazarus, he says, " How
that flame of Hades is to be understood, that bosom
of Abraham, that tongue of the rich man, that finger
1 Aug. c. Priscillianistas, 6, J.
8 Aug. De Civ. Dei, xxi. 17-23 ; Baur, Dogmengesch. ii. 440.
IX.] WA VE RINGS OF ST. AUGUSTINE. 295
of the beggar, that thirst of torment, that drop of
refreshment, is perhaps scarcely discoverable by those
who inquire with gentleness, but by those who con
tend in a quarrelsome spirit, never?
ii. The other is as to the meaning of the word
" eternal." Again and again has St. Augustine
dogmatised on this philological question. He makes
loud assertions about it, with which his earlier Mani-
chaean proclivities had much more to do than his
imperfect knowledge of philology. Yet there, were
moments in which even he is forced to waver and
in his commentary on Matt. xxv. 46 he feels him
self obliged to repudiate much of his own dog
matism on the subject. " I would not," he says,
" say this so as to seem to close the door to a more
careful consideration as to the punishments of the
lost, and the sense in which they are in Scripture
called eternal." O si sic omnia f Had he always
spoken in this modest tone he might have saved the
Christian world from many perils.
It would have been far better for the Church if her
mediaeval admiration of Augustine had been less
blind, and if her sense of his fallibility, and the many
limitations of his knowledge and intellectual power,
had been more decided. It would have been above
all well for her if she had noticed that, in spite of all
his dogmatism, he did not, in his humbler moments,
even profess to have closed the door of inquiry on a
subject concerning which his means of coming to an
authoritative conclusion were far inferior to those of
some of his contemporaries, many of his predecessors,
and thousands of those who have approached the
inquiry with that added knowledge of many cen
turies which God has vouchsafed to His Church by
the Light of His Holy Spirit, shining age after age
in the hearts of His Prophets and His Sons.
1 De Gen. ad Litt. viii. 6.
296 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
NOTE ON ACCOMMODATION
Dispensatio}. ,
The first Church writer who uses the word "oeconomy" in the
sense of " accommodation " is Clemens of Alexandria (Strom, vi.).
To use " oeconorny " was also called acting tcard. ffvfj.irepKpopdv. The
word " condescension " (ffvyKarafiavis) occurs ia St. Chrysostom
(Hom.VA. in Tit.}. The Fathers attribute "oeconomy" not only to
St. Paul (e.g. when he circumcised Timothy), but even to our Lord.
Thus St. Basil is so bold as to remark on Matt. xxiv. 37, TOVTO SLO.
TiyooTreiTjTTjs dyvoias olKovojj.ti (Ep. 8, p, 84). This surely is a bad
instance of irreverent reverence.
"Towards the uninitiated," says Gieseler, 1 "the Alexandrians re
garded a certain accommodation as necessary, which might venture to
make use even oi falsehood for the attainment of a good end, nay,
which was even obliged to do so ; and hence they did not scruple to
acknowledge such an accommodation in many ecclesiastical doctrines."
The doctrine came to them from Plato, who allows the use of
falsehood as a kind of moral medicine. 2 Philo borrowed from Plato
the same notion. Truth ought always to be used, he, says, to the
initiated and the noble-natured ; but those whose natures are dull and
blunt, and blind and childish, need a sort of healing treatment. " Let
all such, therefore, learn things that are false by means of which they
may be benefited if they cannot acquire sober-mindedness by means of
truth. " s
From Plato and Philo this unwholesome tendency which it will be
seen goes farther than the mere suppression of truths beyond the compre
hension of the hearer was inherited by the great Alexandrian Fathers.
"They, "says St. Clemens, "are not in reality liars who arv/j.-rrepi-
0fp^6*/oi (take circuitous methods) because of the oeconomy of
salvation." 4
"Let a man, however," says Origen, referring to the above-quoted
passage of Plato, who is obliged to speak falsely, be very careful so
to use falsehood sometimes as a spice and medicament, otherwise," he
adds, "we shall be judged as enemies of Him who said, I am the
truth. " 6
Again, in another passage, Origen quotes the remark of Solon, that
he had not proposed the best laws possible, but the best he could ; and
applies it to the Christian doctrine of punishments, the threat of which
was best adapted to the amendment of obstinate sinners. 6
1 Eccl. History, i. 234, E. tr.
- De Rep. iii. lv (papu-aKov elSet.
8 Philo, Quod Deus sit immutabilis, p. 3 O2
4 Clem. Alex. Strom, vi. p. 802.
6 Strom, vi. ap. Jer. Apol. I in Rufin. 1 8. There is a tract on
" accommodation " by F. A. Carus, Leipz. 1793.
6 Contr. Celsum, iii. 159.
IX.] NOTE. 297
It was to eschatology especially that this doctrine was applied.
Both Clemens and Origen avowed that they had certain esoteric doc
trines, 1 and the latter expressly implies that they were in part escha-
tological. In the Stromata, St. Clemens says that there were some things
which he was afraid to write, because he was on his guard even against
speaking them. 2
Origen speaks of "hidden mysteries of God which must not be
committed to paper," and will not linger on some subjects "because
they are known to the learned, and can never be known to the
unlearned. " 3
So, too, Jerome alludes to the refreshments "which are now to be
hidden from those to whom fear is useful, that, dreading punishment,
they may cease from sin." 4 It is clear that he both believed in
these "refreshments," and agreed with those to whose opinions he is
referring.
Synesius, when he accepted the bishopric of Ptolemais, openly
accepted the prae-existence of souls, and denied the resurrection of the
body, and believed that "the pure truth could never become the
popular faith." He held the Platonic distinction between exoteric and
esoteric truth, and merely pledged himself not to teach in public any
acknowledged heresy. 5
The reader will find much that bears on the subject in Tracts for the
Times, No. 80, "On Reserve in Communicating Religious Know
ledge."
If any one will read Schrockh, Kirchengeschichte, x. 380-395, or
Daille, De Usu Patrum, vi., and Cardinal Perron, De Eucharistia
( passim], he will, I think, see how many of Dr. Pusey s arguments about
the supposed " positive teaching " of some of his authorities fall at once
to the ground.
1 Orig. c. Cels. i. p. 7.
2 Qofiovfj.vos Ae-yeti/ 8. ital ypafaiv e$uA.aa,u77J/, Strom. i. p. 324, and
speaking of eschatology, r& 8 &\\ a ffiyw 8odfav rov Ktpiov. Comp.
Origen, De Princip. I. vi. I.
3 Orig. in Ep. Rom. ii. 479, Horn, in Lev. ix. 244.
4 Jer. in Is. Ixvi. ad fin.
5 Synesius, Ep. 105.
CHAPTER X.
ORIGEN.
" Vir magnus ab infantia." JER. ad. Psammach.
" Condemno, inquis, et pro haeretico declare ! If a sane te et
orthodoxiae studiosum, et formularum caute loquendi laudabiliter
tenacem ostendis : sed nimium in jndicandis aliis festinas. Ignosce
aliquid, si potest ignosci, viris pietate coruscis baud fucata ; viris de
omni Ecclesia Christiana tarn praeclare alibi mentis ; viris quorum et
aliqui martyrii corona ornati, coram throno Servatoris, ^icut soles
fulgent, imo etiamnum pro salute militantis ecclesiae orant." DIETEL-
MAIR, De Descensu Christi, p. 35.
* Now, Truth, perform thine office ! waft aside
The curtain drawn by prejudice and pride ;
Reveal the man is dead to wondering eyes
This more than monster in his native guise."
COWPER.
WHATEVER may have been his speculative errors,
on which I will touch farther on, few men have ever
rendered to the Church such splendid services, or
lived from childhood to old age a life so noble and
so blameless as Origen ; nay, more abused and
anathematised as he has now been for centuries it
has been granted to few men perhaps scarcely even to
the far less learned and far less profound Augustine
to mould so decisively on a multitude of subjects the
opinions of the Church of God. Amid the rage of
his enemies, great saints sustained and God Himself
blessed his cause. 1
1 Tillernont, OrigZne, art. i. " Que Dieu meme sembloit se declarer
pour lui, en faisant entrer par lui dans la verite et dans le sein de son
CHAP, x.] ORIGEN. 299
Unlike Augustine, who, though he became a pillar
of orthodoxy, was for many years a Manichee, and
for many years a half-heathen rhetorician, and who
bore till his latest day the traces of his Manichaean
heresy and his rhetorical training, Origen was a
Christian from his birth. Unlike Augustine, who,
though he passed by repentance into a life of holi
ness, lived many years of his life in concubinage and
in sinful lusts, Origen, from his early boyhood, bore a
character on which not even the most virulent of his
enemies could fix one authentic stain.
In briefest outline, 1 what is the story of the life of
Origen this greatest of all the great Christian
teachers of the three first Christian centuries ? 2
Origen Adamantius 8 was born at Alexandria about
A.D. 1 86. He was the son of the martyr Leonides,
who trained him from his earliest years in the Holy
Scriptures. Even as a child he showed an intellect
so powerful and precocious that his father, though he
would often check his eager questionings, yet in his
joy at the birth of such a son would often come to
him when he was asleep and reverently kiss the
bosom "in which it seemed so clear that the Holy
i >
Eglise, ceux que cette meme Eglise met aujourd hui entre ses plus
grands ornemens."
1 For this slight sketch of the life of Origen I have consulted (among
others) Gregory Thaumaturgus, Panegyr. ; Eusebius, //. E. vi. 2-4,
8, 10, 1 6, tuadflassim; Socrates, H. E. ii. 35, &c., and vi. 13 ; Sozo-
men, H. E. viii. 11-14; Nicephorus, H. E. v. 2-33; Suidas, s. v. ;
Vincentius Lirinensis, c. ffaer, xxiii. ; Huet s Origeniana ; Tillemont,
vol. iii. (ed. 1699) ; Baronjus, Annales / Cave, Lives of the Primitive
Fathers, i. 213-240; Schrockh, ChristL Kirchengesch. iv. x. 158-266,
xviii. 40-60 ; Redepenning s Origenes, and Guerike, De Schola
Alexandrina. 2 Tillemont, Origene, art. i. ad in.
3 Cave says he was so called " either from the unwearied temper
of his mind and that strength of reason wherewith he compacted his
discourses, or his firmness and constancy in religion, notwithstanding
all the assaults made against it." Lives, i. 215. Others attribute this,
and his other names, Chalcenteros, Chalceutes, and Syntaktes, to his
indefatigable toil (Suidas ; Jer. Ep. xvii.). But it appears from
Eusebius that it was his proper name. See Huet, Qrigeniana, p. 81
(in De La Rue s edition, vol. iv,}.
-3oo MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
Spirit of God had made His temple." 1 From his
father s training he passed into that of St. Clemens
and Ammonius Saccas.
In the tenth year of the Emperor Severus a violent
persecution broke out against the Christians, and the
boy showed so passionate a desire for martyrdom that
he was only restrained by the tears and entreaties of
his mother. But when Leonides 2 was arrested, Origen
was so eager to share his father s fate that his mother
could only keep him at home by concealing his
clothes, 3 so that he could do nothing but write to his
father, entreating him not to succumb. 4 Leonides
was beheaded, and Origen, then but sixteen years
old, was left the sole support of his widowed mother,
and of his six younger brothers. As his father s
goods were confiscated, the family would have been
in absolute destitution, had not Origen been adopted
by a wealthy Alexandrian matron. Dislike to holding
any communion with a notorious heretic a certain
Paul of Antioch who also shared the lady s hospi
tality, made him eager to win an independence for
himself by taking pupils in " grammar." This he
was easily able to do from the astonishing range of
his acquisitions, which comprised also ethics, logic,
rhetoric, geometry, philosophy, and later on even
a knowledge of Hebrew, which was at that time
extremely rare. 5
Applied to by heathens to teach them the elements
of Christianity, he won many over to the faith.
Among his first converts were the martyr Plutarchus
and his brother Heraclas, who succeeded Origen
as Catechist in the school of Alexandria, and sub-
1 Pectus facit theologum.
2 Suidas is mistaken when he says that Leonides was a bishop.
3 TT)J/ iraffav avrov eff&rJTa d.TTOKpv^a/j.evi/] otnoi /xeretv a.va.yKf\v tiTTJ yev.
EUSEB. H. E, vi. 2.
4 eTTexe MTJ Si T]/j.as &\\o TI Qpovfiaris. SlJID.
5 Jer. De Virr Illustr. He says that he mastered Hebrew in a few
months. Ep. ad Paulam. xxii. ; Greg. Thaumaturg. Panegyr.
X.] LIFE OF ORIGEN. 301
sequently became Patriarch of Alexandria. The
martyrs Serenus and Herais were also among his
pupils, 1 and later on the confessor Ambrosius. Called
by Demetrius at the age of eighteen to the catechetical
chair of the famous school in his native city, 2 he
distinguished himself by the zeal and assiduity with
which again and again he risked his life in attending
upon the martyrs in prison and on their way to death.
Meanwhile his life resembled his teaching, 3 and, as
even Epiphanius admits, his teaching equalled the
sanctity of his life. 4 He lived in the strictest asceti
cism, and having given up his secular work in order
to devote himself exclusively to sacred teaching, he
sold his precious books of heathen literature that he
might gain by the sale of them the fourpence a day
on which he lived. He tasted no wine ; he slept on
the bare ground ; he fasted constantly, even to the
severe injury of his health; he wore no shoes, and
would not possess two coats. 5 To avoid all suspicion
and all possibility of impurity to which his youth
might otherwise have subjected him, seeing that he
numbered women as well as men among his pupils,
and that in times of persecution he had to visit them
at all hours of the day and night, he was misled by
a mistaken but heroic literalism into that self-mutila
tion of which, as an intellectual error, he afterwards
repented. 6 For that error due as it was to an im
perfect judgment, but to the noblest moral motives-
he received at the time not only the forgiveness, but
the admiring approval of the Patriarch Demetrius.
1 See Baronius, Ann, A.D. 299.
" The first five holders of the chair of catechist at Alexandria were :
i, Pantaenus ; 2, Clemens ; 3, Urigen ; 4, Heraclas ; 5, Dionysius ;
6, Athenodorus. 3 Euseb. H. E. vi. 3.
.
4 Epiphan. Haer. Ixiv. 2 ; comp. Euseb. H. E. vi. 3, dlov fovv rov
\6yovToidv5e (patrl Kai rbv rpoirov. Nicephorus, H. E. v. 4.
5 Matt. x. 10.
6 Matt. xix. 12. Eusebius rightly says that " though it was a youth
ful error, it yet gave proof of the greatest faith and temperance."
H. E. vi. 8.
302 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
^,
He was himself so little desirous of fame that
he endeavoured to throw into the shade his own
immensely increasing reputation. But a glory which
was now spreading throughout the whole Church
excited the envy of many, and among others of
Demetrius himself. After a short visit to Rome in
the time of Zephyrinus about A.D. 21 1 he returned
to Alexandria, resigned part of his work to Heraclas,
and devoted himself to the study of Hebrew and of
Gentile philosophy, in which, according to Porphyry,
he made great advance. About this time he con
verted from the Valentinian heresy the devout and
wealthy Ambrosius, who, by supplying him with
seven amanuenses, and other means of study, en
abled him to begin those vast biblical labours which
produced so rich a fruit. About A.D. 216 he visited
Caesarea, and though he was still young, and only
a layman was invited by the Bishops Theoctistus
of Caesarea and Alexander of Jerusalem to discourse
publicly in the church. Although his conduct was
perfectly in accordance with precedent, it furnished
the jealous Demetrius with his first occasion for an
attack upon him. It was at Caesarea, in all pro
bability, that he began his great work, the Tetrapla,
afterwards developed into the Hexapla, a work suffi
cient to eternise the name of any man. By virtue
of this task he rendered an inestimable service to
the Church bf all ages, and must be regarded as the
founder of the school of biblical criticism.
Hurried home by the envy of Demetrius, he re
sumed his catechetical labours ; but being summoned
to Greece in order to encounter the growth of heresy,
he was, on his way, ordained Presbyter by the
Palestinian bishops at the instigation of the sainted
Bishop of Jerusalem. It was this circumstance that
made the enmity of Demetrius blaze out in the most
undisguised manner ; and he had the brutality not
only to heap his invectives on the good bishops of
x.] MISFORTUNES OF O RIG EN. 303
Palestine, 1 but even to taunt the man whom in his
heart he must have felt to be so incomparably his
superior, with that rash act of his youth which in
former days he had himself not only condoned, but
openly praised. 2
It may have been during this journey that Origen
had his famous interview at Antioch with Mammaea,
the mother of the Emperor Alexander Severus,
who desired to see him from the universal honour in
which he was held.
Meanwhile his life was embittered by the hostility
of his bishop, 3 to whom it was permitted (as it has
been penally permitted to thousands like him) to
make sad a heart which surely God had not made
sad, and to poison the very springs of happiness in
the life of the saintly scholar. Taunted not only
with the mistaken heroism of his early sacrifice to
purity, but with a story of which the real facts
1 To this disgraceful jealousy the ancients unhesitatingly attribute
the outburst of attacks against Origen. rpfirerai Sia rovro Arj/j.frplia
els /juffos TO <f>i\rpov ital ot firaivoi els rovs joyous (Photius). He adds
that Pamphilus stated this distinctly /ecu ras fj.(v air las t| &v awsftt)
ras SmySoAos fKpayrjvai r(f OpryeVet ravras (f>r)(ri. Id. Bibl. Cod. Il8.
2 Origen himself (Pro,?/, in Joann. Opp. vi. 101, ed. Benedict)
says that he was banished by the enmity of Demetrius. " His ordina
tion was infinitely resented by Demetrius, .... and now the wind
is turned into a blustering quarter, and nothing but anathemas are
thundered against him from Alexandria." CAVE. Eusebius ascribes
this man s conduct to envy at the honour, learning, and virtue of
Origen. H. E. vi., 8. "Trained as a peasant, he would be unlikely
to understand one by whom he was so absolutely eclipsed." EUSEB.
Chron. St. Jerome says that he was carried away by such a burst of
fury and madness as to write against him to all the world. Cat. Virr.
ilhistr. liv. " Ardore quodam aemulationis (ut est captus hominum)
incensus apud episcopos totius orbis eum [not for here.-y, but] tamquam
absurdissimi facinoris reum notare tentabat." BARONIUS, Ann. A.D,
230. See too Schrockh, iv. 33.
3 Jerome speaks of a letter in which Origen fiercely attacks (lacerat
atque invehitur) Demetrius. If he did so, under such fearful provo
cation, it \vould show that he was human. Jerome was the very last
man who had a right to find fault with such language ; but the only
passage which he quotes is signally calm, moderate, and self-restrained,
(Jer. in Kuf. ii, 5.)
304 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
"%
will perhaps never be known, and which is pro
bably a wicked fabrication, 1 but which even if
it be true leaves no stain upoa his character, but
rather the reverse, Origen was driven from Alex
andria by a Synod of Egyptian Bishops under the
influence of Demetrius. Having in vain tried to
procure his degradation from the priesthood by this
synod, Demetrius got together some other bishops,
creatures of his own, and procured his degradation. 2
But this, be it observed, was not for any of his
opinions, respecting which, so far as we know, no
word was said. 3 Even this was not enough for
episcopal envy. 4 Since Origen was warmly welcomed
1 It is not even alluded to by Eusebius or Pamphilus, or by Por
phyry, who had seen Origen ; or by his contemporary, Dionysius
of Alexandria ; nor is it mentioned by St. Jerome, Rufinus, Vincent
of Lerins, or Theophilus of Alexandria bitter as some of them were.
It first occurs in the weak, credulous, and violent Epiphanius, who,
envenomed as he was against Origen, whom he could not understand,
yet admits that many foolish stories were current against him (Epiphan.
Haer. Ixiv. 229), and, in his worst and weakest manner, adopts and
circulates this story. (See Tillemont, iii. 356 ; Baronius, Ann.
A.D. 253.)
2 These two Egyptian synods are mentioned in the Apology of Pam-
philus ap. Photius, Cod. cxviii. St. Jerome says that they were actu
ated by sheer envy of his greatness, as was also the synod at Rome
(apud Rufin. Invert, ii.), and he says expressly that none of the three
condemned him for heresy. " Urbs Roma ipsa contra hunc cogit
senatum, non propter dogmatum novitatem., non propter haeresim, ut
nunc adversum eum rabidi canes simulant, sed quia gloriam elo-
quentiae ejus et scientiae ferre non poterat et illo dicente ornnes mutt
putabantur." Ap. Rufin. Invert, ii. And yet we are constantly told
so reckle.-s is the way in which prejudice will snatch at the falsest
assertion that Universalism was condemned by these two Egyptian
synods ! A cause which thus uses the weapons of falsified history
cannot in the long run prosper.
3 Those who venture to tell us that Origen s views of future restora
tion were condemned in these Egyptian synods and at Rome, not only
state what is the reverse of fact, but seem unable to see that if those
views had been condemned the case of those who embrace them is
indefinitely strengthened by the circumstance that, in spite of such
supposed condemnation, the best part of the Church still held Origen
in the highest honour, and treated his excommunication as a mere
dead letter.
4 Dr. Newman calls Origen " a victim of Episcopacy." Hist. Essays,
i. 406
x.J INCOMPARABLE SERVICES OF ORIGEN. 305
and protected by the bishops of Palestine, Phoenicia,
Arabia, and Achaia, Demetrius wrote to every bishop
whom he could influence to procure his excommu
nication a thing which it was not difficult for a
Patriarch of Alexandria to do, especially when there
was no one to dispute his own party statements.
Ordinary bishops, in those days, it must be remem
bered, were often men of neither theological nor
secular learning, and it would not be difficult to
imagine that many modern teachers, living and dead,
of the purest life and the profoundest learning, would
have had little chance of escaping " degradation,"
" excommunication," or any other penalty which
theological hatred can inflict, if their fate depended
on isolated metropolitans, and meetings of provincial
clergymen. Demetrius soon after went to his account ;
but though Heraclas succeeded him, Origen was not
recalled, and thus some of the noblest works of
Christian antiquity, including the ablest ancient
defence of Christianity, and commentaries upon a
large part of the Bible, were written by a " degraded "
presbyter and an excommunicated exile ! l
His Hexapla was called Opus Ecclesiae, as though
it were a very special treasure of the whole Church ;
but the local Church for which he had laboured,
night and day, in zeal and holiness, had been in
fluenced by the spleen of one heart to drive him
from her bosom. " Calm, pitying, he retired." No
word of anger escaped him. No word of anger, at
any rate, is found in his extant writings, and very
few even of apology and explanation. He left his
1 "All this combustion vanished into smoke, Origen still retaining
his priesthood, publicly preaching in the Church," &c. CAVE, /. c.
On the total disregard of these censures in the Churches of Palestine,
Arabia, Greece, &c. , see a good note of Valesius in his edition of
husebius, p. 124. Doucin says that " the storm raised against him did
not hinder him from being consulted as the oracle of Asia and Greece,
or from being called the Master of the Churches. Even Rome
respected him, and Egypt seemed to repent for having treated him so
ill." Hist, de T Origenisme^ p. I.
X
306 .MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
cause to God. He found . in Palestine an honoured
home, and all the rest of his life was passed in the
same blameless and beautiful tenor. It was at this
period that he became the teacher of St. Atheno-
dorus and of his great and glorious brother Origen s
early panegyrist St. Gregory the Wonder-worker ;
others of his pupils were Bishop Theodorus of
Jerusalem, and Dionysius, afterwards Patriarch of
Alexandria. It was at this period, too, that he re
converted to the orthodox belief Beryllus, Bishop of
Bostra, who on more than one occasion gave him public
thanks. 1 Excommunicate and "heretic" as he has
been called, he was yet invited to be present at a
general synod in Arabia, in which he won over a
new sect of heretics by his arguments, and also saved
Arabia from the spread of the Elcesaite heresy. 2 At
this time, too, he wrote his great work against
Celsus, and his treatise on Martyrdom, to encourage
Ambrosius and the presbyter Prototectus to face
death. He might console himself under the evil
jealousy of Demetrius, while he had the love and
esteem of Alexander of Jerusalem, and Theoctistus of
Caesarea, and Firmilian of Caesarea in Cappadocia,
and St. Gregory Thaumaturgus, and many more
among the contemporary Bishops and Saints of God.
By this time Decius (A.D. 249-251) had succeeded
to the empire. Origen boundless as was the energy
which won for him the admiring titles of Chalcenteros
(brazen-bowelled), and Chalceutes (brazier) was now
utterly worn out with sorrows and persecutions ; with
the violence which more than once in life he had
endured at the hands of Pagan persecutors ; with
lifelong poverty and severe self-denial ; with long
journeyings and inexhaustible labours. Perhaps he
1 St. Jer. s. v. Beryllus.
2 He speaks of these Elcesaites in his Horn, in PP. Ixxxii. ap. Euseb.
H. E. vi. 38. They were a Judaising sect chiefly in Palestine, who
denied the divinity of Christ. (See Marcossius, De Haereticis, p. 151.)
x] GLORY OF O RIG EN. 307
was still more worn and weaned with the fierce
hatred which had been stirred up against him ; with
the wilful misrepresentation of his opinions, against
which he appealed in vain ; with the interpolation of
his books by enemies ; with the circulation of the dead
liest calumnies concerning him ; with the meanness y
the perversity, the stupidity, the ingratitude of man
kind ; with the narrow, remorseless ignorance of an
embittered ecclesiasticism. We know of no man in
the whole Christian era, except St. Paul, who laboured
so incessantly, and rendered to the Church such in
estimable services. We know of no man, except St.
Paul, who had to suffer from such black and bitter
ingratitude. He, the converter of the heathen, the
strengthener of the martyrs, the profoundest of
Christian teachers, the greatest and most learned
of the interpreters of Scripture, he to whom kings
and bishops and philosophers had been proud to
listen he who had refuted the ablest of all the
assailants of Christianity he who had founded the
first school of biblical exegesis and biblical philology
he who had done more for the honour and the
knowledge of the Oracles of God, not only than all
his assailants (for that is not saying much), but than
all the then bishops and writers of the Church put
together he who had known the Scriptures from
infancy, who had vainly tried to grasp in boyhood
the crown of martyrdom, who had been the honoured
teacher of saints, who had been all his life long a
confessor he in the very errors of whose life was
more of nobleness than in the whole lives of his
assailants he who had lived a life more apostolic,
who did more and suffered more for the truth of
Christ than any man after the first century of our
era, and whose accurately measurable services stand all
but unapproachable by all the centuries, he who
himself tells us that he had consecrated to God s
service, not some parts of his life, but all his
X 2
308 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
%
actions 1 had now reached the time of his welcome
death. Persecution began once more to "rage.
He whose father was a martyred saint he who
would have been a martyred saint at the age of
sixteen if his mother had suffered him was not
likely to shrink from martyrdom when, bowed down
with labours and sorrows, he had reached the age of
nearly seventy years. But his persecutors almost
as cruel as his ecclesiastical enemies desired only
to torture him, while they withheld from him the
martyr s longed-for crown. He was seized and im
prisoned, and loaded with fetters, but kept alive in
the midst of torments. Fire was applied to his limbs.
Heavy masses of iron were laid on him. For many
days his feet were stretched four holes apart in the
stocks in agonising tension. He bore it all with
patient magnanimity, and, if not under those tor
ments, yet in consequence of them, he died a man
who may have erred, as millions of men have erred,
but a martyr and a saint if ever there lived on earth
a martyr and a saint of God. 2 From the fury of the
heathen, from the worse fury of professing Christians,
he passed to the presence of his Saviour, into a peace
in which he can but cast a pitying smile if to souls
in bliss there be any knowledge of things on earth
at the posthumous dishonour heaped on his memory
by men who verily think, in their ignorance, that they
have a zeal for God.
" Certainly," says Mosheim, " if any man deserves
to stand first in the catalogue of saints and martyrs
and to be annually held up as an example to Chris
tians, this is the man ; for, except the apostles of
Jesus Christ and their companions, I know of no one
Tn Joann. proem,
2 Pamphilus called Origen s death a "martyrdom," and the name
was freely given to the endurance of cruel and dangerous tortures,
even if the sufferer survived for a time. See Origen, Opp. iv. Append.
14 (ed. De La Rue. Paris, 1759). He probably died in A.i>. 253,
threfc years after the Decian persecution.
x.] GLORY OF ORIGEN. 309
among all those ennobled and honoured as saints,
who excelled him in virtue and holiness." " There
were homilies before his," says Canon Westcott,
" but he fixed the type of a popular exposition.
His Hexapla was the greatest textual enterprise of
ancient times ; his treatise on First Principles the
earliest attempt at a systematic view of the Christian
faith. Both in criticism and interpretation his labours
marked an epoch."
And this is the man the man who proved himself
the first writer, the profoundest thinker, the greatest
educationist, the most accurate critic, the most
honoured preacher, the holiest confessor of his age
the man who first laid down the lines of a syste
matic study of the Bible the man whose labours
are the eternal heritage of the Church the man at
whose feet saints and martyrs had been glad to sit
this man, whose whole life was one continuous
martyrdom of seventy years this is the man at
whom every self-contented sciolist, and every igno
rant Pharisee, has thought himself entitled to fling
a stone, on the ground that his enemies who them
selves largely appropriated (as Jerome did) the results
of his labours asserted that he had erred in specu
lative opinions ! Whether and to what extent he did
so err, we shall perhaps be enabled to see, but I for
one will never mention the name of Origen with
out the love, and the admiration, and the reverence
due to one of the greatest and one of the best of
the saints of God. I know nothing so deplorable
as to read the malignant nonsense which has been
written about him by such writers as Nicephorus and
Suidas, and by many who are not worthy so much
as to kiss the hem of his garment. That these
should write of the author of the Hexapla and the
Book against Celsus in a tone of patronage ; that all
the lies circulated against him by wicked gossip should
have been credulously swallowed ; that Baronius
3io MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
and Bellarmine, Luther and Beza should have
openly doubted whether he -was not doomed ta^end-
less torments, is sufficiently painful and shameful. 1
But that forgers, like the Pseudo-Caesarius, should
venture to talk of " the insane and impious Origen";
that the "feeble hands iniquitously just" of men
who never bore one of his trials, or emulated one
of his virtues, or rendered any service whatever to
the Church of Christ, or read one of his books, or
could so much as understand five lines of them if
they attempted to do so ; that men without pity,
without purity, without learning, without humility,
without any knowledge of Scripture, or of theology,
or of history, or of God, should still write of him as
they venture to do is one of the most deplorable
of the many deplorable facts which face us in
page after page of ecclesiastical controversy. If
the legend of Belisarius begging for an obolus
had been true, it would have been less calculated
to awaken our indignation than the fact that
an Origen was condemned by the machinations of
a Theophilus, and at the command of a Justinian.
Even one who joins in the outcry against his asserted
heresies Vincent of Lerins speaks thus of him :
" If a life confers authority, great was his industry,
great his purity, patience, endurance; if nobility or
bearing, what could be nobler than to be born in a
house glorified by martyrdom ? Thus deprived, for
1 Whole volume? have been written to prove that Origen was in hell.
A certain St. Mechtildis, in the fourteenth century, saw Samson, Solo
mon, and Origen in torments, and was told that it was to show the
peril incurred by the strongest, wisest, and most learned. " Origenem,"
says Luther, "jamdudum diris devovi." But Luther only judged of
him through Augustine, and is not here alluding to his e.schatology.
" Peu de personnes," says Doucin (Hist, de I Origenisme, p. 81), "dans
la communion de Rome, o-ent douter de sa damnation eternelle."
Picus of Mirandola was all but condemned by the masters of theology
at Rome for arguing that it was more reasonable to believe that he was
saved ! Apol. vii. 199. Since the seventh century Popes at their con
secration abjured hi> errors, and said that he, Didymus, and Evagrius
were " aeternae condenmationi submissi" Diurn. R. Pontif., p. 312.
x.] GLORY OF ORIGEN. ?>\i
Christ s sake, not only of his father, but even of all
his means of living, he made such advance between
the straits of holy poverty that he was often tor
mented (it is said) for the name of Christ. . . So pro
found, so keen, so polished was his power of intellect
that he far and much surpassed almost all ; such was
the splendour of his learning, and of all erudition,
that there were few parts of sacred philosophy, and
scarce any perhaps of human philosophy, which he
did not attain. . . . Why should I speak of his
eloquence ? It was like flowing honey. It rendered
the abstruse clear, and the difficult most easy. But
perhaps he merely argued ? Nay, no Father ever
appealed more frequently to Scripture. Perhaps he
wrote but little ? No one ever wrote more. Perhaps
he was not fortunate in his pupils ? No man was
ever more fortunate. Innumerable teachers, innu
merable priests, confessors, martyrs, arose from his
bosom. And who can tell what admiration, what
glory, what favour he enjoyed among all ? What
man with anything like real devotion did not fly to
his teaching from all parts of the world ? What
Christian did not venerate him as a prophet, what
philosopher as a master? Even imperial princes
venerated him. Porphyry himself, when a youth,
sailed to Alexandria solely to see him in his old age,
and recognised in him one who had climbed the very
citadel of science. The day would fail me before I
could tell of all his greatness, or even touch on a part
of it." i
It is said that when he was driven from Alexandria
he was invited to preach at Jerusalem, and, rising
before the congregation, gave out as his text Psalm
1. 1 6, I/ " But unto the wicked saith God, Why dost
thou take My covenant in thy mouth, seeing that
thou hatest to be reformed, and hast cast My words
Vincent. Lirinensis, adv. Haer, xxiii. p. 351. (I have compressed
his remarks.)
312 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
behind thee*? " and then, laying down the Book,
burst into such a storm of tears and sobs that he
could not proceed, while his congregation wept with
him. The discourse which he is- said to have de
livered on this occasion, called " Origen s Complaint,"
is spurious, and the whole story may have been in
vented to prop up the brutal and foolish scandal first
recorded by Epiphanius. But if this sad incident at
Jerusalem was true, nothing but the most wooden
incapacity can mistake its true significance. It only
furnishes a fresh instance of the humility for which
Origen was pre-eminent. The confessions of the
holiest are ever the deepest and most sincere. A
man like Origen might weep for faults which a
Demetrius or a Theophilus might almost have re
garded as virtues ; and if he thus wept, the tears may
have been wrung from him by the malice of others,
not by the reproaches of his own sensitive and
tender conscience.
"Blush, Calumny, and write upon his tomb,
If honest eulogy will leave thee room,
Thy deep repentance of thy thousand lies,
Which, aimed at him, have pierced the offended skies
And say, Blot out my sin, confessed, deplored,
Against Thine image in Thy saint, O Lord ! "
I know but one life since the Christian era which ought
so deeply to stir the compassion of repentant mankind
as that of Origen. It is that of another, whose genius
shone like a beacon light over the centuries that
succeeded him Roger Bacon. He, too, for the
gifts of genius and the trials of lifelong devotion,
reaped only the base and cruel ingratitude of the
race which he had striven to ennoble and to serve.
But it is now time for us to mark when it was that
the execrations first uttered by the wicked malignity
of Demetrius began to break out generally against
him ; and to mark also who were his enemies and
who were his friends.
x.] ENEMIES OF ORIGEN. 313
Let us begin with his enemies. Who were those
who, after his death, martyred the martyr afresh with
a yet more cruel and more enduring martyrdom ?
DEMETRIUS was his enemy. Of Demetrius and
his creatures I have said enough. They have for
centuries sunk into oblivion. No good word nor deed
of theirs survives. Their evil manners live in brass ;
and some of them have left no trace of any virtues
which could be even written in water. Their very
names are unknown, nor would they have been so
much as heard of but for their connexion with the
great man whose life they embittered. They enjoy
that most ignoble of all forms of earthly immortality,
the infamy of being remembered as the persecutors
of a man transcendently greater and better than
themselves.
MARCELLUS OF ANCYRA was his enemy. 1 Like
many over-eager assailants of real or supposed
heretics, he was himself deposed for heresy by a
Constantinopolitan synod in A.D. 336, and again at
Sirmium in A.D. 351. His pupil Photinus openly
professed the Sabellianism with which Marcellus was
charged. Thus the first systematic attack on the
orthodoxy of Origen as regards the Nicene faith came
from one who was condemned as a heretic.
EPIPHANIUS, who died a hundred and fifty years
after him (A D. 403), was his determined enemy. He
was a man of some learning and some piety, but the
very .type of a narrow bigot. He too, like many who
have been conspicuous for their zeal in trying to fasten
the charge of heresy on those who deviate from their
own Shibboleths, himself trembled on the verge of
heresy. He threw the diocese of John, Bishop of
Jerusalem, into turmoil and sedition by his meddle
some encroachments, and when almost in his dotage
he was entangled in the schemes of the unscrupulous
f Theophilus of Alexandria, and died on his return
1 Ap. Euseb. c. Marcel!, i. 23.
3H MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
from a wrongiieaded and futile attempt to intimidate
and to depose St. Chrysostom.
THEOPHILUS OF ALEXANDRIA, one of the" most
disgraceful characters in ecclesiastical history, was
his chief enemy. He died A.D. 412, and was known
to his contemporaries as " the Trimmer and " the
Turncoat." He was at first an avowed Origenist, 1
and argued against the Anthropomorphites from the
works of Origen. From motives of policy he turned
round and persecuted the Origenists. 2 He hated St.
Chrysostom also, because he had failed to prevent
the saint s election to the see of Constantinople. To
Theophilus was due the first deposition and banish
ment of that great man. When the people of
Constantinople insisted on the recall of their good
bishop the turbulent intriguer had to make his escape
secretly by night.
METHODIUS OF OLYMPUS wrote a book against
Origen ; but he also wrote much in his praise, and it
is at least a question whether the panegyrics were
not later than the attacks. 3
EUSTATHIUS OF ANTIOCH (f circ. A.I). 337) wrote
a book against him which only deals with minor
points, and is of no importance.
APOLLINARIS THE HERESIARCH wrote against him,
probably because Origen was an orthodox defender
of the faith respecting the nature of Christ. 4
1 It is a most instructive and important fact, that originally the name
" Origenist " had no connexion with eschatology at all, but meant those
who held the truth that "God is a Spirit without body, parts, or
passions," against ignorant Anthropomorphites. See Sozomen, H. E.
viii. ii, 12; Nicephorus, H. . xiii. 10.
2 When charged with studying Origen after he had condemned him,
he said that " Origen s books were like a garden; he selected the
flowers, avoiding the thorns." Socr. H. E. vi. 17.
3 Socrates, H. E. vi. 31, says that the praises of Origen were "by
way of palitiode to the previous censures, and Eusebius does not
contradict this. See Valesius notes to Socrates, p. 80.
4 Socrates, in his remarkable chapter in defence of Origen (H, E. vi.
13), calls these four men <f>t\o\oi8opoi, and "a four-horse chariot of
detractors, going in different directions."
X.] ENEMIES OF O RIG EN. 315
Certainly of some of these, and especially of
Theodore of Alexandria and the Emperor Justinian
and the heretic Apollinaris, it may well be said that
as far as their characters are concerned their blame
was an honour, and their praise would have been a
reproach.
Now who were they who first called him heretic ?
Not apparently even the basest and most envenomed
of his contemporaries. 1 They condemned him for
acts perfectly lawful and not without precedent,
which they regarded as ecclesiastical irregularities :
for his preaching as a layman before bishops ; for his
being ordained, in spite of his physical condition,
by the bishops of another province ; for a vile
story, supported by little or no evidence, which
attributed to him (to him the martyr from boyhood !)
the crime of apostasy. Books published against his
will books garbled by the crime of interpolators
misrepresentations of his views alike by his friends and
his enemies 2 passages which he merely formulated
for the purpose of speculative discussion 3 were used
to excite or to increase the odium which Demetrius
had first stirred up. But so far from being excom
municated as a heretic he was "honourably enter
tained, wherever he came, by the wiser and more
moderate party of the Church." 4 His so-called "ex
communication," -even if it was not (as some think)
withdrawn, was not only despised as invalid by a
large number of bishops, but was even treated as
nugatory in Alexandria itself.
Before his death Origen received a loving letter on
martyrdom from his own patriarch Dionysius, who
carried his views even to the patriarchal throne ; he
died amid the universal veneration of the Churches
1 .This is clear from the silence of Theophilus, Epiphanius, &c.
2 Orig. Horn. xxv. in Luc. This remarkable passage may be found
quoted on the title-page of Eternal Hope.
3 o>s fy\TU)V KCU yvfj.vdcav ATHANAS. Def. NIC. vi. 27.
4 Cave, Lives of Fathers, i. 224.
316 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
in which he had chiefly laboured, and for centuries
afterwards they still pointed to his honoured-tomb
at Tyre as to a martyr s resting-place. 1
And whereas his opinions were n ever branded, nor
his name anathematised till long after his death, this
is how the very greatest, holiest, noblest, and most
orthodox of his immediate contemporaries and suc
cessors speak of him for two centuries. Even as late
as a century and a half after his death, Origen was
still " held in great glory in all the world! 2
ST. GREGORY THAUMATURGUS, his friend and pupil,
Bishop of Neocaesarea, one of the saintliest of the
saints of his day, and one who enjoyed the highest
honour and estimation among his contemporaries,
wrote the panegyric of him which abounds in the
warmest praises. Could the holiest and most re
spected bishop of his day have pronounced a glowing
eulogy on an excommunicated heretic ? Could he
have called him as he does a man of almost divine
endowments ? Could he have expressly thanked his
guardian angel for having brought him under the
influence of Origen ? 3
PAMPHILUS, martyred in A.D. 309, eminent as a
biblical scholar and large-hearted thinker, and founder
of the public library and theological school of
Caesarea, was an ardent admirer of Origen, and wrote
his "Apology for Origen " in five books, the comple
tion of which was only prevented by his martyrdom
in the Diocletian persecution. 4 He spoke of him as
1 William of Tyre, Hist. Sacr. xiii.
1 Niceph. H. E. xi. 17.
3 The panegyric of Origen by St. Gregory is printed in the fourth
volume of De la Rue s edition. I select from it this passage : irepl
yap dj/8pbs 8ia.voovfJ.ai ri Xsysiv fya.LVOiJ.fvov p.ev Kal SOKOVVTOS dvOpdnruv,
rJ> Se iroAu TTJS e|ews TO?S KaOopav Suoi/a^ueVots, a.Trea Keva.a fj.ei ov ^877 pcifoyt
TrapaffKevfj jUer di/acrracrecus Trpbs TO Qtiov.
4 Euseb. H. E. vi. 53. Rufinus, in A.D. 397, wrote an incorrect
Latin version of the first book, which is still extant (it is printed in
the Appendix to vol. iv. of De la Rue s edition of Origen), and Rufinus
attributes it to Pamphilus alone.
x.J FRIENDS OF ORIGEN. 317
having been "for many years a master of the
Church." An anonymous Latin writer says that
Pamphilus and Eusebius quoted many testimonies
of the primitive Fathers in favour of Origen s views
as to prae-existence and restitution. 1 The loss of this
Apology is an irreparable misfortune to theology.
ST. ATHANASIUS, "the father of orthodoxy," the
Patriarch of the very city in which Origen had
laboured, who was so uncompromising an enemy of
every opinion which could be supposed to lead (as
those of Origen are now asserted to do) to Arianism,
so far from condemning him, speaks of him as we
have seen twice with loving epithets, made large use
of his works, and once expressly quotes his authority
for the true doctrine respecting the Eternal and
con-substantial Son. 2 If the Arians ever quoted or
misquoted him on their side, I prefer the testimony
of St. Athanasius, and of many other saints to theirs.
ST. DIONYSIUS, PATRIARCH OF ALEXANDRIA, sur-
named the Great, was his pupil and friend, and wrote
him a letter on martyrdom, full of praises, shortly
before his death. 3 This proves that the persecution
of him had been almost exclusively the work of
Demetrius. 4
ST. BASIL THE GREAT, Patriarch of Antioch, one
of the foremost Churchmen of his day, drew up a
Chrestomathy from the writings of Origen (calling it
j] <f)L\oKa\ta, or " love of the beautiful ") in conjunction
with St. Gregory of Nazianzus. It was drawn up "with
a view to the diffusion of Origen s spiritual ideas, and
1 Multis praecedentibus Patrutn testimoniis usus est pro praedictis
erroribus."
2 In the face of this fact it seems marvellous that Origen should have
been ever called an Arian. Jerome says, " He everywhere acknow
ledged the co-eternity of the Son with the Father." Stephen Gobar
(ap. Phot.)
3 -rrepl (tapTvptas -rrptis rov n.piyevr]v. Euseb. //. E. vi. 46 ; Stephen
Gobar, ap. Phot. Cod. 232.
* Photius, Cod. 117. See Guerike, De Schol. Alex. p. 67 : " Ori-
geni ejusque dogmatis valde favisse dicitur."
3i8 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
particularly of his principles of interpretation." In it
these two great Fathers refuted the Arians otit of
the writings of Origen. 1
ST. GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS not only loved and
admired his writings, but gave unmistakable proofs
of favourable judgment respecting his hopes of the
final restoration. He called him "a lover of the
beautiful" (pkilokalori), and "the whetstone of us
all" ; and he spoke of the Pkilokalia as containing
"extracts useful for the learned."
DlDYMUS THE BLIND, OF ALEXANDRIA, "a prodigy
of science," adopted Origen s whole system, except
where any points had been expressly condemned,
and esteemed him so highly and defended him so
warmly as to have been charged with adopting his
errors. 2 The testimony of these great Alexandrians
in his favour shows how little was thought of
Demetrius and his alleged excommunication.
PlERIUS OF ALEXANDRIA was called in compliment
" the young Origen " by the Christians of Alexandria,
who could not therefore have looked on his name with
disfavour. 3
ST. HILARY OF POICTIERS closely imitated Origen
in his work on the Psalms, and translated into Latin
much of his commentary on Job. 4 He followed
Origen in many respects, 5 and especially as to the
probatory fire. 6 There is no accounting for the
vagaries of literary custom, but to us it does not
seem very creditable to St. Jerome, St. Hilary, and
1 Niceph. H. E. xi. 17.
2 Socrates, H. E. iv. 25. " Origenis apertissimus propugnator."-
BARONIUS, Ann. a.d. 347. Even Doucin ?ays that the Doctors of
this age regarded Origen s books as " une source inepuisible de
lumieres."
3 Phot. Cod. 119 ; Jer. Cat. Virr. lllustr. 76 ; Photius says, 3\v
V TO?S d$io\oywrdrots.
4 Jcr. Cat. Virr. lllustr. c. 76 ; Guerike, p. 75.
5 See the Benedictine Preface to his works, n. 29.
G In Matt. ii. 4 ; in Ps. cxviii. iii. 5, 12.
x.] FRIENDS OF ORIGEN. 319
other Fathers, that they should have t( robbed poor
Origen without any mercy, and yet scarcely do him
the honour so much as to name him." l
JOHN OF JERUSALEM, a holy and humble bishop
who presided at the synod of Diospolis, A.D, 415, in
opposition to the wild attacks of Epiphanius, openly
avowed himself a reader of Origen, and refused in
any way to sanction the attacks upon his asserted
errors. St. Jerome charged him with holding eight
alleged errors of Origen. 2
ST. GREGORY OF NYSSA, though a great and in
dependent theologian, was deeply influenced by Origen,
and embraced more openly than any other his views
on Universalism. He calls him " the most illustrious
master of Christian philosophy who had lived up till
those days."
EUSEBIUS OF VERCELLAE is expressly ranked by
St. Jerome among Origen s admirers and imitators.
EUSEBIUS OF CAESAREA (died circ. 340) added the
sixth book to the Apology for Origen, begun by the
martyr Pamphilus. He says that it was undertaken
because of the detraction against Origen, 3 and was
addressed to Patermuthius and others who were
condemned to the mines of Palestine. 4
TITUS, BISHOP OF BOSTIA, spoke of him with
honour.
ST. FIRMILIAN, Bishop of the Cappadocian
Caesarea, one of the most eminent and respected of
the Asiatic bishops, was his special friend, and
received him for some time after his banishment
from Alexandria. 5
ST. VlCTORiNUS, Bishop of Pettau in Styria, saint
Daille, De Usu Patrum, cap. vi.
1 See Jer. Ep. in Joannem, 23.
3 <$n\a.iTia>v eWa. Euseb. If. E. vi. 53. Probably one of these
detractors was Methodius of Olympus, whose name Eusebius design
edly passes over in his history, just as Jerome takes no notice of Rufinus
in his catalogue of illustrious men.
4 Photius, Cod. n 8. 5 Euseb. H. E. vi. 27.
320 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
and martyr/ borrowed largely from Origen, and
translated some of his works freely into Latin. 1
ST. AMBROSE has filled many of his books,
especially the Hexaemeron and his Commentary on
St. Luke, with what he learned from him, and he
speaks of him as one of the greatest of Scriptural
interpreters. 2 In his book on Abraham he calls him
by the affectionate title of " Origenes noster" 3
RUFINUS, the celebrated presbyter of Aquileia
(died 410), set before himself the express object of
making Origen favourably known in the West
ST. JEROME, though he was dragged by his own
passionate vanity, and by his relations with Theo-
philus, into violent antagonism against Origen, yet
very largely, and often without acknowledgment, ap
propriates his teachings. 4 He calls him "that immortal
intellect." Even in his tract against him he speaks
of him with much tenderness and admiration, and
says, " Let us not imitate his faults whose virtues
we cannot reach." " This only I say, that I would
be willing to have his knowledge of Scripture, even
if coupled with the hatred which attaches to his name,
caring nothing for mere shadows and bugbears whose
nature it is to terrify infants, and to babble in dusky
places." 5 " He was," said St. Jerome, "a great man
from his infancy, and the true son of a martyr " G ;
" the greatest master of the Church after the Apostles." 7
1 Jer. Ep. Ixv. 2.
2 See Ambrose, in Ps. viii. 28 ; Ep. 43 (Tillemont, iii. 277).
3 Ambrose, De Abraham, ii.
4 When taxed with this, he says that he glories in the accusation of
imitating one "quern cunctis prudentibus et vobis placere non dubito,"
Prolog, in Mic. ii. See too Prol. in Ezech.
5 Jer. in Til. iii. " Hoc unum dico, vellem cum invidia nominis ejus
habere etiam scientiam scripturarum," &c. Trad. Hebr. " Quod si quis
Judas Zelotes opposuerit nobis errores ejus . . . non imitemur ejus
vitia cujus virtutes non possumus sequi." Ep. ad. Pammach. Ixv. 3.
6 Ep. Ixix. 3.
7 Praef. in Quaest. in Gen. Rufinus afterwards cast this passage in
St. Jerome s teeth. Invectiv. II. in Hieron.
x.] FRIENDS OF ORIGEN. 321
ST. AUGUSTINE, so far from speaking of him as " the
insane and impious Origen," while charging him with
errors, calls him " ille vir tantus? 1 And this is the
more remarkable because there are no two men whose
characteristics are more sharply contrasted than those
of Origen and Augustine. Augustine was a literalist,
to whom even the descriptions of the Apocalypse are
scarcely symbols : Origen a transcendentalist, who
allegorises even historic narratives. The centre of
Origen s system was God and Hope : the centre of
Augustine s was Punishment and Sin. Origen yearns
for a final unity : Augustine almost exultingly ac
quiesces in a frightful and abiding dualism. Origen
can scarcely bear the thought that even the devil
should be unsaved : Augustine, like so many modern
writers, is undisturbed in contemplating the wide
sentence of an endless doom. 2
PALLADIUS, Bishop of Helenopolis, supported the
monks who had embraced the views of Origen. 3
ISIDORE OF JERUSALEM was a warm admirer and
supporter of the views of Origen. 4
SEDULIUS, in the preface to his Carmen Paschale,
calls him peritissimum divinae legis, and speaks of
his triple series of works on the books of Scripture,
Continuous Commentaries, and briefer Scholia for the
learned, and Homilies addressed to the multitude.
Many of the monks and hermits who were most
eminent in piety such, for instance, as EVAGRIUS of
Pontus were followers of Origen. 5
From Origen s days to those of St. Chrysostom there
is not a single eminent Scriptural commentator who
has not made large use of his writings, and who has
not taken from him the best that he has to teach. 6
L Augustine, Ep. ad Hieron. 40.
y - For a sketch of the two, see Canon Westcott in Contemp. Rev.
xxxv. 500.
1 Dial, in Opp. Chrysost, xiii. ed. Montfaucon.
\ See Neander, iv. 476, E, Tr. 6 Epiphan. Haer. Ixiv. 2-4.
5 See Tillemont, iii. p. 266 (Orig. act. 37).
Y
322 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
Even in the fourth century those who wrote
apologies for Origen were men of the highest repute. 1
SOCRATES relates that when the condemnation of
Origen s writings was being most furiously driven
on by Theophilus and Epiphanius, a good Scythian
bishop named THEOTIMUS OF TOMI plainly told
Epiphanius that he for his part would never so much
dishonour a person so venerable for his piety and
antiquity, nor durst he condemn what their ancestors
never rejected, especially when there were no ill and
mischievous doctrines in Origen s books ; then withal
he pulled out a book of Origen s which he showed
before the whole convention to contain expositions
agreeable to the articles of the Church. 2 Socrates
has these very strong remarks : " Men of slender
ability (eureXet?), who are unable to come to the
light by their own fame, wished to gain distinction
by blaming their betters The accusations of
such men contribute, I maintain, to establish Origen s
reputation And they who revile Origen forget
that they thereby calumniate Athanasius, who praised
him." 3
SOZOMEN also tells with approval the story about
Theotimus of Tomi, whom he warmly eulogises ; and
in his account of the machinations stirred up against
Origen, he speaks with uncompromising condemnation
of Theophilus of Alexandria. 4
HAYMO, Bishop of Halberstadt, after expressing
a doubt whether Origen s opinions were rightly
represented, and were really his, adds ( And if, as
some would have it, they were his own sentiments,
we ought rather to deal compassionately with so
1 ato\oyd>TaToi, Phot. Cod. u8. 2 Socrates, H. E. vi. 12.
3 Socrates speaks most honourably of Origen in many places, H. E.
iii. 7, vi. 12, vii. 6 (where he speaks of his orthodoxy) ; ii. 35 (where
he calls Aetius oXiyofjiaQ^s, for depreciating Origen and Dioscurus,
Hvopas iruai]? crot|)ia$ iiriaT-hv-ovas}. See too vi. 9, 10, 12, 17, where
Theophilus of Alexandria is painted in the darkest colours.
4 Sozomen, H. E. viii 11-14, v "- 2 ^-
x.] EULOGISTS OF ORIGEN. 323
learned a man who has conveyed so vast a treasure
of learning to us. What faults there are in his
writings, those orthodox and useful things which
they contain are abundantly sufficient to over
balance." 1
While such men spoke of him for centuries in
warm terms of admiration we need be very little
disturbed if " the wonderful and labour-loving
Father of St. Athanasius becomes the " heretic
and " schismatic " and " anathema " and " most
unholy " of such persons as Theophilus of Alex
andria and the Pseudo-Caesarius.
In modern times also some of the best and greatest
theological writers have been most conspicuous
for the honour which they paid to the name of
Origen. In spite of anathemas, he rose to new fame
with reviving freedom and reviving knowledge. " I
have read," writes ERASMUS to Colet, "a great part
of the works of Origen, and under his training I think
that I have made good progress ; for he opens, so
to speak, the fountains of theology, and indicates the
methods of the science." HUET, Bishop of Avranches,
devoted years of loving labour to his honour. Dr.
CAVE and BISHOP RUST speak of him with glowing
enthusiasm. BARONIUS says that it was " by a sort
of divine and heavenly providence that his mother
saved him from martyrdom ad maximam plurimorum
uttiitatem." 2 SCHROCKH calls him " the greatest man
that the ancient Church had." 3 TlLLEMONT abounds
in his praises. PlCUS OF MlRANDOLA, GENEBRARD,
HALLOIX, on various grounds, maintained the purity
of his faith. MOSHEIM says that " he possessed every
excellence that can adorn the Christian character."
BAYLE, who calls him one of the rarest geniuses in
the primitive Church, speaks of his admirable purity,
1 Haymo, Breviar. H. IS. vi. 13 (quoted by Cave, Prim. Fathers,
i. 238).
1 Baronius, Ann. A.D. 204, * Schrockh, iv. 27, 39, xviii. 40.
Y 3
324 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
his ardent zeal for the Gospel, his great, beautiful,
and lofty spirit. DOUCIN, so strong an opponent of
his views, yet admits that his " heresies originated
in a desire to convert philosophers, and to shield
Christian truth from Pagan insult. BISHOP BUTLER
found in one single pregnant sentence of his most
anathematised and "heretical" book \heDePrincipiis
which he quotes on the title-page of his Analogy, the
acknowledged germ of the profoundest modern defence
of revealed religion. " I had rather be with Origen,"
said PROF. MAURICE, " wherever he is, than with Jus
tinian and Theodora wherever they are." " I love the
name of Origen," says CARDINAL NEWMAN ; " I will
not listen to the notion that so great a soul was lost." 1
CANON WESTCOTT says " His whole life, from first to
last, was fashioned on the same type. It was, accord
ing to his own grand ideal, one unbroken prayer (jjuia
Trpoaev^r) crwe^o/Aez/?;), one ceaseless effort after close
fellowship with the Unseen and the Eternal. No dis
tractions diverted him from the pursuit of divine
wisdom. No persecution checked for more than the
briefest space the energy of his efforts. He endured
a double martyrdom : perils and sufferings from the
heathen, reproaches and wrongs from Christians ;
and the retrospect of what he had borne only stirred
within him a humbler sense of his shortcomings."
It is not in the writings of such men as these,
whether ancient or modern, but only of men much
less eminent and infinitely more fanatical and un
charitable, that we read such base language as that
about " casting out to destruction the insane Origen
and all his boastful dreams, and his writings full of
various ungodliness," or "subjecting to eternal con
demnation Origen and his impure disciples and
followers, Didymus and Evagrius." Those who thus
" sate in the high places and cursed the saints of
1 See Newman s Hist, of the Arians, p. 42, where he mentions Origen s
" indefatigable zeal and ready services in the confutation of heretics."
x.] GROUNDS ON WHICH HE WAS MISJUDGED. 325
God can only be partly excused on the grounds
of ignorance, and the false notion that such language
could be defended by the supposed authority of the
Fifth Oecumenical Council. They probably knew
little or nothing of those whose redeemed souls they
thus ignorantly cursed. The arm of an Origen is
not to be measured by the finger of a Sophronius.
" Many elephants," says the Bengali proverb, " cannot
wade the river ; the mosquito says it is only knee deep."
But it may be asked, if such were the sentiments
of these great and good men towards him if the
reputation which he won in every branch of his
labours, "however great, falls below the truth"
how is it that he was condemned by the Church ?
How far he was condemned, and why, and whether
he was condemned on valid grounds, and what sort
of weight is to be attached to the views of those who,
centuries after he had gone to God, branded the great
and holy man as a heretic, we shall see in the next
section. Meanwhile let us bear in mind these
facts :
1. A dull writer, a man without imagination and
without genius, and with no gift for speculative
inquiry, has little danger of leaving the groove of
conventional and contemporary opinions. Any one
who repeats old shibboleths in their old seiises, and
does not even care to say sumpsimus if he has been
accustomed to say mumpsimus, should hesitate to
condemn a man whose mind was so active, so subtle,
so far-flashing as that of Origen. There is scarcely
a single writer of genius especially if he have been
also a writer of splendid originality who has not
been a mark for thousands of hostile arrows, and
it would be strange indeed if there were no joints
in human armour through which one or other of those
arrows could find its way.
2. A great writer from his very insight and versa
tility from the necessity which he feels for looking
326 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
H
at truth from all sides, from the impossibility which
exists for him of preventing the full river of his intel
lect from overflowing the straight-dug ditches of human
system, will be specially liable to misrepresentation.
It is not the way of such writers when they lay down
a general proposition carefully to guard themselves
from being supposed to exclude the contradictory.
They do not care, as "safe men" do, " to steer
through the channel of No-meaning between the
Scylla and Charybdis of Aye and No." They will
inevitably present truth, now from one, now from
another, point of view. They will be peculiarly
liable to those small attacks which rely for victory
on the exhibition of supposed " inconsistencies," and
on the quips and quirks of a petty verbal criticism
such as they would themselves disdain.
3. And still more will this be the case when, like
Origen, they are voluminous writers ; when writings
have been blazoned abroad which they only intended
for private circulation 1 ; when they are condemned
long after their death, as Origen was, and have never
been heard in their own defence ; when no distinction
is drawn between their mere tentative suggestions
what may be almost called their speculative solilo
quies 2 -and their defined opinions ; above all, when
their books, if not actually interpolated, have been
most grossly misinterpreted. Even in the publicity
of modern life it is, I find, quite possible for an
1 This was done, as Origen complained, by the misguided zeal of
his friend Ambrosius. St. Jerome, in his letter to Pammachius (De
Errore Origenis), says that in his letter to Fabian, Bishop of Rome, he
had complained of Ambrosius, "quod secrete edita in publicuni pro-
tulerit." Besides these, gross forgeries were circulated under his name,
among others by a certain Bassus (Rufinus).
" It was very early maintained that Origen had " only thrown out some
speculations, yvjavaa-ias x-P LV > t> v wa y f exercitation, not positively or
dogmatically." (Photius, Cod. 296.) St. Athanasius urged this plea on
behalf of some of his views, and said that others among which I
have little doubt that he would have classed Origen s views respecting
eschatology were on points left undecided by Scripture and by the
Church.
x.] GROUNDS OF HIS CONDEMNATION. 327
author to be incessantly charged with opinions which,
so far from having expressed, he has openly, deli
berately, and repeatedly repudiated.
Now every one of these remarks applies to Origen.
If Bishop Jeremy Taylor was alarmed when " a
committee of Scotch spiders was appointed to see
if they could gather or make poison out of his books,
and had drawn some little things into a paper," l
Origen, even in his lifetime, may have been very
obnoxious to attack if every dubious sentiment or
mistaken expression scattered up and down in 6,000
books or pamphlets was marshalled in array against
him. Yet it is on such evidence that " almost all
ages, without any reverence to his parts, learning,
piety, and the judgment of the wisest and best of
the times he lived in, have, without any mercy, pro
nounced him heretic, and his sentiments and specu
lations rash, absurd, pernicious, blasphemous, and,
indeed, what not." 2 Had not the apologies written
for him by Pamphilus the Martyr, and Eusebius, and
Dionysius, and others, 3 perished, " Origen s cause
might appear with a better face, seeing we have now
nothing but his notions dressed up and glossed by
his professed enemies, and many things ascribed to
him which he never owned, but which were coined by
his pretended followers." Primasius says that there
were three Origens. 6 One of them was a wretch
known as " the Impure," who taught the most im
moral doctrines. Besides the partial interpolation of
the works of Origen which began, as he himself com
plains, in his own lifetime, it is by no means impossible
that his opinions might have got mixed up in the
minds of some with those of writers who bore the
same name, and so the hatred against him might
1 Letter to Ormond, Life, p. ci.
2 Cave, /. c. p. 235. The learned and pious author refers with great
approval to the defence of Origen by Bishop Rust in the Phenix,
vol. i. 3 Mentioned by Photius, Cod. cxviii.
4 Cave, /. c. 6 Primasius (?) de Haer. i. 22.
323 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
I
have been increased as in a globe of fire, by into
lerable reflexions." Fierce, narrow, and ungrateful as
many of his fellow-Churchmen showed themselves to
be, Origen always maintained a hurrible and submissive
spirit ; and " a man of a disposition so Catholic may,"
as Tillemont says, " hold some heretical opinions
because he is human and fallible, but he cannot be
a heretic, because he is neither proud nor attached to
his error." x
4. Again, Origen was a great and profound philo
sopher. Scarcely one of all the Fathers and cer
tainly not Augustine was capable of fathoming the
depths or grasping the breadth of his system. Sound
as he seems to have been even in the judgment
of Athanasius as regards the essential truths of
Christianity, fragments, perhaps spurious, certainly
distorted, often purely tentative, were torn out of his
writings and judged in false perspective by men
incapable of judging them in due relation to the
system of which they were but isolated parts.
5. Lastly, the attacks upon Origen at the close
of the fifth century synchronise with a great intel
lectual revolution. The learned Alexandrian and
Asiatic Fathers, men like St. Clemens and Origen,
and St. Basil and the Gregories, were men who were
trained to philosophic thought. They belong to
what has been called " the Age of Doctors. They
were familiar with the works of the great Greek
thinkers, and were deeply imbued with the Platonic
idealism. By the fifth century a very different school
had sprung up. The leaders of Church thought had
been gradually influenced by Aristotelian realism
and the enemies of Origen were actuated not only
1 iii. p. 117, ed. 1699. Two things are clear, (i) that Origen s
so-called Arian tendencies are either a calumny or a mistake ; (ii) that
he considered his eschatological views, even in their widest latitude, to
be strictly reconcilable with Catholic teaching. He distinctly says, in
the Sixteenth Homily on St. Luke, that he desired to be faithful to the
Church as a simple Christian.
x.] GREATNESS OF ORIGEN. 329
by personal antipathy to a teacher whose views were
too large, too humanitarian, and too profound for
their limited capacity and narrow training, but were
also advocates of hierarchical supremacy, and devotees
of rigid formulae. 1 They could not but look with
a suspicion amounting to hatred upon a teacher
who compelled men to face the whole question of
the position and destiny of mankind, and whose
searching views rendered it impossible for them to
be content with the passive acceptance of crystallised
dogmas for no better reason than that they were
enforced by the anathemas of despotic authority.
And so it came about that
"Men whose life, learning, faith, and pure intent,
Would have been held in high esteem by Paul,
Must now be called and printed heretics,
By shallow Edwards and Scotch What-d ye-cail. "
See Canon Westcott, in Contemf. Rev. xxxv. 337.
CHAPTER XI.
ORIGEN AND CHURCH COUNCILS.
" Nos quid Scriptura doceat novimus ; conciliorum decreta si cum
Scripturanon consentiunt merito rejicimus." DIETELMAIR, De Decensu
Christi ad Inferos, p. 22.
THAT Origen held the ultimate restitution of all
mankind is freely admitted.
His view which was only a part of one compre
hensive philosophy was as follows : God s pur
pose in creation was good, and it is His will to
restore His universe to its pristine order. Hence,
since we have all sinned, we must all, more or less,
suffer beyond the grave. But our sufferings are only
intended as means to win us back. Their sole end
and aim is our amelioration. Hence they are not
" endless," though they are called aeonian. 1 They
may last for thousands of years, but they will ter
minate at last After the intermediate state, after
the burning of the world, after the rising of our
heavenly bodies, will follow the condition of blessed
ness, which will be higher and lower in proportion to
the purity of heart and knowledge of God to which
we shall then have attained, and which will continue
until we have reached our fulfilment. Such was the
hope which Origen was led to entertain by his pro
found trust in God and his profound knowledge of
aluvluv K0\t<reuv. C. Ct /s, iii. 499.
CHAP. XL] ORIGEN S OPINIONS. 331
Scripture. But he ever humbly admitted that only
a few dim glimpses into the future were vouchsafed
to us, so that it is well not to speak too much, but to
praise God in the silence of the spirit. 1
Dr. Pusey, like Picus of Mirandola, Merlinus,
Genebrardus, and others before him, has quoted
other passages and expressions which seem to adopt
the current views. The fact that such passages can
be adduced from Origen s writings is alone an over
whelming answer to many previous pages of Dr.
Pusey s book. It shows that a use of the common
scriptural expressions, and particularly of the word
aionios, did not necessarily involve an acceptance of
what Origen, like other great Fathers, regarded as the
misinterpretation to which those expressions were
subjected. " Origen," said St. Jerome, " was not a
fool. He cannot urge direct contradictories." 2 Such
passages, as Petavius says, " either prove nothing
whatever, or have no reference to mankind." As for
the adjective <w0#w ("eternal "), which Origen applies
to the fire of hell, it is nothing to the purpose. He
might have called it so with reference to the devil ;
or have interpreted it in his own sense, since he
always makes " eternal mean " eternal in its own
range," i.e. lasting until the Day of Judgment 3 ; or
again he might have said that the fire was " eternal,"
but that all who entered it were not doomed to
remain therein for ever ; or, once more, that though
the penalty of " eternal fire " was incurred., it need not
necessarily and in all instances be actually inflicted.
Origen, says Dr. Pusey, " laid down beforehand, as
1 See Guerike, De Schol. Alex. ii. 162, and especially Redepenning,
i. 183, ii. 447, where he refers to the numerous original passages.
2 Jer. ApoL. 2.
3 See Petav. De Aug. iii. vi. 12. "Atque nihil hoc genere defen-
sionis levius est. . . Nam omnia fere loca quae a Merlino et Gene-
brardo ex Origene depxompta sunt, aut nihil efficiunt omnino aut ad
homines minima referuntur, velut quod inferorum ignem aeternum vocat
Origenes, nihil hoc est," &c.
332 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
It
the rule of faith, that that only was to be believed as
truth which is in no way out of harmony with the
ecclesiastical and apostolic tradition. That he did
so is a strong proof that he was well aware that the
doctrine of restitution was " in no way out of har
mony with ecclesiastical and apostolic tradition."
But then it is urged Pamphilus, St. Jerome, and
others defended Origen on the ground that many
of his opinions were only put forth unsystematically,
speculatively, as opinions, " lest they should seem
altogether unconsidered." Dr. Pusey, after Wetstein,
shows that he often uses the phrases " perhaps," " it
seems to me," and similar expressions of uncertainty. 2
In this Origen shows his wisdom. The wisest teachers
regarding the future are those who repudiate unten
able dogmatism, not those who themselves dogmatise.
He held his opinions as opinions, 3 and no one has a
right to assert as being "of faith," matters that be
long only to the range of probability, matters on which
the Church has laid down no authoritative dogmas.
Origen, in his doctrinal teaching, not only professed
to be, but was and was for centuries regarded as a
true son of the Church, of which he was also a most
distinguished ornament, and he could not, therefore,
have thought that he was transgressing any doctrinal
teaching of the Church even when he went so far as
to write that " he who is saved is saved through fire,
that if, perchance, he has any alloy of lead in him,
the fire may purge and melt it out, in order that all
may be made pure gold." 4
Now surely it is a simple question of history a
question capable of final decision one way or the
1 De Princip. i. Praef. n. 2.
2 " Quaesita tantum atque projecta ne penitus intractata viderentur."
JER. Ep. lix, ad Avit.
1 "Certius tamen qualiter se habitura sit res scit solus Deus, et si
qui Ejus per Christum et Spiritum Sanctum amici sunt." ORIG. De
Princip. I.
* Orig. Horn. vi. in Exod.
XL] UNIVERSALISM NOT CONDEMNED. 333
other whether the ancient Church has ever cate
gorically condemned the doctrine of Universalism,
as it is expressed in this sentence. No loudness of
mere assertion that she has condemned it can have a
feather s weight in the discussion if, in point of fact,
she has not.
And I undertake to prove that she has not so
condemned it.
I will ask the reader carefully to bear in mind that
this is a mere question of literary evidence which in
no way affects me, or anything which I have said on
the subject.
It in no way affects me (i) because I have never
been able to embrace the dogma of Universalism, and
(ii) because the only Councils of which the Church of
England in any way acknowledges the authority are
the first four Oecumenical Councils. Now no one has
even pretended to say that one word was uttered
against Origen, or one syllable decided against
universal restoration, much less against the milder
hope which repudiates the encroachments of popu
lar religionism, at the Councils of Nice (A. D. 325),
Constantinople (A. D. 381), Ephesus (A. D. 431), or
Chalcedon (A. D. 451).
It would indeed be strange if such had been the
case. In the Council of Nice a prominent part was
taken by Eusebius of Caesarea, the apologist of Origen;
in the Council of Constantinople by St. Gregory of
Nazianzus and St. Gregory of Nyssa, who, on the
subject of restitution, leaned the one somewhat
indirectly, the other quite openly to his eschato-
logical opinions. The Council of Ephesus referred
to the writings of St. Gregory of Nyssa (full as they
are of Universalism) as the great bulwark of the
Church against heresy !
At each, then, of the first three Great Councils,
and probably at the fourth also, men were present
and were received with honour, and held reputations
334 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
for unblemished orthodoxy men of whom some were
canonised saints, and were regarded as bulwarks of
the true faith who on the subject of the final resti
tution of mankind agreed with Origen. But apart
from this, let every unbiassed reader observe the im
mense significance of the fact that Origen s views
respecting Restorationism were perfectly well known,
and were very widely shared even in the days of the
Council of Nice. To St. Athanasius, for instance, as
Patriarch of Alexandria, and as one who loved the
name, quoted the writings, and admired the labours of
Origen, his eschatological views were perfectly fami
liar, and it is certain that as a whole\\e did not approve
of them ; yet at no one of those Councils was the
doctrine of endless punishment for any souls required
as a matter of faith. Had the ancient Church regarded
that doctrine as being so indisputable and so essential
as many now suppose it to be, it is perfectly certain
that they could not have been silent respecting it. The
fact that the first four General Councils took no cognis
ance even of Universalism, though it was then widely
prevalent, is an argument of overwhelming force in
favour of those who maintain that even Universalism
impermissible as a hope in the Christian Church, and
that for nearly five centuries the Church never uttered
respecting it any general and authoritative censure.
I have shown that in almost every age which
has not fallen into " the deep slumber of decided
opinions," in the earliest ages, in the middle ages,
in the dawn of the Reformation, in the seventeenth,
eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, merciful views
have been maintained which go much farther than
those Catholic opinions which I have advocated.
And yet I do not know of a single instance in which
those views have been declared to be untenable, or
in which those who have held them being in some
instances eminent bishops, archbishops, and theolo
gians of our own and other Reformed Churches-
XL] AUTHORITY OF COUNCILS. 335
have had their positions attacked or even threatened
in consequence. 1
It will of course be understood that I am not
making the truth of any doctrine depend on the deci
sion of Councils. I am only using the silence of the
first four General Councils as evidence respecting the
views of the Catholic Church as to what were, and
what were not, regarded as open questions. The
Church of England has expressly refused to bind
herself by the decisions of any Council. She says,
briefly and emphatically, that General Councils may
err, and sometimes have erred, even in things per
taining unto God. The First Article of Henry VIII.
(1536) recognised the judgments of the first Four
Councils against heresies, and in spite of the singularly
contemptuous language about ecclesiastical gatherings
used by the sainted president of the Second Oecu
menical Council, 2 Cranmer in his Refonnatio Legum
Ecclesiasticarum said that " we reverently accept the
first four great Oecumenical Synods."
But if we " reverently accept " the first four, we do
1 It need hardly be said that Mr. Maurice s loss of his professorship
at King s College (in spite of the strenuous efforts of Bishop Wilber-
force) was not due to any act of the English Church, but to the private
decision of an irresponsible corporation. No one dreamt of disputing
his position as Chaplain at Lincoln s Inn. He was subsequently ap
pointed incumbent of Vere Street Chapel, and welcomed with enthu
siasm as a religious teacher in the Professorship at Cambridge, to which
he was appointed without protest.
2 In the document signed by Cranmer and many bishops in the name
of Convocation in 1536, the following words of St. Gregory of Nazian-
zus are quoted: "I think this . . . that all assemblies of bishops
should be eschewed ; for I have seen a good result of no synod, but an
increase rather than a solution of evils ; for love of controversy and
ambition overcometh reason (think not that I write maliciously)."
BURNET, Hist, of the Iteform. app. iii. 5. Nor was this an isolated
expression of his opinion penned in a passing fit of indignation. He
repeats in verse what he has said in prose :
OuSe TI itov ffvvfoounv bjJL6Qpovos etrao/i
epis, tvQa. /jioOos re, Kal afo^ea Kpvirrci i
els eva SiAT/ie^eW -&pov cryei/j^uei/a. Carnt. x.
336 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
not in any way profess to be bound by the decisions
of any others. Whether, therefore, Origen s llniver-
salism was condemned by the Fifth General Council
or by any number of provincial synods, is a purely
literary question ; for we recognise no ground what
ever on which the ecclesiastics of the sixth century
could claim any clearer illumination than those of the
nineteenth. But, nevertheless, I maintain that it was
not so condemned.
Do not let the reader be misled by the assertion
that " Origenism " was condemned, or that " Origen "
was condemned. That proves absolutely nothing as
to this particular opinion ; for this opinion was
notoriously separable from Origenism. It was not
what was meant by " Origenism." It was widely
held by those who opposed Origen in everything
else. If any one wishes to know what " Origenism
was, he has only to read the crude mass of fantastic
opinions attributed to him in the canons of the " Home
Synod." He will see at once that Universalism is a
question which is barely so much as grazed and
that only by one single disputable word in all those
canons put together. I do not see how any one who
has studied the literature of this controversy can fail
to admit that " Origenism meant primarily and
mainly certain heterodox views about the mystery of
the Trinity. It was these which were originally the
question, and not Origen s eschatology " the things
which Origen had (as Jerome asserts) " impiously
said about the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost." 1 It
was these asserted but unproved heresies which made
Pachomius fling a volume of Origen into a river, and
warn his monks against any study of his writings. 2
1 Jer. Apol. i.
2 Ada Sanctorum, May 14. So far as I know, Pachomius (like
Epiphanius) did not even allude to Origen s Restitutionism. The charge
brought against Origen, &c., in the abjuration of the Popes is only that
he adopted " Gentile fables" respecting God and all rational creatures.
Diurn. R. Pont. p. 312.
XL] O RIG EN ISM NOT UNIVERSALISM, 337
The reader may easily convince himself of this im
portant fact if he will read Doucin s Histoire de
I Origenisme (1700). In that book from beginning to
end there is no discussion of Origen s eschatology,
and barely so much as an allusion to it.
The question of Universalism, as a general and in
dependent hope for mankind alone> has never, so
far as I am aware, been so much as submitted to
any ancient or general council whatever. In cases
where it has in some distant degree come under
notice, it has always been mixed up with a multitude
of other views, such as pre-existence, cycles of pro
bation, the salvability of devils, and the insecure bliss
of the saved. St. Augustine indeed asserts without
offering a shadow of proof that " both for this and
for other things, and most of all for the unceasing
alternations of bliss and misery, &c., the Church has
with reason rejected him (jure reprobavit Ecdesia)"
But what is the " this " ? Not, as is often insinu
ated, the simple question of the ultimate salvation
of all men, but for this Universalism together with
the ultimate restoration of the fallen angels. 1 I am
convinced that this addition to simple Universalism
furnished the gravamen of the charge against Origen
under this head. 2 I have shown already that as to
simple Universalism St. Augustine uses language far
more wavering and far less hostile than is generally
1 This was a most undoubted part of Origen s system, and is always
quoted by the ancients in connection with it. Jerome says that in one
of his letters Origen repudiated as absurd the salvability of the devil
(in Ruf. ii.). This I cannot understand. If he ever did so his opinion
must have changed.
2 Pascal clearly recognises this fact. He says that the writings of
Origen were condemned by several councils, and even by the Fifth
General Council, as "containing heresies^ and among others that of tke
reconciliation of demons at the Day of Judgment." Provincial
Letters, xvii. (De Soyres edition, p. 365). What was then prominent
in the minds of those Fathers who opposed Origen is obvious (see
Epiphan. Ep. ad Joan. HierosoL 3; Theophilus, Paschal, 12 ; Jer.
Ep. lix. ad Avitum ; Ep. Ixi. ad Pammach. Ep. Ixxv. ad. Vigilant. \
adv. Pelag. i. 9 ; in Esaiam, xiv. 20 ; xxvii. 1 1 ; in Johan. iii. 6).
Z
338 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
*
acknowledged. Origen rested his opinion on this sub
ject upon a number of texts, every one of which he
quotes. It was on his part a perfectly loyal deduction
from the oracles of God. 1 If many of these are entirely
beside the mark, the same is equally true of many of
the texts urged on the other side. No one, I think,
who is at all acquainted with patristic exegesis will
deny that, on the only principles of interpretation
which were then recognised, the Fathers would have
found it all but impossible to deny the relevancy and
cogency of the texts on which the hopes of Origen
were based.
I do ask earnest attention to the fact that Epi-
phanius, who was the first to attach the name of
" heretic to the honoured name of Origen a man
in every respect his superior does not mention his
eschatology at all. Theophilus, eager as he was to
injure Origen, does not say a word against his Restora-
tionism as regards mankind, but only objects to the
salvability of devils. 2 The same is true of St.
Jerome, 8 and Sulpicius Severus. 4 Similarly in the
remarks of Leo the Great, 5 in the Life of St. Saba
by Cyril of Scythopolis, and even in Justinian s letter
to the Home Synod, the prominent complaint is not
against Origen s Universalism, but against his doctrine
of the prae-existence of souls. Every fresh study of
the original authorities only leaves on my mind a
deeper impression that even in the fifth century
Universalism as regards mankind was regarded as a
perfectly tenable opinion.
But Dr. Pusey says Universalism was separately
condemned at the Synod of Diospolis (A.D. 415).
1 In different works Origen, in -upport of his eschatology, comments
on Is. iv. 16 ; x. 17 ; xii. I ; xxiv. 22 ; xlvii. 14 ; Mic. vii. 9 ; Mai.
iii. 3 ; Ps. xxx. 20 ; Ixi. 2 ; cix. I, 2 ; John x. 16 ; xvii. 21-23 > Rom.
x . 32 ; i Cor. xv. 26, &c.
2 Jer. Opp. i. 537 (ed. Vallars.), Mansi, Condi, iii. 971.
3 fer. Ep. xxxvi. (ad Vigilantium), and xxxviii. (ad PammacJiium),
4 Sulp. Sev. Dial. i. 6, 7. 5 Leo, Ep. 35.
XL] THE SYNOD OF DIOSFOLIS. 339
It would be a matter of very small consequence if
it was; for of all synods which is saying a great
deal this is in every respect one of the weakest and
least authoritative.
The Synod of Diospolis was a mere meeting of four
teen country bishops at Lydda summoned to con
demn Pelagius. There was not among them a single
ecclesiastic with any great pretension to learning or
eminence. Pelagius wrote in Latin, and the bishops
only understood Greek. They were therefore unable
to examine the writings which they were yet called
upon to condemn. They were hoodwinked from first
to last by the " astute heresiarch." The unfortunate
synod was even itself suspected of Pelagianism, since
it recognised Pelagius as a member of the Catholic
Church. It is impossible to read the story of this
gathering of provincial clerics without a smile. It
is impossible not to see that Pelagius was laughing
in his sleeve at the good fathers who were not a
match for him either in acuteness or in technical
theological knowledge. His secret contempt for the
incapacity of his judges breaks out when he promises
to anathematise the holders of certain views if he
may anathematise them "as fools, not as heretics."
St. Jerome unceremoniously called it a synodus miscr-
abilis, and Neander says very moderately that those
fourteen provincial bishops proceeded in an extremely
superficial way.
However, such as it was, what took place as regards
Origen in this "wretched synod," is simply this.
Pelagius had taught "that in the Day of Judgment
the wicked and sinners would not be spared ; but
would be burned up with eternal fires." * This was
charged against him as a heresy. His sole reply was
that he meant it in the sense of Matt. xxv. 45, and that
" if any one thought otherwise he was \_qiwad hoc, of
1 "In die jndicii iniquis et peccatoribus non esse parcendum ; sed
acternis eos ignibus esse exurendos." See supra, p. 283.
Z 2
340 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
It
course] an Origenist." It is clear that much more
must have passed; for a synod which could first
entertain such a charge and then acquit the proposi
tion of being heretical on such a defence, must have
been incompetent indeed. But if Pelagius had tried,
in his stern and gloomy doctrine, to represent as here
tical and " Origenistic the view of a " probatory
fire" of a punishment terminable for some, and
even for the majority "it is" (as Neander says)
" doubtful whether the synod would have been so
easily satisfied." Even the invidious and misleading
word " Origenism " could not have frightened them
out of these convictions. Nothing can show more
decisively that the Church generally did believe in
a terminable punishment for some, than the fact that
Pelagius words should have been brought before
them as heretical. But if the authority of these
fourteen accidental bishops one of the very weakest
and least influential synods which ever assembled
is to be taken as having the smallest importance as
a condemnation of Origen in his heresies, then the
same authority must be accepted as a rehabilitation
of Pelagius in his heresies.
And this is to be described as an agreement of the
East with the West in condemnation of Origen ! We
are to be overawed by the Synod of Diospolis, and to
take no account of the fact that the two profoundest
and most learned schools of Christian antiquity the
school of Alexandria and the school of Antioch
widely as they differed in other respects, yet agreed
in holding wider hopes than are now held as regards
the future of the lost !
For the condemnation of Origen in the East Dr.
Pusey refers us to three other synods.
One is a synod at Alexandria, A.D. 401, consisting
of Egyptian bishops, under the influence of Theo-
philus of Alexandria. In any case the opinion of such
synods on dogmatic questions would be as indecisive
XL] RESTORATIONISM NOT CONDEMNED. 341
as that of any diocesan synod in these days, especi
ally if they were blindly following the lead of some
one powerful bishop. But to say that it condemned
" Origen is to say nothing whatever as to the ques
tion now before us. The question which raged
between Theophilus and the monks did not turn on
Universalism at all, but was simply a question about
Anthropomorphism (i.e. the question whether God
was corporeal or spiritual), in which Origen was abso
lutely in the right, and Theophilus and his creatures
hopelessly in the wrong.
Not a line exists to show that the synod condemned
Origen s views about the future life. The same re
mark applies to the synods held by Epiphanius in
Cyprus, and Anastasius in Rome. 1 The reader must
be jealously on his guard against assertions that
" Origenism " was condemned when they are meant
to imply that the doctrine of man s final restoration
was condemned. Restorationism, in every instance,
was looked upon as a mere fractional element in a
complex system of opinions with which it has not
the least necessary connexion. And I repeat the
remarkable fact that Epiphanius, though his narrow
and bigoted literalism made him a tool in the hands
of the bad Theophilus, yet, in all his assaults on
Origen, says not a syllable against, and does not so
much as barely name, the Restorationist dogma ; while
even Jerome, another hot denouncer of Origen, ap
proached to that dogma far more nearly than those
who quote his authority in order to condemn it.
Origen s general opinions were " fagoted together by
some malicious or quarrelsome readers of his works
in a way which would naturally mislead the ignorant
and unsuspecting ; and by his Universalism, when it
1 Anastasius seems to have known nothing whatever about Origen
(Ep. i, in Johan. Hierosol. A.D. 401) until he was stirred up by a Roman
lady named Marcella, one of the widows who lived in constant com
munication with Jerome, who on his part had been stirred up by
Epiphanius and The >philus.
342 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP,
^
was alluded to at all, was meant a notion that the
devils would be saved, and that the lost would "after
long periods be delivered to try their fortunes again
in various regions of the world.
And Dr. Pusey is surely mistaken in supposing that
these synods were effectual even against Origen s
real errors. " No one/ says Dr. Pusey, " any more
uttered them. The Church had rest. No one
maintained, however hesitatingly, what the Church
had condemned." This style of confident asser
tion is, I venture to think, far too common among
theologians, and in these sentences Dr. Pusey
contradicts the most positive testimony of contem
porary authorities. The " Church " had not in any
true sense spoken ; and thousands maintained, quite
unhesitatingly, the doctrines which are asserted to
have been condemned. If Dr. Pusey means that
no one any longer held Restorationism, he is con
futed at once by the testimonies of St. Augustine
and St. Jerome that " plerique " and " quam plurimi
(Enchir. 112) held it. If he refers to other real
or supposed errors of Origen, he contradicts the con
temporary testimony of Sulpicius Severus, who says,
"Whether it were an error, as I think, or a heresy
as is thought (by others), it not only could not be
repressed by many animadversions of priests, but it
would never have been able to spread so far, had it
not increased by controversy." l Writing on Escha-
tology, St. Jerome says, " Nor am I ignorant how
wide a difference of opinion there is among men . . .
about the promises respecting future things, how they
ought to be received." 2 The certainty that these
1 Sulp. Sev. Dial. \. 3. See too Isidore, iv. Ep. 163, &c.
2 Jer. Proaem. in lib. xviii. in Esaiam. Gieseler says that (long after
the date of these synods) "Origen s opinion as to the duration of
future punishments was so general, even in the West, and among the
opponents of Origen . . . that it had become entirely independent of
his system." Eccl. Hist. i. 85. He refers to Jer. in Gal. v. 22 ;
Eph. iv. 16 ; Ambrosiaster in Eph. iii. 10. Doucin admits that up to
the middle of the fourth century Origen was regarded as a high authority
XL] THEOPHILUS OF ALEXANDRIA. 343
opinions were held is, on Dr. Pusey s own premises,
a decisive proof that (i) either they had never been
condemned by the Church at all, or (ii) that any
censure which had been passed was regarded as non-
authoritative.
But before I leave these synods it may be worth while
to glance at the circumstances in which they originated,
and at the person who was their chief promoter.
The man who did more to blacken the name and
memory of Origen, and to attach to him the stigma of
heresy respecting the nature of Christ heresy from
the charge of which for two centuries the, .greatest
Fathers of the Church had defended him, and which
great and good men like St. Chrysostom entirely
refused to endorse was one of the worst prelates and
one of the worst men who disgraced the early part of
the fifth century. It was Theophilus of Alexandria.
This man began the unworthy career which gained
him from his contemporaries such names as "the
Trimmer "and "the Turncoat/ the "Money-mad
and " the Stone-worshipper" l by being an avowed
Origenist. His change of opinion, if change it was,
was due, according to general testimony, to physical
terror and to private malice. I can find no ancient or
modern author who has a word to say in his defence.
Eusebius, Socrates, Sozomen, and all the ancient
authorities pronounce the most unfavourable verdict
on his conduct and motives. Gibbon calls him " an
active and ambitious prelate, who displayed the fruits
of rapine in moments of ostentation/ speaks of his
" dissimulation and violence," and attributes his
attacks on St. Chrysostom partly to jealousy of
on all matters of faith. Hist, de V Origenisme, p. 102. Elsewhere he
uses these remarkable words, "Pourvu qu on 1 eut de son cote, on se
croyait sur d avoir la verite, tant son temoignage paroissoit alors
decisif sur le premier et le plus pro fond de nos mysteres," p. 2.
1 6 d/x<aAAa|, 6 K60opvo$ (Pa.lla.dius). The latter nickname, which
was also given to Theramenes, means a buskin which fits either foot.
Palladius (ap. Montfaucon), xiii. 20. 6 xpucrojua^s K.a.1 AifloAccTpis. ST.
ISIDORE OF PELUSIUM, i. p. 152.
344 MERC Y AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
Constantinople, and partly to personal exasperation
against St. Chrysostom. 1 Neander says that ".little
dependence could be placed on his principles, for
worldly interests and passions had -more power over
him than principles and rational convictions." Bishop
Rust calls him "proud, revengeful, covetous, crafty,
and turbulent." 2 Gieseler stigmatises him as " am
bitious and violent." 3
When Epiphanius, a man who was too dull of intel
lect to understand Origen, had attacked his views
not as to the future, but respecting the spiritual nature
of God at Jerusalem, Theophilus, then an Origenist,
appeared on the scene as a mediator, and on one
occasion he publicly called Epiphanius an heresiarch.
At that time the Egyptian monks were divided into
two parties. The Nitrian monks were Origenists,
and one of their leaders was the venerable Isidore,
who at that time had great influence over Theophilus.
They were for the most part men of some in
telligence and some culture. The Scetic monks, on
the other hand, were mostly rude and uneducated
peasants, and they hated Origen as the chief enemy
of their " crass and sensuous method of apprehending
divine things," 4 which was known as Anthropomor
phism. Their fleshly notions as to the divine essence
and the image of God in man were simply due to
ignorance ; and in 399, Theophilus, in one of his
Epiphany-programmes, made an inopportune attack
upon them. This threw them into such fury that
they rushed in savage crowds to Alexandria and
threatened Theophilus with death. Thereupon, being
a man " with whom prevarication and falsehood cost
but little," he contrived to soothe them by the hypo-
critic words, " In you I behold the countenance of
God," 5 and yielded to their ignorant demand that he
1 Decline and Fall, iii. 1 86, ed. Milman. 2 The Phenix> i.
8 Eccl. Hist. i. p. 366. 4 Neander, iv. 472, 473.
5 Sozoruen, H. E. viii. II.
xi.l MOTIVES OF THEOPHILUS. 345
"should condemn the godless Origen," of whom
he had hitherto been a recognised defender, and
whose writings these Scetic monks had probably
never read, and had not in any case the requisite
culture to understand.
If that had been all, Theophilus would have been
the last man to find any difficulty in repudiating
an enforced assent. But two other events both
supremely discreditable to him made him henceforth
an avowed foe to the memory of Origen and to the
doctrines which he himself had hitherto maintained.
i. One of these arose from pique. Among the
Nitrian monks was Evagrius of Pontus, a hermit, a
deacon, an ascetic writer of wide influence, a pupil
of the two Saints, Macarius of Egypt and Macarius
of Alexandria, and an ardent Origenist But the
leaders of these Origenist monks at this time were
the four " tall brothers " Dioscurus, Ammonius,
Eusebius, and Euthymius. Forcing them against
their will into the active service of the Church,
Theophilus made Dioscurus Bishop of Hermopolis
and two of his brothers " stewards " of his Church.
A short experience filled these honest men with
profound disgust for the greed and hypocrisy of the
Patriarch, and they begged leave to return to their
desert cells. Divining their real motive which was
that they might not defile their souls any longer
by contact with his sins Theophilus was filled with
fury, and determined on revenge.
ii. This rage was enhanced by his quarrel with his
former friend, the aged Isidore. Isidore, being super
intendent of an almshouse at Alexandria, received
from a wealthy widow a gift of a thousand gold
pieces to buy clothes for poor Alexandrian women,
but under the express condition of not mentioning it
to the Patriarch, whose greed she feared. Theophilus
discovered the secret, and, disguising his spleen under
calumnies, procured the deposition and excommuni-
346 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
cation of this old man of eighty, who fled for refuge
to the Nitrian monks. 1
Since both the "tall brothers and Isidore were
now under their protection, Theophilus began to
attack them by sending among them Anthropo-
morphite monks, who charged them with holding
" the blasphemous opinions of Origen," and by stir
ring up Jerome and Epiphanius against them. After
getting the writings of Origen condemned by his
plastic local bishops, he launched the Praefect of
Egypt on the poor Eremites with an armed band ;
and not content with breaking up the holy and
peaceful retreats in which for years they had lived
with God, he pursued them by encyclical letters,
" dictated by violent passion and malicious cun
ning," 2 when they had fled for refuge to the care of
St. Chrysostom.
On their arrival at Constantinople St. Chrysostom
behaved to them with kindness, but with caution ;
and endeavoured to reconcile them with Theophilus.
The monks, however, appealed to the Emperor
Arcadius and Eudoxia, who appointed a synod,
with Chrysostom as its president, to judge Theo
philus. Theophilus had thenceforth but one object,
namely, the ruin of St. Chrysostom.
He stirred up Epiphanius to go on a second
encroaching and meddlesome expedition, into St.
Chrysostom s diocese, to carry with him the " decrees "
of the provincial synod of Cyprus which Epiphanius
had, on this occasion, convened to condemn " Origen,"
and he demanded that the Patriarch of Constantinople
should both sign these decrees and dismiss from his
protection the Nitrian monks.
Chrysostom very properly refused to do either, not
choosing to betray wronged men to unjust vengeance,
1 Palladium, Bishop of Helenopolis, Dial, de Chrysost. (Opp. xiii.
ed. Montfaucon) ; and the same facts are implied by Sozomen, If. E.
viii. 12. 2 Neander, /. c.
XL] THEOPHILUS AND ST. CHRYSOSTOM. 347
and thinking it a sin and a bad precedent " that a
person of so great learning and piety as Origen, and
who had been so serviceable to the Church, who lived
200 years before, whose books no Council had con
demned, should now be condemned by a small packed
synod of his professed enemies." 1 Whereupon Epi-
phanius instigated by Theophilus, by the Empress
Eudoxia (a strange judge of Origen !), by some cour
tiers, and some licentious priests whom Chrysostom
had been obliged to punish recited the decrees of this
synod before the people, obliquely censuring Chry
sostom himself. After which, coming to a better mind
and a fuller knowledge of the whole question, and
perhaps a little touched in conscience by a sense of
misdoing, Epiphanius prudently retired, and died on
his way home.
Meanwhile Theophilus, by incessant intrigues, was
enabled (A.D. 403) to convene at Chalcedon the
worthless Synod of the Oak, where, supported by
some partisans of his own, " and three or four fellow-
workmen, or rather fellow-apostates," 2 he deposed
Chrysostom, not for Origenism, which was not so
much as mentioned in his case, but for such faults
as eating alone and despising hospitality. He had
the further wickedness to use the Empress s hatred
against the Patriarch to get him condemned for high
treason. Driven from Constantinople, Chrysostom
was immediately recalled amid the tumultuous joy
of the people, in consequence of an earthquake
which had terrified the conscience of Eudoxia. The
following year, however, the machinations of Theo-
1 Bishop Rust, /. c. Doucin (Hist, de FOrigenisme, pp. 237, 266)
expresses astonishment (as well as he may) that for three centuries no
one but St. Jerome and Theophilus disturbed the supposed heresies of
Origenism. It would indeed be strange if these heresies were really
chargeable on Origen. But Theophilus had his reasons for abandoning
Origenism, and in eschatology St. Jerome was more than half an
Origenist. Socrates (H. E. iv. 26) says that up to the fourth century
Origen s name was glorious throughout the world.
2 St. Isidore of Pelusium, i. Ep. 152.
348 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP. xi.
^.
philus triumphed, and St. Chrysostom was driven
out to exile and death (A.D. 404). Not content
with having thus blighted the life of a saint of God,
Theophilus pursued his memory in "an enormous
and horrible volume," l where among other names
he calls him " the enemy of mankind," " prince
of the sacrilegious," and an " impure demon," and
charitably wishes that, if possible, some further
punishment adequate to his crimes may be inflicted
upon him. St. Jerome had the strange meanness to
translate this performance, at the request of Theophilus,
from Greek into Latin ! And Theophilus himself,
who professed such turncoat zeal against the heresies
of Origen, afterwards (410) ordained Synesius a bishop,
though that singular person was well known as a
maintainer of Origenist and semi-pagan opinions ! 2
But the difference was that in the case of Synesius
Theophilus had no private vengeance to pursue, and
his assault on Origenism had merely been " a con
venient means of gratifying his private passions." 3
Thus, then, the first burst of fury against Origen
was due to the revenge of an " impious dissembler "
Theophilus ; and to the votaries of an ignorant
heresy that of the Anthropomorphites ; aided by
the rage of an adulterous Empress Eudoxia. And,
after all, this fury left untouched the one doctrine
which is now almost exclusively connected with the
name and memory of the hapless Origen ! Such
were the persons and these the decisions which,
according to Dr. Pusey, " secured the faith."
Non tali dextra, non def ensoribus istis ! "
1 Facundus Hermian. Defens. vi. 5, apud Gibbon, iii. 189.
2 Synesius, Origenis studio si ssimus ; Pagi, Crit. Hist, in Ann.
Baronii, p. 108.
3 Neander, iv. 489. "The dogma of Origen," says Pagi, had
many, and those the most celebrated, defenders. . . And Theophilus was
privately a most diligent reader of Origen, whom he publicly abused,
and whom, though dead, he first deprived of Church communion, and
devoted to curse." In Baronium t Ann. A.D. 410, p. 103.
CHAPTER XII.
THE FIFTH OECUMENICAL COUNCIL.
" The arbitrary will of an Emperor governed by court intrigue
brought it about that a great Church-teacher, whose influence had been
of no small weight in the development of theological doctrines, should
be condemned as a heretic l ; while the fickle mind of a Roman bishop
whose instability of character made him the sport of circumstances,
must triumph over the better spirit of the West." NEANDER, iv. 281.
" Generalia Concilia . . . quia ex hominibus constant qui non
omnes Spiritu et Verbo Dei reguntur, et errare possunt, et interdum
errarunt." Art. xxi.
ANOTHER century and a half rolled away, and
we are told of another condemnation of Origen
equally vague ; even more disputable ; absolutely un
connected with the wider hope of God s mercy ; beside
the mark even as regards Universalism ; and pro
ceeding from persons no less disreputable than those
whose conduct we have just been passing in review.
It is the condemnation of " Origenism " by the
Home Synod at Constantinople, and the asserted
condemnation of Origen by the Fifth Oecumenical
Council.
The former synods bring us into contact with such
persons as Theophilus and Eudoxia ; the latter were
due to the ecclesiastical jealousies and court intrigues
1 I shall give reasons for doubting this assertion.
350 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
which surrounded the persons of Theodora and Jus
tinian. I will endeavour to .narrate these events with
the utmost possible brevity.
The Monophysite heresy which- "confounded the
substance * of Christ had been condemned by the
Council of Chalcedon. Theodora whose past in
famies should have prevented her, as they ought also
to have prevented Eudoxia, from profanely meddling
with the Church s theology was an active intriguer
on behalf of the Monophysites. She made a tool of
her dull and pedantic husband, whose favourite
passion it was to lay down dogmas for the Church s
guidance, and to enforce their acceptance by cruelty
and persecution when bribes and cajolery had failed.
Keen in the detection, and remorseless in the punish
ment, of what he deemed to be heresy, Justinian
ended by inventing a new heresy and died in the
attempt to corrupt the doctrines to which, by the
practice of the syllogism of violence, it had been his
special pride to give an imperial security.
In pursuit of her design Theodora had bribed
Vigilius, by the offer of the Bishopric of Rome and
a large sum of money, to give a written agreement
that he would try to overthrow the decrees of the
Council of Chalcedon. Being a man who knew but
little of theological questions, and cared less, he se
cretly declared himself a Monophysite, and pledged
himself to anathematise the three great Syrian
Fathers, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret, and
Ibas of Edessa, whom the Monophysites hated, but
of whom the two latter had been declared orthodox
by the Council of Chalcedon.
Meanwhile two Monophysites who belonged to the
party which was called " Origenist," but which was
very unworthy of bearing the great name of Origen,
were busy and influential in the palace of Justinian.
These were Theodorus Ascidas, Bishop of the Cap-
padocian Caesarea, and Domitian, Bishop of Ancyra.
Xii.] ECCLESIASTICAL INTRIGUES. 351
Jealous of their influence, 1 Peter of Jerusalem engaged
a Roman deacon named Pelagius 2 to draw up an in
dictment against Origen and his works, and to send
it through Mennas, Patriarch of Constantinople, to
the Emperor. Justinian was thus furnished with an
opportunity in which he specially delighted that of
dictating Church dogmas. He urged Mennas to
summon a Home Synod a synod of bishops or, as
we should rather call them, rectors of large parishes
residing at Constantinople. Justinian wrote to Men
nas a lengthy epistle still extant
" Verbosa et grandis epistola venit
Ex Capreis "
in which he entered at great length into the doc
trines of Origen, and required the synod to condemn
them in nine canons, one of which was, that " If
any one says or thinks that the punishment of
devils and impious men is temporary, and that it will
one day end, or that there will be a restitution and
redintegration of devils or of impious men, let him
be anathema." Passages from this entirely unautho-
ritative letter of Justinian are in this controversy
often palmed off as a part of the edicts of the Home
Synod, or even of the Fifth Oecumenial Council ! 3
This, be it observed, was Justinian s opinion
valeat quantum ! and this was what he required.
And of what possible value can the opinion of such
a man be in any question as to the orthodoxy of
Origen ? With such a mind as Origen s, such a
mind as Justinian s was wholly incompatible. He had
no capacity for understanding him ; he had still less
power to sympathise with him. " For good or for evil,
Justinian was wholly cast in the mould of formulas, he
knew nothing higher than an edict " ; and though he
prided himself on being a defender of the faith, he
1 Liberatus, Bretiar. 33.
J Afterwards Pope, successor to Vigilius, A.D. 555.
8 As in quite recent \\ orks.
352 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
died not only a heretic, but a heretic who was endea
vouring by sheer tyranny to enforce his heresy upon
the Church. If Origen was happy in the holiness
and greatness of his friends, he was no less happy
in the disrepute and incompetence of many of his
enemies.
The synod met; they read the garbled, second
hand, and virulently ex parte account of Origen s
errors, and proceeded to condemn them in fifteen
canons. Most happily for the cause of truth these
fifteen canons are still extant. But among these
fifteen canons, which any one may read for himself,
the canon which Justinian had dictated to the synod
does not occur, and the only reference made by the
synod to Origen s views as to the future lies in the
one single word " restitution." This was in their
first canon, which ran as follows :
"If any one asserts the fabulous prae-existence of
souls, and the monstrous restitution which follows from
it, let him be anathema."
The Emperor asked them to condemn Origen s
Universalism, which included the conversion of devils.
They in reply do not say a single definite word about
any hope for the future of sinners, or about any pro-
batory fire, or indeed about any single separate
problem of eschatology, but, purposely leaving every
thing as vague as they found it, they combine to
gether "prae-existence and that portentous restitution
(rrjv TeparwSr) aTrofcaTao-Tacriv) consequent on it," and
condemn that in a lump.
Even if they had distinctly condemned Univer
salism, their decision having no pretence to Oecu
menical authority would merely show the opinion
then prevalent at Constantinople. But in a most
marked manner they abstained* front doing so. They
do not follow the Emperor s guidance in this matter ;
they do not adopt his suggested canon ; they only
pronounce their anathema against a very complex
XIL] THE HOME SYNOD. 353
system of theological philosophy which comprised
prae-existence, cycles of probation, the salvability of
devils as well as men, and a multitude of other details
which, with very inconvenient comprehensiveness,
they describe as " that monstrous restitution conse
quent on the doctrine of prae-existence." It would
have been perfectly open to any of the holy and
learned Churchmen who accepted Origen s larger
hope to subscribe to this anathema, and to say, I,
too, reject (not indeed the Scriptural doctrine of a
restitution), but " that portentous restitution." And
accordingly this canon, as well as the rest, was
subscribed whether honestly or not by Theodorus
Ascidas and Domitian, avowed Origenists as they
both were.
But happily the synod do not leave us in doubt as
to what was the sense in which they used the word
" restitution." They use the word again in the four
teenth canon, to which I shall call special attention.
" If any one says that there will be a single unity
(imam henadem} of all rational beings, their substances
and individualities being taken away together with
their bodies, and also that there will be an identity of
cognition as also of persons, and that in the fabulous
restitution they will only be naked even as they had
existed in that prae-existence which they insanely
introduce, let him be anathema."
What has this to do with "the larger hope"? If
any one wishes to see how little a condemnation
of " Origenism " necessarily involved any condemna
tion of Universalism, he has only to read the strange
medley of vagaries attributed to Origen in all the
fourteen succeeding canons, which touch on ques
tions as dead and as unpractical as it is possible to
conceive. Those canons condemn opinions which
most persons would now pronounce to be unintelli
gible nonsense, and which probably represent philo
sophical speculations refracted and reflected through
A A
354 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP
*lt
the hazy brains of those who had not the least con
ception of what the great Alexandrian thinker Jjad
really meant to convey. Of such opinions we shall
be quite safe in asserting that they cannot in the
least represent Origen s real views ; and the wonder
is that no one Hike Pelagius at Diospolis asked
leave " to condemn any who held them as fools, rather
than to anathematise them as heretics." 1
This, then, was " the monstrous restitution as
defined by the synod itself 1 Will any one say that
this is a condemnation of the simple hope that God
may reach and save the souls even of all men, much
less of the majority, beyond the grave ? What living
Universalist would scruple to subscribe to such canons
as these ? And the whole movement caused such a
scandal that Theodorus Ascidas afterwards said that
" Pelagius, who had caused the condemnation of
Origen, and himself, who had caused that of the
Three Chapters, deserved to be burnt alive for what
they had done."
The trouble excited by the action of Peter of Jeru
salem, the Roman Pelagius, and Justinian, did not,
however, end with the Home Synod. Theodorus
Ascidas and Domitian, wishing to divert attention
from Origen altogether, tried to stir up an agitation
against the three eminent Syrian teachers, Theodore
of Mopsuestia, Theodoret, and Ibas of Edessa, who,
from their controversial ability, had always been
hateful to the Monophysites. Now it is more than
probable that all three of these great leaders of the
school of Antioch agreed with Origen in his so-called
1 "S oldie Ketzereien waren es mit deren Verdarnmung sich cine
Kircheuversammlung beschaftigte grosstentheils Grillcn und Traumer-
fien iiber ein vergangenes oder noch kiinftiges Leben, wovon die eine
Parth -y so viel vers-tand als die andere. Bannfliiche auf dieselben zu
schleudern war dahcr beinahe lachn-lich, wenigstens sehr unniitz ; denn
die Anhanger derselben wurdeu dadurch nicht zur Erkenntniss eines
Irrthums geftihrt, s^ndern mehr darinnen durch eine solche Hefdgkeit
b estarkt." - SCHROCKH, xviii. 55.
xii.] THE FIFTH OECUMENICAL COUNCIL. 355
Universalism, although they had written against his
allegorical method of exegesis. Nothing, therefore, was
farther from the wishes of Theodorus and Domitian
than to call in question the Origenistic eschatology,
which was held by themselves as well as by the teachers
who were condemned in the edict of Justinian (A.D. 544)
" on the Three Chapters." The Fifth Oecumenical
Council was summoned (A.D. 553) for the express
purpose of making every bishop subscribe to the
condemnation of these " three Chapters."
Happily I am not here obliged to relate the mise
rable shiftings and tergiversations of the Pope Vigilius
when he found himself in the Emperor s power at
Constantinople. The only questions which concern
us are I., Did the Fifth Oecumenical Council condemn
Origen ? and II., Did a condemnation of Origen in
volve a condemnation of his view that all men would
be ultimately saved ?
I. Did the Fifth Oecumenical Council condemn
Origen ?
The answer is that, i., Even if it did, it only did so
in spite of all ecclesiastical precedent, when he
was undefended, and without any evidence as to his real
views (of which there is not so much as a trace in the
Acts of the Council), 1 by a cursory and grossly unjust
mention of his name in the eleventh canon, together
with those of " Arius, Eunomius, Macedonius, Apol-
linaris, and Eutyches and all other heretics, with their
impious writings," in the fourteenth canon.
ii. Even if it did, yet I say, with Canon Westcott,
that "there is in a life of humble self-sacrifice some
thing too majestic, too divine, to be overthrown
by the uncandid sentence of an ecclesiastical
synod."
iii. A condemnation of " Origen " means a con
demnation of a vast number of opinions, 2 probably
1 See Dupin, v. 189-207; Basnage, Hist, del E.I. i. 519-542.
2 Even Doucin admits this. Hist, de F Origenisme, p. 388.
A A 2
356 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
^^
misunderstood and misrepresented, which were attri
buted to him, but which have no connection w-ith a
simple hope of man s final restitution.
iv. But " it is not impossible," as Neander says,
" that the name of Origen was but a later insertion." 1
Neander gives no reasons, but the following may be
offered :
a. The Acts of the Council have been accidentally
or intentionally mixed up and confused with the
Canons of the mere Home Synod of A.D. 541, and
with the letters of Justinian to that Synod and to
Mennas. 2 The genuineness of the fifteen canons is
far from certain, and passages of Justinian s letter
are often ignorantly quoted as though they were
part of these canons.
ft. There was a strong desire, in later times, to be
able to say that Origen had been condemned by an
Oecumenical synod, so that there was every tempta
tion to insert his name. The same causes produce
the same effects, and lead to the scarcely honest
assertion so often repeated, that Universalism was
condemned by synods and councils which never so
much as touched upon the question.
7. It is certain that the writings of Origen were not
1 Neander, Ch. Hist. iv. 492, E. tr. Gieseler says without hesitation
(Eccles. Hist. ii. 102, E. tr.), " No further notice was taken of the
Origenists." Cave says, " Nee Origenis, nee Origenistarum, nisi capi-
tulo xi. [where, as I shall show, the name of Origen is of doubtful
genuineness] vel levissima mentio ; niulto minus causae istius plenaria
cognitio." Hist. Liter ar. p. 558.
2 The confusion partly arose from the fact that the Second Council of
Constantinople, A.D. 553, was the Fifth Oecumenical Council, and the
Home Synod, A.D. 541, was the fifth council or synod which met at
Constantinople. See F. N. Oxenham, Letter on Everlasting Punish
ment, p. 21. The Rev. J. S. Blunt seems to have arrived at the same
conclusion, though he strongly opposes any form of Universalism. He
says, When the Fifth General Council met they did not take any
notice of these fifteen canons [of the Home Synod] or of the Origenistic
opinions which had been condemned, and notwithstanding the agitation
raised concerning the three chapters, the only conciliar condemnation of
their opinions was in the obscure synod referred to." Diet, of Sects,
j. v. Origenists.
xii.] DOUBTFUL GENUINENESS. 357
discussed at this council, but only in the synod, if
even there. 1
8. The other heretics mentioned had all been more
or less directly condemned in the first Four Councils,
to which this canon expressly refers ; Origen alone
had not.
e. It is, to say the least, very suspicious that
Origen s name, first in order of chronology, should
stand last in the list. 2
f. Theodorus Ascidas, as Bishop of Caesarea,
took a very leading part in the Fifth Council, and he
would certainly have endeavoured to keep out the
name of Origen, from whom it had been his express
object to divert attention. 3
rj. His name does not occur in the preamble to the
Acts of the Council or in the subscription to it by the
Patriarch Eutychius. 4
0. He is not mentioned by Vigilius, Pelagius II.,
or Gregory the Great, who mention the Three
Chapters. 5
L. It is certain that there has been some confusion.
Cyril of Scythopolis, in his life of St. Saba, and
Evagrius (H. E. iv. 38) do indeed say that " Origen
was condemned at this Council, but they may very
easily have fallen into the confusion which I have
mentioned, and it is Gieseler s opinion that they did.
If they made this not unnatural mistake, others
would follow them. The later authorities quoted
by Dr. Pusey have therefore no independent value,
nor can their assertions outweigh the silence of three
Even there they seem only to have read the garbled and misunder
stood extracts scraped together without possibility of explanation by
Pelagius, &c.
2 If it be said that this is because he was last condemned it throws
fresh light on the fact that even his opinions on the nature of Christ
which were probably quite misunderstood had not been condemned by
any conciliar decree for the three centuries which had elapsed since
his death. Origen died A.D. 253. The Fifth Council was held in
A - D - 553- 3 Liberatus, Brev. 24.
4 Harduin III., Collat. viii. p. 193. 5 See Schrockh, xviii. 56,
358 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
%
contemporaries Facundus of Hermiane ; Liberatus
in his Breviarum ; and Victor of Tununum. 1 Besides
this we have the silence of the Acts of the Council
themselves. The error once rooted, it would natur
ally be perpetuated ; and as for Nicephorus, who
wrote nine centuries afterwards, the mistake into
which he fell is obvious on the face of his own nar
rative. He as well as others failed to observe that
the Fifth Council of Constantinople was a term which
applied alike to the Home Synod and to the Fifth
Oecumenical Council, which was held at Constanti
nople.
K. The silence of the Acts of the Council about
Origen ought to weigh far more than the authorities
adduced on the other side, for there is not the least
probability in the suggestion that they were mutilated.
They could not have been mutilated without the con
nivance of Eutychius the Patriarch, and his character
is above all suspicion. He would have no temptation
whatever to suppress facts which told against Origen ;
but there were multitudes who would be very strongly
tempted to invent such facts. It is, for instance, all
but certain that some of the documents collected
against Theodore of Mopsuestia in the proceedings
of this Council are later additions. 2
But (II ) Even if we grant that " Origen" was con
demned, did that involve any condemnation of his
" Universalism " ?
Most unquestionably not ; for these reasons :
i. The name " Origenist" had many different mean
ings. 3
ii. The leading promoters of the Council held the
eschatological opinions of Origen.
iii. The assembled Bishops expressly referred to
1 Dr. Pusey claims the authority of the latter (p. 137) ; but Victor
does not mention the condemnation of Origen.
! See Gieseler, ii. I ; Walch, Ketzerhistorie, viii. 281 291.
3 Schrockh, xviii. 60.
xii.] THE FIFTH OECUMENICAL COUNCIL. 359
St. Gregory of Nazianzus, St. Gregory of Nyssa,
and to other Fathers who were avowed admirers of
Origen, and of whom one at least had repeatedly,
and in the most public manner, expressed ap
proval of Universalist hopes. The last circum
stance seems to me decisive. If Universalism had
been at all in question, would it not have been
the most monstrous injustice to quote St. Gregory
of Nyssa as a canonised defender of orthodoxy in
the same breath in which Origen was condemned
as an impious heretic ? No honest reader can deny
the force of these considerations.
III. But, after all, the authority of the Fifth Council
goes for very little. 1 It was by no means a creditable
assembly. No one can entertain much respect for its
authority who is adequately acquainted with its history.
Its determinations are in no sense binding on the
English Church. It was born and died in jealousies and
counter-jealousies. It was disgraced by the machi
nations of corrupt courtiers. Intrigue stood by its
cradle, and intrigue followed its hearse. It reversed
the decision of the Council of Chalcedon, which had
listened, without impatience, to the praises of Theo
dore of Mopsuestia, and had admitted the orthodoxy
of Ibas as well as that of Theodoret, after hearing
the very letter which the Fifth Council condemned. 2
It originated in a disingenuous attempt to undermine
the authority of the Council of Chalcedon in the in
terests of the Monophysite heresy ; it laid itself open
to the just accusation of breaking an understood
principle in attacking the honoured dead who could
not answer for themselves. 3 It awoke the indignant
1 Undoubtedly the Fifth Council did condemn Theodoret for alleged
Nestorianism ; yet the Jesuit Sirmond, in his Life of Theodoret, did not
hesitate to declare that Theodoret was quite innocent of Nestorianism.
2 Man si, vii. 189.
3 For this reason several protests were raised against it, e.g. by
Fulgentius Ferrandus (Ep. ad Pelag.}. " Ut pro mortuis fratribus
uon generentur inter vivos scandala." The North African Bishop
360 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP. XIL]
^L
protests of Pontianus, Fulgentius Ferrandus, Libe-
ratus, Victor of Tununum, Rusticus, Facundus of
Hermiane, and others, against its uncalled-for dog
matism, caused by the zeal of those who wanted to
teach what they had never learned. It led to an out
burst of cruel and wanton persecution. Its decisions
were for a long time rejected by the Churches of
North Africa, Spain, and Gaul. It was slightly
regarded by Pope Gregory the Great. It displayed
nothing so much as the arbitrary will of a meddling
and heretical Emperor, and the fickle mind of an
ignorant and simoniacal Pope. 1 It had the directly
mischievous effect of stifling free inquiry, checking
theological development, and depriving the Church
of the writings of some of her greatest and holiest
scholars. It was a condemnation of philosophic
thinkers by men incapable of philosophic thought. 2
And, after all, it is doubtful whether its canons are
genuine, and whether it condemned Origen at all.
Even if it did, that condemnation has no bearing on
the simple question, " Will all men ultimately find
God s mercy or not ? still less on the only question
with which I am personally concerned, " Is there any
hope beyond the grave for souls which have died in
imperfect penitence ?
Pontianus spoke in similar terms. Vigilius, in one of his many wavering
moods, urged the same objection. Eutychius got the Patriarchate (from
which Justinian subsequently deposed him) for proving that it was
quite fair to anathematise the dead, since Josiah had burned the bones
of the priests of Bethel ! If the great writers whom the Council con
demned were by that time in the company of saints and angels, they
must, says Gibbon, "have smiled at the idle fury of the theological
insects who still crawled on the surface of the earth."
1 See Neander, Ch. Hist. iv. 281; Gibbon, iv. 366-388. Justinian
before his death in A. D 564 was endeavouring to force on the Church
by persecution the heresy of the Aphthartodocetae, which happily
died with him. Baronius "almost pronounces his damnation."
1 Let the reader study the perfectly unbiassed criticism of Schrockh,
xviii. 55, and he will find there views amply supported.
CHAPTER XIII,
PRINCIPLES OF SCRIPTURE EXEGESIS.
" I will trust in the mercy of God for ever, and beyond " (le-olam
vaed). Ps. lii. 8.
" W T hat is man, and whereto serveth he? What is his good, and
what is his evil ? The number of man s days at the most are a hundred
years. As a drop of water unto the sea, and a gravel stone in com
parison of the sand ; so are a thousand years to the days of eternity.
Therefore is God patient with them, and poureth forth His mercy
upon them. He saw and perceived their end to be evil, therefore He
multiplied His compassion." ECCLUS. xviii. 8-12.
" Christo dedit Pater omne judicium. Poterit ergo te ille damnare quern
redemit a morte, pro quo se obtulit, cujus istam suae mortis mercem
esse cognoscit ? Nonne dicet quae utilitas in sanguine meo, si damno
quern ipse salvavi ? Deinde consideras Judicem, non consideras Advo-
catum? Potest ille severiorem ferre sententiarn qui interpellare non
desinit, ut paternae reconciliationis in nos conferatur gratia." ST.
AMBROS. De Jacob, et Vit. Beat. i.
"We all are aware that by means of the acumen of later times
many things both from the Gospels and the other Scriptures are now
more clearly developed and more exactly understood than they once
were ; whether it was that the ice was not yet broken by the ancients,
and their times were unequal to the task of accurately sounding the
open sea of Scripture, or that it will ever be possible in so extensive a
field, let the reapers be ever so skilful, to glean somewhere after them.
For there are even now a great number of obscure passages in the
Gospel, which I doubt not posterity will understand much better."
CARDINAL FISHER, Bishop of Rochester, Assert. Luther. Confut. 18.
" Our whole nature leads us to ascribe all moral perfection to God.
and to deny all imperfection in Him. And this will be for ever a
362 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
Tt
practical proof of His moral character to such as will consider what
practical proof is, because it is the .voice of God speaking to us."-
BISHOP BUTLER.
Reason is the only faculty by which we have to judge of anything,
even of revelation itself." BISHOP BUTLER.
"Many have imbibed the unhappy prejudice that our public version
is so accurate and unexceptionable, and so faithful a transcript, as to
suspend all labour employed this way." BENNET, Olam Haneshamotk,
P- 15-
" The Bible has fallen much into the hands of those who imagine
that a few favourite texts will suffice to prove that Omnipotence is on
the side of the most extravagant theologies. The world has already
suffered too much from sytems founded on a few wrested quotations to
allow of much reticence in repudiating these hermentutical methods."
-REV. E. WHITE, Life in Christ, p. 348.
" i. God s Word must be interpreted as consistent with itself.
"2. It must be interpreted as consistent with His own character.
"3. It must be interpreted as consistent with reason and moral
intuition." G. HILL.
"The evidence accompanying the popular interpretation [of the
doctrine of eternal suffering] is by no means to be compared to that
which establishes our common Christianity, and therefore the fate of
the Christian religion is not to be considered as implicated in the belief
or disbelief of the popular doctrine." ROBERT HALL, Works, v. 529.
"The laws of men are but the injunctions of mortality ; but what the
heart prompts is the voice from Heaven within us." SIR WALTER
SCOTT, For times of Nigel.
" La Charite, qui sait tout oublier des homines, et tout esperer de
Dieu." OZANAM, Poetes Francisc. p. 427.
" I scarcely ever met with a person who did not give me the impres
sion that he held bis creed under the law ; referring to particular texts,
but not to a spirit, apparently not even seeing the desirableness of it."
Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, p. 25.
BEFORE I once again examine what Scripture has to
reveal to us respecting the doctrine of future retribu
tion, it will be necessary to make a few preliminary
remarks.
The first and most general applies to that whole
system which sways my view of the faith of
Christ. If, as has been said, there are two systems of
religious doctrine, in one of which "sin" is the central
XIII.] THE ESSENCE OF REVELATION. 363
thought ; " terror " the motive power ; " personal salva
tion," the object : and in the other, " God as revealed
in Christ," the centre ; " the goodness of God the
motive power; " the restoration of His scattered chil
dren to Him the object, then I think that the
former may be taken to represent much of the popular
theology and the latter the Gospel of Christ. The
result of the former is too apt to be a hard and love
less religionism : the latter may, by God s grace,
develop the spiritual mind.
There are many who make the text, " Knowing
therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men " (2
Cor.v. I i),the keynote of their religion and their preach
ing. That " text " like most of the others adduced for
a similar purpose, is mistranslated and most egregi-
ously misapplied. It does not so much as touch on
the outermost sphere of the subject which we have
been examining. The context almost demonstrates
its meaning to be simply this " knowing that the fear
of God is the principle of my own life, I try to per
suade you that it is so, and that I am no hypocrite ;
my sincerity is known to God, and I strive to make
it known to you."
The outline of the revelation of God which polarises
my own thoughts is very different from that which
uses terror as an object of persuasion. It is that God
is love ; that the object of true religion is to be like
Him ; that destruction is the falling from that founda
tion and failure of that end; that salvation is the
deliverance from that error and from that sin; and
that God the Saviour is manifested in the name of
Jesus because He saves His people from their sins. 1
These are the impressions which I have learnt from
the teaching of God in Scripture and in life, and
there is nothing in the Bible which militates against
them if it be interpreted in accordance with the fol
lowing axioms.
1 See On Truth and Error, by J. Hamilton of St. Ernan s, p. 22.
364 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
"%
1. The authority of Scripture must not be con
founded with the wholly unauthoritative and some
times strangely mistaken inferences which even for
centuries together have been deduced from it by
fallible men.
2. No Scripture is of " private interpretation." It
can only be interpreted by the known rules of human
language, and by the acknowledged laws of philolo
gical and historic criticism.
3. The true meaning of the words of Scripture has
been, to an almost incredible extent, confused by the
meaning which those words have gradually acquired.
They have been taken to imply not what they really
mean, but \vhat, to the minds of modern readers, they
erroneously connote. It is assumed that " they cover
the whole extent of the meaning which to the reader
himself they have come to imply." They are quoted
as decisive about controversies with which in their
exact and original meaning they have not so much
as the most distant connexion. If I say of a man
that he was " another Cromwell," I may mean either
that he was a great and glorious ruler, or that he
was an amb itious and fanatical hypocrite, according
as I adopt one or other view of Cromwell s cha
racter. It would be preposterous for a reader to say
that I must necessarily mean that the man whom I
thus compare with Cromwell was a fanatical hypo
crite, simply because he takes that view of Cromwell s
characte-r. My meaning could only be discovered
either from the context or from some other state
ment of mine respecting Cromwell s character. Yet
in Scriptural arguments words and phrases are quoted
as decisive, of which the asserted meaning is resolutely
disputed and even disproved.
4. The meaning of Scripture must be determined by
its whole drift and tenour, and not by picking out of it
a few isolated passages to be tessellated into systems
to which they were long anterior. " A text," says a
XIIL] RULES OF EXEGESIS. 365
writer in the Church Quarterly (July, 1871), "may be
made to mean anything or nothing according to the
prepossessions with which the interpreter approaches
it. But problems like this must be measured by wider
considerations theological considerations based on
the great facts of nature and revelation." It is the
neglect of this principle which has given rise to the
bitter but not undeserved epigram
" Hie liber est in quo quaerit sua dogmata quisque,
Invenit et pariter dogmata quisque sua."
I will make a few remarks on these axioms.
I. We must discriminate between the teaching of
Scripture and the fallible inferences which have been
drawn from Scripture. Can there be any more con
spicuous proof of the unauthoritative character of such
inferences than the immense diversity of the theolo
gical systems deduced from Scripture exclusively by
men of the most entire honesty and learning ?
Let me, by way of illustration, show the danger
which must arise from pressing into the service of
theology the details of parables. This has been done
to a very large extent in treating of eschatology.
Unlimited inferences have, for instance, been drawn
from the Parable of Dives and Lazarus, regardless of
the fact that (i) that it is not only a parable, but also
full of metaphoric language ; (2) that the tremendous
inferences built upon its symbols must at least be
modified by other inferences equally valid ; and (3)
above all that Dives is in the Intermediate, not in the
Final State.
Or, if we need any proof that " parabolic theo
logy is not demonstrative," 1 let us take the parable
of the Unjust Steward. One plain and inestimable
lesson of that parable, the need of an active energy
1 " Omnes sensus Scripturae fundantur super unum sensum litteralem,
ex quo solo potest trahi argumentum, non autein ex iis quae secundum
allerjoriarn dicuntur." THOS. AQUIN. Sumnta, i. Qu. i. Art. x.
366 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
and a heavenly wisdom in using the things of earth so
as thereby to be helped, not hindered, in winning- the
things eternal lies plainly upon its surface. But
when commentators come to explain the details of
the parable scarcely any two of them agree. Thus
the Unjust Steward has been taken by different com
mentators to mean the Pharisees, the Publicans, Judas
Iscariot, Pontius Pilate, Satan, the Apostle Paul, 1 and
even the blessed Lord Himself! 2
Again, if we look at single passages, the instance
furnished by Gal. iii. 19, 20, will show us how little
we can rely on inferential exegesis. There is in that
passage no insuperable difficulty, yet there have been
" upwards of three hundred " different interpretations
of it!
Sometimes a single word has been most objection
ably pressed by inference into a complete system.
Such is the word " ransom." Our deliverance from
sin and death by the death of Christ is called in
Scripture " a ransom," because we were thereby set
free from bondage. But when men began to speculate
on the word and to draw all sorts of inferences from
it, there rose the whole forensic scheme of redemp
tion, and for nearly a thousand years, roughly speak
ing from Origen to Anselm, the notion prevailed that
the ransom was paid by Christ to Satan a notion
thoroughly Manichaean and absolutely unscriptural,
involving, as Anselm pointed out, a recognition by the
All Good and the All Merciful that evil and injustice
had established a right to exist in the universe which
He had made. 3
2. It should be self-evident that since " the law
speaks in the tongue of the sons of men " Scripture can
only be interpreted in accordance with the significance
of language ascertained by human thought and study.
The inner depths of the truths which its words convey
Theophilus of Antioch (? Jer. ad Algas. Ep. 121). 2 Unger.
3 See Oxenham, Catholic EscJiatology, p. 167.
xiii.] RULES OF EXEGESIS. 367
can indeed only be brought home to the soul by
the work of the Holy Spirit ; but the Holy Spirit does
not inspire a supernatural knowledge of the laws of
grammar, nor of the historic circumstances and national
idioms which determine the meaning of the sacred
writers. The intuition of a saint may enable him to
see more deeply into the spiritual force of a passage
than the erudition of a scholar, but the commentaries
of many saints show that no amount of spiritual
insight could save them from complete misapprehen
sion as to the significance of thousands of words and of
hundreds of texts. Spiritual knowledge is one thing ;
biblical criticism is another. About the great main
truths of Christianity all Christians are agreed. They
are plain and indisputable. The wayfaring man,
though a fool, need not err therein. He who runs
may read them. But spiritual attainments, as has
been proved by innumerable instances, do not protect
a man from the adoption, and even the intolerant
maintenance, of pernicious error in disputable matters.
Cartwright, the leader of the Presbyterians in the days
of Queen Elizabeth, was a good man, yet he said that
heretics ought to be burned even after repentance, and
that " if this was extreme and bloody, he was content
to be so counted with the Holy Ghost." Cardinal Bor-
romeo, who in the plague at Milan tended the sick with
the assiduity of a saint, afterwards persecuted heretics
with the fury of an inquisitor. Calvin s holiness did not
save him from polluting the pure stream of Gospel truth
by the influxes of a remorseless logic which led him to
conclusions utterly revolting to the moral sense. John
Wesley was a man worthy of the utmost admiration,
yet he said that to cease to believe in witches was to
give up the authority of the Bible. 1
3. Scripture must be interpreted in accordance with
1 See this subject, on which 1 can here only touch, a little more fully
illustrated in two papers of mine on " Wresting the Scriptures," in the
Expositor for 1880.
368 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
the original meaning of the terms which it employs.
The tyranny of words exists as much in the, lan
guage of theology as in every other branch of human
study. It would be easy to mention words which have
exercised a deadly influence in obstructing progress
and knowledge, because they carry with them a train
of associations which they have gradually acquired,
but which do not properly belong to them. 1 It is
hardly possible to exaggerate the consequences which
are traceable throughout history as having resulted
from single expressions. Consider the effects produced
on the Saxons by the word niedrig ; on the French
by the word gloire ; on many nations by the simple
onomatopoeia barbarian ; on philosophy by the use of
the word "attraction " ; on our Indian government by
the misapplication of the word " landed proprietor
All these, besides multitudes of theological terms, are
instances of those " rabble-charming words " which, as
South says, " have so much wild-fire wrapped up in
them." Consider again the marvellous correlation of
language and national morality. There is " a besetting
intoxication which this verbal magic, if I may so call
it, brings upon the mind of men. . . . Words are able to
persuade men out of what they find and feel, to re
verse the very impressions of sense, and to amuse them
with fancies and paradoxes even in spite of nature
and experience. He who shall duly consider these
matters shall find that there is a certain bewitching or
fascination in words which makes them operate with a
force beyond what we can naturally give account of." 2
4. The fourth axiom, that Scripture must be
1 "Illam dumtaxat Scripturarum interpretationem pro orthodoxa et
genuina agnoscimus quae ex ipsis petita Scripturis (ex ingenio utique
ejus linguae in qua sunt scripta, secundurn circurnstantias item expensa,
et pro ratione locorum vel similium vel dissimilium plurimorum quoque et
clariorum exposita) cum regula fidei et charitatis congrunt, et ad gloriarn
Dei, hominumque salutern eximie faciunt." BULLINGER, Conf. Helvet.
ii. 2.
2 South s Sermons. See my Language and Languages, p. 244.
xin.] SCRIPTURE TERMS. 369
understood and interpreted as a whole, and not by
its isolated and uncertain expressions, is too self-
evident to need further remark.
The application of these axioms bears directly on
the subject before us.
(i) It is a matter of simple demonstration that the
words which are prevalent in Christian eschatology
have exercised for centuries an influence which does
not belong to them. They have acquired meanings
which were not their original meanings, and which
now convey impressions entirely alien from their true
significance.
Such, for instance, is the word " damnation."
The words " damn and its derivatives do not
once occur in the Old Testament. In the New
Testament they are the exceptional and arbitrary
translation of two Greek verbs or their derivatives,
which occur 308 times. 1 These words are apollumi
and krino. Apoleia, " destruction," or " waste," is
once rendered "damnation (2 Pet. ii. 3), and once
"damnable" (2 Pet. ii. i) ; krino, judge/ occurs
114 times, and is only once rendered "damned" (2
Thess. ii. 12). Krima, "judgment," or "sentence," oc
curs 24 times, and is 7 times rendered " damnation."
Krisis, "judging," occurs 49 times, and is 3 times
rendered "damnation." Katakrino, "I condemn,"
occurs 24 times, and is twice only rendered " be
damned."
Now turn to a modern dictionary, and you will see
" damnation >; defined as " exclusion from divine
mercy; condemnation to eternal punishment." In
common usage the word has no other sense.
But to say that such is the necessary meaning of
the words which are rendered by " damn : and
" damnation," is to say what is absurdly and even
wickedly false. It is to say that a young widow who
marries again must be damned to endless torments
1 See Eternity in Concordance of Texts, p. 75 (Bagster s).
B B
370 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
%.
(i Tim. v. 12, having damnation," krima), although
St. Paul expressly recommends young widows to da so
two verses later on. It is to say that every one who ever
eats the Lord s Supper unworthily, eats and drinks
" eternal punishment " to himself, though St. Paul
adds, almost in the next verse, that the judgment
(krima) is disciplinary or educational
to save us from condemnation (Iva jjurj
I Cor. xi. 29-12). It is to say that "the Day of
Judgment " ought to be called "the Day of Damna
tion " (John v. 29). It is curious that our translators
have chosen this most unfortunate variation of
" damn and its cognates only fifteen times out of
upwards of two hundred times that krino and its
cognates occur ; and that they have used it for
kris is and krima, not for the stronger compounds
katakrima, &c. The translators, however, may not
be to blame. It is probable that " damn " was once
a milder word than condemn, and had a far milder
meaning than that which modern eschatology has
furnished to modern blasphemy. We find from an
Act passed when a John Russell was Chancellor (in the
reign of Richard III. or Henry VII.), that the sanction
of an Act against extorted benevolences is called
" a damnation " that is, " the infliction of a loss." x
This is the true etymological meaning of the word,
as derived from damnum^ " a loss " ; and this original
meaning is still found in such words as " damnify,"
" indemnify," and " indemnity/ In the margin of
i Cor. xi. 29, we find "judgment" for "damna
tion" ; whereas in verse 32 the "judgment of the
Lord is milder than His " condemnation." Dr. Hey,
in his lecture on the Ninth Article, thinks that the
phrase, "it deserveth God s wrath and damnation," is
used in the milder sense of the word which was
originally prevalent. However this may be, the word
has, as the Bishop of Chester says, undergone u
1 See Campbell s Lives of the Lord Chancellors, Lc.
xiu.] THE WORD "HELL." 371
modification of meaning from the lapse of time, and
it is an unmixed gain that both it and its congeners
will wholly disappear from the revised version of the
English Bible. "Judgment" and " condemnation
are the true representatives of krisis and katakrisis,
and they are not steeped, like the word " damnation,"
in a mass of associated conceptions which do not
naturally or properly belong to them.
(2) Equally unfortunate is the word "hell."
It is unfortunate because, though its original
meaning was harmless, it has now acquired the
deadliest conceivable significance. Archbishop Usher,
in his Answer to a Jesuit, tells us that (since helan
meant " to cover,") to " hell the head used to mean
"to put on a hat," and a " hellier" meant a " slater."
It was the name given to the place under the Ex
chequer Chambers where the king s debtors were
confined. It was used also for the place where a
tailor flung his shreds.
It is unfortunate because it has acquired a sense
of endlessness which is not once predicated either of
Sheol, or Hades, or (as we have already partly seen, and
shall further see), of Gehenna. It is a fact, which any
reader can at any time verify for himself, that dura
tion of time is never so much as mentioned in the
Bible in connection with Sheol or Hades ; and if he
be a candid seeker after truth, he can soon learn by
study that it is neither predicated of Gehenna, nor
formed any part of the normal Jewish conception of
that metaphorical word.
It is unfortunate because it is used to render
the three wholly different words Sheol or Hades,
Gehenna, and (in one place) Tartarus (2 Pet. ii. 4).
a. It is used for Sheol in such passages as " Thou
wilt not leave my soul in hell," Ps. xvi. 10 (i.e. Thou
wilt not abandon my soul to Sheol, the dim under
world or abode of the dead Acts ii. 27-31). In
such a passage as this there is no more reason to
B B 2
372 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
fk
render Sheol by hell than there would be in Gen.
xxxvii. 35, to read "I will go down into hell, unto
my son, mourning." The mistranslation, preserved
in the article of the Creed, " He descended into hell,"
probably fixes in many minds the grievous error that
our Blessed Lord endured (as some have actually
asserted) the sufferings of the lost.
Sheol occurs in the Old Testament sixty-five
times ; is rendered " hell " thirty-one times ; " grave "
thirty-one times ; and " pit " three times. It seems
to be akin to hy&, "hollow of the hand," the outside
of the world being regarded as a somewhat bent
hand, the covered inside of the hand being Sheol.
Yet can any words be more widely separated in their
associations than the words " grave ;I and " hell "
the former word calling up images of rest and peace,
the latter of endless and intolerable anguish ?
It is profoundly unsatisfactory that ordinary readers
should be at the mercy of a caprice which can thus
use a word of such tremendous associations, or can
substitute for it a word so mild and colourless as
" the grave," and that without so much as assigning
a reason. " Sheol," says the learned author of Olam
Haneschamoth, " is a term as opposite to hell as light
is to darkness." It ought to be rendered always
either Sheol or " the under-world/
/3. It is used for Hades. 1 That word occurs in the
New Testament eleven times, and in ten of them is
rendered " hell." In no one of the eleven does
it mean " hell." 2 In Luke xvi. 23, the rendering
" in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments/ has
" 1 Hades, "the grave," the region of the dead, though it is the exact
equivalent of Sheol, is only once rendered by "grave," I Cor. xv. 55.
It is certainly not derived from a and FiS, "the unseen," as the aspi
rate shows. Whether it is (by antiphrasis) connected with avSdvw
eoSoi/ may be doubted. Perhaps it may have some connection with
the Hebrew IV, ad. The Assyrian Bit-edi House of Eternity (?).
2 See Matt. xi. 23 ; xvi. 1 8 ; Lukex. 15 ; xvi. 23 ; Acts, ii. 27, 31 ;
Rev. i. 18; vi. 8 ; xx. 13, 14.
xiii.] HADES. 373
led to multitudes of false inferences, which are at
once dissipated when we render the verse " in
Hades."
There are many other passages where the use of
" hell " for " Hades " leads to dangerously false con
clusions. Our translators might have been aware
that it would do so. In I Cor. xv. 55 they would
not venture to render the clause by " O hell, where is
thy victory ? " (though in every other instance they
render "Hades" by "hell") because, by their day
the word had begun to acquire its darkest shades of
meaning, and they knew too well that if the word
"hell" be used in its popular conception, its victory
over the human race has been final and terrible
indeed.
In estimating the sense which the word " Hades "
conveyed to the Jewish mind, it must not be forgotten
that Philo defined the retributive Hades to mean
simply the life of the wicked. 1
7. " Hell " is used in rendering the verb " to plunge
in Tartarus " in 2 Pet. ii. 4, where it is no less un
suitable, because St. Peter is expressly referring to a
temporary, not an endless state, in which - the angels
who sinned " are " reserved for judgment." Seeing the
licence of theological inference, and the way in which
whole systems are built like inverted pyramids on
isolated expressions, it is astonishing that some have
not argued from St. Peter s mention of Tartarus that
the stories of Ixion, Tantalus, and Sisyphus must be
true. The inference would be quite as secure and
quite as logical as many of those which have contributed
to the mediaeval conception.
S. " Hell" is used for Gehenna twelve times. Now,
in endeavouring to discover the meaning of this word,
I will simply ask the reader to observe these plain
facts :
1 o irpbs d\-f}Qta.v"A$Tr)s (which he contrasts with 6 fj.v0ev6i*vos) 6 TOV
) )3ios effriv. PHILO.
374 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
a. The word means Valley of Hinnom, or, as it is
sometimes called, of the son or sons of Hinnom. ^
b. The Valley of Hinnom is mentioned thirteen
times in the Old Testament.
c. In no one of those thirteen passages does it mean
Five times it is used of a valley outside Jerusalem
which in ancient days had been, and in subsequent
ages again became, " the pleasant valley of Hinnom
(Josh. xv. 8, bis ; xviii. 16, bis ; Nehem. xi. 30).
Three times it is mentioned as having been defiled
by the burning of human beings alive in the Moloch
worship of Ahaz and Manasseh (2 Chron. xxviii. 3 ;
xxxiii. 6 ; 2 Kings, xxiii. 10).
Five times in connection with God s wrath against
the abomination of cruelly burning human beings,
and especially infants, with fire ; of which He ex
presses His abhorrence as a thing "which never came
into His mind (Jer. vii. 31, 32 ; xix. 115 ; xxxii.
35). In two of these passages it is spoken of as a
place of carcases. 1
d. In the New Testament Gehenna is alluded to
by our Lord seven times in St. Matthew (v. 22, 29, 30 ;
x. 28; xviii. 9; xxiii. 15, 33); three times in St.
Mark ; once in St. Luke (xii. 5) ; once in St. James
(iii. 6). In not one of these passages is it called
" endless." The only possible inducement to attach
such a notion to it is the addition in Mark ix. 43 of
"the quenchless fire and deathless worm," expressions
purely metaphorical and directly borrowed from a
metaphor of Isaiah respecting earthly consequences.
Seven of the ten allusions to Gehenna come out of
one single passage of one single discourse (Matt. v.
repeated partly in Matt, xviii., Mark ix.), and it is
1 It may be alluded to in Is. xxx. 33, as a place where the bodies of
the Assyrians were to be burnt ; but Topheth " may there mean
merely "a burning-place," or place for funeral pyres. The word
Gehenna does not occur in the Apocrypha.
xin.] GEHENNA. 375
extremely questionable whether in all seven the
primary allusion is not to an earthly Jewish punish
ment. 1
The other references are of the most general descrip
tion. The word does not occur once in all the thirteen
Epistles of St. Paul, and Hades only once, though he
had declared to his converts " the whole counsel of
God." Nor does it occur once in the pages of him
who leaned on the Lord s bosom ; nor in the Epistle
to the Hebrews; nor in the Epistles of the Chief of
the Apostles.
Origen, one of the few Fathers who studied He
brew for the express purpose of interpreting Scrip
ture, tells us that he had found by inquiry what the
Jews really meant by Gehenna ; and that Celsus and
1 Thus Schleusner, j.z/. Teevva (though he holds the old views), says
that it also meant " quaevis gravissimae poenae et maxime contume-
liosa mortis genera." He renders " a son of Gehenna" (Matt, xxiii. 15),
by "worthy of the severest punishments"; and "shall be liable to
the Gehenna of fire " (Matt. v. 22), by "worthy of a disgraceful death."
The ordinary account of Gehenna as a place defiled by Moloch worship,
then made the common cesspool of the city, and purified by huge fires,
appears to rest solely on the authority of Rabbi David Kimohi on
2 Kings xxiii. IO and Ps. xxvii. 13, and Rabbi Elias in Thishbi, f. 14,
2 (Stehelin, ii. 31). It is at least open to question whether the meta
phorical meaning of the name may not have been derived from some
gaseous exhalation which led many to imagine that in that valley lay
one of the "mouths of hell." The current belief that Gehenna, in
common Jewish opinion, ended in annihilation for the worst offenders,
was pointed out long ago by Bentley, in the first sermon of his Boyle
Lectures. He says that the learnedest doctors among the Jews "have
esteemed it (extinction) the most dreadful of all punishments, and have
assigned it for the portion of the blackest criminals of the damned,
so interpreting Tophet, Abaddon, &c., for final extinction and depriv
ation of living." For a full account of all that can be learnt about the
origin of the name Gehenna, &c., see Bottcher, /?<? Inferis, pp. 81-85 ;
Carpzov, Apparat. Crit. p. 484, sq. ; Glass, Philolog. Sacr. p. 806, sq.
It is at least a possible conjecture that the name means " the valley of
wailing." Its seven names (Jon. ii. 2 ; Ps. Ixxxviii. n ; xvi. 2 ; xl. 2;
cvii. 14, &c.) are mentioned in Eruvm, f. 19, I. The notion of rcfri-
geria (see supra, p. 282) and progressive mitigation is clearly expressed
in the Talmud, JaUmth Tehillin, 84 (Hershon s Talmudic Miscellany,
P- 3 r 3) "Rabbi Jochanan said the praises of God which ascend
from Gehenna are more than those which ascend from Paradise,"
376 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
*%
others (like most men now) talked of it with no
knowledge of its real significance. Besides its primary
meaning of the Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem,
it had come, he said, to acquire the secondary mean
ing of a purificatory punishment. There he stops
short with a mysterious remark that " he does not
think it wise to dwell any further on his discoveries."
It is impossible to doubt that he had discovered that
normally the Jews did not apply the word to an end
less but to a terminable punishment terminable
partly by deliverance from it, partly by extinction of
sentient life. It was in accordance with Origen s
avowed use of " oeconomy " in treating of the sub
ject, that in a popular book he should have kept his
discovery in the background. Then, as now, there
were men who regarded popular misconceptions as
too useful to correct. 1
Here then are three words of which the first and
commonest (Sheol, Hades) does not necessarily imply
a place of punishment at all ; and of which all three
are demonstrably used to describe an intermediate
and normally terminable condition. And yet they
are indiscriminately rendered by one word which is
normally taken to mean endless torture in material -
flames !
Well may the Bishop of Chester 2 remark that
"the confusion of Hades with Gehenna," as well as
the change of meaning in the word " damnation,"
" must be allowed to go some way towards justifying
a desire for further revision."
" Still greater misunderstanding arises," says the
Bishop of Durham, "from translating Hades, the
place of departed spirits, and Gehenna, the place of
fire and torment, by the same word hell, and thus
confusing two ideas wholly distinct. In such pas
sages as Acts ii. 27, 31, the misconception thus
created is very serious." 3
1 Orig. f. Cels. vi. 25. - Charge, p. 30. 3 On Revision^ p. 79.
xiil.] " GEHENNA " NOT " HELL." 377
" We find the Roman Catholic hell," says Dr.
Ernest Petavel, " still filled with the tortures
belonging to a barbarous age, red-hot gridirons,
boiling cauldrons of lead and brimstone, a pesti
lential atmosphere, and a multitude of horned and
cloven-footed demons, who .... pursue the damned,
inflicting upon them untold torments .... We have
rejected these monstrous fables, but have unfortu
nately preserved a word which recalls them and
which confuses the popular imagination by its con
stant misuse. It is the word hell, which the sacred
writers never use in the sense which is generally
given to it." l
That a word so misleading should still be retained
in the Revised Version is an error which I cannot
but fear that another generation will severely cen
sure. Quite apart from controversy, it seems to me
perfectly indefensible to render a word, of which it is
to the last degree important that we should form a
right conception, by another word of which the equi
valence is even disputable. I say this not as a matter
of doctrine, but as a matter of criticism. Even for us
who believe that souls may pass into endless loss,
the word hell is irrevocably mingled with masses of
false, superstitious, and unscriptural fancies. Our
revisers, by seeming to sanction the error that the
words Gehenna and Hell are accurate equivalents,
perpetuate misconceptions which are more dangerous
than any others to the general acceptance of the
Gospel of Christ. If they had rendered " Gehenna"
by " Gehenna they would have been responsible
for nothing. They would have followed a divine
and unerring example. It cannot be otherwise than
dangerous to diverge from the example which made
the Apostles and our blessed Lord Himself keep a
Hebrew technical term in its Hebrew technical form. 2
(3) Still more unfortunate and misleading is the
1 The Struggle for Eternal Life t p. 30, ? See sufra, pp. 184, 215.
3?8 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
variant rendering of aionios > now by " eternal/ now
by " everlasting."
It must be indeed a hopeless prejudice a blind
ness which can be regarded as little short of penal
which refuses to see that aionios does not necessarily
mean endless.
Aion, Hebrew. #&*% means properly "an age/ an
indefinite period, long or short. The phrases which
are asserted to imply endlessness are again and again
used of things which have long since ceased to be. 1 If
aion meant "eternity," how came it to have a plural
(alwves, olamiui] ? 2 and how came the Jews to talk of
" for ever and beyond " ? The latter expression alone
was decisive to the clear mind of Origen. He says
that the authority of Holy Scripture taught him
that the "word rendered " eternity " meant " limited
duration/ 3
Since aion meant " an age," aionios means properly
"belonging to an age," or "age long" ; and any one
who asserts that it must always mean "endless " de
fends a position which even Augustine practically
abandoned twelve centuries ago. 4 Even if aion
always meant " eternity " which is not the case
either in classic or Hellenistic Greek aionios could
1 The Passover sprinkling, Ex. xii. 24 ; the Aaronic priesthood, &c.,
Ex. xxix. 9; xxxii. 13; xl. 15; Lev. iii. 17; Num. xviii. 19; the
inheritance of Caleb, Josh. xiv. 9 ; Solomon s temple, I Kings viii.
12, 13 ; the smoke of Edom, Is. xxxiv. 9, 10. (Cotnp. Gen. xvii. 8 ;
xlix. 26; 2 Sam. vii. 16; Deut. xiii. 16 ; xv. 17; 2 Kings v. 27 ; xxi.
7 ; I Chr. xxviii. 4. ) To take but one or two books, combinations of
Olam (which is rendered by ai&if 439 times in the LXX. ) occur in
Exodus at least twelve times out of fourteen of things which have
passed away ; in Leviticus twenty-four times, always of things which
have come to an end ; in Numbers ten times ; in Deuteronomy about
ten times out of twelve ; and so on throughout the Old Testament.
If the word were used but once in a finite sense it would be enough,
but the fact is that it is so used repeatedly, and more often than not.
2 This plural occurs thirteen times.
3 Orig. De Princip. ii. 3, 5.
4 Gen. ix. 12 ; xvii. 8 ; xlviii. 4 ; xlix. 26 ; Num. xxv. 13 ; Lev. iii,
17 ; xvi. 34 ; Kab. iii. 6, &c.
xiii.] "AEONIAN" NOT ENDLESS. 379
still only mean " belonging to eternity" not " lasting
through it." Aionios does not even mean " endless
within the sphere of its own existence." For in
Deut. xxiii. 3 "for ever" is distinctly made an equi
valent to " even to their tenth generation." So again
in Is. Ix. 15, " 1 will make thee an aeonian excellency,"
is explained in the next clause by " a joy of many
generations " ; and in Lam. v. 19 " for ever and ever"
is the equivalent of " from generation to generation."
And though any further instances are superfluous, in
Is. xxxii. 14 we read, " The forts and towers shall be
dens forever, until the Spirit be poured upon us. . . .
Then judgment shall dwell in the wilderness." Are
we to believe that the Kings of Babylon " shall
sleep an endless sleep, and shall not awake " ? (Jer.
K. 39-57)-
The word by itself whether adjective or substan
tive never means endless. If such were its meaning,
or that of its Hebrew equivalent, the Jews would
have been perfectly justified in rejecting the Christian
religion which proclaimed the annulment of ordinances
which in their law they had again and again been told
were to be " eternal " and " for ever." If they could have
established that meaning of the word they would have
had an unanswerable argument against Christianity.
Aionios may in some instances connote endlessness,
because it catches something of its colour from the
words to which it is joined ; just as the word " in
definite might catch the sense of "infinite" if, in
speaking of things which for other reasons I knew
to be infinite in duration, I spoke of them as being
" of indefinite duration." It is a word which, like
many other adjectives, shines simply " by reflected
light."
Josephus shows that aionios did not necessarily
mean endless. He applies the epithet to the period
between the giving of the law and his own writing ;
and to the imprisonment of the tyrant John by the
380 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
Romans ; and to Herod s Temple, which was already
destroyed when he wrote. And when he wants to
assimilate Jewish theology to Greek teaching, he is
so well aware that aionios will not convey his mean
ing, that he purposely uses instead the word aidios,
and employs no less than four expressions, of which
every one is alike unknown to the Old Testament
and the New namely, " endless prison," " endless
vengeance," "incessant vengeance," and "immortal
vengeance." 1 As for the usage of Philo, there could
not be a better authority than his editor, Dr.
Mangey, who says that he never used aionios for
endless duration.
The Greek Fathers were well aware of these facts :
a. Thus St. Gregory of Nyssa speaks of aionion
diastema : " an aeonian interval." 2 Here the mean
ing " endless " introduces positive absurdity. 8
b. Leontius of Byzantium, even in arguing against
Universalists, admits that aion is used of a definite
period. He says that Origenists argued from the
finite use of aion, that "aeonian correction" must be
terminable. 4
c. St. Chrysostom, in his Homily on Eph. ii. 1-3,
says that " Satan s kingdom is aeonian that is, will
cease with this present world." Here in the Oxford
Library of the Fathers the word aionios is rendered
"secular." If, in his homily on 2 Thess. i. 9, IQ, he
uses the word to show that the " destruction " is not
temporal, this is a part of the inconsistency which
seems to attach to all the utterances of the Fathers
on this subject, but which does not at all shake the
force of his previous admission.
1 ftpy/j^s dl Stoy, cu Sios, dStaAenrros, dflaVaros n/j.<apia.
Opp. ii. 650.
3 See Bennet, Olam Haneshamoth, pp. 381-419, " On the opinion of
the Greek and Latin Fathers with respect to the Intermediate State,"
&c. (1800).
4 OTI TO TOV al&vo i 6vo/jLa irepl w/NCTjUeVou -xp6vov Xeyerat. LEONT.
BYZ. I have quoted the rest of the passage, infra, p. 400.
xiii.] " AEONIAN " NOT ENDLESS. 38 1
d. Justinian, in his virulent letter to the Patriarch
Mennas, evidently avoids the exclusive use of the
word, because he felt that it was so indecisive, and
uses instead the unscriptural ateleutetos aionios for
" life," and ateleutetos for " punishment."
e. And in spite of Dr. Pusey s assertion that
" there must be some mistake here " I repeat that
the author of the spurious dialogues which pass
under the name of Caesarius, the brother of St.
Gregory of Nyssa, points out that the Universalists
derived one of their very arguments as to the termi-
nability of future punishment from its being only
called aionion. 1 The reader can judge for himself. Dr.
Pusey says, " No Greek could have so argued/ That
they did so argue is abundantly clear from the fact,
which I have now proved, that so many eminent Greek
Fathers leaned to Universalism, although they freely
used the word aionios of future punishment. Some
times they do not even shrink from the stronger word
aidios, because they know that such words are often
used in a vague rhetorical way, just as the Hebrew
"for ever" is used without the writer even dreaming
of the abstract conception of absolute endlessness. It
has been repeatedly argued that aionios must mean
" endless," because it is applied to God. The futility
of the argument may be exposed by one of hundreds
of instances. In Is. Ixii. 12, Olam (efe TOV al&va) is
applied to God s everlasting name; yet in Deut.
xv. 17 the very same expressions are applied to the
lifetime of a slave.
Further, the Greek Fathers could not have failed
to attach deep significance to a fact which, owing to
Huet, Origeniana, Opp. Orig. iv. 231, 233 (ed. Paris).
2 The Pseudo-Caesarius says that they argued e/c rou al&viov /j.6vov
^Tjfrat Kvpiov rb KoXaar^piov irvp Ka.1 OVK alc&i/iov atwj/wv. The impossible
Greek of the two last words obviously arises from some mere homoeo-
teleuton or other clerical error ; for I have shown above in the extracts
from Origen and Leontius that the Origenists did use an argument of
this kind.
382 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
"%
the unfortunate inaccuracy of rendering aionios by
"everlasting," escapes the notice of English readers
altogether. That fact is that in no single instance is
unmistakable and indisputable endlessness predicated
in Scripture of future punishment. A remarkable
illustration of this fact may be found in the autobio
graphy of an American divine the Rev. Dr. Theodore
Clapp. 1 He had just been preaching at New Orleans
a zealous sermon on endless torments, when a judge in
the congregation, who was an eminent scholar, and who
had abandoned an original destination for the ministry
from his inability to find this doctrine clearly revealed
in Scripture, asked the preacher to furnish him with
a list of texts in Hebrew and Greek to prove the
doctrine which he had been preaching. Dr. Clapp
proceeds to give a detailed account of his studies.
Carefully reading through the whole of the Old
Testament in Hebrew, he was unable to find the
doctrine which he sought, or even to find in Hebrew
a word at all corresponding to hell" as a place of
future punishment ; and he found (he says) that
orthodox critics of the greatest celebrity were per
fectly familiar with these facts. Confessing to the
judge that he could not find in the Hebrew Old
Testament the text he sought, he still turned with
perfect confidence to the New ; but after a study of
eight years was compelled by his conscience to admit
that he could not find a single text in the Greek
Testament which, when fairly interpreted, affirms
the endless misery of any human souls. He ends his
account by the remark that he was led to repudiate
the dogma by the Bible only, in spite of all the con
current prejudices of his early life, parental teaching,
and the influence of school, college, theological
seminary, and professional caste. Others, following
1 See The Theology of the Bible, by Chancellor Halsted, p. 626.
Similarly it was by an exclusive study of the liible that Mr. Jukes was
led to his view of Restitution.
xiii.] "ENDLESSNESS" NEVER ASSERTED. 383
the same course, might arrive at a different conclusion ;
but such a story from the life of an honest man is one
more indication of the fact which is supported by a
mass of evidence in all ages, that the popular views
are by no means revealed with that indisputable dis
tinctness and defmiteness which has been asserted for
them by the self-confidence of a purely assertive
dogmatism.
Now there are many adjectives, and many phrases,
any one of which might have been used by any
one of the Apostles and Evangelists, or by our
Lord Himself, which would have rendered any
question on the subject impossible to those who
accept the arbitrament of Scripture. Those adjectives
and expressions are used again and again by the later
writers who do mean to call future punishment
" endless " for all. The idea could be expressed with
the utmost ease and simplicity either in Hebrew or in
Greek in a hundred different and indisputable ways.
Yet not one of those decisive adjectives, not one of
those indisputable phrases, is once applied to Hades
or Gehenna. Those who make much of the silence of
Scripture as being often highly significant are bound
in common honesty to consider this fact.
The assertion that " if the expressions used in the
Bible for future retribution do not express endless
ness, no possible expression could have been found
which would have been adequate to do so," is
an assertion which can only be due to the blindest
prejudice. It is at any rate most astonishingly
false.
A scholar like Mr. Oxenham should not have asked
"whether, if Christ had intended to teach the doc
trine of eternal [he means " endless " ] punishment,
He could possibly have taught it in plainer terms ?" x
The answer is that He could have taught it in scores
of terms not only more plain, but absolutely indisput-
1 Review of Mr. Jukes in the Christian Apologist, ii. 103.
384 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAF
able. The absence of such terms, when compared
with their existence elsewhere, is very striking.
It is somewhat sad to find Dr. Angus putting forth
such a statement as that " Every form of words em
ployed in Scripture to describe everlastingness, our
Lord and His Apostles employ to describe the state
of those who die in sin and disbelief."
If controversialists are content to rely on such
assertions as this their views are doomed to the
speedy extinction which awaits error. Has not
Dr. Angus so much as read in the Septuagint
many expressions applied to God far stronger than,
throughout the whole Bible, are ever applied to
punishment or to evil ? l
For one of the strongest arguments against that
final doom, the possibility of which for absolutely
hardened sinners I do not deny, is derived from the
very fact that the doctrine is not taught with the
clearness which we should have expected if a view
so terrible were a matter of essential faith. It is
too often supported, as Athanase Coquerel says, by
trifles of criticism and variations of rendering." It
is still more often supported in what I consider the
worst way of all, namely, by the bald assertion that
all who deny it teach contrary to our Lord s express
words. This style of assertion shows an utter in
difference to argument. Thousands of learned and
holy men before Origen, and since, would have
accepted the doctrine without reserve, if they had
not been convinced that our Lord s words were not
decisive, and that they have been misunderstood.
The words of our Lord do on the whole render it
impossible for me to be an Universalist, but common
honesty and reverence for truth prevent me from
1 For instance, ets rbi/ alwva Kat tVe/ceii/a, Mic. iv. 5 > a^r aluvos val
<i)S at&i/os, I Chr. xxix. 10 ; els TOV aluva Kal ert, Dan. xii. 3 ; rbv
aiwva Kal CTT aiwva Kal ert, Ex. xv. 1 8 ; tts T^V alwva Kal tls T&V aluva
TOV aiuvos, P?. ix. 40, &c. &c.
xiil.j "ENDLESSNESS" NOT ASSERTED. 385
asserting the infallibility of my own interpretation
of them.
For, if we had so much as once been told in the
Bible that Gehenna, or that punishment, is ate-
leutetos, or aperantos, or aidios^ or adialeiptqs^ or that
the life in such punishment should be aplithartos,
there would have been no dispute as to the literal
meaning of such words. Josephus and some Christian
writers, when they want to speak of endless retri
bution, do use such words.
Our Lord and the Apostles might again have
spoken of men as bound in chains which can never
be loosed [akatalutos]. Or they might have said of
evil, as they have said of good, that it would last
" through all the aeons/ or through " all the genera
tions of the aeons," and even to " the ends of the
aeons." * Any one out of many Greek phrases
would have sufficed them to express the meaning
which they have never once expressed so unam
biguously as to make even Universalism an impossible
hope in the minds of Christians. Such phrases
Jiave been used by multitudes of Christian writers in
later ages ; but they are not found in Holy Writ.
And while Scripture nowhere says that evil will
last through all the ages, it uses some expressions
which seem distinctly to imply the reverse. While
therefore we may be unable to affirm that all evil
will have an end, we think it unwise to assert, as a
distinct article of faith, that it will not.
The pages of theologians in all ages show a start
ling prevalence of such terms as "everlasting death,"
everlasting damnation," "endless torments, " " ever
lasting vengeance," " everlasting fire." One might
1 I Cor. x. II, Eph. iii. 26 ; comp. Ps. cxlv. 13, Is. li. 6-8. "An
aeon may come to an end ; aeons of aeons may come to an end. Only
that which lasts through all the aeons is without an end. And Scripture
affirms this only of the Kingdom of God. The absolute eternity of
evil is nowhere affirmed." DR. CLEMANCE, Fiiture Punish ment, p. 86.
C C
386 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
^.
have supposed that the Bible was full of these ex
pressions. But what are the facts ?
In my view of the meaning of aionios not one of
these expressions has any Scriptural authority. But
further,
I. " Everlasting death? though used in our Liturgy,
is a phrase quite unknown to the Scriptures. They
never speak even of aeonian death, often as they
speak of aeonian life.
II. " Everlasting damnation" is a mistranslation of
" aeonian judgment." It occurs but once in Heb.
vi. 2. In Mark iii. 29, it is in all probability a mis
reading for " aeonian sin."
III. " Everlasting fire" is " aeonian fire." It occurs
once in Jude (verse 7) of the earthly and temporary
fire which destroyed the Cities of the Plain ; and twice
in St. Matthew, once in a parable, and both times as
an equivalent for the vague Hebrew le-olam. In the
Gospels it is the "fire not of earth/ the "spiritual 1
fire of God s wrath against obstinate wickedness.
IV. " Everlasting punishment " is " aeonian correc
tion " " correction in the world to come."
V. "Everlasting vengeance" so far from being an
inspired expression, has no Scriptural parallel what
ever. It comes first from the athanatos timoria in the
Graecised misrepresentation of Jewish eschatology by
Josephus; and, afterwards, in some of the Fathers.
VI. "Endless torments" is an expression for which
there is not one iota of direct Scriptural authority.
Is a doctrine of such stupendous horror to be made
to rest on this extremely rare occurrence * of an ad
jective which scores of times has not the meaning
thus attributed to it ? And is this meaning to be
1 rfutviov irvp, Matt, xviii. 8 ; xxv. 41 ; Jude 7.
aluvios ic6\affLS, Matt. xxv. 46.
aluiviov a,ua/>T7j/xa, Mark iii. 29. rfi&viov npifjia, Heb. vi. 2.
No such combination occurs even once in the Gospel or Epistles of
St. John ; or in the Gospel or Apts of St. Luke ; or in all the thirteen
Epistles of St. Paul (;-ee infra, p. 465) ; or in either of the Epistles of
Xiil.} "ENDLESSNESS" NOT ASSERTED. 387
given to it in spite of the fact that the doctrine, if it
had been intended, could have been expressed, with
out a shadow of ambiguity, by at least ten or twelve
other expressions known to and used by the sacred
writers, but never once applied by them to the dura
tion of evil or of future retribution ?
" Endless," says the laborious author of Eternity,
a Concordance of Texts ^ "a. word so often employed
by men with reference to things eternal, does not
occur in the Old Testament, and twice only in the
New Testament, where it is the representative (not
of aionios, but) of two very different Greek words,
neither of which are used elsewhere in the New
Testament." These two words are akatalutos* ("end
less genealogies," I Tim. i. 4) and aperantos ("the
power of an endless life," Heb. vii. 16).
The simple and unmistakable words " immortal
(athanatos, aphthartos}* and " immortality " (athanasia,
aphtharsia) are never predicated of sinners. 4
There are other words to imply " endlessness "
which occur in the Septuagint, and not in the New
Testament, such as aenaos. But so little had the
ancients faced the abstract idea of " endlessness " that
even this word is applied equally to God (Deut.
xxxiii. 27) and to the hills (Gen. xlix. 26).
The expression Leolam vaed(" for ever and beyond ")
occurs fifteen times in the Old Testament. Even this
phrase is, used in a perfectly general sense ; but why
is it not once predicated of future punishment ?
St. Peter ; or in St. James ; or even in the Revelation. In our Lord s
ministry, the phrase occurred but incidentally in two discourses, that
recorded in Matt, xviii. 8, Mark ix. 43, and that in Matt. xxv.
1 Published by Messrs. Bagster, 1879.
2 Even this word is purely metaphorical. Though the word means
"endless," it is used in a loose, popular sense for "long and tedious."
3 &&lt;}>QapTos only in Rom. i. 23 ; I Cor. ix. 25 ; xv. 52 ; I Tini. i. 17;
I Pet. i. 4, 23 ; iii. 4, always of God or of heavenly things.
4 aQo.va.ffia. only in I Cor. xv. 53, 54; I Tim. vi. 16 ; a(f>6ao(ria only
in Rom. ii. 7 ; i Cor. xv. 42, 50, 53, 54 ; 2 Tina. i. 10 (in Kph. vi.
24 and Tit. ii. 7 it is "sincerity").
C C 2
338 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
**
-
There are two very simple adverbs in the New
Testament, either of which would have been regarded
as decisive. One is aei, "always." It occurs eight
times in the New Testament, but not once of future
punishment. The other is pantote, which also occurs
eight times, but not once of future punishment.
The strong phrase "to the uttermost" (eis to pan-
teles, Heb. vii. 25) occurs once. It is applied to
salvation, not to condemnation.
Again, the strong phrase " for perpetuity (eis to
dienekes) occurs twice in the New Testament (Heb. x.
12, 14) of God, and of final sanctification. It is never
used of future punishment.
Once more we are told that the glory of Christ
shall last " to all the ages (et9 irdvra^ rovs cu&vat;,
Jude 2*5). Had such an expression been applied,
even so much as once, to the dominion of evil, it
would have been regarded as decisive. But it is not
so applied, not even by St. Jude.
A large number of other Greek phrases 1 would have
served equally well to express "endlessness," if such
had been the meaning which the word aionios was
intended to convey. How is it that they are not used ?
How is it that the adjective employed is one which
is far more frequently used of things not endless, but
terminable ? Why are the other and far stronger and
clearer adjectives only employed in other combina
tions? 2 If the dreadful tenet were as indisputable
and as essential as its supporters assert, why did not
any of the Prophets, or our Blessed Lord, or any one
of His Apostles and Evangelists preclude all contro
versy on the subject by any single statement such as
would have been conveyed in the very simple every
day words that future punishment would last es aei or
aneu telous?
1 Such, for instance, as various combinations of ovSe, Matt. xxiv. 21.
2 Aiitios of God in Roui. i. 20 ; but even this word of a temporary
fire in Jude 6.
xin.] "AEON/AN" NOT "ENDLESS," 389
Let none imagine that such facts will be set aside
at their bidding and on their assertion. They may
be and will be distorted, and ignored, and sophis
ticated, and explained away ; but they will remain
unshaken, because they are indisputable.
The Jews had never faced the abstract conception
of "endlessness." It is a conception beyond our
finite grasp. It may involve a sort of absurdity.
For, as Professor Challis says, " The difficulty con
cerning the duration of future punishment appears to
be attributable to a preconception tacitly, perhaps
unconsciously, entertained by most persons that time
and space have an independent existence, although
the teaching of Scripture is directly opposed to this
view. . . . May we not conclude that eternal life and
eternal punishment terminate alike with the end of
time, and that, in the consummation of all things
both are merged in indissoluble life [o>>7 a.Kard\vro^ y
Heb. vii. 16], that God may be all in all ?
The Greek Fathers were so well aware of these
facts that they attached no importance to the stock
sophism which has been repeated so often since the
days of St. Augustine that because aionios zoe means
"endless life" (which is not true), therefore aionios
kolasis must mean "endless punishment" (which does
not follow). 2 Such an argument would have seemed
altogether idle to an Origen, a Gregory of Nyssa, or
a Theodore. They believed and said that punishment
was "aeonian"; they did not believe it to be "end
less." Even the Latin Fathers who had risen to a
competent knowledge of Greek and had not become
quite stereotyped in prejudice were aware that there
1 Scriptural Doctrine of Immortality, pp. 127-132.
2 De Civ. Dei, xxi. 23. The argument is worthy of its companion
argument, that our only security of bliss rests on the punishment of the
wicked being " endless," because otherwise our bliss might not be
" endless." If the saints had not traditionally repeated such an angu-
ment, I should have thought that no Christian who realised what he
was saying could, without a blush, have used a plea so ignobly selfish.
390 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
r
was no real force in such a position. They were also
aware that aeternus was used in just the same loose
way for " an indefinite period " iri Latin writers, as
aionios was in Greek. 1
This was the cause of Jerome s inconsistencies; and
even Augustine was so well aware (when the spirit of
system allowed him to think of the matter) that
aionios is not a word of precision that though he
defines "the paying of the last farthing 3 to be
" eternal punishment," he says that he does not
thereby mean " to prevent a more careful inquiry
about the punishments of sinners, in what sense they
are in Scripture called eternal ; although in any
case they should be avoided rather than known." 2
The Augustinian argument, in which he practically
contradicts his own admissions, would have been dead
and buried long ago were it not that " words often
repeated react on the mind of the speaker, and at
last ossify the very organs of intelligence."
If even a single passage could be adduced in which
aionios does not mean endless we should be justified
in rejecting that meaning in any connexion which
bound us to conceptions such as those popularly
current concerning the torments of " Hell." But the
New Testament writers borrow the word aionios from
the Septuagint, and no amount of argument can alter
the fact that " of the ninety widely different subjects
to which the Scriptures apply terms which occasion
ally take the sense of endlessness, in seventy instances
they are confessedly of a limited and temporary
nature." 3
1 e.g. " Aeterna civica bella."- OVID, Pont. ii. 126. So we say,
"It will be an endless business"; "This led to endless trouble,"
&c.
a " Neque hoc dixerim ut diligentiorem tractationem videar ademisse
de poenis peccatorum, quomodo in Scripturis dicuntur aeternae, quam-
cjaam quolibet modo vitandae sunt potius quam sciendae."- AUG. in
AJatt. xxv. 26.
a White. Life in Christ, p. 397.
xiii.] " AEONIAN" NOT * ENDLESS? 39*
It is no answer whatever to say with Dr. Pusey that
of the seventy-one times in which the v/ord is used
in the New Testament, it is always applied to things
which are endless. For,
(i) In the first place this is simply to beg the ques
tion it is to assert what is denied. Though aionios
is often applied as an epithet to endless things, that
conjunction no more makes the word mean endless
than the fact that it is applied to spiritual things
makes the word necessarily mean spiritual.
And (2) our contention is (a) that in not one of the
seventy-one passages does the word mean " endless,"
and (/) that in some of them no ingenuity can suc
ceed in attaching such a meaning to it, since it is
applied to ages which have already come to an end.
In Rom. xvi. 25 the " aeonian times " are now ended
by the proclamation of the mystery. In 2 Tim. i. 10,
the aeonian times cannot begin to be " endless," any
more than they can in Tit. i. 2. In Philem. 15, the
"aeonian" relation between Philemon and his slave
either means (as in Deut. xv. 17) a relation for their
common lifetime, or that the old temporal relation
was replaced by a spiritual bond. In Luke i. 70, and
Acts iii. 21, prophets have not been prophesying " for
ever." In Jude 7, the "aeonian fire " is the sul
phurous storm, which in a single day destroyed the
Cities of the Plain. In Mark iii. 29, " aeonian sin
does not mean " endless sin," but sin of which the
effects shall continue in the world to come.
(3) And in the third place it would be perfectly
admissible to say that even if aionios implied " end
lessness when attached to words which express
things in accordance with the nature of God, it by
no means follows that it would have the same mean
ing when attached to things which are alien from, and
antagonistic to, His nature. If " life " or " future
bliss" came to an end, that would come to an end
which Christ, died to secure for all mankind ; if evil
392 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
-*
came to an end that would come to an end which
Christ died expressly to destroy. 1
(4) Moreover here are two distinct passages in
which aionios occurs in two consecutive clauses, and
in one of those clauses connotes endlessness, and yet
in the other is used of things which have already come
to an end, or soon shall come to an end.
a. One is Habakkuk iii. 6.
" The everlasting mountains were scattered, the
perpetual hills did bow ; His ways are everlasting."
Here God s ways are, in the strictest meaning of the
word, " everlasting and endless" ; but to say that the
hills are " everlasting " and " endless," is to contradict
the plain words of Scripture. Even in English it is
as gratuitous to explain the vague word " everlast
ing " of literal " endlessness/ as to insist that the
" pit is literally " bottomless," because it is so
called nine times in the Book of Revelation. The
one word is simply expressive of indefinite time, the
other of indefinite space.
Here, then, is one instance from the Old Testa
ment which would alone be sufficient to overthrow
what I called the battered and aged argument of
St. Augustine, about the supposed " absurdity " of
making aionios soe mean " endless life," and yet not
making aionios kolasis mean necessarily "endless
punishment." 2
1 See Dr. Clemance, p. 65.
2 Bishop Wordsworth, echoing this exploded "argument, says:
" Hence it may be inferred that the misery of the one and the joy of
the other will be co-extensive in duration. Now this appears to be
taught by other places of Holy Scripture." Duration, drv., of Future
Punishment, p. 15. The only answer is that a Christian is not bound
to accept so precarious an inference as adequate foundation for an
immense and startling dogma; and that to many " it does not appear
to be taught" by other passages of Scripture, but to be contradicted by
them. He adds : "And when the contrary opinion was broached by
Origen, the universal Church of Christ condemned it as heretical."
I have shown that it was broached long before Origen, and that
the universal Church of Christ never has condemned this opinion
as heretical at all, but on the contrary has (among others) canonised
xiii.] "AEONIAN" NOT "ENDLESS." 393
/3. And here is a second instance, from the New
Testament. Rom. xvi. 25.
" According to the revelation of the mystery which
was kept hushed from the eternal times (%p6voi<;
aiWiotsO, but now is made manifest . . . according to
the commandment of the eternal God (rov ala>viov
Now here, according to the triumphant argument
of St. Augustine and the host of followers who cite
his false logic, it would be wultum absurdum to
make aionios mean " endless " in one clause and yet
not make it mean " endless " in the other. Yet in
the other, so far from meaning " endless/ it is ex
pressly applied to times which have now come to an
end ; and "in aeonian, times" simply means, as Theo-
doret says, "long ago."
(5) I will give one more instance which ought suffi
ciently to prove that " eternal fire " does not neces
sarily mean " endless fire." In Jude 7 we are told that
Sodom " is set forth for an example, suffering the
vengeance of eternal fire." The " eternal fire ; is the
fire of God s wrath which destroyed Sodom ; and yet
if we make it mean " endless torments," this ignorant
method of wresting general expressions is at once
confuted by Ezek. xvi. 53 55, where we are ex
pressly told that God would bring back the captivity
of Sodom, and that Sodom, as well as one who had
sinned more grievously than Sodom, would return to
her former state.
The force of such arguments is unmistakable.
When Dr. Pusey says of Rom. xvi. 25, that St. Paul
"the Theologian," and "the Father of Fathers," both of whom held
it. *And so far from condemning the opinion "when it was broached
by Origen," it held four general oecumenical councils, and any number
of synods, after Origen s death, without condemning him or his theory
of Restitution (which was far wider than Universalism) ; and if it ever
condemned that opinion at all which I have shown to be in the very
highest degree doubtful did not do so till three centuries after Origen s
death.
394 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
here " places us altogether (so to speak) in the
Being of God," and " speaks of the eternal purpose
of God," he says what is quite true ; but he is then
practically taking refuge in vague phrases, and abso
lutely giving up all his previous arguments that
aionios must mean endless.
(6) But even if we could produce no such demon
strative instances, it would have been enough to say,
and we have already said, that good and evil are not
in pan materid. " I profoundly believe," says De
Quincey, " that the Scriptures ascribe absolute and
metaphysical eternity to one sole being, viz. God. . . .
Having anchorage in God, innumerable entities
may possibly be admitted to a participation in
the divine aion. But what interest in the favour of
God can belong to falsehood, to malignity, to im
purity ? To invest them with aionian privileges is in
effect and by its results to distrust and insult the
Deity. Evil would not be evil if it had that power
of self-subsistence which is imparted to it in sup
posing its aionian life to be co-eternal with that
which crowns and glorifies the good."
(7) In point of fact the word " spiritual " conveys
a much nearer approximation to the New Testament
usage of aionios (at any rate as St. John and St.
Paul use it) than either " everlasting or " endless.
And for this reason. The Jews divided all time into
the olam hazzeh, or present age, aeon, or dispensa-*-
tion ; and the olam habba, or future age, aeon, or dis
pensation. Their applications of the latter phrase
differ, and we have similar differences in the Greek
equivalents of these phrases. But aionios is predomi-
nently used in the New Testament of that which
belongs to the future aeon the unseen tl the eternal "
without any prominence being given, or even any
reference made, to the notion of endlessness. To
render " the aeonian God " by the " endless God "
would rightly sound shocking to us. It means the
xin.] "AEONIAN" NOT "ENDLESS." 395
God whom no man hath seen or can see 1 ; the God
into whose presence we shall pass in the future life.
The word is a favourite one with St. John, who uses
it twenty-three times of "life," as St. Paul also uses
it twenty-one times. Now it might have been assumed
that neither St. John nor St. Paul meant by this
merely " endless life," seeing that it is assumed that
we shall all live endlessly. The meaning of the word
in both these great Apostles is purely qualitative, the
blessed life of the world to come. This is the phrase
used by the Peshito version to render kolasis aionios
the "punishment of the world to come." The
epithet expresses the cJiaracter of the life, not its
duration, if indeed duration can at all rightly be
predicated of "the eternal now."
To give the meaning of " endless " to this word if-,
in many passages, simply impossible ; in others it
is only possible at the expense of altogether lowering
the conception. " The eternal/ says Canon Westcott,
is revealed as the present, and life is laid open in all
its possible nobility. The separation which men are
inclined to make arbitrarily between the here and
the ( there in spiritual things is done away." 2
It is satisfactory to find that this is the view taken
by Bennet in his grave and learned treatise Olam
Haneshamoth* In an elaborate examination of the
word olam he concludes that it means "the hidden
period." Thus when applied to God he makes it mean
the God of hidden duration," or " of the invisible
world." He says that by being rendered " for ever,
everlasting," &c., the true meaning is completely veiled,
because in many places the word does not signify
duration at all. Thus in Heb. viii. 5, "to the copy
of the heavenly things," corresponds to le-hukath
" I believe, as you do, that eternity has nothing to do with dura
tion. ... So eternal life is God s own life ; it is essential life ; and
eternal punishment is the misery belonging to the nature of sin, and not
coming from outward causes." Letters of Thomas Erskine, p. 235.
2 St. John, p. xxxix. 3 Olam, pp. 50-70.
396 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
41
olam. On the phrase " everlasting consolation
(paraklesis aionios], in 2 Thess. ii. 16, he argues that
consolation is in its very nature an intermediate
thing, and cannot apply to an endless state, but to
the period between death and resurrection. He
says that the term " eternal (aeonian) king 1 was
understood by the Seventy and the Rabbis to in
dicate God s care over souls during the interval
between death and the resurrection, which he calls
the " shadow of the hand of God (Is. li. 16).
Professor Maurice has often spoken to the same
effect. In a sermon on 2 Cor. iv. 1 8, he said, "We
often speak of time as a river, and of eternity as the
ocean into which it flows ... as though we were
floating down the stream of time, and death first
brought us into contact with eternity. The words of
this text suggest a very different notion. St. Paul
says that the things seen are temporal (irpbcncaipa) ;
the things unseen, eternal. He does not describe the
one as present, the other as future. He does not tell
us that here he is only among passing things, that
hereafter he shall be among permanent things. He
feels that he is in the midst of both here on this earth."
Let the reader consider the following passages :
" He that believeth on the Son hath eternal life."
John iii. 36.
" We are in Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus
Christ ; this is the true God and eternal life." I John
v. 20.
" Search the Scriptures ; for in them ye think ye
have eternal life." John v. 39.
" Thou hast the words of eternal life." vi. 68.
" His commandment is eternal life." xii. 50.
" Ye know that no murderer hath eternal life abid
ing in him." I John iii. 15.
If any one thinks that the substitution of " endless "
for "eternal" or "aeonian" in these and other pas
sages will express the meaning of St. John, I can only
XIIL] " AEONIAN " NOT " EXDLESS." 397
say that he is easily satisfied. But the latest and by
far the profoundest commentator on St. John s Epistles
Eric Haupt agrees in this matter with the latest
and profoundest commentator on the Gospel Canon
Westcott. Dr. Haupt says, "At the outset it must
be noted that eternal life is not to St. John a mere
term for unbroken continuance in being, as though
it were simply equivalent to the indissoluble life (zoe
akatalutos) of Heb. v. 6 ; that it does not define the
form of this life so much as the nature and meaning
of it ; zoe aionios is, in other words, a description of
divine life, of the life which is in God, and which by
God is communicated." 1 And again, speaking on
the verse, " Ye know that no murderer hath eternal
life abiding in him," he says, " Here it is primarily
obvious that aeonian life has in it no thought of time,
but is altogether an ethical idea or characteristic ; for
if we would take it in the sense of endless life
(Heb. v. 6), it is clear that there would be a contra
diction in terms." 2
Nor do these eminent writers stand alone. " Zoe
aionios" says Meyer, " signifies the eternal Messianic
life, which the believer already possesses. ... It is
that moral and blessed life which is independent of
death." " It is," says Liicke, " a present reality a
resurrection process prior to bodily death the sum
of Messianic blessedness an existing life, not a life
after death." Eternity consists, not in endlessness, but
in knowing, seeing, and loving God. " Eternal life,"
says Erskine of Linlathen, "is living in the love of
God ; eternal death is living ih self; so that a man
may be in eternal life or in eternal death for ten
minutes as he changes from one state to the other."
(8) But in point of fact all these authorities are
needless, for St. Paul and St. John both define the
sense in which they use the word " eternal." In both
of them, so far from meaning "endless," the word is
1 Haupt on I Join i. 2. 2 Id. on I John iii. 15.
398 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
almost the antithesis of " endless." " The things that
are unseen! says St. Paul, " are eternal," not the
things that are future. " Things eternal " are not
things of " endless time," but things with which time
has no connexion ; not things which shall exist end
lessly hereafter, but things which do exist now, only
that they lie outside the world of sense. St. John
gives a definition or indication of his usage exactly
analogous to this. "This," he says, "is life eternal."
What ? To live endlessly ? No ! But " to know
Thee the only God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou
hast sent." 1
(9) "Aeon is used in a similar spiritual and meta
physical sense. "Aeon," says Philo, "is the life of
God, and is not time, but the archetype of time, and
in it there i;> neither past, nor present, nor future." 2
" What to us is time," says St. Gregory of Nazianzus,
" is to the immortals the aeon." (Orat. 38.) Indeed
to degrade the word eternity to mean "endlessness," is
not only to mistake, but to reverse its true character,
Eternity is the timeless state; to make it a synonom
of time endlessly prolonged is a conception as mean
in philosophy as it is false theologically. " Eternity,"
says Tertullian, "has no time; it is itself all time.""
"Eternity," says St. Thomas Aquinas, "has no suc
cession, but exists altogether." 4 " The duration of
eternity," says Bishop Pearson, " is completely indi
visible and all at once. " 5 " God," says Bishop Bever-
idge, " is Himself eternity. . . . Eternity without
time." 6 " By eternity," says Spinoza, " I understand
abstract existence." " I think," said Thomas Erskine
of Linlathen, " eternal means essential in opposition
to phenomenal."
1 See accordant uses of the word in I Tim. i. 16 ; vi. 12 ; 2 Thess.
ii. 16 ; Gal. vi. 8. (The spiritual life springs up as a harvest from
sowing to the spirit.) 2 Philo, Opp. i. 277, 619 (ed. Mangey).
Tert. c. Marc, i. 8. * St. Thorn. Aquin. Sutnma, pt. i. qu. x. I.
Pearson, Minor Theolog. Works.
6 Beveridge, On the Articles, p. 16.
XIIL] "ETERNAL NOT " ENDLESS." 399
The word " eternal," if it could but be dissociated
from the vulgar confusion which takes it to mean
"endless," would be a very fitting translation for aionios.
" Everlasting" is a translation which ought never to
have been imposed upon us, and which now, it is
hoped, will disappear. If taken literally it fixes a
meaning upon a word in- some places which the
word cannot have in other places. It tends to
render permanent an unwarrantable decision of a
question which has again and again been success
fully disputed. And it is after all a decision per
fectly valueless, since no man is bound by the
unscriptural word "everlasting," but only by the
Scriptural word "eternal," or "aeonian." Let it
be solemnly and reverently remembered that He
who spake of " aeonian fire used the same adjec
tive, within a few hours, in senses which have no
connection with time whatever. 1 In many instances
the best rendering of zoe aionios would be the expres
sion of our Nicene Creed : " The life of the world to
come." Aionios then, so far as it has any reference to
duration at all, means, as Schleusner accurately says,
" duration determined by the subject to which it is
applied." But very often there is no direct reference
whatever to duration. When the Fathers talked of
the " Eternal Generation " of the Son, did they mean
the " Endless Generation " ?
Although it is hardly worth while to append autho
rities in proof of so obvious a fact as that aionios does
not necessarily mean endless, I will add a few more.
Some of them, be it observed, say that it a/so, in
some places, means endless. But, in saying this,
they are merely drawing inferences, and inferences
which, so far as the word is concerned, they cannot
prove. We have nothing to do with the indescrib
able confusion which they have caused by reading
their own theology into words which do not contain
1 John xvii. 3.
400 MERCY AND JUDGMENT, [CHAP.
it. If the word does not necessarily mean endless,
any one has a perfect right to reject that meaning,
and then so far as the argument from this word Is
concerned, the whole fabric of this terrible doctrine
collapses and falls to the ground. 1 Aion ought
always to be rendered by aeon or " age," and aionios
by aeonian or " eternal," if only it be borne in mind
that eternal and " endless " are two entirely different
words.
ORIGEN. "Quoties in saeculum dicitur longi-
tudo quidem temporis, sed esse finis aliquis indicatur,
et quoties saeculum saeculorum nominatur fortasse
licet ignotus nobis tamen a Deo statutus finis indic
atur."- -Horn. vi. in Exod.
LEONTIUS OF BYZANTIUM.- -The word aeon is in
reality often used of a definite period, both by heathen
and sacred writers (/cal irapa TO? eo) /cal Trapa rfj
ST. JEROME. " Et ultra non eris in sempiternum ;
sive, ut in Hebraeis olam et in Graeco aion scribitur,
unum saeculum significat." In Ezek. xxvi. ad fin.
IBN EZRA. " Leolam, for ever, merely means a
long time, i.e. till the year of jubilee." On Ex. xxi. 6.
OLYMPIODRUS. " When aionios is used for a period
which by assumption is infinite and unbounded, it
means eternal ; but when used in reference to time
or things limited the sense is limited to this."
BISHOP HUET. " Non simplici notione gaudet,
nam modo finitum tempus, modo indefinitum, modo
infinitum sonat." -Origeniana, p. 231.
JEREMY TAYLOR. " Everlasting signifies only to
the end of its own proper period." Works iv. 43,
ed. Eden.
1 Rev. II . C. Calverley, Fellow of Corpus Christ! College, Oxford,
Four Sermons, p. 25. The weight of the authorities quoted is all the
stronger because most of them are entangled in the common error.
One or two of the following definitions are borrowed from the exhaus
tive little book, Aion Aionios, by the Rev. Dr. Hanson (Chicago,
1875)
XIII.] OLAM AND AIONIOS. 401
GROTIUS. He explains "aeonian consolation" as
" solatia piis medio tempore concessa, quae Hebraei
vocant Nuach-Eden."
DR. ISAAC WATTS. " Nor do I think that we
ought, when we speak concerning the creatures, to
affirm positively that their existence shall be equal
to that of the Blessed God, especially with regard to
the duration of their punishments." - World to Come.
MACKNIGHT. " I must be so candid as to acknow
ledge that the use of these terms for ever, eternal/
everlasting, shows that they who understood these
words in a limited sense when applied to punishment
put no forced interpretation upon them."
REV. G. BENNET. " The primary nature of olam
is hidden, and both as to past and future denotes
a duration that is unknown." Olam Haneshamoth,
p. 44.
DR. TAYLOR (who thrice wrote out the whole
Hebrew Bible). " Olam (aion) signifies eternity, not
from the proper force of the word, but when the sense
of the place or the nature of the subject requires it, as
God and His attributes."
PARKHURST. " Olam (aeon) seems to be used
much more for an indefinite than for an infinite
time." Lexicon.
WHISTON. "The word used about the duration
of torments in the New Testament and all over the
Septuagint, whence the language of the New Testa
ment was taken, nowhere means a proper eternity."
Memoirs, p. 144.
SCHLEUSNER. " Aionios is so used of any space
of time that its length must be inferred from the
context, the mind of the writer, and the things and
persons about which he is speaking." Lexic. on Nov.
Testament.
PROF. KNAPP of Halle. " The Hebrew was desti
tute of any single word to express endless duration.
.... The pure idea of eternity is too abstract to
D D
402 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
4
have been conceived in the early ages of the world,
and accordingly is not found expressed by any word
in the ancient languages."
PROF. MOSES STUART. "The different shades by
which the word is rendered depend on the object with
which aionios is associated."
ALEX. CAMPBELL." Its radical idea is indefinite
duration."
DE LAMMENAIS. " In Hebrew and Greek the
words rendered everlasting have not this sense. They
signify * a long duration of time/ * a period ; whence
the phrase during these eternities and beyond.
SCARLETT. " That aionios does not mean endless
or eternal may appear from considering that no ad
jective can have a greater force than the noun from
which it is derived. If aion means age (which none
either will or can deny), then aionios must mean age-
lasting, or duration through the ages to which the
thing spoken of relates."
CRUDEN. " The words eternal, everlasting, for
ever, are sometimes taken for a long time, and are
not always to be understood strictly." Concordance,
s. v. Eternal.
DE QuiNCEY. "Meanwhile all this speculation
first and last is pure nonsense. Aionios does not
mean eternal [i.e. endless]. Neither does it mean of
a limited duration."
CANON KINGSLEY. " The word aion is never used
in Scripture or anywhere else in the sense of endless
ness (vulgarly called eternity). It always meant, both
in Scripture and out, a period of time."
REV. ARCHER GURNEY. " The words eternal and
everlasting are constantly used in a relative sense in
the Old Testament Scriptures with reference to Jewish
ordinances, designed to pass away, and they signify
indefinite and continuous, until superseded by a
higher law, or principle, never tending to come to an
end of themselves/
XIIL] AIONIOS. 403
REV. T. E. FOWLE. " Aionios is a particularly
colourless and almost mystical adjective, found in
combination with very dissimilar nouns, and qualify
ing incompatible objects and so lending itself to
varying shades of meaning." Essay on aiwv, p. 23.
REV. J. S. BLUNT. " The conception of eternity
in the Semitic languages is that of a long duration
and series of ages." Diet, of Theology , s. v. Eternity.
PROFESSOR TAYLOR LEWIS, in an elaborate dis
quisition on the word in the translation of Lange s
Ecclesiastes, written against Universalism, gives up
the tenability of the argument that awn, aionios,
necessarily carry the meaning of endless duration ;
and says of Matt. xxv. 46, " All we can etymologically
or exegetically make of the word in this passage is
* These shall go away into the restraint, imprison
ment of the world to come.
OLSHAUSEN. " The Bible is deficient in an
expression for timelessness. . . . All the Biblical
expressions imply or denote long periods."
In looking at the lexicographers, ancient and
modern, we are met by this remarkable fact. The
later lexicographers after the fifth century give to
the words aion and aionios the occasional meaning of
" endless," though of course they are all compelled
to admit that they also imply limited durations.
After that time the words were often used with the
connotation of " endlessness," because by that time
theology had read that sense into them. But the oldest
lexicographers are entirely silent as to such a meaning.
Thus HESYCHIUS, who is the oldest of them, defines
aion as " the life of man, the time of life, and some
times it is used for a long time/ 1
The SCHOLIAST on Homer (//. v. 685) says that
aion is " the life of man."
6 j3t<5? TOO dvQpWWOV . . . 7TOT6 $6 (TT\ /UttKpoG XP^ OV l Of~TO.l.
Aristotle s definition is given in De Caelo, i. 9. "The limit which
includes the time of the life of each is called the caon of each."
D D 2
404 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
4f
APOLLONIUS.; "The aeon is the measure of the
human life."
THEODORET (Migne, iv. 401) says " A ion is ndt
any existing thing, but an interval denoting time
sometimes infinite when spoken of God, sometimes
proportioned to the duration of the creation, and
sometimes to the life of man."
JOHN OF DAMASCUS defines aion as (i) the life
of each man; (2) the life of this world; (3) the life
to come."
It is not till we come to PHAVORINUS, in the
sixteenth century, that we find "Aion, time, life.
. . . Aion is also the eternal and the endless, as it
seems to the theologian ! That last clause is very
suggestive !
I cannot imagine how Mr. Riddell, as quoted by
Dr. Pusey, could say that in classical writers the word
was strictly used of eternity (i.e. endlessness, in Dr.
Pusey s sense). The word aionios occurs I believe
first in Plato, and since no Greek writer before Plato
had ever used aion of endlessness it would be very
strange if aionios in Plato meant "endless." Homer,
Hesiod, Pindar, Sophocles, Aristotle, all use aion of
" human life," or a " period." When Aristotle wants
to express endless he says not aionios t but a-iwv avvextfs
KOI atSios (Metaph. xiv. 7). Plato, inventing the word,
uses it five times. In one place he speaks of the
" aeonian intoxication " of certain souls in Hades
(Rep. ii. 363), which is not " endless," for he held
that souls returned from Hades. Aidios, not aionios,
is his word for endless in the Timaeus.
The Roman games which were called secular were
held (nominally) once in a century. The word
"secular" was rendered aionios by Greek writers.
Did they mean the " endless games " ?
Let me conclude in the weighty words of Bishop
Rust, the successor of Bishop Jeremy Taylor in the
See of Dromore. " Some there are," he says, " who
Xiii.] "DESTRUCTION? 405
think that those phrases ["aeonian fire" and "correc
tion "] and the like cannot be reconciled with Origen s
opinion. But these objections seem to take the
meaning of the word aionios from scholastic defini
tions rather than from the true and lawful masters
of language or the authentick rule of its popular
use. For tis notoriously known that the Jews,
whether writing in Hebrew or Greek, do by olam
and aion mean any remarkable period and duration,
whether it be of life, of dispensation, or polity. And
even by such phrases as * to eternity and beyond,
they do not mean a scholastic eternity, unless the
nature of the things they express require such an
interminable duration. Every lexicographer and
expositor will furnish you with authorities enough
to confirm what I have said.
There are three other words on which we may make
a few remarks before proceeding to the exegesis of
the most important texts. These words are apoleia,
" destruction," asbestos, " unquenched," and kolasis,
"punishment."
I. Many regard as decisive for the final ruin of the
majority of mankind the words of our Lord that
" broad is the path that leadeth to destruction
(apoleian), and many there be which go in thereat."
Yet the most cursory examination of the word ought
to show them that the passage has nothing to do
with endless torments. No Christian doubts that
sin is destruction as long as it is persisted in. The
road leads to destruction, and that is the goal to
which it leads all who do not turn from it by re
pentance. But there is nothing in the text to show
that men may not be turned from that path here
after as they are turned here. The same word apoleia
is used of the " waste " of the spikenard of Mary of
Bethany. Let us take another passage where the far
406 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
f
stronger word otethros occurs. St. Paul in the First
Epistle to the Corinthians says that he had handed\
over to Satan the incestuous offender " for the de
struction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved
in the day of the Lord Jesus." Yet in the short
interval which elapsed between the First and Second
Epistles the offender had repented, and was restored
to the commmunion of the Church. Is it not, then,
clear that the word "destruction 1 has a limited and
temporary sense ? and that the effects of it can be
removed by repentance ?
2. Probably the popular notions of Gehenna are
due in no small degree to the entirely unwarrant
able translation of the word asbestos by the words
" that never shall be quenched." The word means
" unquenched " or " unquenchable," and to build dog
matic systems on the current usage of a general
epithet is to the last degree uncritical and super
stitious.
It occurs but three times in the New Testament.
In Matt. iii. 12, and Luke iii. 17, "unquenchable
fire " is here the metaphor used by John the Baptist
for the fire used to burn up the chaff. In Matt. ix.
43 it is also used of the fire of Gehenna.
Nothing but a literalism which defies all the ordi
nary laws of human language and literature, and which
approaches to fetish worship in its slavishness and
ignorance, could possibly build on such a word as this
the popular doctrine of "endless torments." The word
is poetic and metaphoric. In Homer, where it first
occurs, it is applied to the fire which for a few hours
rages in the Grecian fleet l ; to the gleam of Hector s
helmet; to glory; to laughter ; and most frequently
to shouting. 2 As a prose word asbestos means " un
slaked lime," as in Gen. xi. 3, the only passage of the
Septuagint in which the word occurs. What makes it
1 //. xvi. 123, i. 599, xi. 50, xvi. 267, &c.
2 See Wetstein, Nov. Test. i. 267.
xiii.] " UNQUENCHABLE:* 407
more inexcusable to force and exaggerate the mean
ing of the word is that the equivalent Old Testament
phrases refer to the brief flame which burns up the
gates of Jerusalem, and the dry trees of the forest
of the South. The phrase, " wrath that shall not be
quenched," 1 is used only of national and temporary
calamities, and is the same wrath which we are told
elsewhere 2 " endureth but the twinkling of an eye,"
the wrath "of Him who doth not keep His anger
for ever." 3
The word is used in the same popular way in plain
prose passages of the Fathers. Thus Eusebius says
that the two martyrs, " Cronion and Julian, were first
scourged, and then consumed with unquenchable fire " ;
and again, that two others, Epimachus and Alexander,
were " destroyed by unquenchable fire." Would a
man be thought to be in his sound senses who at
tempted to argue that Eusebius could only mean that
the fire was a miraculous fire, and still continued to
burn ? And this mere epitheton soleinne is to be made
a stumbling-block to the faith of mankind, by first
forcing it into literalness, and then assuming that,
since the metaphoric fire of retribution is once called
unquenchable, every soul consigned to it must also
remain in it for ever, and be incapable of destruction !
3. The word kolasis (incorrectly rendered " torment "
in i John iv. 1 8) means " punishment," and although
the accurate distinction between it and timoria may
have been partly obliterated in Hellenistic Greek, it
is still confessedly the milder word. It is only used
in i John iv. 18, and in Matt xxv. 46. Now timoria
is " vindictive " or retributive punishment, and is used
once only (Heb. x. 29) of the most violent apostates,
the most deadly conceivable offenders ; and in the
same Epistle (xii. 10) we are expressly told that God
1 Jer. xvii. 27 ; Is. i. 28-31 ; Ezek. xx. 47-48.
2 2 Kings xxii. 17 ; Jer. vii. 20 ; xxi. 12 ; Amos v. 6, &c.
8 Ps. xxx. 5, 6 ; ciii. 9 ; Mic. vii. 18.
4o8 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
does not punish us for His pleasure, but for our profit.
Everywhere else kolasis is used, and accurately kolasis
means, as Grotius says, that kind of punishment
which tends to the improvement of the criminal." 1
Hence the kolasis aionios of Matt. xxv. 46, is " the
correction in the future state of being." " Do we
want to know," says Professor Max Miiller, "what
was uppermost in the minds of those who formed the
word for punishment, the Latin poena or punio, the
root pu in Sanskrit, which means to cleanse, or purify,
tells us that the Latin derivative was originally formed,
not to express mere striking or torture, but cleansing,
correcting, delivering from the stain of sin."
To this corrective aim of all true punishment a
conception to which in modern times the Spirit of
God has more and more been leading the nations of
Christendom Origen attached the extremest im
portance. The Jewish victims, he argued, were
killed in order that by them the sins of those who
offered them might be cleansed. And could not the
same truth apply to the greatest of all victims, who
made His life an offering for sin ? " Were it not
useful to the conversion of sinners to inflict torments
upon them, never would a merciful and compassionate
God inflict wickedness with punishments." 2
Nor let those who are so anxious to explain that
God s " correction " (kolasis} is " vengeance " (timoria),
forget that in the sole epistle where this latter word
occurs we are expressly told that God s punishment
is fatherly chastening (paideusis), and is intended for
1 Its first meaning is " clipping," " pruning." On the healing intention
of true punishment, see Arist. Eth. ii. 3, Rhet. i. 10, and Plato, Protag.
38. " No one punishes the wicked looking at the past only, simply
for the wrong he has done that is, no one does this who does not act
like a wild beast, desiring only revenge without thought hence he who
seeks to punish with reason . . . punishes for the purpose of deterring
from wickedness."
2 Orig. Horn, in Ezek. i. 355 ; in Levit. iii. 196 ; xi. 248 ; xiv. 266 ;
in Num. x. 302 (Redepenning, ii. 447).
xiii.] THE AIM OF CORRECTION. 409
o.ur interest and advantage (eVl TO a-v/jifyepov}, <( that
we may be partakers of His holiness." 1
And, indeed, has any other notion of punishment
but the corrective one ever been held to correspond
to the truest and noblest conception of what punish
ment should be ? Over the door of the prison of
St. Michael at Rome, Pope Clement XL, in 1703,
ordered to be carved the wise inscription " Parum
est improbos coercere poena, nisi probos efncias
disciplina." " It is not enough to restrain offenders
by punishment unless you render them honest by
discipline." Was it not from Scripture itself that*
the Pope learnt this lesson ? Again and again do
the sacred writers impress upon us the educational
function of the divine punishments. " Whom the
Lord loveth He correcteth." 2 "Blessed is the man
whom Thou chastenest, O Lord." 3 "I have been
afflicted that I might learn Thy statutes." 4 "As
many as I love I rebuke and chasten." 5 " Behold, I
have refined thee. I have chosen thee in the furnace
of affliction." 6 "And He shall sit as a refiner and
purifier of silver, and He shall purify the sons of Levi
and purge them as gold and silver." 7
Thus does Scripture confirm the natural insight
of the great heathen moralist who said " chastisement
(kolasis) aims at correction." s
1 Heb. xii. 10. 2 Prov. iii. 12.
1 Ps. xciv. 12 ; Job. v. 17 ; Heb. xii. 6, 30. 4 Ps. cix. 17.
1 Rev. iii. 19. ti Is. xlviii. 10.
7 Mai. iii. 3. 8 Arist. Rhet. i. 10.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE GENERAL TEACHING OF SCRIPTURE
RESPECTING FUTURE RETRIBUTION.
Deliver me, O Lord, from the narrowing influence of human
lessons, from humaju systems of theology ; teach me directly out of the
fulness and freeness of Thine own Word. Hasten the time when,
unfettered by sectarian intolerance, and unawed by the authority of
men, the Bible shall make its rightful impression upon all the simple
and obedient readers thereof, calling no man Master but Christ only."
CHALMERS.
" Why should attempts at further elucidation be discouraged, as if in
searching the Scriptures we ought to stop -at the sense in which our
fathers understood them? and, as if already possessed of all the in
formation that could be given, to .imagine that no new accession of
light could arise from a new investigation of the original, or the
writings of the rabbins? These were much more accustomed than
Christian commentators to dwell upon and to catch the rays of light
which are reflected from the Hebrew." BEN NET, Olam Haneshamoth,
p. 2.
"To those Christians whose faith has been crystallised and frozen
down in artificial syslems of theology . . . every new truth drawn
fresh from the Scriptures is an unwelcome guest, or even a suspected
enemy." REV. PROFESSOR BIRKS.
WE learn much in Scripture concerning the nature
of God ; concerning the efficacy, universality, and
preciousness of Christian redemption ; concerning
the methods of God s government and the objects of
His chastisements.
St. John, for instance, in the Epistle which is
perhaps the latest utterance of revelation, tells us
that God is righteous ; that God is light ; and (twice
over) that God is love.
CHAP. xiv.] THE REVELATION OF GOD. 411
How deep is the significance of such revelations,
and how awful the responsibility of not clouding their
meaning by human fancies ! For, as Bacon truly says,
" Better to have no opinion of God at all than such
an opinion as is unworthy of Him ; for the one is
unbelief, the other is contumely."
"God is righteous" . and therefore He hates all
unrighteousness in others, and there can be no un
righteousness in Him. The notions that represent
Him as a God of arbitrary caprice, treating men as
though they were nothing but dead clay, to be dashed
about and shattered at His will notions which repre
sent His justice as something alien from ours, and
those things as good in Him which would be evil in
us these idols of the school are shattered on the
rock of the truth that He is righteous !
" God is Light" : notions that represent Him as
delighting in man s narrow dogmatism, self-satisfied
security, and bitter exclusiveness, making His elect
and His favoured ones of the religionists who would
claim each for his own sect or party a monopoly of
His revelation as though one should love the dwarfed
thistles and the jagged bents better than the cedars
of Lebanon ; these idols of the fanatic, idols of the
sectarian, idols of the Pharisee, are shattered by the
ringing hammer-stroke of the truth that God is
light !
" GOD IS LOVE " : not merely loving, but love l ;
and therefore the notions which would represent Him
as only living a life turned towards self, or folded
within self, caring only for His own glory, caring
nothing for the endless agonies of the creatures He
has made, regarding even the sins of children as
1 " I m apt to think the man
That could surround the sum of things, and spy
The heart of God and secrets of His empire,
Would speak but love with him the bright result
Would change the hue of intermediate scenes,
And make one thing of all theology." GA.MBOLD.
4 i2 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
infinite because He is infinite idols which have so
distorted the blessed doctrine of the Atonement as
to say that His wrath must have some victim, and
therefore that (in the language of one writer) " He
drew His sword on Calvary to smite down His
only Son," x and of another, that Christ s death
" wiped the red anger-spot from the brow of God " 2
these idols of the zealot, idols of the systematiser,
idols of those who think that their remorseless systems
can work the righteousness of God -these idols are
dashed to pieces by the sweeping and illimitable force
of the truth that God is Love.
Of such a God as this of a God who is Love, Light,
Righteousness we can think with trembling and
adoring devotion. " There is mercy with Thee ; there
fore shalt Thou be feared." But who can " sweetly
meditate" on the God of Calvin, of Jonathan Edwards,
of Boston, or of Pinamonti, whom they describe as
damning little children and young girls to the endless
company of ferocious and uncontrolled devils, and
holding " sinners like spiders over the pit of hell with
one hand, while He torments them with the other" ?
Is this the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ ?
is it the God who " declareth His almighty power
most chiefly by showing mercy and pity " ? or is it
some Indian Shiva, some deadlier Moloch of the
children of Ammon, to whom human beings are to
be perpetually burnt in living sacrifice ? Can any
Christian who sees God in Christ hesitate to stamp
such thoughts such accretions to the just and solemn
truth of a future as of a present retribution with
the abhorrence which they deserve ?
No ! for " God is Love." If He punishes, it is
through love. If He chose a people, it was to pro
claim His love. If He charges our Lord and Saviour
Jesus Christ to execute His just but merciful judg
ment against sinners, it is by the work of love. " The
1 Prof. Parkes. 2 Dr. Gumming.
xiv.] GOD IN CHRIST. 413
source of all His works is love, and the end of all His
works is an end of love. Nothing can be found in
Him which is not love ; for He Himself is Love." l
Where can we see most clearly the character of
God? Is it not in the life of Him who was " the
brightness of His glory and the express image of
His person " ?
If, then, we can best judge of the nature of God
in the acts of Jesus Christ, is it not in the acts of One
who, while He declared, as none had ever declared, the
awful breadth and grandeur and searchingness of the
moral law, and who, while He was terrible to false and
loveless religionists, and to them alone, yet was ever
tender to sin and sorrow with an infinite tenderness,
and went about releasing the demoniac, giving light to
the blind, cleansing the leper, preaching to the poor,
eating with sinners, feeding the hungry multitude,
listening to the heathen woman s cry, welcoming the
outcast publican, praying for His very murderers at
the moment that they drove the nails through His
torn hands, standing alone with guilt and misery,
suffering the weeping woman who was a sinner to
wash His feet with her tears, and to wipe them with
the hairs of her head ?
And if the Lord Jesus thus represented God in His
acts, how did He represent Him in His teachings ?
Was it not solely, essentially, exclusively as a Father ?
As our Father which art in Heaven ? Was it not as
endless, unweariable, universal, awful love ? Was it
not as the God who maketh His sun to shine on the
evil and the good, and His rain to fall on the just and
on the unjust ? as the God who is kind even to the
unthankful and the evil ? 2 as the God of little
children, whose angels behold His face in Heaven ?
as the God of the lilies, and the ravens, and the fall
ing sparrow, and the lost sheep ? as the Father who
1 Guillaume Monod, Jugement dernier, p. 28.
2 Luke vi. 35.
414 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
weeps upon the necks of His lost and ragged pro
digals ? as the God by whom the very hairs of our
heads are all numbered ? If the Fatherhood of God be
infinitely deeper and more tender than human father
hood, yea, even as He has told us, than human
motherhood, 1 must we go to a heathen moralist to
teach us that " little punishment suffices a father for
even a great offence" 2 ? And who, as he reads such
words as he recalls the stern rebuke of the Almighty
to those who defended in a remorseless spirit the
fancied " orthodoxy of their day who would not
cry with trembling humility
" Dear God and Father of us all,
Forgive our faith in cruel lies,
Forgive the blindness that denies !
Forgive Thy creature when he takes
For the all-perfect Love Thou art
Some grim creation of the heart.
Cast down our idols ! overturn
Our bloody altars ! Let us see
Thyself in Thy humanity ! " 3
And, indeed, whether we turn to the Old or the New
Testament, there is an overwhelming mass of evidence
on the side of those who think that God s highest
glory is the prerogative of absolute and boundless
mercy that in the words of our collect, " His nature
and property are ever to have mercy and forgive."
If we are to press to the utmost limits the meaning
of the expression "for ever" and "eternal" in the
1 Is. xlix. 15. "Can a mother forget her sucking child, that she
should not have compassion on the son of her womb ? Yea, they
may forget, yet will I not forget thee." Conip. Ps. ciii. 13 ; Jer. xxxi.
20 ; Mai. iii. 17 ; Matt. vii. n.
2 Pro peccato magno paulum supplici satis est patri." TERENT.
Andria, v. iii.
3 " We are not at liberty to call that conduct justice or wisdom in the
Almighty which we should charge with folly or cruelty in a human
governor ; or to silence doubts which may have arisen from our own
unskilful handling of the Word of Life by a bare appeal to the Divine
Sovereignty, as if the Most High were exalted above the eternal laws
of justice and goodness which are binding on all the reasonable
creatures He has made." Rev. Prof. BIRKS.
xiv.] INFINITE MERCY. 415
half-dozen texts scattered throughout the Bible which
seem at first sight to reveal for all sinners a hopeless
and endless doom at the moment of death, are we to
ignore, or minimise, or explain away the multitudes
of such texts as these ?
Arid the Lord passed by before him, and proclaimed,
the Eternal, the Eternal, a God merciful and gracious,
long-suffering and abundant in goodness and truth, keep
ing mercy for thousands , forgiving iniquity and trans
gression and sin, but who will by no means always
leave unpunished. 1 Ex. xxxiv. 6, 7.
His anger endureth but a moment ; in His favour
is life. Ps. xxx. 5.
Good and upriglit is the Lord: therefore will He teach
sinners in the way. Ps. xxv. 8.
The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger,
and plenteous in mercy. He will not always chide :
neither will He keep His anger for ever. Ps. ciii. 8, 9.
Unto Thee, O Lord, belongeth mercy : for Thou
renderest unto every man according to his work.
Ps. Ixii. 12.
He is good, and His mercy endureth for ever.
Ps. cvi. i; cvii. I (and the whole of this psalm); cxviii.
I 4 ; cxxxvi. I 26.
Thou art good, and doest good. Ps. cxix. 68.
But there is forgiveness with Thee, that Thou mayest
be feared. Let Israel hope in the Lord: for with the
Lord there is mercy, and with Him is plenteous
redemption. Ps. cxxx. 4, 7.
Look unto Me, and be ye saved, all tJie ends of the
earth : for I am God, and there is none else. I have
sworn by Myself, the word is gone out of My mouth
in righteousness, and shall not return, that unto Me
1 The last words are specially precious, because they show that God s
punishments are but a form of the love and compassion which He has
thus in such manifold terms described. That for which the merciful
plead is ultimate pardon for all who are recoverable, not entire impunity
for any who have sinned.
416 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear. Is. xlv.
22, 23.
In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a
moment ; but with everlasting kindness will I have
mercy on thee, saith the Lord thy Redeemer. .... For
the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed ;
but My kindness shall not depart from thee, neither
shall the covenant of My peace be removed, saith the
Lord that hath mercy on thee. Is. liv. 8, 10.
/ will not contend for ever, neither will I be always
wroth : for the spirit should fail before me, and the
souls which I have made. Is. Ivii. 16.
For the Lord will not cast off for ever : but though
He cause grief, yet will He have compassion according
to the multitude of His mercies. For He doth not
afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men. To
crush under His feet all the prisoners of the earth. . . .
the Lord approveth not. Lam. iii. 31 34.
The Lord your God . . is gracious and merciful, slow
to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth Him of
the evil. Who knoweth if He will return and repent,
and leave a blessing behind Him ?--Joel ii. 13, 14.
To the Lord our God belong mercies and forgivenesses,
though we have rebelled against Him. Dan. ix. 9.
/, even I, am He that blotteth out thy transgressions
for Mine ovvn sake, and will not remember thy sins.
Is. xliii. 25.
They refused to obey. . . . but Thou art a God ready
to pardon, gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and
of great kindness, and forsookest them not. Nehem.
ix. 17.
Who is a God like unto Thee, that pardoneth iniquity
and passeth by the transgression of the remnant of His
heritage f He retaineth not His anger for ever, because
He delighteth in mercy. He will turn again, He will
Jiave compassion upon us ; He will subdue our iniquities;
and Thou wilt cast all their sins into the depths of
the sea. Micah vii. 18, 19.
xiv.] INFINITE MERCY.
It is needless to continue. To do so would be
to fill pages. We are told again and again that His
anger endureth but a moment 1 ; that He, being- full of
compassion, forgives iniquity 2 ; that in a little vvrath
He hides His face for a moment, but with everlasting
kindness will He have mercy* ; that He is gracious,
longs uffering, plenteous in mercy, full of compassion 4 ;
that He is the Father of mercies 5 ; that He is rich in
mercy ^ ; that His mercy is as great as the heaven is
high 7 ; that He is present even in the region of the
dead* ; that His tender mercies and lovingkindnesses
have been ever of old g ; that He is a just God and
a Saviour ; and may not all these attributes be
summed up in the grand words of the prophet Isaiah,
as plain as words can be :
For I will not contend for ever, neither will 1 be
always wroth ; for the spirit should fail before me, and
the souls which I have made. 11
Or in these, no less plain, of the prophet
Jeremiah :
For the Lord will not cast off for ever : but though
He cause grief, yet will He have compassion according
to the multitude of His mercies. For He doth not
afflict willingly, nor grieve the children of men.
Or in the equally unmistakable words of the
Prophet David, of which, as of the other two pass
ages, it maybe said that they simply "could not have
been written by any believer in the popular doctrine
of endless torments " :
He will not always chide : neither will He retain His
anger for eternity Qe-olain}^
These texts will have slight weight with those only
1 Ps. xxx. 5. 2 Ps. Ixxviii. 38. 3 Is. liv. 7, 8.
Ps. Ixxxvi. 15. 5 2 Cor. i. 3. 6 Eph. ii. 4.
7 Ps. ciii. 9. 8 Ps. cxxxix. 8. 9 Ps. xxv. 6.
1 Is. xlv. 21. n Is. Ivii. 1 6.
2 Ps. ciii. 9. , " Dieu aime autant chaque homme que tout le genre
humain. . . . Eternel, infini, il n a que des amours immense*. "
JOUBERT, i. 103.
E E
4i8 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
whose souls are hardened into scholastic system ; and
with those who think that one-half of God s character
is mercy and the other half is wrath, and that there
fore they must set one against the other ; and with
those who employ one-hundredth part of the Bible
to evacuate of meaning the other ninety-nine ; and
with those who stretch every severe anthropomorphic
metaphor on the rack of literalism and inference,
while they minimise as " dangerous every broad
promise of mercy, and quench as " delusive" every
bright gleam of final hope ; and with those who go
to the Bible not to find truth there, but only to snatch
from it a semblance of support for their own dogmas ;
and with those who do despite to every text which
runs counter to invincible prejudice. But those who
really reverence God s Word will see from these pass
ages, and ten times as many more, that they may
trust in the lovingkindness of the Lord for their sad
and suffering brethren no less than for themselves,
and that if God is forced to punish it is only
because He loves. No bigotry, no ignorance, no hard
theology, no angry anathemas shall rob us of one
inch of the breadth of hope which these words in
spire. If we had no book of Scripture left us but
the single book of Job we should see from that alone
that for the champions of a pitiless " orthodoxy
God feels nothing but disapproval. He does not
strive to silence the natural cry of the human heart.
He has never reproved the natural sense of horror
which, with a "God forbid ! " flings from it the syllo
gisms of a loveless and unspiritual logic. 1
And if the popular view be true; if according to
current theology it had been well (xaXov} not for
Judas only but the mass of the human race that they
1 "If to have raised out of the womb of faultless unoffending
nothing infinite myriads of men, into a condition from which, unthink
ing, they should unavoidably drop into eternal unutterable sorrows, be
consistent with goodness, contradictions may be true, and all rational
deductions but a dream." PLAIFERE.
Xiv.] CHRIST DIED TO SA VE THE LOST. 419
had not been born ; if there is no difference between
holding even this, and holding that they must suffer
endless torments ; if millions of years of unutterable
and inconceivable agonies for millions and millions
of mankind are to be the outcome of a few short miser
able sinful years on earth what, we may well ask,
is the result of the Atonement ? Christ died for
human souls. In spite of His Cross shall the great
harvest of human souls become the prey of Satan
and only the gleanings be the Lord s ? Shall Satan
gather the clusters of the vintage, and leave for our
Father in Heaven only a grape here and there upon
the topmost boughs ?
Of all the unworthy arguments and they are many
in number which are urged against the hopes of
suffering man, surely not one is so fantastic and
dishonest as that a wider hope can only spring from
deficient views of the Atonement ! When one hears
such arguments it is difficult to restrain a strong in
dignation. Christ came to seek and save the lost ;
He said that the publican and the harlot entered
the kingdom of heaven before the Pharisee ; and yet
we are to be told that to believe in the fulness and
efficacy and victorious infinitude of this redemp
tion to hope that it will have achieved, more largely
than human ignorance has taught us, the very aim
for the sake of which alone the mighty work was
finished is to have "deficient views of the Atone
ment"; or, as the phrase is sometimes varied, to have
" inadequate conceptions of the heinousness of sin " !
But is it the Gospel of mercy, or is it not rather the
message of all-but-universal damnation, which most
clouds the blessedness of the Atonement ? Do not
the views of many writers belie, verse by verse, ai^
that we are told of it from Genesis to Revelation, or,
at the least, explain away all the breadth and richness
of its blessed significance ?
Scarcely had man fallen, when to the woman came
K K 2
420 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
the promise that her seed " should bruise the serpent s
head." How so if the vast majority of her offspring
are to agonise in flames for endless millenniums ?
As soon as
" E en the great deluge, when its task was done,
Threw up a rosy arch, and ebbed away,"
Noah and his children, no less than Adam to
whom it was the first command were bidden to be
fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth. 1 Would
it not have been, would it not still be, a command
of awful irony and cruelty if the earth was to be
replenished with whole millions of denizens of an
endless hell ?
The promise of Abraham was that " in thy seed
shall all the nations of earth be blessed." 2 How
could they be blessed if all but the few were destined
to an unutterable doom ?
Of the Divine Redeemer it was prophesied that
" He should see of the travail of His soul and be
satisfied," Would He be satisfied if, according to the
common conception of theologians for ages, Satan
was to be for ever the lord paramount of countless
shuddering and tortured souls ?
When Christ upon the Cross, with the one mighty
word, Teletestai ! "It is finished," ended His life
and His work, did that word mean only that the mass
of the human race, even of those who should be called
by His name, would pass from life to an unending and
an unutterable doom ?
What is the meaning of all those passages of the
New Testament that " Christ is the Lamb of God
1 Gen. ix. I ; i. 28. "We wish to impress upon the champions of
tins dogma [the current accretions which I repudiate] that they have no
business to marry ; for in so doing they run the greatest risk of bringing
souls into the world to be tormented for ever."- L? Alliance Libh-ale,
December 3, 1870.
2 Gen. xxii. 18.
xiv.] UNIVERSAL REDEMPTION. 421
which taketh away the sin of the world " 1 ; that
" God hath sent His Son into the world, not to con
demn the world, but that the world through Him
might be saved " 2 ; that " the Father hath given all
things into His hands " 3 ; that " He is the Saviour of
the Universe" 4 ; that "I, if I be lifted up, will draw
all things unto Me " 5 ; that the Son of Man came " not
to destroy men s lives, but to save " 6 ; that " He is
the propitiation not only for our sins, but also for the
whole world " 7 ; that Christ died and rose, " that He
might be Lord both of the dead and living " 8 ; that
Christ died " for sins," "for sinners," " for the un
godly/ " for the unjust"; that " God laid on Him
the iniquity of us all " ; that " He tasted death for
every man " 9 ; that " He gave His life a ransom for
all " 10 ; that " the grace of God hath been manifested,
which is a source of salvation to all men " n ? What
is meant by God being " the Saviour of all men,"
though " specially of them that believe " 12 ? What
is meant by " God, being in Christ, not imputing
their trespasses unto them " 13 ? What is meant by
its being His will (6e\ei) for who has resisted His
will ? that " all men should be saved and come to
the knowledge of the truth " H ? What is meant by
the truth that the very object of Christ s Incarnation
was " that He might destroy the devil " 15 ? What is
meant by Christ " tasting death for every rational
being except God " 16 ?
1 John. i. 29. " John iii. 17. 3 John iii. 35.
1 I John iv. 14. 5 John xii. 32, leg. iravra.
6 Luke ix. 56. 7 i John ii. 2. 8 Rom. xiv. 9.
1 Heb. ii. 9. 10 i Tim. ii. 6. n Tit. ii. u, 12.
12 I Tim, iv. IO. 13 2 Cor. v. 19.
14 It is sad to see the attempts of St. Augustine to force him?elf out
of the cogency of this text. In one place he says that " all" means
many " (c. Julian, iv. 8) ; in another, that it means some " of every
kind" (Enchirid. c. 103) ; in another, that it means that God makes
us all wish to be saved (De corrept. et grat. c. 15) ; and once more, that
it means that no one can be saved except those whom God willed !
(Enchirid. id. I.e.) See Gieseler, //. E. i. 383.
15 Heb. ii. 14. l6 Heb. ii. 9, leg. x<*pls
422 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
Are we, at one wave of the wand of an Augustine
or a Calvin, to lose nine-tenths of the significance
of all these texts, and multitudes more, in the
interests of some formal system of theology, half
Manichaean in its origin, and wholly dualistic in
its results? If it be granted as I do grant
that not even these texts, manifold as they are,
and clear and unlimited as they seem to be, are to be
taken in absolute literalism,- are they, on the other
hand, to be narrowed into perfect consistence with the
" decretum korribile" ? Let those who write in tones
of positive hatred against us to whom God has mer
cifully granted the possibility of embracing a hope
somewhat wider than Calvin dreamt of let them
beware lest they tear out of the Bible, which they
profess to defend, the precious truths which constitute
its very heart. Let them meditate over the question,
" Will ye speak wickedly for God ? or talk deceitfully
for Him ? J1 Let them remember that of the three
things which God requires of them one is " to love
mercy." Let them learn from one of the sternest
epistles in the Bible that the Wisdom which is from
above is " full of mercy," 2 and that " he shall have
judgment without mercy that hath showed no
mercy"; and that "mercy boasteth over (/cara-
Kav^arai) judgment."
For indeed these revelations of the will of God cut
at the very root of the false philosophy and falser
theology which, apart from the mere necessities of
anthropomorphic expression, make of justice and
1 Job. xiii. 7.
2 James iii. 17. This verse furnishes one of the hundreds of distor
tions of which a conventional exegesis is guilty. The meaning given to
the verse, " The wisdom which is from above is first pure, then peaceable,
gentle, and easy to be entreated . ."is that "orthodoxy" must exist
(for this is their perversion of the word " pure") before there can be
any pity. The verse has no such meaning. The Bible does not lend
itself quite so easily to the manipulations of the odium theologicum.
" Omnes omnium caritates complexa est Ecclesia " is not true, either of
the sects or of the parties.
xiv.] INFINITE MERCY. 423
mercy two things and not one, as though God s
Being and His Eternity would be rent asunder by
opposing forces in eternal collision. They are a still
stronger refutation of the dark error which makes
justice and not love (humanly speaking) the basis of
the character of God. God is just; Scripture no
where says God is justice ; it does say God is love.
Because He is love, and not mere inexorable justice,
He will not deal with us after our sins, neither reward
us according to our iniquities. Love is not like some
white lily lying on a dark expanse of justice ; no
mere " flower hung upon a pillar cold and dark as
stone." Love is the principle, not the palliative.
" Mercy is the only true justice. Justice is but the
severe form of mercy." " Mercy boasteth over judg
ment." " Unto Thee, O Lord, belongeth mercy, for
Thou renderest unto every man according to his
works."
But since many delight to press the most rigid
and literal meaning of every expression of threaten
ing, while they evaporate at a touch all the promises
of infinite mercy what do they make of the many
passages for which the advocates of conditional im
mortality claim also a literal interpretation ? I say,
unquestioningly and unhesitatingly, that all the pas
sages adduced, and thus interpreted, by Mr. White,
Mr. Minton, Mr. R . W. Dale, and other able and
thoughtful Christians, furnish a far stronger proof of
the ultimate annihilation of the wicked than the
" upwards of a hundred texts of Bishop Horbery
furnish of the mediaeval and Calvinistic hell based,
as most of Bishop Horbery s texts are, on an exploded
and untenable method of exegesis, and many of them
as completely irrelevant to the subject as it is possible
to conceive. I do not accept the doctrine of " con
ditional immortality," but its supporters at least have
furnished an impregnable bulwark against the necessity
for any man to believe in the hell of Tertullian, or
424 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
Dante, or modern revivalists. If all these wise and
faithful inquirers can offer such a mass of Scriptural
phraseology in favour of the extinction of being
for all hopeless sinners, 1 they too must be Scripturally
dealt with before any of us can be bidden to accept
the belief of endless tortures in material flames. For
the silence of annihilation is a very opposite thing
from and a thing infinitely preferable to the inter-
minableness of conscious anguish. Once again, I do
not accept their views ; but I do say that if the
argument is to be confined to the literal acceptance
of certain expressions of Scripture, unchecked by its
general drift, it seems to me that they have incom
parably the stronger weight of evidence on their side.
They defeat their opponents on their own premisses,
and absolutely demolish them with their own weapons.
Their arguments are only powerless against those
whose premisses are different, and whose weapons are
forged in what they deem to be more heavenly
armouries than those of literalism and system. 2
And again, what do traditionalists make of all
those texts neither few nor indistinct which, on the
face of them, apart from all kinds of parings down
and explainings away in the interests of scholastic
theology seem so plainly to point to a restitution of
all things ?
Is there to be a restitution of all things ? If not,
why did St. Peter speak of it ? 3 If so, is it com
patible with the belief of a prison full of the maddened
and shrieking torments of myriads of the lost ? And
1 Ps. xxxvii. 10, 20, 36 ; xcii. 7 ; cxlv. 20; Obad. 16 ; Mai. iv. 1-3 ;
Matt. xiii. 30, 48, 49 ; xxi. 41, 44 ; i Thess. v. 3 ; 2 Thess. i. 9 ;
Heb. ii. 14 ; Rev. xx. 11-15 > xx ^- 4> 5 8, &c.
2 What are the facts? The "death," "destructi m," "loss,"&c.,
of wicked souls is spoken of in the New Testament fifty-six times ; the
"life" of the soul generally, forty-eight times ; its "aeonian life," or
Avhat implies it, fifty times; its "loss," or "salvation," without a hint
of duration, seven times ; and there are but two or three passages at the
outside which can be reasonably quoted in favour of endless torments.
8 Acts iii. 21.
xiv.j "THE RESTITUTION OF ALL THINGS: 425
if there is not to be a restitution, what is the mean
ing of all the passages in which St. Paul tells us that
it is God s good pleasure " to gather together in one
all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and
which are on earth " 1 ; that God highly exalted
Christ, " that in the name of Jesus every knee should
bow of things in heaven, and things on earth, and
things under the earth 2 ; that " it hath pleased the
Father by Him to reconcile all things unto Himself,
by Him, I say, whether they be things in earth or
things in heaven" 3 ; that Christ must reign till he
have put down caused to cease, made void (/carap-
7770-77) all rule and all authority and power, and
sent forth judgment unto victory, and swallowed up
death in victory 4 ; that " the whole creation/ " every
creature," is " waiting for the redemption of our
body, and shall be delivered from the bondage of
corruption into the freedom of the glory of the
children of God " 5 ; that at the end, when all things
have been subjected to Christ, the Son also Himself
shall be subject unto Him that put all things under
Him, that God may be all in all omnia in omnibus
all things in all things, and therefore in all men ?
Is it not a mere paltering with words in a double
sense to assert that these many forms of universal
expression merely imply unrealised possibilities, not
actual facts? or that "all" is to be watered down
into a mere handful of the elect ?
I urge the question. Are all these passages even
if we do not wish to press them into the dogmatic
assertions of Universalism are they to go for nothing ?
1 Eph. i. 10. 2 Phil ij Ia
3 Col. i. 19, 20. Writing on this verse Keble says, speaking of "the
whole creation " :
" The God who hallowed thee, and blest,
Pronouncing thee all good
Hath He not all thy wrongs redrest,
And all thy bliss renewed ? "
See the whole of his poem for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity.
* I Cor. xv. 24, 25 ; Matt. xii. 20. 5 Rom. viii. 19-24.
426 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
Is this ultimate universality of God s blessed Im
manence in all things, which Scripture thus expressly,
emphatically, and repeatedly asserts, to be some ab- .
stract thing which is to mean nothing to agonising
millions of countless generations of mankind ?
Is Bishop Horbery, or some similar exegete, with
his entirely obsolete misinterpretations " of more than
a hundred texts," to stand by and say that, as far as
the mass of mankind is concerned, all this still means
an endless and blaspheming hell ? So long as such
a place exists how can it be true that everything
accursed shall exist no longer (jrav tcardOe/jLa OVK
ecrrat en) x ? or that every created thing (TTCLV /crlcr/Aa)
shall join in praising the Lamb for ages of ages 2 ?
Is an endless hell of the kind which he describes
consistent with that new heaven and new earth
where the lake of fire, which is represented as being
on the old earth, having obviously ceased to exist
" there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor
crying, neither shall there be any more pain ; for the
former things are passed away " 3 ?
And what is to become of the elaborate general
argument of long passages in St. Paul, of which the
whole drift is directly in antagonism to the current
view ? For the current view is that, after all, Satan
is the great victor; that he is to possess the multi
tude of human souls ; that those prodigals whom,
up to the instant of death, God has loved so dearly
here are, after that instant, to "roar, curse, and
blaspheme God in inextinguishable flames for the
countless ages of eternity. When St. Paul says
that, "As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall
1 Rev. xxii. 3. 2 Rev. v. 13.
3 Rev. xxi. 4. The allusion to the lake of fire must be retrospective;
otherwise (i) either this passage, taken in its natural sense, would be
wholly irreconcilable with it, or (2) it must be implied thnt the fearful,
&c., have been annihilated, or (3), that the "part" they once had in
that " second death " is ended. Apocalyptic symbols cannot be built
into theological arguments, but they do not all look one way.
xiv. J THE PAULINE CONCEPTION. 427
all be made alive" 1 ; is the explanation of this verse
to be in the very teeth of the argument which has
been trumpeted as unanswerable for ten centuries,
from St. Augustine to Dr. Pusey, that "eternal 1
(misinterpreted into " endless ") must mean the same
thing of " punishment" as it does of " life" ? Or is
the " making alive " of which St. Paul speaks in this
paean of victory over Death, the last enemy of
mankind, to be made a paean in honour of endless
torments for all but the elect few ? And when he
says that " God hath concluded them all in un
belief, that He might have mercy upon all" 2 by what
subterfuge of African or Genevan theology is that
second " all " to be evacuated of its fuller meaning
by literalists who elsewhere talk about plain words ?
Let any honest and humble-minded man read the
Fifth Chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, and
then let him look up to Heaven and say, " On my
principles of Biblical interpretation all this argu
ment and its central axiom is the blessed state
ment that where sin abounded, grace did much
more abound, is perfectly consistent w r ith the Mani-
chaean dogma that only the few will be saved."
I ask again, as the Rev. J. LI. Davies asked years
ago, " Will any one contend that the Pauline con
ception would be satisfied by the endless existence
of the majority of the human race in misery and
sin ? Has Christ subdued those who gnash their
teeth at Him because He makes them suffer ? Is this
the working whereby He is able to subdue even all
things to Himself? Will God be all in all when
vast multitudes of His creatures are in impotent but
absolute rebellion against Him ?
I will now consider generally the texts on which
those rely who still cling to the mediaeval conceptions
1 i Cor. xv. 22. 2 Roni. xi. 32.
428 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
which I have repudiated and which (it is needless
to add) the Church has never laid down for our
belief. But even before I look at them, the mass of
evidence with which the previous pages are weighted
should be sufficient to show that, so far as these texts
are used to support the popular view, they must be
interpreted with the extremest caution. They are few
in number, and when the false meaning attached to the
Greek adjective on which their cogency is supposed to
depend is swept away, there is not one among them
all which decisively teaches the doctrine of endless
torments in the form in which it is popularly held.
Had our Blessed Lord so taught, for me, at any
rate, the question would have been absolutely at
an end ; I should at once have accepted it at His
lips, and bowed my head in anguish at the doom of
miserable man. Had He so taught, the teaching
would be accepted by faithful Christians, even if it
seemed to the natural conscience of mankind irre
concilably alien from all His other teaching. But
the only question is as to the interpretation of His
words ; and I have already adduced overwhelming
evidence to show that His words have been mis
interpreted by the perversion and mistranslation of
the terms which He employed.
And if the doctrine of " endless torment for the
vast majority in material flames be not in His
words it is not in the words of any of His disciples.
Some at least of those disciples would too well remem
ber the stern rebuke which they received from Him
when they wished to call down in His name so
much as one mere flash of earthly fire.
But how strong is the a priori argument against
the common view of His meaning which at once
results from the all but total reticence of the Old
Testament, in which there is not so much as one
single text from which that doctrine can find any
support except by the use of methods which may
xiv.] SILENCE OF THE APOSTLES. 429
deceive the ignorant, but which every honest theolo
gian ought by this time to despise !
And how far stronger an argument against the
common error as to our Lord s meaning arises from
the all but total reticence of the Apostles.
There are four chief Apostles St. Paul, St. Peter,
St. James, St. John, and in the writings of all four-
excluding for the moment the disputed symbols of
the Apocalypse there is not one word which teaches
us the endless misery of any, much less of the majority,
of mankind. Yet how worse than cruel would such
reticence have been in men who professed to teach
"the whole counsel of God," if indeed the common
view formed any part of that counsel ?
a. ST. PAUL S Epistles comprise the greater part
of the New Testament. Again and again in those
Epistles passages and arguments occur where the
whole nature of the subject would at once have led
to some expression of this doctrine, if indeed it
had been an essential of the Christian faith. 1 Yet in
all these passages, at the very moment at which
we should have expected the doctrine to be in
troduced, we find it is in a marked manner avoided,
and some different turn given to the sentence. St.
Paul would not say what he did not know. In all
St. Paul s thirteen epistles there is but one passage,
and that in almost his earliest letter, 2 which any one
who understands the meaning of words can even pre
tend to offer in proof of this dogma ; and that pass
age, as we shall see, bears no such meaning. What
St. Paul said was, that if God had shut up all in un
belief it was that He might have mercy upon all. He
had learnt from his childhood that He who " visited
the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third
and fourth generations of them that hate Him," is also
He who showeth mercy unto "thousands and thousands
1 See, for instance, Rom. ii. 8, 9 ; v. 21 ; vi. 23 ; Gal. v. 21 ; vi. 8 ;
Phil, iii. 1 8, 19. - 2 Thess. i. 9.
430 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
of generations " of them that love Him and keep His
commandments. It was hardly likely the New Gospel
should shrink but into a rill of mercy, where even the
Old Law was as a river ; nay, if the Old was as a river,
the New was as an illimitable sea. In Adam all had
died ; in Christ all should be made alive. Where sin
had abounded, grace had superabounded there. 1
/3. Nor is this reticence less marked in ST. PETER,
the Apostle of the Circumcision. In his first and un
doubtedly genuine epistle, there is not a word about
endless torment. If the second epistle be his, not
even there, not even in the terrible imagery of the
second chapter, is there one word as to the endless
misery of the lost.
7. Nor is it otherwise with " JAMES, the Lord s bro
ther." Stern as he is in all his moral judgments, stern
as he is in his tone of denunciation, he does not utter
one syllable which can be interpreted to imply the
common doctrine of " endless torments."
8. Nor is it otherwise with the doctrinal writings of
ST. JOHN. It is, as I have said, a common remark of
modern conventionality, that those who lean to the side
of hope in dwelling on the future of the mass of man
kind have never appreciated the " awful malignity "
of sin. Like many such remarks, it is hardly worth
refuting. Supposing a child told a lie, or stole a
shilling, and a father punished it, punished it with
severity : which should we consider the wiser and
nobler father, he who had so trained his child, and
won his love, that the worst punishment of all would
be the child s sense that he was grieved, or he who
needed to apply the scourge ? Now if a father chas
tised his child for such an offence, no one would call
him unjust. But if he scourged the child day by day,
and tortured him with implacable severity, is there
any good man who would not think the father a viler
offender than the child ? And would the father be
1 Rom. v. 15, 20.
xiv.] "A DEFICIENT SENSE OF SIN." 431
justified in saying to those who rebuked him that they
were creatures of loose morality and easy conscience,
who did not realise the awful malignity of theft or
lying ? If any one were to argue that sin deserves
no retribution no future retribution no terrible re
tribution no retribution which must continue as long
as the sinful state continues the sickly theological
commonplace that he could have " no due feeling of
the heinousness of sin" might have some sense in it,
and some charity. But to apply it to men who have
spent their lives*in trying to wean their fellows from
sin, and who have again and again uttered the
most solemn warnings against it, can be accounted
nothing better than idle talk. One saint of God
in this generation one of whom a friend said
that " whenever he thought of God the thought of
Thomas Erskine was not far away" was the
one man who had embraced more fully than all
others a belief in the final restoration of all man
kind. This belief was the very heart and centre
of his religious life ; and of mm it was testified by
one who did not share his views that " No man I ever
knew had a deeper sense of the exceeding evil of sin,
and of the Divine necessity that sin must be always
misery. His universalistic views did not in any way
relax his profound sense of God s abhorrence of sin." l
St. Augustine, the great repertory of arguments on
this subject, which are alike doctrinally, morally, and
exegetically false, is ready with what I am reluctantly
compelled to call his deplorable sophism that a " sin
against an infinite being must deserve an infinite
punishment." 2 It is difficult to treat such an argu
ment without scorn. As far as logic is concerned, there
is about as much logic in it (as has been rightly said)
1 Principal Shairp.
2 He is followed, as usual, by St. Thomas Aquinas. " Unde cum
non possit esse infinita poena per intensionem, requiritur ut sit saltern (!)
duratione infinita."
432 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
as would be involved in the assertion that if th? fourth
word of one clause is the word " infinite," the fourth
word of the next clause must be the word " infinite "
also. It has no more cogency as an argument than
the line has which asserts that
" Who drives fat oxen must himself be fat."
If one did not disdain the mere playing with words
which have no ascertainable significance, it would be
far truer to say that " finite beings can only commit
finite sins," or that " infinite strength can never wreak
insatiable vengeance upon infinite weakness." But
morally, and in another point of view, the Augusti-
nian sophism bears an even worse aspect. It asserts,
in direct contradiction to the repeated teaching of
Scripture, that the necessity for vengeance is great in
proportion to the greatness of Him against whom we
offend. It would apply equally to the smallest pecca
dillo of a little child and to the most brutal act of a
deliberate assassin. Will any one pretend that this
was the view of the Lord Jesus, who prayed for all
His murderers prayed to His Father for their for
giveness at the very moment that He was being
nailed by them to the cross ? Or will any utter the
blasphemy that His prayer arose from a deficient
estimate of the heinousness of sin ?
This no doubt was the very thing which the Phari
sees might have said of Him, and did say. They
made their " I am holier than thou," heard on every
side, and applied it to Christ Himself, mainly be
cause He was always merciful. They were always
exclaiming against Him, lifting up their hands, turn
ing up their eyes in scandalised astonishment.
" This man eateth and drinketh with publicans and
sinners." "This man blasphemeth." "We know
that this man is a sinner." It is not pity but hard
ness, it is not purity but impurity, it is not pure and
peaceable religion but proud and Pharisaic religionism,
xiv.] TENDERNESS OF TRUE SAINTS. 433
which says of those who plead for the love of God that
they are inclined to heresy, and show a deficient esti
mate of sin. The saintliest are the most tender. The
justest and the purest men and women are not those
who have on their lips the perpetual damnamus or
the reiterated anathema. No, the saintliest are the
most merciful. Finite purism often means fastidi
ousness, separation and self-conceit. Purity when it
becomes infinite becomes redemptive. Finite purity
is content to be pure, Infinite purity is purifying also.
It is the direct cause of infinite pity. " It longs and
yearns ; it waits and prays and strives ; it soothes, and
when need is, it burns ; it has colour, and soul, and
life." The more our pity is "human to the red-ripe of
the heart," the more akin is it to the Divine. It says,
" For a small moment have I forsaken thee, but with
great mercies will I gather thee. In a little wrath I
hid my face from thee for a moment, but with ever
lasting kindness will I have mercy upon thee, saith
the Lord thy Redeemer."
Yes, " Mercy boasteth over Judgment " ; but justice
repudiates, even more indignantly than mercy, the
traditionalist and Calvinistic hell. It was God who
called man out of the clay; and if the honest and
unsophisticated conscience of any man be he saint,
like Origen or Thomas Erskine, or be he sinner be
asked whether it is just that the sins against which
he may long have vainly struggled, and which have
already overwhelmed his life with a sense of remorse,
defeat, and misery, should be visited with an ever
lasting spasm of martyrdom such as men have said
that hell is, the general verdict of the human heart
in its open denial in its secret recoil answers No !
" Eternal pain," says Augustine, " seems harsh and
unjust to human sense." " With the majority of
men of the world," says Bishop Butler, who certainly
did not accept the doctrine of hell in its popular form
" this doctrine seems, when they think at all about
F F
434 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
it, monstrous, disproportioned, impossible." If God
were to ask the verdict of the creatures He has made
as to whether the decree to endless torments was
a just punishment for the sins of a short life, man,
with one voice if he spoke the truth would say
that to his instincts and to his conscience it did
not seem to be so. The reason why the heart of
many of the best men who have ever lived, and are
living now, is rejecting these "horrible decrees," is
because they know that God is justice, and that the
Judge of all the earth will do right. Pain as hopeless
and excruciating after countless ages as when the
first groan for it was uttered will never seem to man
a just punishment for the sins of a life enmeshed with
temptation, or for the stumbling in a path which is
full of gins. The revolt of man s heart against such
teachings will drive him into despair and infidelity,
and provoke the well-known but too-daring words
of Omar Khayyam. Such words applied to the God
who is our God and shall be our guide unto death,
would indeed be blasphemous even on the lips of
a Mohammedan; but applied to such a God as has
been set forth by the fierce blindness of human igno
rance are such as He would Himself approve.
Now St. John speaks in a tone of awful moral
severity, yet in his Gospel and Epistles he does not
use one word which can be interpreted to imply end
less torment. Had he then a deficient view of the
malignity of sin ?
Facts like these may be ignored they who utter
them may be censured, as all men have been who
have endeavoured to convince a multitude that their
blindness is not sight ; but long after we are in our
graves they will prevail with the force of truth, and
the best thing which we can hope for some of those
who now so bitterly assail them is that in those days
their writings may have been consigned to a merciful
oblivion ; that their thoughts may not survive to
XIV.] THE OLD TESTAMENT. 435
furnish proofs of the aberrations of scholastic theo
logy, and to alienate mankind from accepting the
Gospel of the love of God.
But, after this general survey, I will proceed to
examine more closely what I have here stated in
the form of general facts.
The Old Testament is the library and the literature
of the chosen people. Its books from Moses to Ezra
cover the space of fifteen hundred years. It contains
the special revelations of God to man during that
millennium and a half of the history of Israel, and it
contains the records of all His previous revelations
back to the very creation of the world. In the Old
Testament, therefore, we have all which constitutes
the peculiar message of God to man during some four
millenniums of human history. Now it is not pre
tended by any one that the Jews or the Pagans of those
ages were less immortal than we, or that their future
was a different one from ours. And if so, surely the
popular doctrine of hell, were it a true one, was one
which, on the repeated assertions of its advocates, it
infinitely imported for man to know. And it would
indeed have required very explicit teaching teaching
infinitely stronger than the attempt to put a new and
literal meaning into a Hebrew phrase which simply
implied "the hidden" and "the indefinite," to en
force upon Jews the notion that " endless torments for
the vast majority" was the decree of Him who bade
them be kind to the little birds ; and not to seethe the
kid in its mother s milk ; and to break the Sabbath
rest for the sake of their thirsty cattle; and to
give anaesthetics to dull the death-pangs of doomed
criminals. To hear the common talk about souls
daily passing by thousands into hell, we might con
clude that nothing is so dangerous or so wicked as
to conceal the doctrine of " endless torments," or not
F F 2
436 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
to dwell upon it in the strongest terms that human
tongue can utter. Any concealment of it, any
mitigation of it, can only spring, it has been said,
from unhappily deficient views of the heinousness of
sin ; and can only tend to a shipwreck of all virtue
by relaxing the tense strain of human terrors. To
St. Augustine and his school it was the fear of hell
which was believed to people heaven ! Surely this is
the very cynicism of theology. If this be true, let
us canonise La Rochefoucauld, who always said that
it was from religious teachers that he had learnt to
look on human virtues as only vices in disguise, and
on self-interest as the only motive power of human
goodness. But
" Is selfishness
For time a sin, spun out to eternity,
Celestial prudence ? Shame ! "
And yet it is assumed that man could not be really
actuated by any principle short of such selfishness.
Preachers have said, again and again, that if there be
no endless hell, such as they conceive and represent,
it would not be worth any man s while to preach
at all. Rob them of their pictures of future horror,
and they seem to have no lever left wherewith to move
mankind ! Strange that for four thousand years the
Most High by His servants while He ever pointed
out the natural consequences of sin revealed no
such terror, appealed to no such motives ! In all
those books of the Old Testament there are but four
texts which, even by stretching them on the rack
of an impossible exegesis, can be made even to
seem to bear witness to the Augustinian, mediaeval,
and modern views of hell. Neither Moses, nor
Samuel, nor Elijah, nor Elisha, nor the writers of
the historical books, nor Ezra, nor Neherriiah, nor
the Sweet Psalmist of Israel, nor fourteen out of the
sixteen Prophets have one word to say which, even
xiv.] " WHERE THE TREE FALLS." 437
when they speak of retribution, can by the most
violent and unreasonable methods be made to say
a word about endless torments. And the popular
theology, which is declared to be so potent, is, on the
contrary, so wholly inefficacious, that it has been
taught for centuries with this result, that it is un
happily the standing jest alike of the ablest and of
the coarsest of those who would be assumed to need
it most as an element of terror.
But further, out of these four texts in the whole
Old Testament which can alone be forced by any
competent critic into the service of Calvinistic escha-
tology, three are so absolutely irrelevant that to
adduce them at all can only prove how feeble are
the weapons which can be snatched up for misuse by
a despairing cause.
I. Perhaps the most frequently quoted, or rather
misquoted, is Eccl. xi. 3 : "If the tree fall toward
the south or toward the north, in the place where the
tree falleth, there it shall be."
Again and again, even in recent articles on escha-
tology, this text is adduced as though it were
decisive as to the endless doom which awaits the
sinner at the moment of death !
I do not think it an exaggeration to say that
hundreds of texts of Scripture are constantly quoted
in senses quite different from their true meaning ;
but there is hardly any instance of the use of a text
more glaringly irrelevant than this to the purpose
to which it is applied. A doctrine of deepest import
a doctrine which cannot be proved by any other
passage in all Scripture the awful doctrine that
each soul, at the instant of death, enters into a
final and irreversible condition, is here made to
depend on the description of an every-day fact in a
passage which does not so much as refer to the future
life at all ! No one (except in ignorance) can quote
this text without showing once more the recklessness
438 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
* ~ *
with which words are torn from their context to be
misapplied to objects which were not in the most
distant degree in the mind of the writer. Such a
misuse furnishes a remarkable illustration of" the ever-
widening spiral ergo out* of the narrow aperture of
single texts."
Let us for a moment go on the false assumption
that there is any allusion here to the future life ; even
then the text has no bearing on the popular notions
of " hell." It says not a word as to the nature or
duration of the doom ; as to any possible close of it
by the extinction of being ; as to its possible mitiga
tions ;, as to its being a doom which included its own
terminability. It is but a metaphor at the best, and
certainly two other passages about fallen trees in the
Old Testament are singularly the reverse of hopeless.
One of these, Is. vi. 13, in which unhappily our
version gives no sense says that "as the terebinth
and the oak, though cut down, have their stock re
maining, so a holy seed shall be the stock of the
felled tree of the nation s glory " ; and that promise
has light thrown upon it afterwards by the prophecy
that there shall be a " rod out of the stock of Jesse,
and a branch shall grow out of his roots."
The other passage about a fallen tree is in Dan.
iv. 23, 26.
" Whereas the king saw a watcher and an holy one
coming down from heaven, and saying, Hew the
tree down, and destroy it; yet leave the stump of
the roots thereof in the earth, even with a band of
iron and brass, in the tender grass of the field ; and
let it be wet with the dew of heaven. This is the
interpretation, O king, whereas they commanded to
leave the stump of the tree roots ; thy kingdom shall
be sure unto thee, after that thou shalt have known
that the heavens do rule. "
So that even if we had no New Testament even
if this verse had the remotest reference to the future
xiv.] " WHERE THE TREE FALLS. 439
life even if we might not hope, as has been said,
that " He who was called the Carpenter (Mark vi.
3) would still have much to say to the felled and
fallen tree," hopelessness and the finality of misery
would, on Scripture analogy, be very far indeed
from the significance of this verse.
But the verse has nothing to do with the subject.
It is nothing but a wise warning against over-anxiety.
Do your work, and leave the issues with God. The
summary of the six verses to which it belongs is
simply, be not
" Over exquisite
To cast the fashion of uncertain evils."
The tree will fall to south or north as God wills ; sim
ply do thou thy work. Be kind to all, and leave the
result to God. We are to be kind and good whatever
comes of it, remembering that we are not responsible
for events beyond our control.
And the truth thus illustrated accords with the
context however we translate the verse. Abn Ezra
thinks that the word " tree " should be here taken in
the sense of " fruit of the tree " ; in which case it
would mean, " let thy good deeds be like ripe fruit,
which is gathered wherever it falls." Others, as Rosen-
miiller, make it mean, " Do good to men here, for the
opportunity of doing so will cease at death." Others
think that there is an allusion to the falling staff of
the augur in some form of belomancy. But what
ever special interpretation be adopted, it is astonishing,
and it is sad, that the verse should be so habitually
and so inexcusably wrested from its own proper
meaning to one from which it is so completely alien.
2. Another passage, wrested to bear on the future
of the lost, is Is. xxxiii. 14, which in the English
version runs as follows :
" The. sinners in Zion are afraid; fearfulness hath
surprised the hypocrites. Who among us shall dwell
440 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
with the devouring fire ? who among us shall dwell
with everlasting burnings ?
This text, as it was triumphantly referred to by
Jonathan Edwards, will, I suppose, continue to be
misapplied for years to come. And yet to apply it to
future punishment is an inexcusable perversion. The
Prophet has been threatening the horrors of the
Assyrian invasion. With the prophetic eye he sees
the march of the advancing enemy, and describes
the scathing desolation wrought by fire and sword.
Then he announces that judgments shall fall on the
Assyrians also, and he imagines the sinners and
hypocrites exclaiming in terror, " Which among us
can abide this consuming fire ? Which among us
can abide these perpetual conflagrations?" 1 And
he answers, " Those can abide them who are not
sinners and hypocrites like you." The words refer
exclusively to temporal judgments, and to the Assy
rian invader. To draw an argument from them in
favour of " endless torments " is to argue in a way
which can only end by bringing the whole Bible
into contempt. It is to make of the Bible a mere
nasus cereus^ to be twisted into any semblance which
suits us best.
3. Another passage is Is. Ixvi. 24.
"And they shall go forth, and look upon the
carcases of the men who have rebelled [comp. i. 2]
against Me ; for their worm shall not die, neither
shall their fire be quenched ; and they shall be an
abhorring to all flesh."
1 Bishop Lowth s translation. Mr. Cheyne s paraphrase is, Which
of us is destined to be tormented with the Assyrian ? " Isaiah, p. 97
(first edition). Hitzig supposed that the special "fire" alluded to is
the burning of the plague. Even if it be supposed to be a picture of
God Himself as a consuming fire, the reference to earthly judgment
continues. The Targum has, " Who of us shall dwell in Zion, where
the brightness of His Shechinah is a devouring fire ? " (Comp. Ps.
xv. I, Ez. xx. 17.)
1 Bellarmine taunted Protestant exegetes (De Verbo Dei, iii. I, 2) with
making of the Bible a sword which could be thrust into any scabbard.
xiv.] FIRE AND WORM FOR CORPSES. 441
To apply this passage to endless torments is again
to ignore every principle which centuries of Biblical
study have taught us, and to put us back to the crude
and impossible methods of ten centuries ago. The
verse, once more, has not the remotest reference to
that " damnation of the wicked " to which the heading
of the chapter unfortunate and misleading in this
as in so many instances refers it. The Prophet is
speaking of Jerusalem and its future peace, and of
the vengeance that shall fall on idolaters and apos
tates who eat swine s flesh and other abominations ;
and the nations shall come to Zion with offerings, and
shall worship at the new moons and sabbaths, and
shall go forth and look on the abhorrent valley, where
rot or burn the dead corpses of those that have rebelled
against God. 1 What is there of endlessness or of tor
ment here ? To give it such an explanation is to read
Isaiah as if he were writing in the style of Thomas
Aquinas, and to turn Semitic passion into theolo
gical prose. Even if, in dull violation of all the
laws of Eastern idiom and poetry, we were to be so
unreasonable as to understand literal worms that
literally do not die, and fires literally unquenchable
a proceeding that nothing could excuse but a sort of
idolatry of words and syllables how can carcases,
dead corpses? feel the gnawing of the worm, or the
burning of the flame ? Are we to torture the text into
a doctrine of horror by understanding metaphorically
the word which is obviously literal, and by under
standing literally (so far as it suits us) the expressions
1 The vision is strictly analogous to that of Ezek, xxxix. 11-16.
Gog the heathen world gathers himself against Israel. He and his
multitude are overthrown by a Divine judgment on the east of the Dead
Sea. All Israelites go forth to bury them, their arms and chariots, and
occupy seven months in burying them in Hamon-gog, that they may
cleanse the land. Comp. Joel iii. 12, Zech. xiv. 12. Why is Isaiah s
language to be taken literally, and Ezekiei s not ?
2 Pegarim, as in 2 Kings xix. 35.
442 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
which are obviously metaphorical ? l The poet in his
burning patriotism is only depicting in bold imagery
the triumph of his people, and the special mention of
new moons and sabbaths, and pilgrimages to a spot
outside Jerusalem, as well as the fact that he is
speaking of dead corpses, should alone have sufficed
to rescue his passionate metaphors from being abused
into an endless eschatology.
4. The fourth and sole remaining passage is Dan.
xii. 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."
There is more prima facie excuse for trying to
force this passage into the controversy ; and yet the
whole bearing of it on the argument literally crumbles
to pieces the moment it is examined.
In the first place the translation of the verse is far
too uncertain to be relied upon.
Abn Ezra renders it : " Those who awake shall be
(appointed) to eternal (aeonian) life, and those who
awake not shall be (appointed) to shame and eternal
(aeonian) contempt." 2
Similarly Tregelles : " And many from among the
sleepers of the dust shall awake, these shall be unto
everlasting (aeonian) life, but those (i.e. who do not
awake), shall be unto shame and everlasting (aeonian)
contempt."
It is difficult to see the particular crisis of which
the seer is speaking, but in any case, whether these
versions be correct or not, nothing can be more dis
tant from the passage than a notion of endless
torments. For "the shame and contempt," of
1 This is the method of the valueless post-Christian forgery of Jewish
hatred the Book of Judith, the vengeance of the ungodly is fire and
worms, and they shall feel them and weep for ever " ; but even this
"for ever "is only e eos aiwvos, and has therefore no connexion with
abstract endlessness.
- See White, Life in Christ, p. 171 ; Weill, Le Jiidaisme, iv. dogm.
xiii. ch, iii. I.
xiv.] NON-RESURRECTION. 443
which the latter word is the same as the " abhor
ring " of Is. Ixvi. 24 is that which attaches to the
memory of those who themselves sleep in the
dust and do not awake. Hence this passage was
explained by the most eminent Rabbis to mean
<( death and immobility." 1
What then is the result of our examination of
the Old Testament ? It is that there are only four
passages which, by any pretence or perversion, can
be made to imply the everlasting misery of the
lost ; and these passages are found on examination,
and in the opinion of the best critics, to have not
the least relevancy. It would be strange in any
case if the warnings of this frightful doom, vouch
safed to generations of sinful men, were to be found
in three disputed texts of two late Prophets ; it is
stranger still when we find these texts to be altogether
beside the mark. May we not ask with Mr. White,
though his view of these texts differs from mine,
" Is this the method of the Divine Government ?
Is there not here rather the method of theologizing
handed down to us by men of the fourth century,
who knew little of Scripture, little of history, and still
less of God the Righteous and the Merciful." z
/
1 Weill, Lejuddisme, iv. pp. 565, 590. Rabbi Saadjah says, " The
meaning is, that for Israelites the resurrection constitutes eternal life,
and that for non-Israelites the eternal shame consists in the non-resur
rection which is their lot."
* Life in Christ, p. 172.
CHAPTER XV.
THE TEACHING OF THE NEW TESTAMENT ON
FUTURE RETRIBUTION.
" Dear friend, I am as thoroughly persuaded as I am of my own
existence that God will not be overcome of evil, but will overcome evil
with good, and I am therefore not much disturbed by one or two difficult
passages which seem to point to a different result." Letters of Thomas
Erskine, p. 145.
"Just guessing, through their murky blind
Few, faint, and baffling sight,
Streaks of a brighter heaven behind,
A cloudless depth of light. "
KEBLE.
LET us turn to the New Testament.
The existence of hell, if the meaning of that
word be limited to the single conception of a retri
bution beyond the grave, is revealed. It is the
natural sequence of that doctrine of immortality which
Christ brought to light. Even an endless future retri
bution is so far revealed that its possibility seems to
be dimly implied in certain passages if they be taken
alone. What is not revealed is the dreadful series of
human inferences and imaginations which have now
for centuries been conglomerated into the meaning of
" hell," but which hardly came into definite existence
till the fifth century, and which constitute such a
belief as the Church has never at any time required.
The necessity for these imaginations and infer
ences is absolutely denied. " If in revelation," says
Bishop Butler, " there may be found any passages,
CHAP, xv.] GOD S LOVE TO MAN. 445
the seeming meaning of which is contrary to natural
religion, we may most certainly conclude such seeming
meaning not to be the real one. " It may be said, with
less ambiguity, that where our unsophisticated moral
intuition pronounces a doctrine, as popularly set
forth, to be unworthy of our reason and abhorrent to
our sense of justice, it is less likely that our moral
intuition should be wrong than that our interpreta
tion of Scripture should be mistaken. " Of all our
faculties," as Professor Jellet says, "the moral intui
tion is least likely to err. The moral intuition of
the middle ages was blunted and degraded by the
callousness to suffering induced by centuries of
cruelty ; it was still further blunted by the supposed
revelation of the accretions which we reject. The
more it becomes enlightened, the more loving and
merciful the heart of man becomes, the more empha
tically and indignantly will it pronounce, that men
have wronged and distorted by perversion, and mis
interpretation, and most unwarranted addition, the
words and metaphors of Christ."
And in interpreting these texts I cannot forget
the intensity of God s love for man, which is the very
essence of the Gospel message. That love is not
quenched by our sinfulness, but only mingled with
grief. "The Living Word showed forth this grief;
the Written Word is full of its utterance. There is
no living relationship which the Prophets have not
used to give vent to this unutterable sorrow a
father s heart-broken indignation, a mother s pitiful
yearning, a lover s agonised relentings, a husband s out
raged honour, a friend s broken confidence, a master s
insulted dignity, nor mutual human relationships
only. . . . The trouble of the shepherd over one sheep
strayed from his charge, the disappointed expectation
of the husbandman, add some tones to the great
lament." This grief, this love, are manifested even
to impenitent sinners. What is there in the Gospel
446 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
to lead us to suppose that God will inflict endless and
irremediable torments on any whom His love can
reach even beyond the grave ? Where are we told
that the love of God who changes not will be changed
into hatred, fury, and implacable vengeance by the
moment of death ? " Is it the great crime of dying
which can quench the love that our enmity and our
sin could not quench ? No ! Love never faileth."
The principal passages bearing on the subject are
found in the Gospel of St. Matthew.
a. It would be quite needless to enter upon any
examination of mere general threatenings of temporal
or other consequences expressed by the metaphor
of "fire. Fire consumes and fire purifies; the
notion of a material miraculous fire, meant to keep
men alive in pain without destroying them, is a
human fiction derived from the literalising of figures
ill understood. When St. John Baptist says, " He
will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire," he is
using a metaphor of chaff being burnt up and con
sumed, to illustrate the work of the Messiah who should
in that age, by an immediately impending judgment,
purge the good elements of the nation from the bad,
by the political and physical destruction of the Jewish
race. 1 //"these passages, and the figures of the burnt
tares in the parable, the bad fish cast away, the dead
branch burnt, the faithless servant cut asunder, are
indeed meant to be taken literally and not as figures,
and if they are interpreted to imply future torments,
not earthly ruin to the Jews to whom they were
addressed, nothing can be clearer than that what
1 Keble clearly caught this meaning.
" Caught from that blaze by wrath divine,
Lost branches of the once-loved vine,
Now wither d, spent, and sere,
See Israel s sons like glowing brands,
Toss d wildly o er a thousand lands,
For twice a thousand year."
Fifth Sunday in Lent.
xv.] PARABLES, 447
they imply is not hopeless misery, but total destruc
tion. 1 In my view these parabolic metaphors imply
neither endless torments nor annihilation, but they
are metaphors of the natural laws which are the
Divine laws of retribution by which all evil is punished,
until it is repented of, both in this world and beyond
the grave.
@. It is not, therefore, needful to examine once
more the Parables of Judgment.
There is at least a general truth in the remark of.
Archbishop Whately, that " the only truth that is
essential in a parable is the truth of the moral or
doctrine conveyed by it." That these parables are
full of awful warning that they dwell on the warning
and not on the hope I freely admit. It is on this
very ground that I cannot teach that all souls will be
saved. But yet I think that the inferences from these
parables are far less demonstrative than is sometimes
supposed.
The wicked husbandmen who are cast out mean
primarily the Jews who lose their land and their
privileges, and on whom heavy temporal judgments
fall. Their fate cannot prove any doctrine of endless
torments ; nor can that of the one single guest who is
cast out of the banquet ; still less that of the unwise
virgins, of whom it is certainly not hinted that they
suffered hopeless misery because they were too late
for the Bridegroom s feast. The external scenery of
these and other parables may indeed be interpreted
of great general principles. They certainly imply
most solemn and awful warnings, of immediate and
future retribution on sloth, faithlessness, and sin. But
1 The same inference would naturally be drawn from Matt. x. 28,
where the Apostles are bidden to fear, not those who kill the body, but
Him who is able to destroy both body and soul in hell. It refers to
the undoubted power of God to deprive man of the immortality which
He has Himself bestowed. It is an allusion to God s omnipotence,
not a declaration of His intention.
448 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
when their details are pressed into the service of sys
tematic eschatology, they are used to ends for which
they never were intended, and such a misapplication
of them can only lead to contradiction and confusion.
No dogmatic truth can be proved by such methods.
The vineyard, the wedding banquet, the king s
supper, are emblems of the Kingdom of Heaven into
which Gentiles should enter, from which Jews would
be excluded in the present Messianic Age. None
can ever enter it who refuse the first requisite con
ditions. When men accept those conditions the
doors are opened wide.
Nor must it be forgotten that if the details of these
parables be sternly pressed to the most remorseless
logical inferences, there are at least as many parables
which, in accordance with the whole drift of Scripture,
we have fully as much right to press into the higher
service of hope and mercy. Such are those which
tell us that the Good Shepherd will not cease to
search for His wandering sheep until He find it ;
that the imprisonment of the unforgiving debtor is
only to last until the last farthing of his debt has
been paid, which debt for sinners is paid as soon as
they accept the ransom freely offered ; that the leaven
is at last to leaven the whole of the three measures of
meal ; that there is joy in Heaven over one sinner
that repenteth, more than over ninety-and-nine just
persons which need no repentance ; that God accepts
the repentance of His prodigals even when it has
been only wrung from them by misery and shame.
Turning to passages of which the meaning is sup
posed to be distinctly in favour of the popular view,
we shall find how rashly and how extravagantly their
meaning has been pressed.
I. There is, for instance, the passage, Matt. v. 21,
22, which ends by saying, " Whosoever shall say, thou
fool, shall be in danger of the Gehenna of fire."
The ordinary interpretation of this passage is so
xv.] IN DANGER OF GEHENNA. 449
strange that the general acceptance of it only shows
the otiose state of mind in which men languidly
accept the most startling misinterpretations. Our
Lord is speaking of three degrees of sinful anger,
and telling His hearers that it had been a law for
their fathers that a murderer was liable to the
" judgment" i.e. the decision, whatever it might
be, of the Beth Din, or local court (Deut. xvi. 18). He
came to give a more searching law, which would trace
to its very source, in evil thoughts and words, the
guilt of murder. In His law, whoever is angry with
his brother 1 is as guilty as if he thereby came under
the cognizance of the Beth Din with its sentence of
death by the sword 2 ; if he lets his anger burst forth
in the contumelious word " worthless," 3 he is as
guilty as if he came under the cognizance of the
Sanhedrin, or Supreme Court of Jerusalem ; if his
rage is still more ungovernable, and he uses the
furious taunt of " rebel " 4 (the word which cost so
sad a punishment to Moses and Aaron), 5 he morally
deserves the severest form of Jewish sentence, the
sentence which ordered his body to be burnt and
then flung forth and consumed in the Burning
Valley. 6 Thus, as Bengel says, the general meaning
is that by these forms of anger a man practically
makes himself a homicide in the first, second, or third
degree. What possible connexion has this with
endless torments, the introduction of which renders
the whole passage unintelligible ? The primary
1 N. B. Vulg. and many Fathers omit the words "without a cause,"
which are, however, a fair gloss. 2 Jos. Antt. iv. 8, 14.
3 f]* 1 "]. S> &vdp(aire Keys. James ii. 2O.
4 miD. It involved the imputation of conduct punishable with
death. Deut. xxi. 18-20. 5 Num. xx. 10.
6 Death by burning was a recognised punishment of the law. (Lev.
xx. 14.) The flinging forth of the body into Gehenna rests on tradition
only. Compare a very similar triple gradation in Kiddushin, f. xxviii. I.
If a man calls another "slave" he deserves excommunication; if
" bastard" he deserves forty stripes ; if " impious" lie deserves death.
(See Meuschen, Hor. Hebr. p. 34.)
G G
450 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
reference of the * Gehenna of fire : is here, beyond
all question, to a form of temporal punishment which
had especial horror to the Jewish mind, on the
ground, among others, that they/ like all ancient
nations, attached intense importance to burial rites. 1
When we find that Jewish writings abound in similar
turns of phrase, which were intended to inculcate
deep moral truths in the most striking form, but in
which no one dreamed of confusing the essential
meaning by attaching literal importance to the form,
we can feel no doubt that our Lord was using language
which all His hearers would readily understand. 2
2. In the same chapter (Matt. v. 29, 30, comp. xviii.
8, 9) occurs the passage in which our Lord says that
it is better to cut off the right hand and to pluck
out the right eye rather than let them be the means
and instruments of sin, since it is profitable that
one of the members should perish, and not that
the whole body should be cast into Gehenna.
None but persons of disturbed reason have ever
supposed that the passage ought to be taken
literally. Any literal acceptance of it has been
emphatically condemned by Church decrees. The
general meaning is distinct. It is that the severest
self-denial is often the highest self-interest, and that
it would be better to incur any amount of personal
loss and suffering, and so to enter into relationship
with God, by accepting Christ, than to be led into
sins so awful as those which involved the casting forth
t>
of the body of the criminal into the Burning Valley,
which was the severest punishment for crimes against
the law. " The whole passage," as Baumgarten-
Crusius says, " must not be understood of the punish
ments of hell." At any rate, the allusion to future
1 Eccl. vi. 3. "If a man begat an hundred children . . . and also
he have no burial, I say that an untimely birth is better than he.
Comp. 2 Kings ix. 35 ; Is. xiv. 19, 20 ; Jer. xxii. 19.
See Niddak, f. 13 ; Shabbath, f. 33, I ; and other passages iu
Meuschen, c.
xv.] THE BURNING VALLEY. 451
punishment is only indicated in a dim and indefinite
manner, on which no elaborate system can be built.
The Rabbis said, using a very similar turn of phrase,
" It is better for a man to throw himself into a fur
nace than to make any one blush in public" 1 ....
The truth thus expressed is admirable ; yet would
any sane man, except Biblical literalists, be so absurd
as to understand it literally ?
3. The passage finds its best illustration from the
parallel passage in Mark ix. 4150 ; and if in that
passage its sterner aspects are emphasised, so too is
the less terrible line of interpretation abundantly
supported. The Beloved Disciple, in the exclusive
spirit which always marks an erroneous tendency and
an imperfect Christianity, had forbidden one who was
casting out demons in Christ s name without having
joined the body of the disciples. Christ, after gently
rebuking this sectarian pride, proceeds to teach His
disciples that the smallest kindness done in His name
and for His sake to one of His children, shall gain a
reward ; and that, on the other hand, it were better
to have a millstone hung round the neck and be
drowned than to lead His little ones into sin by placing
stumbling-blocks in the path of their truth and holi
ness. Then follows the passage about cutting off
the right hand and plucking out the right eye as
being a less terrible loss than to be cast into Gehenna.
Does not this parallel throw a very different light on
the common notions of being cast into Gehenna ? It
were better to be drowned at once than to put a
stumbling-block in the path of the weak ; it were
better to make a present sacrifice, however costly,
than to incur such guilt as was punished by the most
ignominious and terrible sentence of the Jewish law
the denial of the rites of burial and the casting
of the body into the Burning Valley. What parallel
1 Berachoth (Schwab, p. 404).
G G 2
452 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP
would there be between a moment of drowning agony
and endless torments in material fire ?
The particulars which are added to the description
of the Burning Valley enhance the awful picture of
such a doom. They are " to be cast into Gehenna,
into the unquenchable fire [words of doubtful genuine
ness], where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not
quenched."
Probably the misunderstanding of this verse has
been one main cause of the unscriptural views of the
future which have so fatally darkened the souls of
many Christians. It is the verse on which St.
Augustine lays his main stress. It has been relied
upon by those who have accepted the worst aspect of
his " hell," and have rejected the mercy of his " pur
gatory." It is so impossible to eradicate the errors and
prejudices of centuries it is so impossible to impart
by a few words that sense of the true meaning and
application of phrases which can only come as the
result of lifelong culture and literary training that to
many every endeavour to put the words in their true
light will always wear the aspect of explaining them
away. When the Roman Catholic lifts up his eyes
to the dome of St. Peter s, and sees the glittering and
colossal inscription, " I say unto thee, thou art Peter,
and on this rock will I build my Church," no amount
of Protestant argument will shake his conviction that
the grounds on which he argues for the supremacy
of his Church are based on the express teaching of
Christ ; and he will treat as so many wilful sophisms
all endeavours to explain their true import. When
Luther was wearied out with the arguments brought
against the doctrine of the Real Presence, he thought
it sufficient to end all controversy by again and again
repeating the words, " This is my body," and no rea
soning as to the true bearing of symbolic expressions
would have sufficed to shake his obstinate literalism.
When the Calvinist has quoted some text in which
xv.] MISINTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE. 453
the word " elect " occurs, or in which allusion is made
to Pharaoh and Esau, he thinks it little short of wilful
atheism to reject his system of theology. So again,
all the rest of Scripture will often fail to put in its
due perspective the true doctrine of justification by
faith when that expression has been changed from a
living truth into a dead shibboleth ; and there was a
gleam of partial insight in Swedenborg s vision of
Melanchthon incessantly employed in the next world
in writing down, " The just shall live by faith," while
the words disappeared every time that he wrote
them down. All the vast weight of the moral and
spiritual revelations which have made men reject
such pictures of hell as I have quoted, are powerless
against those who are unable to coordinate with the
rest of God s revelations the literal meaning of a few
texts. The superstitious and arbitrarily invented
theory of " verbal dictation is the source of count
less errors, miseries, and wrongs, and will always be a
fatal hindrance to the right reception of divine truths.
And yet, thank God, multitudes of the wisest and
holiest of mankind are at last beginning to under
stand more of the true explanation of these metaphors.
That the repetition of this verse about the worm and
flame in verses 4548, is due to some tampering with
the text is now admitted. 1 But it is further beginning
to be recognised (i) that " the quenchless fire " and
1 These verses are omitted by the best MS. (tf. B. C. L. A. &c.). If
it be asked what temptation there could have been thus to heighten the
supposed luridness of the metaphor by repetition and reiteration, the
answer is that to a certain class of minds there is a positive fascination
in dwelling on the most frightful supposed features of anguish and
horror in a doom which they reserve for others. For instance, how
fearfully common in the coarse terrorism of revivalists is the use of the
phrase "hell- fire." What is the Scriptural authority for it? It is a
complete mistranslation of the phrase "the Gehenna of fire," which
occurs exactly twice in the whole Bible (Matt. v. 22, xviii. 9), and
there primarily as a literal description of a particular valley ! The
addition " of fire" is not found in the parallel passages. Here in Mark
ix. 46, 47, the "fire" is a heightening interpolation not found in the
best MSS.
454 MERC Y AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
.
"undying worm "are simply descriptions of what the
Valley of Hinnom became after the days of King
Josiah, because worms bred in the corruption and
fires were burnt to consume the refuse and purify the
air ; (2) that so far as they refer to any future retribu
tion they are metaphors, since not even the dullest
imagination has supposed that there are literally
deathless worms ; (3) that, like so many of the New
Testament metaphors, they are borrowed from the
page of ancient prophecy ; (4) that in the passage of
Isaiah from which they are borrowed, and are some
what softened in the borrowing, they refer to tem
poral judgments ; (5) that as in that passage the
worm and flame feed on dead corpses, and are
descriptive of temporal judgments, so there must
be the very strongest probability that here also
they are a general picture of just retribution,
whether in this life or in that to come, but that
they are wholly inadequate of themselves to sup
port even if they have the least bearing on the
doctrine of the endlessness of torment.
And difficult as is the passage with which our
Lord s discourse concludes the recovery of the
true reading being alone a matter of very consider
able uncertainty it is full of a most precious hope
fulness, which, alas ! has also been terribly per
verted. After warning us that any present self-
denial is better than the ultimate consequences of
unrepented sin, our Blessed Lord adds, " For every
one shall be salted with fire." I will venture to say
that no thought could have been more distant in this
passage from the tender love of the Blessed Re
deemer than that truly "sickening thought," which
even Keble was so misled by the hard misinterpreta
tions of human fancy as to bid us "hold fast." Can
anything be more reckless than the inference that we
should be " salted with fire " in order to preserve us
alive in interminable and unutterable agonies ! Such
xv.] "SALTED WITH FIRE: 1 455
a fancy (which Augustine has to support by the
analogies of worms in hot springs, and salamanders
which live in flame !) could not but have been im
possible to the mind of Him who came " to save
sinners," " to be a propitiation for the sins of the
whole world." No ! " Salt is good," and fire too is
good. It is (as the whole context shows) a purifying
fire the " purification and consecration wrought by
wisdom -which shall do the work of salt when salt
has failed. 1 It is the refiner s fire of the day of the
Lord 2 which shall purify and purge us as gold and
silver. For it is not only those who have refused
to make the great earthly sacrifices not only the
offenders of Christ s little ones but "every one
who shall be " salted with fire." If the words
" salted with fire " do indeed
" Seem to show
How spirits lost in endless woe
May undecaying live,"
then they are a universal threat ; as much a threat of
those undecaying torments for the Pharisee as for the
Publican. But that they should ever have been so
interpreted, that the actual words and context of the
passage and the entire bearing of its symbolism 3
should thus have been wrenched from their true,
1 In our version we read, " And every sacrifice shall be salted with
salt," and popular religionism delights to claim this for the elect, and
leave the torment-preserving fire for reprobates. But the clause is
probably spurious, not being found in N. B. L. A.
2 Mai. iii. 2.
3 For "salt" see Matt. v. 13 ; Luke xiv. 34 ; C:>1. iv. 6 ; Lev. ii.
13. For "fire" see Matt. iii. II ; I Cor. iii. 13 ; I Pet. i. 7 ; Mai. ii.
Any one who will observe the scores of different manners in which this
passage has been interpreted will see how little suitable it is to be made
the basis of the "sickening thought" of Keble. Euthymius Ziga-
benus explains it of " the fire of faith in God, or of love to man."
Luther says that "the Gospel is a fire and a salt ; the old man is cruci
fied, renewed, salted." Even Meyer, who takes the darkest view of
it, admits that the diversity of interpretation proves the obscurity of the
passage, and that the clue to the true meaning is perhaps lost.
456 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
*
blessed, and consoling applications, and impressed
into the service of the most terrible of all conceivable
theories, is but too grievously characteristic of that
tormenting fear which is the natural antithesis of
true love to God. Of all interpretations of the pas
sage the least tenable, even on grammatical and
exegetical grounds, is that which applies these two
verses to endless torments. So far from aggravating
the awful significance of the retribution which is
symbolised by " Gehenna," they throw on that sym
bolism a gleam of blessed light ; they are an addi
tional argument in favour of understanding Gehenna
even when it is used as a metaphor of future retri
bution as being what the Jews normally held it to
be, a purifying and terminable retribution ; and we
must probably find the key to their solution in that
fire which, St. Paul tells us, shall try every man s
work, of what kind it is, and from which the work
man may be saved, so as by fire, even when his work
is burned. Fire in Scripture is the element of life
(Is. iv. 5), of purification (Mai. iii. 3), of atonement
(Lev. xvi. 27), of transformation (2 Pet. iii. 10) ; and,
at the worst only, of total destruction (Rev. xx. 9) ;
never of preservation alive for purposes of anguish.
4. The passage most relied upon is Matt. xxv.
41-46. It is the close of the parable concerning the
last judgment, and the final separation made
between the sheep and the goats. All nations are
summoned before the bar of Christ. He divides
them as the shepherd divides his flock, setting the
sheep on His right hand and the goats on His left.
To those on His right He says, " Come, ye blessed
of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you
from the foundation of the world." The reason
assigned for this reward of blessedness is that they
have done deeds of kindness to the sick, and the
hungry, and the naked, and the prisoners, and in so
doing have done kindness to Him. For their neglect
XV.] THE SHEEP AND THE KIDS. 457
of these deeds of kindness, and for no other specified
cause, those on the left hear the awful words,
" Depart from Me, ye cursed, into aeonian fire, pre
pared " not for them, but " for the devil and his
angels." ..." And these shall go away into aeonian
punishment, but the righteous into aeonian life u :
that is, they shall go respectively into the " cor
rection" and the " life" of u the age to come."
The words, therefore, denounce a stern judgment
on those who are unmerciful and hard-hearted. That
we are dealing with language which cannot be
pressed into close details is manifest from the fact
that the decision is represented as turning solely on
the fulfilment or neglect of one single virtue active
benevolence. When the true meaning of the word
" aeonian " is restored, the passage ceases entirely
to prove the doctrine of " endless torments," even if
these other features of it did not exclude such an
explanation.
But the scene described is not the judgment of the
dead at all, but of the living. It is the trial of " all
the Gentiles " x at the second coming of Christ. So
little of certainty can there be in the details of its
eschatology that such commentators as Keil, Olshau-
sen, and Greswell confine its application to Gentiles
only, whereas Grotius and Meyer confine it to Chris
tians only. We cannot then assert with confidence
that it is meant to shadow forth the ultimate doom
of individual men, but the judgments and losses
which follow on the exclusion from the kingdom of
Christ. It is a description, based on Old Testa
ment metaphors, of that which shall happen to those
Gentiles who, at Christ s coming His Parousia
at the close of the old dispensation -shall be found
rejecting Him and persecuting His children. The
fire which burns for them is that fire which ever
burns against sin, and which is therefore described
1 TrcrVro TO tdut). ROM. xv. 21-12, 0.
453 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
as prepared for the devil and his angels. There is
nothing to indicate that this " fire of the age to come "
may not cease when that age is merged into the
great, the final, and the blessed consummation.
Further, our Lord could hardly have used the
metaphor of the shepherd separating the sheep from
the goats without direct reference to the thirty-fourth
chapter of Ezekiel. In that chapter God, indignant
with the idle and selfish shepherds, says, " Behold I
judge between cattle and cattle, between the rams
and he-goats " ; or perhaps rather " between other
cattle and the rams and the he-goats." But the
sheep and goats are alike clean ; they alike form part
of the common flock l ; and in the passage of Ezekiel
are all under one loving shepherd, and the words
used by our Lord for goats " eriphia " literally
" kidlings," has nothing in itself which points to final
exclusion or implacable indignation.
5. Only one passage remains for our consideration
in the Gospels. It is the solemn sentence of warning
which our Lord addressed to Judas, Matt. xxvi. 24
(Mark xiv. 21). " Woe unto that man through whom
the Son of Man is betrayed ; good were it for that
man if he had not been born."
i. A word or two may first be said on the actual
phraseology.
a. First it should be observed that the " Woe unto
that man," is not, as is usually supposed, an anathema,
but, as Stier says, " the most affecting and melting
lamentation of love, which feels the woe as much as
holiness requires or will admit." The woe is, as in
Matt. xxiv. 19, an expression of the deepest pity.
b. The latter clause, which is omitted in the parallel
passage of St. Luke, is expressed in a manner which,
though scarcely noticed by any commentator, is at
least susceptible of another interpretation. It runs
literally, " good were it for him (avrw) if he had not
1 See Tristram, Nat. Hist, of the Bible, p. 89.
xv.] "BETTER NOT TO HAVE BEEN BORN." 459
been born that man (o avOpwTros e/eetz o?)." * But for
dogmatic objections to such a translation, the verse
would seem naturally to require the rendering, " It
were good for Him (avrcS), the Son of Man who has
last been mentioned if that man (Judas) had not
been born." The words, " that man " (o dvrjp e/ceivos},
at the end of the clause, look as if they were added,
so to speak, by an after-thought, lest there should be
any confusion in the grammar as to the nominative
of the verb (eycvtfGif). The words would then mean,
" For me, as the Son of Man, with that awful abyss
of sorrow and agony before Me, into which I must
now descend, it were good if that man, who is, humanly
speaking, the guilty cause of My sufferings, had not /
been born. From the depths of My heart I pity him
for the sin which he is now committing." And the
reason why such a view is not at once to be pro
nounced untenable is that we find that our Lord
did shudder at the cup, which yet He drank because
it was His Father s will ; that He prayed that, if
possible, it might pass from Him ; that " He offered
up prayers and supplications with strong crying and
tears unto Him that was able to save Him from death,
and was heard in that He feared." 2 If therefore His
words be interpreted according to ordinary rules of
grammar, there would be no difficulty at all in under
standing Him to mean that, though His sufferings
had been fore-ordained, yet (humanly speaking) it
were good for Him if the traitorous disciple had never
been born. 3
c. But it is perhaps more important to observe that
1 The peculiar structure of the clause na\6v yv avry el
& &vQp<t3iros K?i/os is not noticed in our version, but it is preserved in
the Vulgate, Wiclif, Tyndale, Luther, the Rhemish, &c.
1 Matt. xxvi. 36-44 ; Mark xiv. 36-39 ; Luke xxii. 42 ; Heb. v. 7.
3 The real objection to the grammatical rendering of the word arises
from the fact that " it were good for him not to have been born " was a
common Jewish phrase (Eccl. vi. 3 ; Berachoth, f. xvii. I. ; Chagigah,
f. xi. 2, &c.).
460 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
" good were it for nim " (tcakov TJV avrw), to whomever
applied, are far from necessarily meaning the absolute
best. " God has many bests." What is "good " for a
man in one aspect, may yet through God s infinite
mercy not be so when the whole is considered. There
may be a better than this good. Our Lord said that
" it is not good (KO\OV) to take the children s bread and
cast it to dogs " (Mark vii. 27), yet He did the deed of
mercy which, to try the gold of the woman s faith, He
had so described. Peter on the mount said, " It is good
(fca\6v) for us to be here" ; and so it was, but there was
something better. St. Paul, in I Cor. vii. 8, says that
it is " good " (Ka\6v) to live a life of absolute celibacy ;
and so under conditions and circumstances it is. Yet
this abstract " good " did not prevent St. Paul from
recommending marriage as an ordinary " better." l
d. I do not, therefore, think that this verse can be
used without hesitation as bearing on the unending
future of any man, even of Judas. So far from
sanctioning the popular views of hell in all their terror,
the verse seems to me to be full of mercy. For our
examination of the phrase, " it were good for him," has
shown that it by no means excludes every blessed
alternative of God s goodness. It is not a phrase
which is by any means equivalent to " it is a frightful
curse to him that he was ever born." It does not
demand severer interpretation than that regarding
him in the light of his unutterable crime it were
better for him not to have been born. It does not by
any means necessarily imply what men have harshly
interpreted it to mean, that Judas was to be shut out
for ever from every ray of the grace of God. 2 Let us
not distort and exaggerate the words of Him who
came to seek and save the lost. While we are not
called upon to speculate as to the place and lot of
1 I Cor. vii. I, 8, 26.
The phrase was common enough Job iii. II, x. 18; Ecclus. xxiii.
14; Luke xxii. 29. See former note.
xv.] "IT WERE BETTER FOR HIM: 1 461
Judas, let us remember that there were some in the
early Church who saw in the remorse of his suicide
the germs of a possible repentance, and thought that
the wretched man hurried into the next world that
he might there implore his Lord for that forgiveness
which Peter, who in the hour of danger had denied
Him with curses, lived to gain on earth. 1
e. The words of Christ, and the phrases He used,
are best interpreted by their meaning in other parts
of His discourses. Let us then take the closest
parallel we can find to His use of this phrase. It is
in the passage which I have just examined Mark ix.
42 : " And whosoever shall cause to offend one of the
little ones who have faith, it were better for him " [the
expression is stronger] " if a great millstone hung
about his neck, and he had been cast into the sea." 2
No one can mistake the general sense of such lan
guage. It means that " it were better to be struck
dead than to commit deadly sins." It means what
Queen Blanche of Navarre meant when she said that
she had rather see her son St. Louis dead at her feet
than see him live to commit a mortal sin. Yet how
utterly far is the statement of such general prin
ciples from being identical with a threat of " hell-
fire." Did not David cause the enemies of God to
blaspheme, and yet did he not die a holy man ? Have
not many caused Christ s little ones to offend have
not many great Church doctors even cast stumbling-
blocks before the childhood of the world ? and yet,
though to do so be a grievous thing though in the
abstract it were better to die than so to have done
though previous death would have saved them, may
hap, a pain and shame worse than death do we deny
them all chance of repentance ? do we even deny that,
in other aspects, their lives may have been blessed
with elements of good ? And as for criminals, there
1 Orig. in Matt. tr. xxv. See supra, p. 79.
- KO.\OV tffTiv avTcp /xaA\o^. (In Matt, xviii. 6 it is ffvptitptt
462 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
has been many a "criminal, like the Moloch-worship
ping Manasseh, of whom men have often said that
he had better have never been born, and for whom
that saying is perfectly true, when we look at
their crimes alone, who have yet lived to find that
God forgives. Again and again must we insist that
" the law speaks in the tongue of the sons of men " ;
that Scripture is to be interpreted according to the
ordinary usage and interpretation of finite human
speech ; and that to those who persist in ignoring this
plain and obvious principle it must remain in great
measure a sealed book, a book which they will be
liable to misuse as terribly to the wrong and injury of
mankind as it has been misused again and again by
the ignorance of rulers and the tyranny of priests.
ii. To me I confess that these stern, sad words to
Judas are full of hope. Judas, by the common
consent of mankind, was guilty of the most heinous
sin which was ever committed. Yet all that our
Blessed Lord said even of him (if indeed that inter
pretation of the words be true) was, " Good were it
for him that he had not been born." Take the words
in their severest aspect stretch them to the utmost
conceivable extent and they fall very far short of a
threat to Judas of the popular hell. No such inter
pretation can, even at the worst, be forced from them.
For certainly they would have been true to the fullest
extent if Judas had died at that very moment, and
never suffered one pang more. The words neither
do, nor can, contain in themselves a prophecy that
he should suffer endless agonies. There is many a
wealthy and prosperous man living at this moment
in ease and luxury of whom one might still say that
even if death were extinction, " Good were it for
him that he had not been born." It requires no
fire or worm to make that judgment true. Many
even of God s saints have exclaimed at moments of
sorrow that they wished they had not been born.
xv.] JUDAS. 463
The author of Ecclesiastes says that " an untimely
birth" that is, death at the moment of birth is
better than to " die and have no burial " (Eccl. ix. 3).
Has any one dreamt of understanding those words
otherwise than as an expression of the deep import
ance which the Jews attached to burial ? Why is
one passage of Scripture to be taken literally,
while another is treated according to the ordinary
limitations of human speech ?
iii. But then, lastly, it was Judas alone of all living
men of whom these words were spoken. Had the
popular teaching about hell been true they would
indeed have been amazing in their unexpected mild
ness. Why, if that popular teaching had been true,
it were good for millions and millions of mankind, it
were good for the vast majority of the human race
it were good for all but one "little flock" -if they
had not been born ! If those writers have taught
the truth, then for most men the awful conclusion of
Schopenhauer is irresistible, and mankind is a failure
and a mistake, and it were better that it had never
been. But of one man only has this been said, and
even in his case the language is quite indefinitely mild
compared with what men have dreamed. "Awful as
the words were, they have their bright as well as
their dark side." In thus applying them to the case
of the traitor in its exceptional enormity there is
suggested the thought that for others whose guilt
were not like his, existence even in the penal suffering
which their sins have brought on them may be
better than never to have been at all.
6. And another passage used by Dr. Pusey and
others to support the Augustinian view of hell is
also full of hope by what it implies and full of hope
from the mercy and limitation of what it actually
says. In Mark iii. 29, the Pharisees that is the
representatives of the religionism of Christ s day
had tried to persuade the people that He had an
464 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
unclean spirit. To speak thus was a fearful and a
willing blasphemy. It was. deliberately to identify
the divinest holiness with demoniac guilt. Our
Lord therefore first makes the glorious statement
that " all sins shall be forgiven unto men, and
blasphemies, however greatly (leg. ocra edv) they shall
blaspheme, but whosoever shall blaspheme against
the Holy Spirit hath no remission for the aeon, but is
guilty of an aeonian sin (a/jLapr^aro^)" The substi
tution of "judgment" for sin in many MSS. is due to
the " pious fraud " of some scribe who feared conse
quences more than guilt ; and the rendering of
"judgment 1 by "damnation is one of the worst
faults of our English version. And how grievously
has the passage been abused by an inferential ex
egesis ! Our Lord says that every sin but one
shall be forgiven : that broad and blessed promise
has been ignored. The one sin which He says is
alone "aeonian" that is, of which alone the effects
must cling to a man in the future aeon is like that
alluded to in Heb. x. 29 the deliberate rejection of
divine grace, and the willing substitution of evil for
good. Certainly the words mean that there is one
sin so heinous that its effects last for even invisible
periods beyond the grave. But if this be asserted so
emphatically of one sin, does it not necessarily imply
that other sins are not so hopeless ? It is doubtful
whether it is meant that even this sin can never be re
pented of, either here or in the world to come. There
is nothing in all the Bible which says that other sins
may not be repented of after death. The theory of an
endless hell caused by endless accumulation of sins
after death is the figment of those who felt that they
could only blush for the ordinary pleas as to the
abstract justice of endless woes for finite transgres
sions. In all Scripture there is not a word about
the possibility of committing sin beyond the grave.
That theory is the gratuitous invention of despairing
xv.j TEACHING OF ST. PAUL. 465
traditionalists. And what is said of this " aeonian
sin"? It is implied that it must produce aeonian
loss, but as to endless torments not a syllable is
breathed.
I pass to the writings of St. Paul. There is but
one passage in all St. Paul s Epistles forming as they
do the bulk of the New Testament which can be
wrested to support the common view of endless tor
ments. It is in almost his earliest epistle, 2 Thess.
i. 9. Speaking of the Second Advent in a manner to
which he scarcely ever if ever reverted in his later
writings, he says that the Lord Jesus " shall be re
vealed in flaming fire, assigning retribution to them
that know not God [i.e. Gentiles], and to them that
obey not the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. And
they shall pay a penalty aeonian destruction from
the face of the Lord, and from the glory of His
power, when He shall come to be glorified in His
saints."
The whole meaning which the passage can bear is
that at Christ s Advent and primarily at the close
of the old dispensation the guiltily ignorant Gentiles
and the faithlessly disobedient Jews will, as a
penalty, suffer that aeonian punishment which is
defined as " destruction from (i.e. cutting off from)
" the presence and glory of God " aeonian exclusion
from the privileges of the kingdom of Heaven.
Neither here nor in any other passage of St. Paul, if
the passage be explained on the analogy of Scripture
language, is there anything about torments, or a word
to show that the aeon of this exclusion can never
end. In point of fact, these words, were written at
a moment of extreme exacerbation against the Jews
of Thessalonica, and what is here denounced upon
them is a punishment like that of Cain the poena
H H
466 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
damni the being cut off from the presence of God
the rupture of the old Covenant relation.
In estimating its force we must remember that the
words rendered "taking vengeance" mean rather "in
flicting retribution " ; that the " flaming fire " is not
the penal flame of Gehenna, but the Shechinah splen
dour of the Advent ; that those who are to be judged
are not ordinary sinners such as are found among
the myriads of mankind, but obstinately unbelieving
Gentiles, and obstinately disobedient Jews ; and that
the retribution of aeonian exclusion is inflicted at the
First Advent, not at the final Judgment Day. 1
With regard to the general views of St. Paul it is
quite clear that while he speaks of "the perishing,"
and always insists on the awful certainty that all sin
involves, both here and hereafter, retribution and
suffering, yet his whole philosophy of Divine history as
sketched especially in Rom. viii., xi., and in I Cor. xv.,
points to a final consummation of unclouded splen
dour and blessedness. He speaks of the abolition of
all powers hostile to God, and of the absolute
subjection of all creatures to Christ. These words
have been understood of a crushing of sinners into
agonised and blaspheming impotence ; but the annihi
lation of evil beings is the victory, not of good over
evil, but of strength over weakness. The only true
victory of good over evil is the conversion of evil
beings into good beings. 2
That the eschatological perspective of the Apostle,
as Pfleiderer truly says, 3 embraces the whole universe,
is notably attested by his assertion of the final re
demption of the " whole creation " from " the bondage
of corruption " into <c the liberty of the glory of the
children of God." I do not see how those who else-
1 See my Life of St. Paul, i. 607. The word " apoleia" mu^t be
taken in close connection with the following words destruction from
the Lord s Presence.
2 See Erskine s Letters, p. 237. 3 Paulinismus, ad fin.
XV.] TEACHING OF ST. PAUL. 467
where insist so passionately upon the literal acceptance
of all the inferences which may be pressed out of
metaphorical language can resist the literal acceptance
of so plain and unconditioned a statement. If hell be
still peopled to the end of all the aeons with even half
or one-fourth of the human race, in what sense can it
be true that God is either allot in all ? For literalists
I see no possible escape from the magnificent com
prehensiveness of these prophecies except in the
theories of either Universalism or Annihilationism.
Throughout the writings of St. Paul the universality
of death in Adam is contrasted with the universality
of resurrection in Christ ; the universality of man s
disobedience with the universality of God s mercy in
Christ. Is it possible to resist the conclusion that
St. Paul, when he speaks out of the fulness and depth
of his absolute view of God s dealings with the
universe,, looks forward to a final restoration ? The
dualism of predestination seems to lose itself (Rom.
ix.-xi.) in the final unity in which we can only sup
pose that those who are now " the perishing " shall
then have been rescued, in which the dead shall be
alive again and the lost be found. If these passages,
though they always occur in the very climax of St.
Paul s greatest and most triumphant arguments, are
not to go for everything, surely the humble Christian
student may claim that they should not count for
nothing in his views of eschatology !
It has been the custom to urge many expressions
of St. Paul which a moment s thought will show to
be irrelevant. Of what use, for instance, is it to say
that a larger hope can be refuted by the teaching
that certain classes of sinners drunkards, fornicators,
&c. shall not enter into the kingdom of Heaven?
Is there any one who has ever supposed that they
can enter there while they remain what they are ?
" St. Paul warns us," says Bishop Wordsworth, that
" they who live in the indulgence of fleshly lusts and
H II 2
468 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
do not repent shall not inherit the kingdom of
heaven." But if it be legitimate, nay necessary, to
interpolate a clause so important as " and do not
repent," when speaking of this life, what is there to
prevent our saying that neither in this life nor beyond
the grave shall flagrant sinners while they continue
to be such enter the kingdom of God ? Any
number of such texts do not touch the question
before us. That question is simply this : " Have we
any right to teach as a dogma of the faith that the
issues of man s destiny are finally and irrevocably
uniform after the few short years of life, and that God s
mercy cannot reach any soul beyond the grave ? "
I might well decline the task of examining any
of the passages which are alleged on behalf of this
dogma from the Apocalypse. Like most of such
passages, they apply to nations and classes, not to
individuals ; and primarily to temporal and earthly,
not to future and endless judgments. Without in
any way weakening its canonical authority, I might
(if need were) claim to coordinate its teachings with
the later wisdom of St. John s riper and more
loving age in the Gospel and Epistles. It is
obvious that a book respecting the interpretation
of which the Church has never agreed ; a book of
which the strange symbols have been understood by
devout and learned students in hundreds, if not in
thousands, of different ways ; is less suited than
any other to furnish " texts for the basis of
dogmas which find from all the rest of Scripture
so very small a measure of support. 1 It is obvious
1 " To handle a prophetico-poetic book, composed in allegories, as if
it were a work of literal meaning, is manifestly an utterly unreasonable
and mischievous procedure. . . If an interpreter know that an alle
gorical composition should be explained as such, and if he, nevertheless,
xv.j THE APOCALYPSE. 469
too that this book, if its weird metaphors have
given rise to endless speculations as to the horrors
of Hell, furnishes us also with passages which (as
is the case with the rest of Scripture) seem to tell
of a glorious final consummation. Until men have
approximately agreed as to whether, on the au
thority of that book, there is or is not to be on
earth a literal reign of Christ for a thousand years ;
until they have settled whether they are going to
be Praeterists or Futurists, or neither; until they have
come to a reasonable certainty as to whether the
main symbolism of the Book points to a progressive
history of the Church for hundreds of years, or only
to the events which should precede and accompany the
coming of Christ in the close of the old dispensation
and the destruction of Jerusalem ; until they can give
us some finally decisive criterion as to the interpreta
tion of this prophetic imagery, and in what cases it is
to be taken in the sense of temporal judgments, and
in what other cases of everlasting doom, it is obvious
that we are building the popular doctrines upon the
sandiest of foundations if we rely for their proof on
passages taken from so mysterious a book :
"Nil agit exemplum quod litem lite resolvit."
Take, for instance, the vision of Rev. xiv., which is
the vision of the harvest of the world and the vintage
and winepress of the wrath of God. It is the chapter
from which has been deduced the pernicious belief-
a belief more liable than any other to deprave and
harden the character of so many professing Christians
that the blest will exult in the torments of the
damned. That passage is as follows :
" If any man worship the beast. . . he shall be tor
mented with fire and brimstone in the presence of
in order to illustrate certain school opinions, torture that allegorical
composition until its language seems to be that of the latter, his conduct
is a moral scandal." Lange, Preface to Apocalypse.
470 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
the angels, and in the presence of the Lamb ; and
the smoke of their torments ascendeth up for aeons
of aeons, and they have no rest days nor nights, who
worship the beast."
Perhaps it is hardly wonderful that, educated as
most men are in ignorance of all the principles which
apply to the true appreciation of Scripture language,
and in the vanity which makes them think their in
terpretations infallible, they should take this literally,
and apply it to endless torments, though one cannot
but wonder at the pure arbitrariness which would, I
suppose, refuse, a few verses later, to take literally
the river of blood rolling out of a winepress bridle
deep for a length of one hundred miles. But mean
while what becomes of such applications after we have
noticed one or two facts ?
First of all the judgment obviously has a very
limited primary application, because, beyond all
shadow of a doubt, the Apocalyptic Beast is, in the
first instance, Nero. 1 Here then we at once get the
true bearings of the verse. Those who worship the
beast, that is the persecuting world-power of Rome,
and as long as they worship the beast are doomed to
terrible catastrophes, such as actually did befall Rome
during that epoch; and these calamities are compared
to being tortured with fire and brimstone. Even
Mr. E. B. Elliott, in his elaborate Horae Apocalypticae,
comes to the conclusion that, so far from revealing
the endless torments of the wicked, the whole vision
refers to temporal judgments in this present world.
These earthly catastrophes are indicated in strong
Jewish metaphor, not untinged with the natural
feelings inspired by an epoch of horrible persecution,
and the Lamb and His angels are (in human
language), represented as cognizant of the earthly
1 On this point all recent criticism worth the name of every pchool
alike has now passed a unanimous verdict. See my article on " The
Beast and his Number," in the Expositor, May, 1881.
xv.j THE APOCALYPSE. 471
overthrow and punishment of those who vainly war
against them. 1 And this is to be twisted into the
delight of the blest at the shrieks and writhings of
the lost, among whom may inevitably be some of
those who were sweetest and dearest to them on
earth ! The whole passage is a symbol as unlike
as possible to the inferences which have been deduced
from it. And to interpret of interminable agony the
expression, " the smoke of their torment ascendeth
for aeons of aeons" is doubly erroneous ; for first, the
phrase is borrowed partly from Gen. xix. 28, and
partly from Is. xxxiv. 10, both of which refer to
temporal judgments, and of which the second fur
nishes a strong proof of the false results of an un
reasoning literalism. Of the land of Idumaea, Isaiah
says, " The streams thereof shall be turned into pitch,
and the dust thereof into brimstone, and the land
thereof into burning pitch. It shall not be quenched
night nor day ; the smoke thereof shall go up for ever."
Interpreted in the light of the prophecy, and of sub
sequent history, it is clear that "fire" and "brimstone,"
and " smoke ascending for ever," are terms which, in
the highly impassioned and figurative language of
prophecy, may be applied to temporal catastrophes,
without the remotest allusion to the state of souls in
the world beyond the grave. 2 But if the most learned
1 The word eVwTrioi/, which has been stretched on the rack of inferen
tial "theology," after the whole bearing of the rest of the text has
been perverted, is merely the Hebrew "OSb, as in Luke i. 15,17 ; Heb.
xiii. 21 ; James iv. 10, &c.
2 Thus in Jude 7 we are told that the cities of the plains are "set
forth as an example suffering the vengeance of aeonian fire." The
aeonian fire " is the temporal overthrow in which those cities perished,
and which left its traces on the scathed soil. The only word said
about any ultimate punishment of their inhabitants is our Lord s
remark that it should be better for them in the Day of Judgment than
for Chorazin and Bethsaida. He said that if they had heard His mes
sage they would have repented ; pointing to the direct inference that
the chance of repentance should still be given them ; and moreover
there is an express prophecy that Sodom should hereafter "return to
her former estate" (Ezek. xvi. 55 ; see supra, p. 391).
472 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
and approved of alt the Evangelical commentators on
the Apocalypse tells us that the vision has no reference
to the life to come, what guarantee have we that any
of the other visions are not similarly inapplicable to
future torments ?
And here I will furnish another proof of our
liability to misinterpret entirely the daring metaphors
of Eastern imagination. We think " a lake of fire
and brimstone," and " a fiery oven," and a " burning,
fiery furnace," images far too frightful and intense to
represent temporal calamities, or anything but the
most inconceivable anguish. If we took the trouble
to search the Bible, instead of reading into it our own
fancies and those of the Fathers, it would remove all
misconceptions by throwing the plainest possible
light on its own symbols and figurative forms of
expression. Thus in Deut. iv. 20 Egypt is said to
have been to the Israelites an " iron furnace " ; and
the same terrible metaphor is repeated in Jer. xi. 4,
and in I Kings viii. 5 1 (" Thy people which Thou
broughtest forth out of Egypt from the midst of the
furnace of iron "). And yet the metaphors imply a
condition so far removed from intolerable torments
that the children of Israel said, " It was well with us
in Egypt," and positively sighed for that which they
describe as a land of sensual ease ! " We remember
the fish that we did eat in Egypt freely ; the cucum
bers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions,
and the garlick." Until we take the trouble to learn
something of the hyperbolic character of Eastern and
prophetic metaphor, it is certain that we shall be led
continually into wild mistakes.
Instances so decisive will probably be sufficient for
many competent and candid readers. They will see
how little we can build dogmas on such metaphors as
the Devil being cast with the Beast (Nero and the
Roman world-powers) and the false prophet (?) "into
the lake of fire and brimstone, and tormented by day
xv.] THE APOCALYPSE. 473
and by night for the aeons of the aeons l ; into which
also are cast two such abstract entities as " Death,"
and " Hades." At any rate he will see that this lake
of fire is on the earth, and that immediately after
wards we read of that earth being destroyed, and a
new heaven and a new earth in which there is to be
no more death or curse. In the Book of Revelation
there are infinitely great and precious truths, but cer
tainly no method which has ever yet been applied to
it justifies us in regarding the notions of future retri
bution which have been founded on the literalising of
its symbols as other than in the last degree precarious
and wrong. 2
Further, let me say once more that if any one could
prove the impossible thesis that these passages must
be taken literally, or even quasi-literally, the argument
of those who derive from them a belief in the future
annihilation of the wicked is absolutely irresistible.
When they argue with those who accept similar
methods of interpretation to their own with those,
therefore, who still cling to a mediaeval style of exe
gesis they have most triumphantly the best of the
argument. No demolition can be so logical and so
complete as that which Mr. White, Mr. Minton, and
others have inflicted on the arguments hitherto
brought against them by those who think that these
questions require nothing for their decision but the
shuffling and manipulations of a few phrases and
1 Rev. xx. 10.
2 "To make language which applies to religious sects or nations in
their temporal relation apply to individual men in their eternal destinies
to make fire literal when it is only a figure to go on exhausting the
resources of an arithmetical imagination, and saying that after trillions
of years it will but be breakfast time in hell, is to speak beyond the
Word ; it is to vulgarise God s righteous judgments, and beget a sense
of exaggeration and untruth in the hearer s mind which will surely pro
mote infidelity and induration of heart rather than reverential fear of
God s holy, and just, yet also, in the largest sense, merciful indignation."
ALEX. BROWN.
474 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
texts. The devout believers in conditional immor
tality are perfectly right in insisting that if we bind
ourselves by the literal meaning of the greatest
number of Biblical expressions there is ten times
more in the Bible which points to extinction as the
final doom of the wicked than there is which points
to their future existence in everlasting agonies. If I
am not drawn in the smallest degree to their views it
is because I derive my belief, not from the literal
meaning of certain words and phrases, but from many
wider and deeper considerations, and especially from
the judgment which I form on the principles by which
human language is to be interpreted, and on the
entire drift and tenor of Scripture as a revelation of
the love and fatherhood of God.
It is then the reverse of the truth to assert in the
style so dear to theological controversialists, that
eternal torments are " indisputably taught in twenty-
six passages of the New Testament." They are not
indisputably taught in so much as one. So far as
I can see I say, with Dr. Isaac Watts, that I cannot
find one single " text : in all Scripture which, when
fairly interpreted, teaches, as a matter of faith, or in
a way even approaching to distinctness and decisive
ness, the common views about " endless torments."
Most of those which are quoted in this connection
including the " upwards of a hundred adduced
years ago by Bishop Horbery, and appealed to by
Bishop Ryle, are entirely irrelevant ; others are mis
translated and misexplained ; other are pressed to
an extent of inference which, if applied to other
passages, would lead to the most pernicious absurdi
ties. Explained by the known usage and meaning
of words, their argumentative force in favour of the
mediaeval " hell " crumbles to dust. Thousands of half-
informed writers, inflated with a very mistaken belief in
their own infallibility, will probably go on repeating
them in order still further to stereotype the prejudices
xv.] THE ABUSE OF TEXTS. 475
of those who seek nothing but the confirmation of
their existing belief. But in the course of time they
will cease to be thus misapplied, because such a
method of explaining them will only cause a smile.
And " it is morally inconceivable if it had been the
intention of Heaven to convey to mankind . . . the
threatening of a torment which should be absolutely
endless, that such a threatening would be, in ninety-
nine cases out of a hundred, expressed in terms which
literally signify something wholly inconsistent with
such a destiny ; and that the announcement should be
dubiously ascertainable only from passages in which
it is difficult to distinguish metaphors from simple
terms, and where the terms employed are themselves
undoubtedly employed by Jewish Rabbis and in the
Bible to denote a limited period of duration in punish
ment. A question so vast as the eternal destinies of
the human race cannot be determined on the evidence
of a few poetic or prophetic phrases."
The abuse of texts has been a dreadful curse in
the history of Christendom. To foster it has been a
masterpiece of Satanic ingenuity. By means of it a
large part of the Bible has been torn away from the
service of God and placed at the disposal of the
wiles of the devil. It has given tenfold force to the
cunning of his deceits. By means of it he has, in
generation after generation, arrayed many of the
clergy against the advance of knowledge, and on the
side of ignorance and sin. The Old Testament was
quoted against our Lord and against His Apostles ;
the Old and the New alike have been quoted times
without number against the wisest teachings of the
saintliest men. The martyrs of science have been
mostly slain, the reformers of religion have been
mostly murdered, by the enginery of isolated texts.
The tyranny of tyrants has been defended by the
supposed sanction which texts gave to the duty of
passive obedience ; and tyrannicides have none the less
476 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP,
been defended by other texts which seem to imply
approval of Ehud and of Jael Wars of extermina
tion have been justified out of the Pentateuch and the
Book of Judges. The Inquisition has had its hand
ful of favourite texts. Slavery has quoted its texts.
Modern religious hatred defends itself by texts.
Persecution, intolerance, subterfuge, oppression, ignor
ance, have all appealed to the texts whose abuse
has been suggested to them by the glozing tempter.
How deep was the insight into this truth of our
greatest poet when he wrote :
" The devil can quote Scripture for his purpose.
An evil soul producing holy witness
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek ;
A goodly apple rotten at the core " ;
and again :
" In religion
What damned error but some sober brow
Will bless it and approve it with a text,
Hiding the grossness with fair ornament."
I say again, that I care but little in any controversy
for the stress laid on one or two isolated and dubious
expressions, snatched here and there from the sacred
literature of fifteen hundred years and explained with
no reference to the language in which they were
formulated, or the history in the midst of which they
arose. They may be torn from their context ; they
may be distorted ; they may be misinterpreted ; they
may be irrelevant ; they may be misunderstood ;
they may be in direct apparent contradiction to other
texts more numerous and more weighty ; they may
reflect the ignorance of a dark age or the fragments
of an imperfect revelation, or the bitterness of a
human passion ; they may be an unwilling concession
to imperfection, or a temporary stepping-stone to
progress. " In reading the Scriptures," says Bishop
Rust, "we are not to understand any text in such
xv.] THE ABUSE OF TEXTS. 477
sense as is not plain in Scripture, or is contrary to
Scripture, or contrary to the law of nature, or against
the general goodness of God to mankind ; or to lessen
the goodness of God, or contrary to the gracious spirit
and mercifulness of a saint ; or contrary to the mind
of Christ which He declared when on earth ; or con
trary to the fruits of the Blessed Spirit, or that shall
tend to contradict or lessen the glory of God, or lessen
the greatness and riches of His grace." What the
Bible teaches as a whole what the Bibles teach as
a whole for History, and Conscience, and Nature,
and Experience, these too are sacred books that,
and that only, is the clear revelation and immutable
will of God.
And now if any reader thinks that there has been
any " explaining away " of these texts let him consider
whether the advocates of the popular view will not
have to " explain away," not only multitudes of
passages in the Psalms of David and in the Old
Testament, but also in the New Testament? If
the following passages be calmly and humbly con
sidered, with no attempt to minimise their natural
significance, is there nothing in them which neces
sitates a modification of the current teaching ?
THE SYNOPTISTS.
ST. MATTHEW.
xviii. II. The Son of Man is come to save that
which was lost."
xiii. 33. " Till the whole was leavened."
ST. LUKE.
ix. 56. " The Son of Man is not come to destroy
men s lives, but to save them."
xii. 48. " But he that knew not, and did commit
478 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few
stripes." [This verse seems . to prove that there is
such a thing in the life to come as a terminable retri
bution. Can " few " be synonymous with " endless " ?]
xix. 10. " The Son of Man is come to seek and to
save that which was lost."
xv. 4. " What man of you having a hundred sheep,
if he lose one of them, doth he not leave the ninety and
nine in the wilderness, and go after that which was
lost, until he find it? [John x. n ; . Ps. cxix. 176;
Is. liii. 6.]
ST. JOHN.
i. 29. "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh
away (6 aipwv) the sin of the world."
iii. 17. " God sent not His Son into the world to
condemn the world ; but that the world (o Koalas]
through Him might be saved."
iii. 35. " The Father loveth the Son, and hath given
all things into His hands." [Comp. xiii. 3 ; Matt. xi.
27 ; xxviii 18 ; Heb. ii. 8.]
iv. 42. " This is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of
the world."
xii. 32. " And I, if I be lifted up from the earth,
will draw all men unto Me."
xii. 47. " I came not to judge the world, but to save
the world."
i JOHN.
ii. 2. " He is the propitiation for our sins, and not
for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole
world."
iii. 8. " The Son of God was manifested that He
might destroy (iva XUOT?) the works of the devil."
iv. 14. " The Father sent the Son to be the
Saviour of the world."
xv.] UNIVERSAL PROMISES. 479
ACTS.
iii. 21. "Until the times of restitution of all
things."
ST. PAUL.
Rom. v. 20. "Where sin abounded, grace did
much more abound." [See the entire argument of
the chapter.]
viii. 22. " The creature itself also shall be de
livered from corruption into the glorious liberty of
the children of God." [See verses 19-24.]
xi. 32. " God hath concluded them all in unbelief
that He might have mercy upon all." [See the
argument of the whole chapter.]
xiv. 9. " To this end Christ both died, and rose
and revived, that He might be the Lord both of the
dead and living." [And consider the drift of the
entire Epistle.]
1 Cor. xv. 22. "As in Adam all die, even so in
Christ shall all be made alive." [Consider the entire
drift of the argument.]
xv. 28. " That God may be all in all " (irdvra
ev Tracriz/). 1
2 Cor. v. 19. "God was in Christ reconciling
the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses
unto them."
Eph. i. 10. "That He might gather together in
one all things in Christ."
Phil. ii. 10, ii. "That in the name of Jesus every
knee should bow of beings in heaven, and on earth,
and under the earth." [Compare Rev. v. 13.]
Col. i. 19, 20. " It hath pleased the Father ....
by Him to reconcile all things to Himself."
1 Dr. Pusey s attempt to explain away these glorious words is one of
the most singular pieces of exegesis which I have ever read. I cannot
suppose that any human being will be convinced by it.
MERCY AND JUDGMENT.
[CHAP.
i Tim. ii. 4. "Who willeth all men to be saved,
and to come to the knowledge of the truth."
ii. 6. " Who gave Himself a ransom for all, to
be testified in due time."
iv. 10. " The living God who is the Saviour of all
men, specially of those that believe."
Heb. ii. 9. " That He by the grace of God should
taste death for every man," or reading %&&gt;pt9 0eoO.
"that He should taste death for every man (for every
thing), except God." [Compare verses 14, 15.]
ix. 26. " Now once in the end of the world hath
He appeared to put away sin (et? aOerrjcnv a
by the sacrifice of Himself."
CHAPTER XVI.
CONCLUSION.
" So runs my creed : but what am I ?
An infant crying in the night :
An infant crying for the light :
And with no language but a cry." TENNYSON,
" And Thou, oh God, by whom are seen
All creatures as they be,
Forgive me, if too close I lean
My human heart on Thee." WHITTIER.
BUT to conclude : If, as I have shown, the ultimate
extinction of the being of sinners appears to be
taught by the literal meaning of many passages of
Scripture ; and if the final restoration of all mankind
appears also to be taught in many passages of
Scripture ; and if the popular conception of endless
torments for the vast majority is nowhere indisputa
bly taught in Scripture ; and if it is only by inference
we are led to the fear that any souls may be finally
excluded from the presence of God at the end of the
ages ; if, I say, these are the conclusions to which
Scripture alone has led us, what is it that on this
subject I finally believe ?
It will be seen at once that I propound no " Op
timist theory " (as it has been called), " that all men
will be saved " ; though since the suppression of the
old 42nd article that view is nowhere declared to be
untenable in our formularies as interpreted by the
highest authority. Still less do I teach that all men
will attain to everlasting felicity, or that to refer to
I I
482 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
the coarse instance selected by Jerome a Jezebel
will be at last as a Virgin Mary. Nay, I do not even
say that some men may not for ever suffer from the
consequences of their sins, and from impenitence
respecting them, dearly as I wish that it were pos
sible for us to believe in final universal felicity as
a glorious triumph of the love of God and the cross
of Christ. But I think that even if some portion
of the "pain of loss" may continue for ever, there
is nothing to sanction the assertion that such hopes
as sinners may here embrace may not also be open
to them, at least until the great Judgment, in the
Intermediate State beyond the grave. The death
of the soul shall last as long as its willing sinfulness
lasts, and its "hell" burn as long as its enmity to God
continues. The only hope is that from this sin and
this enmity it may at last far off before the end
of the ages possibly be saved. Hell and death are
endless conditions so long as there is persistent im
penitence. They cease when the soul repents, but not
till then. But who shall say that when the moment
of death is over there can be no further answer to
the sinner s cry, "Will the Lord cast off for ever, and
will He be favourable no more ? Is His mercy clean
gone for ever ? Doth His promise fail for evermore ?
Hath God forgotten to be gracious ? Hath He shut
up His lovingkindness in displeasure ?
But it is due to my readers that I should try to
express this in language as clear as the subject admits,
not by way of laying down a dogma or of giving
expression to a novelty, but by stating what I hold
to be the teaching not of sects or of individuals, or
even of majorities, but of the Catholic Church, of
which I am, and ever have been, a loyal and faithful,
though most humble and most unworthy son.
In accordance then with what the Church has ever
held adding nothing to that Catholic creed, and
subtracting nothing from it,
xvi.] CONCLUSION. 483
I believe that on the subject of man s future it has
been God s will to leave us uninstructed in details,
and that He has vouchsafed to us only so much light
as may serve to guide our lives.
I believe in God the Father, the Creator ; in God
the Son, the Redeemer; in God the Holy Ghost, the
Comforter.
I believe that God is Love.
I believe that God willeth all men to be saved.
I believe that God has given to all men the gift of
immortality, and that the gifts of God are without
repentance.
I believe that every man shall stand before
the Judgment-seat of Christ, and shall be judged
according to his deeds.
I believe that He who shall be our Judge is He
who died for the sins of the whole world.
I believe that " if any man sin, we have an Advo
cate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous,
and He is the propitiation for our sins/
I believe in the forgiveness of sins.
I believe that all who are saved are saved only by
grace through faith ; and that not of ourselves ; it is
the gift of God.
I believe that every penitent and pardoned soul
will pass from this life into a condition of hope,
blessedness, and peace.
I believe that man s destiny stops not at the grave,
and that many who knew not Christ here will know
Him there.
I believe that " in the depths of the Divine com
passion there may be opportunity to win faith in the
future state."
I believe that hereafter whether by means of the
" almost-sacrament of death or in other ways
unknown to us God s mercy may reach many who,
to all earthly appearance, might seem to us to die in
a lost and unregenerate state.
484 MERCY AND JUDGMENT. [CHAP.
I believe that as unrepented sin is punished here,
so also it is punished beyond the grave.
I believe that the punishment is effected, not by
arbitrary inflictions, but by natural and inevitable
consequences, and therefore that the expressions
which have been interpreted to mean physical and
material agonies by worm and flame are metaphors
for a state of remorse and alienation from God.
I see reasons to hope that these agonies may be so
tempered by the mercy of God that the soul may here
after find some measure of peace and patience, even if
it be not admitted into His vision and His sabbath.
I believe that among the punishments of the world
to come there are " few stripes as well as " many
stripes," and I do not see how any fair interpreta
tion of the metaphor, " few stripes," can be made to
involve the conception of endlessness for all who incur
future retribution.
I believe that Christ went and preached to the
spirits in prison, and I see reasons to hope that since
the Gospel was thus once preached " to them that
were dead," the offers of God s mercy may in some
form be extended to the soul, even after death.
I believe that there is an Intermediate State of the
soul, and that the great separation of souls into two
classes will not take place until the final judgment.
I believe that we are permitted to hope that,
whether by a process of discipline, or enlightenment,
or purification, or punishment, or by the special mercy
of God in Christ, or in consequence of prayer, the
state of many souls may be one of progress and
diminishing sorrow, and of advancing happiness in
the Intermediate State.
I believe that tl\ ere will be degrees of blessedness
and degrees of punishment or deprivation, and I see
reasons to hope that there may be gradual mitiga
tions of penal doom to all souls that accept the Will
of God respecting them.
xvi.] CONCLUSION. 485
I believe, as Christ has said, that " all manner of sin
shall be forgiven unto men, and their blasphemies,
however greatly they shall blaspheme," and that as
there is but one sin of which He.said that it should
be forgiven neither in this aeon nor in the next,
there must be some sins which will be forgiven in
the next as well as in this.
I believe that without holiness no man can see the
Lord, and that no sinner can be pardoned or accepted
till he has repented, and till his free will is in unison
with the Will of God ; and I cannot tell whether
some souls may not resist God for ever, and therefore
may not be for ever shut out from His presence.
And I believe that to be without God is "hell";
and that in this sense there is a hell beyond
the grave; and that for any soul to fall even
for a time into this condition, though it be through
its own hardened impenitence and resistance of God s
grace, is a very awful and terrible prospect ; and
that in this sense there may be for some souls an
endless hell. But I see reason to hope that through
God s mercy, and through the merits of Christ s
sacrifice, the great majority of mankind may be
delivered from this awful doom. For, according to
the Scriptures, though, I know not what its nature
will be or how it will be effected,
I believe in the restitution of all things ; and
I believe in the coming of that time when, though
in what sense I cannot pretend to explain or to
fathom
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