Conditional immortality...

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Conditional Immortality

Preface

Charles Frederick Hudson's Debt and Grace, and Edward White's Life in Christ, are likelylong to remain, what they are at present, the classical authorities on the subject of conditional immortality.

The mere fact that I am disposed to be a little less confident and positive than these writers in stating results, satisfied with likelihood where they seem to find certitude, or a very near approach to certitude, would not of itself justify me in attempting to add a word to what has already been by them admirably said. Agreeing with them, as I do, in their main drift, I ought, if this were all, to be well content to remain silent.

There are, however, those whose attention cannot be secured for elaborate treatises unless some

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VI PREFACE.

measure of interest in the subject treated has been previously aroused by arguments briefly put and easily understood.

I therefore venture to print these unambitious Sermons, originally prepared for parochial use, hoping that, slight and sketchy as they are, they may serve to win a hearing for voices better worth listening to than mine. It may be well to add that Sermons I., II., and IX., although germane to the general subject, are not essential to the integrity of the argument.

W. R. H.

Contents

SERMON PAGE

I. The Eternal Purpose i

II. The Argument for Retribution 20

II. The Argument for Retribution

Isa. iii : 10, n.

Say ye to the righteous that it shall be well with him ; for they shall eat the fruit of their doings.

Woe unto the wicked ! It shall be ill with him ; for the reward of his hands shall be given him.

THUS much with respect to the problem of human destiny all the prophets of God, ancient and modern, have felt themselves empowered to utter. Some of them have been moved to sayvery much more; none of them have been disposed to say very much less. Common to them all has been this broad basis of agreement — that with the righteous it shall be well, with the wicked it shall be ill. No doubt, the moment we set foot

upon this common ground in a spirit of inquiry difficulties spring up to meet us like armed men. What, for instance, is the future into which the prophet is looking? Is it a limited or a limitless one ? is it bounded by the horizon of this life ? or does it stretch out far beyond the threescore years and ten ? Who are the righteous ? and by what tests may we distinguish them from the wicked, so as to know certainly upon whom the blessing is to fall, and upon whom the woe ? And, further still, of what sort is the blessing and of wfrat sort the woe ? Is it, on the one hand, a blessing wholly unalloyed with grief ? Is it, on the other, a woe not mitigated by any ray of pity from without ?

These are not captious or unreasonable questions ; they are natural, fair, and to the point. But does the fact that it is possible to ask them destroy the value of what I have called the common basis of agreement furnished by the text ? Certainly not. From a clearing in a forest, the woodsmen who have lost their way strike out in all directions, each choosing his own path, and blazing it as he advances ; but it is a great thing for all of the party that there is the clearing to turn back to, for only so can those who were mistaken meet and rejoin the one who happened to be right. In religious discussions, especially in such of them as cover regions of profound mystery, we ought to remember more constantly than we do that the interest of each is the interest of all, and the interest of all the interest of each ; and instead of starting from our differences to see if we cannot bring about a forced agreement, we ought to start from our agreements to see if we cannot harmonize our differences. The agreement in this case, the open spot from which Christian thinkers may best start in search of the truth about man's future, is the general declaration of the text, that with the righteous it shall be well in time to come, and with the unrighteous ill.

But before setting out upon any such investigation ourselves — and presently I shall propose that we do this very thing — let us look for a little while at the reasons why it has proved easy to secure so large a measure of agreement as has been, in point of fact, secured among men as to this single point of belief, that retribution is to come. In a word, why are so many ready to assent without dispute to the statement that in some way, and at some time, the way and time not being too accurately defined, all men will receive their just deserts, whether of good or evil ? I do not believe that any single reason will suffice to explain this very general unanimity. It is a result that comes from various causes working together, rather than from any isolated one. People have concluded that, on the whole, it is most likely so to be. But the foundation of the likelihood is complex. In part, no doubt, the persuasion has its source in what our senses tell us of the world without us and around us. Fire burns, water drowns, and cold freezes without the slightest partiality. Loosen the rock that holds it in its place, and down the avalanche comes upon the passing traveller, be he Caesar or peasant. And not only is Nature no respecter of persons, as concerns rank and dignity, but she appears to make no allowance for ignorance, to have no compassion for innocence, and to pay no regard to penitence. The unwitting offence of the inexperienced child is visited as relentlessly as the conscious transgression of the man who might have known better ; and the same flame that shrivels pitilessly the outstretched hand of Cranmer at the stake carries genial warmth to the bad-hearted persecutor standing a little way removed. Such is " natural law," as we name it, an awful reality, which we blink out of sight at our peril. Such is the method that force uses in the realm of which our eyes and ears and finger-tips take cognizance.

When, now, we turn our thoughts away from these sequences of cause and effect in the outer world of earth and air and sea, and bend them inward, upon that world invisible which is the dwelling-place of the soul, when we do this, we find a state of things partly resembling and partly differing from what we discerned in external Nature. We find a law asserting itself through a voice which says, " Thou shalt," and " Thou shalt not ; " but we by no means find penalty following upon transgression with the same promptitude and certainty. In Nature the headsman's axe falls with the precision of mechanism, but in this inner world of spirit it hangs trembling, and often seems never to drop at all. No doubt there is always a protest on the part of the law-giving voice every time its word "Thou shalt " is disobeyed. We call it the rebuke of conscience. But, strangely enough, the protest grows more and more inaudible, the more frequently it is disregarded, until, finally, in many instances, it dies away into silence, and the sin which has become a habit is followed by no perceptible pain. Now, is it to be wondered at that men, observing this marked contrast between the inevitableness of penalty in the world of Nature, and the seeming uncertainty of it in the world of spirit, should argue that since the same God reigns in both worlds, and is likely to be working on the same principles in both, the probability must be that, for reasons known to Himself, He is reserving at least a portion of the retribution due the law-breaker till a future day? This is one argument in favor of a judgment to come, a very simple and easy one. I do not say it proves the point ; I only say it makes in favor of it. Take another argument, also drawn from what we observe of the workings of the Creative Mind in Nature. Everywhere in the universe, so far as we are able to study it, there seems to prevail a tendency or disposition to keep things evenly adjusted. The thought I have in mind finds expression in the common saying, that in the long run Nature may be depended upon to balance her books. The sun draws no more water from the sea than the lakes are able to receive and the rivers to carry back. Immense as is the pressure of the atmo-

THE ARGUMENT FOR RETRIBUTION. 2J

sphere upon every hair's-breadth of surface, we move about in it unconscious of discomfort because our own powers of resistance have been exactly proportioned to the need. In hundreds and thousands of ways, many of which the curious mind of man is only just beginning to understand, this principle of equilibrium or balance asserts itself. Can it be that the principle has no application to the ordering of human life ? its mysterious inequalities, its seemingly so ill-proportioned justice ? This is the burden that has weighed on sensitive consciences and aching hearts since the world began, or, at least, since men began to think. " The tabernacles of robbers prosper," cries Job, dismayed at his own reversal of fortune, " and they that provoke God are secure; . . . their houses are safe from fear, neither is the rod of God upon them." He tries, as well as he can, to meet the difficulty by reminding himself of the many instances in which we do actually see wickedness repaid with penalty in this world, but he cannot help feeling, even after he has spoken of these temporal judgments, how little force there really is in an argument built upon exceptions, and he falls back upon the hard fact, that " one dieth in his full strength, being wholly at ease and quiet, and another dieth in the bitterness of his soul, and never eateth with pleasure/' And he adds, "They shall lie down alike in the dust."

Now, the only way out of this difficulty for any one who believes that God is not only a strong Maker, but also a King of men holy and just, is to let the eye take in a larger sweep of time than the days of our age on earth can bound, and to conclude that, in the eternal years, compensations may be brought about, addings and substractions made, which in the end will secure a balance as absolutely perfect as that which holds the stars to their courses. It was in this temper of reliance that the baffled but still trustful mind of Abraham cried out to God, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" Perhaps, to him listening, there came down, in answer, the distant music of the song, " Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and true are thy ways, thou king of saints." Here, then, we have a second argument from Nature in favor of some destined readjustment of man's lot in the age or the ages to come. The working of the principle of balance in the world we see suggests the working of the same principle in the world we cannot see. I do not say of the argument that it is conclusive ; I only say that it helps toward a conclusion.

Again, men find as a matter of fact, and as a result of experience, that it is impossible for them to live together in society without some code of law, and that it is equally impossible to carry out the law without attaching to it some scheme of rewards and punishments. In the civil state, quite as really as in the kingdom of God, there is need of a voice to say to the righteous it shall be well with him, and to the wicked it shall be ill with him. No doubt, we can imagine a condition of things in which the simple publication of the law as the will of the rightful ruler would of itself suffice to secure absolute obedience and complete order. But we know perfectly well that, as a matter of historical fact, no such community, keeping law for law's own sake, ever existed. Commonwealths there have been and are in which law does its work and maintains its sanctity with less aid from the motives of hope and fear in the hearts of the citizens than is elsewhere found necessary; but, nowhere, it is safe to assert — nowhere does the nation, the province, the city, the town, the village or the family exist where the principle of retribution (and retribution, be it remembered, is a word that applies equally to reward and punishment) can be wholly dropped out of the scheme of government without damage to the interests of law.

Well, then, is it strange that the great bulk of men, seeing how potent a part of the enginery of control is furnished by the appeal to hope and fear, should hold it likely that the Maker of the human race means to employ these motives in ruling the race that He has made ? And, further, is it strange that, seeing how partial and imperfect the distribution upon earth of these divine rewards and punishments appears to be, they should fall back on the belief that, to a great extent, the final distribution of them is reserved for scenes other than those in which we are moving now ? Thus we arrive at a third reason for believing in the retributions of a life to come. Mans own poor attempts at governing himself and his fellowcreatures show him the necessity of enlisting hope and fear as aids to the efficient administration of the law. I do not call the argument demonstrative ; I call it highly suggestive.

But we must not leave the question here. There is more to be said. Thus far we have been dealing only with considerations of the kind technically called analogical. We have been comparing one thing with another, natural law with spiritual, human governance with divine, and reasoning from like to like. Listen, now, for a few moments to an argument of a wholly different sort.

From time to time, in the history of the past, there have appeared on earth, and notably within a definite region and among the people of a particular race, certain men of marked spiritual stature who have claimed for themselves the title of prophet or messenger of God. First and last, there have been many of these preachers of righteousness, these spokesmen of Jehovah, but some of them so conspicuously overtopped the rest, gained such mastery over the thought of their times, that their names have come down to us as the names of "the prophets/' and they stand before us the representatives of the great fellowship of which they formed a part. Enoch, the seventh from Adam, who walked with God, was one of these ; Noah was another; Moses, lawgiver indeed, but prophet also, another; Samuel and David, Elijah and Elisha, Isaiah and Ezekiel, — I need not recount them : their names and their words have been familiar to us from childhood. What I would have you remember about them, is the fact that as a company of preachers they bore consistent testimony to a purpose on God's part to bring the world to judgment. Through the dimness of the time in which they moved, with the smoke of idolatrous altars clouding their sky, and the noise of tumult roughly breaking in upon the stillness of the soul, they patiently, believingly, serenely looked forward, and pointed their fellows forward, to a day when He who had made the world would judge the world. Not as a matter of conjecture, not by arguments from analogy, such as I have thus far been using, but (so they alleged), with authority and by commission from the Most High, they stoutly taught these two companion truths : the Lord is righteous, and He shall come to be our Judge.

At last we find ourselves in the presence of Him to whom all the prophets lead up, Him who is King and Priest and Prophet all in one ; and what has He to tell us ? simply this — that to Him all judgment has been committed, that in Him we see the Judge. He scruples not to picture Himself to us as seated on the clouds of heaven ; armies of angels make the background of the scene, and before Him is assembled the whole vast family of man. Take out of this majestic vision as much as you choose under the name of figure and imagery and similitude, hush the sound of the archangel's trump, and lengthen, if you will, the day of judgment till it cover a thousand years or twenty thousand, there yet remains to be explained away, if explain it away you can, the momentous prediction from the lips of that preacher who has secured more listeners than any who ever spoke before or since ; there yet remains, I say, the momentous prediction of a time when God shall judge the world in righteousness by that man whom He hath ordained.

I have been laboring to build up, as you see, a cumulative argument in defence of the doctrine of retribution. Observe the successive stages by which we have advanced : first, we noted the presence of suffering in Nature as the penalty of broken law ; next, we studied the principle of balance as it manifests itself in the same sphere ; then, turning from Nature to human society, we marked the absolute necessity of some system of rewards and punishment in connection with the administration of law ; from society we passed to history, and listened to the voices of the prophets ; thus, starting from Nature's symbols, we have worked our way on and up to the spoken word of Him whom Christians recognize as Nature's Lord and only true interpreter.

No doubt, at every step of the process there has been room for cavil and plausible objection ; but the question is whether, taking all these considerations that I have urged together and in the mass, they do not carry great weight of persuasion, a momentum of probability quite sufficient to justify the strong language of the text : " Say ye to the righteous it shall be well with him ; woe to the wicked, it shall be ill with him." And yet all that has been thus far said only brings us to the threshold of the subject in hand. We have been looking into foundations, or, to speak more accurately, we have been surveying the ground upon which it is proposed to lay a foundation.

The question of the nature and the extent of the retributions which we have seen it to be a not irrational thing to anticipate yet remains untouched. With this question, in its various phases, I purpose, God willing, to attempt to deal in my Sunday-morning sermons during Lent.

How weighty the responsibility incurred in making the effort I think I fully understand and keenly appreciate. In the presence of a problem so awful one might well covet the privilege of silence. But, as even the cynic among the prophets admits, there is a time to speak as well as a time to keep silence. And it does seem that when the mind of the community is very generally agitated upon a question of deep spiritual import, the duty of the honest minister of Christ is to do the best he can, poor as that best may be, to lead those who care to trust his guidance to right and just conclusions. To no one can it be matter of small concern what his belief shall be with reference to the destiny of those who sleep. If Nature has anything to tell, if reason has anything to tell, if Scripture has anything to tell, we want to know what it is. It is little to the credit of any man's intelligence, let alone his conscience and his heart, to boast that he does not care.

I do not forget, indeed I have already reminded you, that retribution has its bright as well as its dark side. There is a retribution of good as well as a retribution of evil, though it must be confessed that it is highly characteristic of our disposition to think the worst things of God rather than the best, of our tendency to dread instead of trusting Him, that we have let the gloomy aspect of the word so cloud and cover the cheerful phase of it, that the very mention of " retribution " carries terror with it. The Son of Man came not to destroy men's lives, but to save them, and the retribution to those on His right hand is at least as worthy of our thankful recognition as the retribution to those on His left hand is worthy of our fear.

It is not at all out of forgetfulness of this larger way of looking at the whole subject that I ask you to approach the problem from the side of loss and punishment, rather than from the side of blessedness and reward ; but partly because the present awakening of inquiry has more to do with the character of the penalty than with the character of the reward ; partly because, in the movement of the Christian year, Easter may, more properly than Lent, bring in thoughts about Heaven and the things of Heaven ; and partly because in Nature's order it is usual for the darkness to come before the light, even as "the evening and the morning were the first day."

III. Possible Forms of Penalty

i. Peter iv : 17.

, . . What shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God?

Although his question admits of no fewer than six different answers, the apostle is content with asking it. He puts on record no reply — certainly no prompt and plain reply. He leaves us to infer from his tone that the doom of the ungodly and the sinner is a fearful one, but precisely wherein the fearfulness consists he fails to state ; just what the end shall be of them that obey not the gospel of God he does not say.

It is on account of this very circumstance that I

have taken the words as a text for this morning's

sermon. Verses of Holy Scripture abound, any

one of which, looked at by itself, might be understood as settling forever and beyond controversy the question which this verse raises, but does not settle. Why should we pass by these apparently decisive sayings of the Bible, and take up with such an evidently indecisive one instead? Why preach from a text that opens the whole question, when a text might have been found that would have sufficed, not only to open the question, but to close it?

The answer is obvious. We must do one thing at a time. Opening the question is quite enough for the present; it will be well to think about closing it after we have carefully considered the subject in its length and breadth, or, at any rate, so far considered it as the limitations of pulpit-teaching will allow. If those other and apparently decisive verses to which I have referred were all of them decisive in the same direction, then, indeed, it would have been well to have chosen a text from among them ; but it so happens that while some of them seem to decide the matter in one way, others of them seem, with equal positiveness, to decide it in a wholly different way. A hasty inference from this fact is that any attempt to find the truth must necessarily be hopeless, but the wise, and prudent, and right inference is simply this, that we are bound to settle our belief upon the point at issue, not by any one isolated verse, or by any two or three such verses, but by a careful and impartial survey of the whole field. To such a survey the text invites us to address ourselves ; we could not have a better one.

" What shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God ? "

When I said that this question admitted of no fewer than six different answers, I did not mean that all the possible answers were such as Christian believers might give, and remain Christian believers after giving them, for such a statement would not be true ; but I meant that looking at the matter in a purely speculative way, as one might look at a problem in philosophy, six answers were conceivable. These answers group themselves under three heads corresponding to three forms of belief about the nature of the soul, which are, first, (1.) that the soul is mortal and perishes with the body, never to be revived again ; secondly, (2.) that the soul is necessarily immortal, and cannot die, but must under any circumstances continue to exist forever; and, thirdly, (3.) that the soul, though subject to death in consequence of sin, may by the grace and gift of God become immortal and live forever. More briefly, we may characterize these forms of belief as pointing respectively to the mortality, the necessary immortality, and the conditional immortality of the soul. Now, it is evident that every one of the possible answers to the question of our text, " What shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God?" must come under one or other of these beliefs about the nature of the soul. To the man who holds that the soul is mortal and perishes when the body does, of course only a single answer is possible. One event, he replies, happeneth to all, and the end of those who obey not the Gospel is the same as the end of those who do obey it. Good and bad, they lie down in the grave and perish with the same destruction. In the spirit of this belief," or perhaps pretended belief, the French wrote over the gateways of their graveyards during the first Revolution, " Death is an eternal sleep."

Under the second of the forms of belief mentioned, namely, that of the necessary immortality of all souls, whatever their attitude toward God, there is room for four answers to the question of the text. It may be said of the souls of the wicked, that when liberated from the bondage of the body and its lusts they are lifted at once into purity and blessedness. A belief of this sort has sometimes been built upon a misconception of St. Paul's words, " He that is dead is freed from sin."

Or, secondly, it may be believed that the souls of the wicked at death enter upon a period of discipline and purgation more or less prolonged, at the end of which time they are restored to God's favor, and enjoy, for ever after, a life of blessedness and peace. This is the opinion popularly known as Restorationism.

Or, thirdly, it may be believed that in the future life, and throughout eternity, there will be the same mingled experience for souls which we witness and share here and now — spiritual growth and spiritual decline, moral advance and moral retreat, blessedness and misery, victory and failure, running on to all eternity in an order of succession such as none but God can foresee.

Or, fourthly, it may be believed that the souls of the lost are tormented with a punishment which never ceases, that they live on for ever and ever, the victims of an anguish to which nothing puts or can put an end. Belief in the necessary immortality of the soul makes supposable, then, any one of these four different destinies for the wicked: immediate and entire release, temporary punishment to be followed by final restoration to favor, a continual alternation of happiness and wretchedness, according to the life that is lived, and a never-ending suffering.

To those, again, who hold the last of the three opinions with regard the nature of the soul, namely, that the soul is not necessarily, but only conditionally immortal, two forms of belief are open, first : that only such as are " accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection of the dead," will survive the grave at all, all other souls perishing with the bodies that have clothed them here (a view which, so far as the destiny of the wicked is concerned, is" identical with that which denies any future life at all, and therefore need not be counted as a separate answer to the question of our text), or, secondly, that although all will survive the grave, and be judged for the deeds done in the body, only a portion of those so surviving will inherit an endless life, the rest, through failure to obtain that life, lapsing finally into literal, complete, and lasting death — non-existence.

We see, then, that there are thus six possible answers to the question, What shall the end be of them that obey not the Gospel of God ? Be patient, for a moment, while I recapitulate them : first, (1.) extinction of being at the moment of death ; second, (2.) immediate admission to a state of pardon and blessedness at the moment of death ; third, (3.) restoration after a season of punishment ; fourth, (4.) alternation of happiness and unhappiness, according to conduct, as we have it here in this present world ; fifth, (5.) neverceasing torment ; sixth, (6.) final extinction after a period of punishment that shall have been accurately apportioned to the sinner's deserts.