IV
These are the only conjectures offered us to solve the difficulties connected with Final Retribution. We find them all unsatisfactory. We have reached no definite doctrine of Hell. With the evidence at our disposal it seems impossible to do so. The failure of all attempts at reconciling the seeming contradictions of Scripture must suggest to us that the solution of this problem is beyond the range of our present powers. At any rate it is beyond the range of our present knowledge. Surely it is wise and reverent to think that this points to some dealing of God beyond our human ken which will one day reconcile all the difficulties.[5] Our little guesses do not exhaust God's possibilities. Some day we shall find the answer in that land where we shall know even as we are known. And when we find it we know it will be consistent with our highest thoughts of God. I like to think that it is those who have grown closest to Christ in sympathy for sorrow and pain and who unlike us, know all the facts of the case, who are represented as joining in that glad shout hereafter, "Hallelujah! salvation and glory and power belong to our God, FOR TRUE AND RIGHTEOUS ARE HIS JUDGMENTS." Leave the manifestation of this to God. A wise old man once said, "God has a good deal of time to do things between this and the other side of eternity."
This then is the conclusion of the whole matter. A return to the reserve and reticence of Scripture. But with this result of our study, that we feel no longer forced to believe of God that which Conscience declares to be unworthy of Him. We are set free to believe that the Judge of all the earth will do right—that Hell as well as Heaven is within the confines of His dominion—that evil shall not last for ever; that in spite of all its conflicting evidence the trend of Scripture moves towards the golden age, the final victory of good.
Thus we leave it.
In our final vision of humanity in Christ's great drama of the Judgment, those on the left are passing into the outer darkness and as they pass the curtain falls behind them and we see them no more. We know not what is passing in that outer darkness where there is "weeping and gnashing of teeth." We have no grounds to believe that any soul there is being born again through sorrow and shame, that any spoiled and deformed life is being remoulded in that awful crucible of God.
But as we watch the awful shadows of that outer darkness, there comes beyond it on the far horizon the quivering of a coming dawn. For that age of God's Gehenna is to have its end, and far away the day will dawn for which the whole creation groaneth and travaileth together; when evil shall have vanished out of the universe for ever; when death and Hell, the evil and the Evil One shall be cast into the lake of fire; when "at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow of things in Heaven and earth, and under the earth" (in the world of the dead). "And every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father." "Then cometh the end," says St. Paul, "when Christ shall deliver up the Kingdom to God, even the Father, when all His enemies shall be subjected unto Him. And when all His enemies have been subjected unto Him, then shall the Son also Himself be subjected unto Him that put all things under Him, that God may be all in all."
That is what shall be. One day, somewhere in the far mysterious future the "purpose of the ages" shall be accomplished. Evil shall have vanished out of the universe for ever and God shall be all in all. One day again it shall be as at the creation when "God looked on everything that He had made and behold it was very good." How? We know not and we need not know. We need not be able to assert dogmatically how He will accomplish His purpose. We need not be able to assert that all men shall be saved or that all who are not will be annihilated. But we must be able with trustful hearts to assert God's love and God's power and the final abolishing of evil, even though we can only do it with the poet's vagueness:
At last I heard a voice upon the slope
Cry to the summit, "Is there any hope?"
To which an answer pealed from that high land,
But in a tongue no man could understand,
And on the glimmering summit far withdrawn
God made Himself an awful rose of dawn.
[1] 1 John iii. 8.
[2] Gen. iii. 15.
[3] kolasis—chastisement, correction, punishment (see Greek Lexicon).
[4] The same Greek words are used of His enemies' subjection to Christ as of Christ's subjection to the Father suggesting that it would be of the same kind.
[5] In other antinomies of Scripture, e. g., Man's free will and God's foreknowledge, we have to take refuge in a similar belief.