Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors

by James Freeman Clarke

§ 2. The Doctrine of Everlasting Punishment, as held by the Orthodox at the Present Time.

What is this doctrine, as it is taught at the present day in all Orthodox churches, and as it stands in all Orthodox creeds? It is, that the moment of death decides, and decides forever, the destiny of man; that those who die impenitent, unbelieving, and unconverted are forever lost, without the possibility of return; that those thus lost are to suffer forever and ever, without [pg 354] end, the most grievous torments in soul and body. These torments consist in banishment from the presence of God, and positive sufferings, in addition thereto, of an awful kind. Precisely what they are, it is not, perhaps, necessary for an Orthodox man to believe. There is no Orthodox definition which is authoritative on that point; and considerable range, therefore, is allowable. The suffering may be that of literal fire, or it may not. It may be physical suffering, or the pangs of conscience, the absence of love, and the sense of emptiness. On these points there is some liberty of opinion, doubtless. But we presume that it would not be Orthodox to admit a preponderance, in hell, of good over evil; or to admit, with Swedenborg, the existence of pleasure there, even though it be only a diabolical and sinful pleasure. The doctrine of Orthodoxy certainly is, that evil predominates over good, and pain over pleasure, in the condition of the damned; so that there existence is a curse, and not a blessing. Especially is hope shut out: there is no hope of return, no possibility of escape, no chance of repentance, even at the end of myriads of years. The man who is condemned to imprisonment for life, in solitary confinement, is in an unfortunate condition; but he has hope,—hope of escape, hope of pardon,—sure hope, at all events, of deliverance, one day, by death, from his condition, and a change to something better, or at least to something different. But, in the Orthodox opinion, there is no such alleviation as this to the sufferings of the future state.

It is usual, we know, for many Orthodox preachers to intensify in description the sufferings of the future state, and to task their imagination for multiplied pictures of horror; and we shall presently give some examples to show how far this is carried. We have no doubt that there are many Orthodox men who are as much shocked by these gross descriptions as those are who deny everlasting punishment. But are they not themselves really responsible for them? Those [pg 355] who admit the principle that God can torment his children forever, in the other life, for sins committed in this, have accepted the principle, from which any view of the Deity, however shocking, may very legitimately proceed.

But let us, for the present, only assume that Orthodoxy asserts a preponderance of evil over good in the other world, and that this preponderance is to be continued without end—forever. Let us see what this means.

It means that the suffering to be endured hereafter by each individual soul, as a punishment for sins committed in this world, will infinitely exceed in amount all the suffering borne on the surface of the earth, by its total population, from the creation of Adam to the destruction of the world. Each lost soul will suffer not only more, but infinitely more, than all the accumulated sufferings of the human race throughout all time. We shudder as we read the account of the sufferings from hydrophobia, or the burning alive of a slave at the South, or the tortures inflicted by the Holy Inquisition, or the horrors of a field of battle, or the cruelties inflicted by savages upon their victims; but all of these, added together, are finite, and the sufferings of a single soul hereafter are infinite. That is to say, all the pain and evil of this world, resulting from all human sin, through all time, is infinitely small and insignificant when compared with the punishment endured by a single soul hereafter for his share of that sin. And all this is inflicted by God; and he is a God of love.

There are some doctrines, the statement of which is their refutation. This, we think, is one of them.

But it must also be considered, that this doctrine, which throws such darkness over the future, also sends down a rayless night over the present. It refutes every theodicy; it nullifies every solution of evil. The consolation for the sufferings of this world is, that the fashion of this world passes away, and that there is a better world to come. The explanation of the evils of this life is, that they are finite, and [pg 356] that they are, therefore, to be swallowed up and to disappear in an infinite good. The Christian finds relief, in considering the sufferings of this world, by regarding them as the means of a greater ultimate joy; by looking forward to the time when all tears shall be wiped away; and by a firm faith that love is stronger than selfishness, good stronger than evil. But the doctrine of eternal punishment gives us, in the condition of a single lost soul, a greater amount of evil hereafter than all the evil, which is to be thus explained, here; and the myriads of lost souls, each of which is to suffer infinitely more than all the sufferings of the present world, present us with a problem, in the future, so appalling, that the problem of present evil, vast as it is, becomes insignificant by its side.

We are tormented with evil here. We seek a solution of the problem: we find it in the limited, finite, and ancillary nature of evil. But that solution is wholly taken away when we are told that evil is infinite and eternal.

It seems to us impossible to hold the common doctrine on this subject, without having the gospel view of the divine character essentially shaken; it is not possible to regard Him as a being in whom love is the essential attribute. If this is so, as we shall presently undertake to prove, it becomes a matter of vital importance that the doctrine should be disproved and rejected. It is not enough that it should be quietly laid aside: it is due to the truth that it should be distinctly and fully confuted. For this doctrine, if it be false, is deeply dishonorable to God: it takes away his highest glory; it substitutes fear of him, in the place of love, in the human heart; it neutralizes the peculiar power of the gospel; it degrades the quality of Christian piety, and poisons religion in its fountain.

The Orthodox doctrine of future punishment is, then, exceedingly simple. There is to be a judgment in the last day, universal and final. All mankind are to be collected before [pg 357] the judgment seat of Christ, and there to be divided into two classes,—one on the right hand, and the other on the left. These are to go upward, to heaven, to be eternally happy; those downward, to hell, to be eternally miserable. There are no degrees of suffering; for the torments of hell are infinite in degree, as well as everlasting in duration. Usually the suffering is made intensively as well as extensively infinite. Sometimes degrees are allowed in suffering. No allowance is made for ignorance, or want of opportunity; for inherited evil, or evil resulting from force of circumstances. The purest and best of men, who does not believe the precise Orthodox theory concerning the Trinity, sits in hell side by side with Zingis Khan, who murdered in cold blood hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children, marking his bloody route by pyramids of skulls. The unbaptized child, who goes to hell because of the original sin derived from Adam, is exposed to God's wrath no less than Pope Alexander VI, who outraged every law of God and man, and who, says Machiavelli, “was followed to the tomb by the holy feet of his three dear companions—Luxury, Simony, and Cruelty.”[46]

This is the doctrine which every denomination and sect in Christendom, except the Unitarians and Universalists, maintain as essential to Orthodoxy. It is but a year or two since twenty-one bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church [pg 359] issued a declaration of their belief that this doctrine is maintained, without reserve or qualification, by the Church of England. Only recently an ecclesiastical council of Congregationalists refused the fellowship of the churches to a gentleman elected as its pastor by the Third Congregational Church in Portland, Maine. In the report of the result, the council says that it believes the candidate to be generally sound in his belief, and exemplary in his Christian spirit, and heartily extends to him its Christian sympathy. But it [pg 360] declines to install him as pastor, because it “understands him as saying, that he does not know but there may be another state of probation and offer of salvation, after death, for all to whom Christ is not personally preached; and that, whilst believing in a future retribution, he says that the everlasting punishment of the wicked may be an extinction of the wicked by annihilation.” So that a mere doubt on this subject is considered a sufficient reason, by the most advanced and liberal of the whole Orthodox body at the present day, for refusing church fellowship.

The American Tract Society floods the land with loose leaves, all appealing to the fear of an eternal hell. We have one before us now, called “Are you insured?” which represents Christianity as a contrivance for escaping from everlasting torment, as a spiritual insurance office, where one must “take out a policy,” and so escape everlasting fire.[47]

There is no theological journal, bearing the Orthodox name, which is more rational and liberal than the “New York Independent.” But in its issue of January 5, 1860, it speaks of future endless misery thus, saying that there is a “vast amount and weight of evidence to the point—evidence enough to prove it, if provable; all nature, all law, all revelation uttering the doctrine, so that it is an amazing [pg 361] stretch and energy of unbelief not to believe it, implying a moral state and position that will not believe it on any testimony, however clearly and unqualifiedly, even to the exhaustion of the capabilities of language, God himself may declare and affirm it.”

There is evidently an energetic attempt made in some quarters to revive the decaying belief in the doctrine of everlasting punishment in the future state, as a penalty for the sins of this. Dr. Thompson, of New York, has published a work to this end, called “Love and Penalty.” Dr. J. P. Thompson, the author of this book, is considered the leader of New Haven theology—the Elisha on whose shoulders the mantle of Dr. Taylor, of New Haven, has fallen. Dr. Nehemiah Adams, of Boston, has labored in the same field, exerting himself to prove this doctrine in various tracts and other works. Professor Hovey, of the Baptist Seminary of Newton, has published a little book on the same subject.

It is probably thought dangerous by these gentlemen to relax at all the terrors of futurity. And, no doubt, if all those who have been restrained from evil by fear of eternal punishment were to lose that belief suddenly, the consequences, at first, would be sometimes bad. If you have exerted your whole force in producing fear of hell, instead of fear of sin, then, the terror of hell being taken away, men might rush at first into license. But the dread of a future hell is by no means so efficacious a motive as is often thought. We become hardened to everything, and neither the clergyman nor his parish eat any less heartily of their Sunday dinner, nor sleep any less soundly on Sunday night, in consequence of the terrible descriptions of eternal torments contained in the morning's sermon.[48]