"O King of our salvation,
Many would curse to thee, and I for one!
Fling Thee Thy bliss, and snatch at Thy damnation,
Scorn and abhor the rising of Thy sun.
"Is it not worth while to believe," blandly urges a Christian writer, "if it is true, as it is true, that they who deny will suffer everlasting torments?" No! we thunder back at him, it is not worth while; it is not worth while to believe a lie, or to acknowledge as true that which our hearts and intellects alike reject as false; it is not worth while to sell our souls for a heaven, or to defile our honesty to escape a hell; it is not worth while to bow our knee to a Satan or bend our heads before a spectre. Better, far better, to "dwell with everlasting burnings" than to degrade our humanity by calling a lie, truth, and cruelty, love, and unreasonableness, justice; better to suffer in hell, than to have our hearts so hard that we could enjoy while others suffer; could rejoice while others are tormented, could sing alleluias to the music of golden harps, while our lyrics are echoed by the anguished wailing of the lost. God Himself—were He such as Christians paint Him—could not blot out of our souls our love of truth, of righteousness, of justice. While we have these we are ourselves, and we can suffer and be happy; but we cannot afford to pay down these as the price of our admission to heaven. We should be miserable even as we paced the golden streets, and should sit in tears beside the river of the water of life. Yet this is salvation; this is what Christians offer us in the name of Jesus; this is the glad tidings brought to us as the gospel of the Saviour, as the "good news of God;" and this we reject, wholly and utterly, laughing it to scorn from the depths of our glad hearts which the Truth has made free; this we denounce, with a stern and bitter determination, in the name of the Universal Father, in the name of the self-reliance of humanity, in the name of all that is holy, and just, and loving.
But happily many, even among Christians, are beginning to shrink from this idea of salvation from the God in whom they say they place all their hopes. They put aside the doctrine, they gloss it over, they prefer not to speak of it. Free thought is leavening Christianity, and is moulding the old faith against its will. Christianity now hides its own cruel side, and only where the bold opponents of its creeds have not yet spread, does it dare to show itself in its real colours; in Spain, in Mexico, we see Christianity unveiled; here, in England, liberty is too strong for it, and it is forced into a semblance of liberality. The old wine is being poured into new bottles; what will be the result? We may, however, rejoice that nobler thoughts about God are beginning to prevail, and are driving out the old wicked notions about Him and His revenge. The Face of the Father is beginning, however dimly, to shine out from His world, and before the Beauty of that Face all hard thoughts about Him are fading away. Nature is too fair to be slandered for ever, and when men perceive that God and Nature are One, all that is ghastly and horrible must die and drop into forgetfulness. The popular Christian ideas of mediation and salvation must soon pass away into the limbo of rejected creeds which is being filled so fast; they are already dead, and their pale ghosts shall soon flit no longer to vex and harass the souls of living men.
ON ETERNAL TORTURE.
SOME time ago a Clergyman was proving to me by arguments many and strong that hell was right, necessary and just; that it brought glory to God and good to man; that the holiness of God required it as a preventive, and the justice of God exacted it as a penalty, of sin. I listened quietly till all was over and silence fell on the reverend denunciator; he ceased, satisfied with his arguments, triumphant in the consciousness that they were crushing and unassailable. But my eyes were fixed on the fair scene without the library window, on the sacrament of earth, the visible sign of the invisible beauty, and the contrast between God's works and the Church's speech came strongly upon me. And all I found to say in answer came in a few words: "If I had not heard you mention the name of God, I should have thought you were speaking of the Devil." The words, dropped softly and meditatively, had a startling effect. Horror at the blasphemy, indignation at the unexpected result of laboured argument, struggled against a dawning feeling that there must be something wrong in a conception which laid itself open to such a blow; the short answer told more powerfully than half an hour's reasoning.
The various classes of orthodox Christian doctrines should be attacked in very different styles by the champions of the great army of free-thinkers, who are at the present day besieging the venerable superstitions of the past. Around the Deity of Jesus cluster many hallowed memories and fond associations; the worship of centuries has shed around his figure a halo of light, and he has been made into the ideal of Humanity; the noblest conceptions of morality, the highest flights of enlightened minds, have been enshrined in a human personality and called by the name of Christ; the Christ-idea has risen and expanded with every development of human progress, and the Christ of the highest Christianity of the day is far other than the Christ of Augustine, of Thomas à Kempis, of Luther, or Knox; the strivings after light, after knowledge, after holiness, of the noblest sons of men have been called by them a following of Jesus; Jesus is baptized in human tears, crucified in human pains, glorified in human hopes. Because of all this, because he is dear to human hearts and identified with human struggles, therefore he should be gently spoken of by all who feel the bonds of the brotherhood of man; the dogma of his Deity must be assailed, must be overthrown, because it is false, because it destroys the unity of God, because it veils from us the Eternal Spirit, the source of all things, but he himself should be reverently spoken of, so far as truthfulness permits, and this dogma, although persistently battled against, should be attacked without anger and without scorn.
There are other doctrines which, while degrading in regard to man's conception of God, and therefore deserving of reprobation, yet enshrine great moral truths and have become bound up with ennobling lessons; such is the doctrine of the Atonement, which enshrines the idea of selfless love and of self-sacrifice for the good of humanity. There are others again against which ridicule and indignation may rightly be brought to bear, which are concessions to human infirmity, and which belong to the childhood of the race; man may be laughed out of his sacraments and out of his devils, and indignantly reminded that he insults God and degrades himself by placing a priesthood or mediator between God and his own soul. But there is one dogma of Orthodox Christianity which stands alone in its atrocity, which is thoroughly and essentially bad, which is without one redeeming feature, which is as blasphemous towards God as it is injurious to man; on it therefore should be poured out unsparingly the bitterest scorn and the sharpest indignation. There is no good human emotion enlisted on the side of an Eternal Hell; it is not hallowed by human love or human longings, it does not enshrine human aspirations, nor is it the outcome of human hopes. In support of this no appeal can be made to any feeling of the nobler side of our nature, nor does eternal fire stimulate our higher faculties: it acts only on the lower, baser, part of man; it excites fear, distrust of God, terror of his presence; it may scare from evil occasionally, but can never teach good; it sees God in the lightning-flash that slays, but not in the sunshine which invigorates; in the avalanche which buries a village in its fall, but not in the rich promise of the vineyard and the joyous beauty of the summer day. Hell has driven thousands half-mad with terror, it has driven monks to the solitary deserts, nuns to the sepulchre of the nunnery, but has it ever caused one soul of man to rejoice in the Father of all, and pant, "as the hart panteth after the water-springs, for the presence of God"?
It is only just to state, in attacking this as a Christian doctrine, that, though believed in by the vast majority of Christians, the most enlightened of that very indefinite body repudiate it with one voice. It is well known how the great Broad-Church leader, Frederick Denison Maurice, endeavoured to harmonize, on this point, his Bible and his strong moral sense, and failed in so doing, as all must fail who would reconcile two contradictories. How he fought with that word "eternal," struggled to prove that whatever else it might mean it did not mean everlasting in our modern sense of the word: that "eternal death" being the antithesis to "eternal life" must mean a state of ignorance of the Eternal One, even as its opposite was the knowledge of God: that therefore men could rise from eternal death, aye, did so rise every day in this life, and might so rise in the life to come. Noble was his protest against this awful doctrine, fettered as he was by undue reverence for, and clinging to, the Bible. His appeal to the moral sense in man as the arbiter of all doctrine has borne good fruit, and his labours have opened a road to free thought greater than he expected or even hoped. Many other clergymen have followed in his steps. The word "eternal" has been wrangled over continually, but, however they arrive there, all Broad Churchmen unite in the conclusion that it does not, cannot, shall not, mean literally lasting for ever. This school of thought has laid much stress on the fondness of Orientals for imagery; they have pointed out that the Jewish word Gehenna is the same as Ge Hinnom, or valley of Hinnom, and have seen in the state of that valley the materials for "the worm that dieth not and the fire that is not quenched:" they show how by a natural transition the place into which were thrown the bodies of the worst criminals became the type of punishment in the next world, and the valley where children were sacrificed to Moloch gave its name to the infernal abode of devils. From that valley Jesus drew his awful picture, suggested by the pale lurid fires ever creeping there, mingling their ghastly flames with the decaying bodies of the dishonoured dead. In all this there is probably much truth, and many Broad Churchmen are content to accept this explanation, and so retain their belief in the supernatural character of the Bible, while satisfying their moral sense by rejecting its most immoral dogma.
Among the evangelicals, only one voice, so far as I know, is heard to protest against eternal torture; and all honour is due to the Rev. Samuel Minton, for his rare courage in defying on this point the opinion of his "world," and braving the censure which has been duly inflicted on him. He seems to make "eternal" the equivalent of "irremediable" in some cases and of "everlasting" in others. He believes that the wicked will be literally destroyed, burnt up, consumed; the fact that the fire is eternal by no means implies, he remarks, that that which is cast into the fire should be likewise eternal, and that the fire is unquenchable does not prove that the chaff is unconsumable. "Eternal destruction" he explains as irreparable destruction, final and irreversible extinction. This theory should have more to recommend it to all who believe in the supernatural inspiration of the Bible, than the Broad Church explanation; it uses far less violence towards the words of Scripture, and, indeed, a very fair case may be made out for it from the Bible itself.