(c) Eternal death may be regarded as the culmination and completion of spiritual death, and as essentially consisting in the correspondence of the outward condition with the inward state of the evil soul (Acts 1:25). It would seem to be inaugurated by some peculiar repellent energy of the divine holiness (Mat. 25:41; 2 Thess. 1:9), and to involve positive retribution visited by a personal God upon both the body and the soul of the evil-doer (Mat. 10:28; Heb. 10:31; Rev. 14:11).
Acts 1:25—“Judas fell away, that he might go to his own place”; Mat. 25:41—“Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels”; 2 Thess. 1:9—“who shall suffer punishment, even eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might”; Mat. 10:28—“fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”; Heb. 10:31—“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God”; Rev. 14:11—“the smoke of their torment goeth up for ever and ever.”
Kurtz, Religionslehre, 67—“So long as God is holy, he must maintain the order of the world, and where this is destroyed, restore it. This however can happen in no other way than this: the injury by which the sinner has destroyed the order of the world falls back upon himself,—and this is penalty. Sin is the negation of the law. Penalty is the negation of that negation, that is, the reëstablishment of the law. Sin is a thrust of the sinner against the law. Penalty is the adverse thrust of the elastic because living law, which encounters the sinner.”
Plato, Gorgias, 472 e; 509 b; 511 a; 515 b—“Impunity is a more dreadful curse than any punishment, and nothing so good can befall the criminal as his retribution, the failure of which would make a double disorder in the universe. The offender himself may spend his arts in devices of escape and think himself happy if he is not found out. But all this plotting is but part of the delusion of his sin; and when he comes to himself and sees his transgression as it really is, he will yield himself up the prisoner of eternal justice and know that it is good for him to be afflicted, and so for the first time to be set at one with truth.”
On the general subject of the penalty of sin, see Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:245 sq.; 2:286-397; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 263-279; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 194-219; Krabbe, Lehre von der Sünde und vom Tode; Weisse, in Studien und Kritiken, 1836:371; S. R. Mason, Truth Unfolded, 369-384; Bartlett, in New Englander, Oct. 1871:677, 678.
Section VII.—The Salvation Of Infants.
The views which have been presented with regard to inborn depravity and the reaction of divine holiness against it suggest the question whether [pg 661] infants dying before arriving at moral consciousness are saved, and if so, in what way. To this question we reply as follows:
(a) Infants are in a state of sin, need to be regenerated, and can be saved only through Christ.
Job 14:4—“Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one”; Ps. 51:5—“Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity; And in sin did my mother conceive me”; John 3:6—“That which is born of the flesh is flesh”; Rom. 5:14—“Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the likeness of Adam's transgression”; Eph. 2:3—“by nature children of wrath”; 1 Cor. 7:14—“else were your children unclean”—clearly intimate the naturally impure state of infants; and Mat. 19:14—“Suffer the little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me”—is not only consistent with this doctrine, but strongly confirms it; for the meaning is: “forbid them not to come unto me”—whom they need as a Savior. “Coming to Christ” is always the coming of a sinner, to him who is the sacrifice for sin; cf. Mat. 11:28—“Come unto me, all ye that labor.”