Since neither one of these two forms of the annihilation theory is Scriptural or rational, we avail ourselves of the evolutionary hypothesis as throwing light upon the problem. Death is not degeneracy ending in extinction, nor punishment ending in extinction,—it is atavism that returns, or tends to return, to the animal type. As moral development is from the brute to man, so abnormal development is from man to the brute.
Lord Byron: “All suffering doth destroy, or is destroyed.” This is true, not of man's being, but of his well being. Ribot, Diseases of the Will, 115—“Dissolution pursues a regressive course from the more voluntary and more complex to the less voluntary and more simple, that is to say, toward the automatic. One of the first signs of mental impairment is incapacity for sustained attention. Unity, stability, power, have ceased, and the end is extinction of the will.” We prefer to say, loss of the freedom of the will. On the principle of evolution, abuse of freedom may result in reversion to the brute, annihilation not of existence but of higher manhood, punishment from within rather than from without, eternal penalty in the shape of eternal loss. Mat. 24:13—“he that endureth to the end, the same shall be saved”—has for its parallel passage Luke 21:19—“In your patience ye shall win your souls,” i. e., shall by free will get possession of your own being. Losing one's soul is just the opposite, namely, losing one's free will, by disuse renouncing freedom, becoming a victim of habit, nature, circumstance, and this is the cutting off and annihilation of true manhood. “To be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer” (Bernard Shaw).
In John 15:2 Christ says of all men—the natural branches of the vine—“Every branch in me that beareth not fruit, he taketh it away”; Ps. 49:20—“Man that is in honor, and understandeth not, Is like the beasts that perish”; Rev. 22:15—“Without are the dogs.” In heathen fable men were turned into beasts, and even into trees. The story of Circe is a parable of human fate,—men may become apes, tigers, or swine. They may lose their higher powers of consciousness and will. By perpetual degradation they may suffer eternal punishment. All life that is worthy of the name may cease, while still existence of a low animal type is prolonged. We see precisely these results of sin in this world. We have reason to believe that the same laws of development will operate in the world to come.
McConnell, Evolution of Immortality, 85-95, 99, 124, 180—“Immortality, or survival after death, depends upon man's freeing himself from the law which sweeps away the many, and becoming an individual (indivisible) that is fit to survive. The individual must become stronger than the species. By using will aright, he lays hold of the infinite Life, and becomes one who, like Christ, has ‘life in himself’ (John 5:26). Gravitation and chemical affinity had their way in the universe until they were arrested and turned about in the interest of life. Overproduction, death, and the survival of the fittest, had their ruthless sway until they were reversed in the interest of affection. The supremacy of the race at the expense of the individual we may expect to continue until something in the individual comes to be of more importance than that law, and no longer.... Goodness can arrest and turn back for nations the primal law of growth, vigor, and decline. Is it too much to believe that it may do the same for an individual man?... Life is a thing to be achieved. At every step there are a thousand candidates who fail, for one that attains.... Until moral sensibility becomes self-conscious, all question of personal immortality becomes irrelevant, because there is, accurately speaking, no personality to be immortal. Up to that point the individual living creature, whether in human form or not, falls short of that essential personality for which eternal life can [pg 1039]have any meaning.” But how about children who never come to moral consciousness? McConnell appeals to heredity. The child of one who has himself achieved immortality may also prove to be immortal. But is there no chance for the children of sinners? The doctrine of McConnell leans toward the true solution, but it is vitiated by the belief that individuality is a transient gift which only goodness can make permanent. We hold on the other hand that this gift of God is “without repentance” (Rom. 11:29), and that no human being can lose life, except in the sense of losing all that makes life desirable.
B. Punishment after death excludes new probation and ultimate restoration of the wicked.
Some have maintained the ultimate restoration of all human beings, by appeal to such passages as the following: Mat. 19:28; Acts 3:21; Eph. 1:9, 10.
Mat. 19:28—“in the regeneration when the Son of man shall sit on the throne of his glory”; Acts 3:21—Jesus, “whom the heaven must receive until the times of restoration of all things”; 1 Cor. 15:26—“The last enemy that shall be abolished is death”; Eph. 1:9, 10—“according to his good pleasure which he purposed in him unto a dispensation of the fulness of the times, to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens, and the things upon the earth”; Phil. 2:10, 11—“that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven and things on earth and things under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father”; 2 Pet. 3:9, 13—“not wishing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance ... But, according to his promise, we look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.”
Robert Browning: “That God, by God's own ways occult, May—doth, I will believe—bring back All wanderers to a single track.” B. W. Lockhart: “I must believe that evil is essentially transient and mortal, or alter my predicates of God. And I must believe in the ultimate extinction of that personality whom the power of God cannot sometime win to goodness. The only alternative is the termination of a wicked life either through redemption or through extinction.” Mulford, Republic of God, claims that the soul's state cannot be fixed by any event, such as death, outside of itself. If it could, the soul would exist, not under a moral government, but under fate, and God himself would be only another name for fate. The soul carries its fate, under God, in its power of choice; and who dares to say that this power to choose the good ceases at death?
For advocacy of a second probation for those who have not consciously rejected Christ in this life, see Newman Smyth's edition of Dorner's Eschatology. For the theory of restoration, see Farrar, Eternal Hope; Birks, Victory of Divine Goodness; Jukes, Restitution of All Things; Delitzsch, Bib. Psychologie, 469-476; Robert Browning, Apparent Failure; Tennyson, In Memoriam, § liv. Per contra, see Hovey, Bib. Eschatology, 95-144. See also, Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 406-440.