This doctrine,—of the limited and corrective nature of future punishment,—is often likened by those who disbelieve and disapprove it, to the Catholic doctrine of purgatory; a likeness which Catholics and Unitarians are perhaps equally unwilling to admit, though the latter have little doubt that the belief in purgatory is a corruption of the genuine doctrine as they hold it now.
It was the opinion of many of the Fathers in very early times, that the world would be destroyed by fire; that the good would be purified by the process, and the wicked consumed. It is clear that they derived a part of this belief from some other source than the Scriptures; but it is equally clear that they had no notion of an eternity of torment. Origen, Clemens Alexandrinus, his master, with Gregory Nazianzen, and others of the Fathers, held that the wicked would survive this punishment, and come out purified and fit for a blissful state. The Catholic doctrine of purgatory probably arose out of some of these opinions, though it embraces much which does not appear to have entered into the imaginations of the Fathers. Its substance, as declared in the councils of Florence and Trent, is that every man is liable both to temporal and eternal punishment for his sins; that the eternal punishment may be escaped by faith in the atonement of Christ; but that the temporal must be borne by the individual in this world or at his entrance on the next; that the sufferings of those who undergo purgation may be relieved by the prayers and suffrages of their earthly brethren, though in what manner this relief is wrought, whether by a process of satisfaction, or of intercession, or of any other method, it is not essential to true faith to be certified. Neither is it necessary to know where the place of purgation is; of what nature its pains are, and how long sufferers may be detained there. The belief in purgatory was, for some ages, held by all Christians, except the ancient Waldenses, who left the Church of Rome before the doctrine was established there, and who never admitted it. Soon after the Reformation, it was abandoned by all who left the Church of Rome; so that it has since been peculiar to that church.
Our reasons for rejecting it are, that we find no trace of it in Scripture, and that, as we declared before, we do not admit ecclesiastical traditions as matters of faith. We also reject the notion that any part of the punishment of sin can be escaped through the sacrifices, or mediation, or intercession of any being whomsoever. We have been frequently accused of impairing a divinely appointed sanction by asserting the limited extent of future punishment; but we think that the sanction is, in reality, abolished by the admission that the Divine decrees may be set aside by human acts, and that the relations of good and evil, virtue and vice, which are declared to be immutable, may be changed at the pleasure of mortal agents. We believe the punishment of sin to be of limited duration; but as certain as the existence of the moral agent, and as little capable of remission through the will of any created being as the law which regulates the rise and fall of the tides, the changes of the moon, and the revolutions of the planets. We hold it to be awful, not only from its certainty, but from its concealed nature. It will doubtless transcend all that the experience of earth can suggest to the imagination. Can it be said that we impair this sanction when we hold that the suffering consequent on guilt is absolutely certain, lasting in its duration, and inconceivably dreadful in its nature? What apprehensions could be fitted to excite greater dread?
For the purpose of explaining why we believe that no part of the consequences of guilt can be evaded through the sacrifices, mediation, or intercession of any being whatsoever, it is necessary to pass on to the next division of our subject. Having stated the three leading doctrines of Christianity, the Unity of God, the unlimited scope of the plan of redemption, and a future state, we now proceed briefly to examine the principles of morals proposed by the Gospel.
The fundamental truths of Morals are eternal as He to whom they primarily relate, and immutable as the purposes which they subserve. But it is necessary that they should be communicated to men under different forms and according to various methods, as minds are prepared to receive them: and their application must also be regulated according to the circumstances in which men are placed. The same principle was proposed to Adam in Paradise, to Abraham in Beersheba, and to Paul when he set his face steadfastly to go to Jerusalem, knowing that bonds and afflictions awaited him there. Obedience to God was the motive proposed for abstaining from the forbidden fruit, for sacrificing an only son, and for facing suffering and death. But an intimation which was all powerful with Abraham was insufficient to secure a much less painful obedience from Adam; and the self-devotion of Paul was ennobled in all its manifold instances, by its springing, not from so many express directions, but from a principle, undeviating and perpetual in its operation. In the infancy of the race, it would have been utterly useless to reveal the grand principles of morals in any other way than that which was adopted, viz. by exhibiting their application in various instances. The Divine will was therefore made known in express directions, probably very few in number at first, and gradually increasing in number and importance, so as to enable observers, from remarking the similar tendency of several, to infer a general principle from them. All the records which we possess of the history of the race to the calling of the Israelites out of Egypt, prove this to have been the method adopted. The commands of God, and the promises and threats by which they were sanctioned, bore an analogy, in their gradual elevation, to those by which we influence an opening mind in its progress from the first manifestation of intelligence to the age when the power of conscience is recognizable. In the Mosaic system, a considerable advance was made, a direct appeal to conscience being instituted, and the gradual revelation of a moral government being provided for. Men were then taught, not what we now know, that the relation between virtue and happiness, vice and misery, is immutable (which they could not have understood,) but that in their particular case, obedience to certain laws would secure prosperity, and disobedience adversity. Such obedience, the most virtuous were incited to render, from a fear and love of God; but they could not have rendered it in any but specified cases, because, not yet being made acquainted with the principle as a principle, they could not direct its application for themselves. The case was the same with the other great principle, Benevolence, as with Piety; and, accordingly, the body of laws which was prepared for the Israelites was voluminous, and their sanctions were expressed in a copious variety of promises and threatenings, and embodied in a burthensome ritual, consisting chiefly of penal acts. When the nation had thus been exercised long enough to prepare it for entering on a new course of moral agency (as we prepare a child for the spontaneous exercise of filial duty and fraternal love by a discipline of express commands and particular acts,) Christianity was dispensed, and men were at length furnished with the principles themselves, with whose application they were henceforth to be entrusted.
Christianity was designed to be permanent and universal; and, therefore, though it was first communicated in the form best adapted to those who were first to receive it, it contains within itself that which shall fit it to be a revelation to the mind of man in every stage.
It contains eternal principles of doctrine and morals, embodied in facts, which are the only immutable and universal language. The character of Christ affords a never-failing suggestion, and a perfect illustration of the principles of morals; a suggestion which only the most careless minds can fail to receive, and an illustration by which only the most hardened can fail to be impressed. From him it was learned what part of the moral law of Moses was to be retained and what forgone; how much was vital and permanent and how much external and temporary. From him it was learned, and shall be learned to the end of time, how the sympathy which caused tears at the grave of Lazarus, the compassion which relieved the widowed mother of Nain, the tenderness which yearned towards the repentant Apostle, the diffusive love which embraced in its prayer all of every age and nation who needed the gospel of grace, combined to enforce and adorn the principle of Benevolence. His parables are eloquent in their praise of benevolence; his entreaties to mutual love are urgent, and his commands decisive; but the eloquence of his example is by far more urgent and irresistible. From him it was, and ever shall be, learned that the rule of life is to be found in the will of God. From his devotion to the work which God had given him to do, from his perpetual reference of all things to the Divine will, from his unhesitating submission to suffering and death, from his supreme delight in devotional communion, we learn how Piety is the pre-eminent principle of feeling and action which men are required to adopt. The parables which inculcate ready filial obedience and sorrow for disobedience, the declarations that it was his meat and drink to do the will of God, and that he was not alone because the Father was with him, are powerful enforcements of the principle; but not so powerful as the acts of obedience and resignation in which its power shone forth. The whole scheme of morals is comprehended in the precepts, 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and soul, and mind, and strength, and thy neighbor as thyself;' but the concentration of truth and beauty is less resplendant, less engaging, less universally clear and interesting, than in the character of him who deduced these two principles from all the law and the prophets.
With these two principles, and all the subordinate ones which are derived from them, are connected sanctions from above, which attest their origin and secure their adoption. By an irreversible decree of Him who founded nature and vouchsafed a revelation, certain states of enjoyment and suffering are connected with the practical adoption or rejection of the principles of duty, not by way of arbitrary appointment, but of natural consequence. The relations of holiness and happiness, of guilt and misery, are unalterable; shown to be so by the teachings of nature and experience, by the explicit declarations of Scripture, and by every species of evidence which the mind of man is capable of receiving.
Though the chief object of the Christian revelation was to make this relation more evident than it had ever been before, many who received the Gospel imagine that it discovers to them a means by which the relation may be suspended or destroyed. This misapprehension we hold to be more fatal in its moral consequences than any other which human prejudice has originated. By what appears to us a strange perversion of Scripture language, and by the gradual increase of some subordinate errors, it began to be imagined, some centuries ago, that, though misery is necessarily connected with guilt, yet that the guilt may be perpetrated by one person, and the consequent misery endured by another; and this belief has subsisted in almost every Christian church till this day. It is well that it has been confined to the churches, and that its application has been limited, by all but Catholics, to one very peculiar case; for if it had become the common doctrine of our schools, and colleges, and homes, if it had been enforced by parents and moral philosophers and professors as a general truth, as it is by divines with reference to a particular case, the very foundations of virtue would have been overthrown, and the force of its sanctions not only wasted but fatally perverted.
Happily the accents of reason and religion have been too distinct and harmonious to be overpowered by the dictates of error, or very extensively neglected. Notwithstanding all that religious teachers have erroneously inculcated of the possible and actual separation of guilt and its punishment on the principle of vicarious suffering, education has still proceeded, and moral discipline been enforced as if no such false principle had ever been advocated. Children are swayed by hope and fear of the consequences of their actions to themselves; and self-government is enforced at a riper age by the same motives, though enlarged and elevated. In religion alone has an error, as absurd in its nature as injurious in its tendencies, been retained thus long by the force of prejudice; and that it has not spread further we hold to be owing to its manifest folly and to its evidently noxious influence when applied to any case but that to which it is appropriated. There can be no surer proof that the principle itself is false.