Reluctantly, impelled by a sense of duty, I have dealt with this theory more fully than with the others. Should any godly people fear that I am lightening an awful deterrent to sin let me say what long experience has taught me of the danger of this common theory.
It is making sad loving hearts whom God has not made sad and making earnest Christians, who feel forced to believe it, perplexed about the love and justice of God and the prophecies of the final victory of good.
It is forcing into the background the true and awfully solemn teaching about Hell which ought to be prominent in all our pulpits. When men cannot see any possible reconciliation between the doctrine of God's love and their doctrine of Hell they are very apt to find an easy way out. "We cannot reconcile them," said a young layman to me one day, "therefore we drop out one of them—Hell." Do not be shocked at it. Many besides my young layman are unconsciously doing it. Nowadays more than ever we, clergy, are teaching much about the love of God. But nowadays more than ever we are holding our tongues about Hell. We know the horrible idea which Hell commonly conveys. Therefore we keep it in the background trusting that our hearers will leave it there during the sermon on God's love. But they do not, and so we are very unconvincing about both doctrines.
Again, this common theory of Hell is so unreasonable that it has lost its power as a deterrent. No teaching from which Conscience revolts can long hold its power over men. The rough common sense, the rough moral sense of careless men makes them reject it and treat it as a subject of jest. When men can stupidly laugh together over jests about hell-fire, when the devil is presented as a clown in the pantomime it indicates something very wrong in the teaching. No doctrine has any real hold on the crowd when they can lightly jest about it. And because of their unbelief in this false notion of Hell they are ceasing to believe in any Hell at all—ceasing to believe in that awful real Hell which is taught in the Bible and of which God is giving some men foretastes even in this life.
And this false notion of Hell tends to shake men's belief in the reality of Heaven. For if the redeemed could enjoy their bliss in Heaven, knowing that myriads are existing for ever and ever in endless suffering and still worse in endless sin, one feels that they have grown so selfish and opposite to Christ that they have no business in any heaven.
We dare not leave out the love of God and we dare not leave out the doctrine of Hell. Both are certainly true. Therefore they must be capable of reconciliation. The reconciliation must not come in ignoring Hell or believing in a kindly, good-natured God who does not judge severely about moral character and who only cares that His child should stop crying and be happy. We are having too much of this sentimentalism nowadays. It is a miserable misconception of that awful holiness which is "of purer eyes than to behold iniquity." It would never explain the need of Christ dying on the cross to put away sin.
Whatever reconciliation we find here or hereafter it must have at bottom God's unutterable hatred of sin but also God's unutterable love and pain over every sinful soul which He has made. This theory of Endless Torment and Endless Sin certainly does not appear to satisfy this test, and it has in addition to face the stern revolt of Reason and Conscience.
II
The theory of Universalism, i. e., that all men shall at length be saved.
This opinion is based on the more hopeful side of Scripture that we have referred to, but it ignores or explains away what contradicts it in the darker and sterner side. If one could forget that, it would be the most inspiring of all the guesses that have been made. As presented by its best exponents, such men as Allen and Jukes and Cox, it is wonderfully attractive and at first sight seems to satisfy many of the conditions of the problem. It takes account of a just and awful retribution for every sin, and takes account also of the mysterious hope in the Hereafter which runs through the Bible. It believes that the power of God has infinite resources and that the love of God has unwearying persistence and that no soul can ultimately resist such resources and such love. Even Hell itself it deems God's final effort when all other means have failed.