The only divine supremacy which Dr. Adams admits is that of force. God is, on the whole, stronger than the Devil; so that He can prevent him from carrying his ravages beyond certain limits. God can “hem in and overrule” the power of sin; but he cannot conquer it. He has no complete power over the heart and will of [pg 466] men to become supreme there; but he has power over their conduct, and can restrain that within certain limits.
God's sovereignty, according to Dr. Adams, is only like that of a human government, and that, again, a weak one. A human government is strong when it is able to dispense with standing armies, with an omnipresent police, with prisons and dungeons: it is weak when its authority is only maintained by these. In the first case, it rests on the love of the people; in the other case, only on force.
Now, according to Dr. Adam's tract, God's sovereignty is essentially one of force. He is not sovereign by overcoming sin through his own holiness, but only by restraining its outbreaks by externally applied force. So far from conquering sin, he is represented as giving up all hope of conquering it. He has tried everything in his power, and has failed. He can do nothing more. Dr. Adams speaks of God's “having expended upon us all which the gospel of his grace includes,” and of “the failure of that which is the brightness of his glory.” Now, Dr. Adams says, “What God will probably do is, to go away and leave us,” God says, according to the idea of this tract, “I will place all of you, who sin, in a world by yourselves, from which I and my friends will forever withdraw.” In substance, He gives up, and acknowledges himself defeated. He is beaten by sin, which is more powerful than his gospel. Sin compels the Deity to compromise; to take some souls, and to leave others; to divide the universe,—love reigning in one part of it, hatred and wickedness in another.
2. The second objection to the doctrine of everlasting punishment, as taught in these works, is, that it is a system of pure materialism. It is naturalism, as opposed to supernaturalism. All its arguments from Scripture interpret Scripture according to its letter, and not according to its spirit. While much stress is laid on the word “eternal,” no real eternity is believed in, or even conceived of. The fundamental law of religious knowledge—namely, that a man must be born of the Spirit in order to see the kingdom of God, and that spiritual things must be spiritually discerned—is wholly lost sight of. The spiritual world, with its bliss and its woe, is supposed to be a continuation of the natural world, instead of being its exact opposite. The same conditions of space and time are supposed to prevail there as here. Hell is regarded by Dr. Adams as a large place, located in some remote part of the universe, where the sufferings and blasphemies of damned souls [pg 467] and devils will not disturb the sentimental happiness of himself and his pious companions. Eternity he regards as an enormous and quite inconceivable accumulation of time, instead of being the very negation of time. An unlimited quantity of days, months, and years, is his notion of eternity.
In like manner, all the arguments by which the school to which he belongs maintains this doctrine, are drawn from relations which exist in this world. Great use is made of the analogies of human government. It is said that it would not be safe for the Deity to forgive sins on the simple condition of repentance, without an atonement, because it would not be safe for human governments to do so. The government of God is made wholly similar to the imperfect and ignorant governments of men. When we say that God, as described in the New Testament, is not a Being to inflict everlasting suffering hereafter, we are told that he inflicts suffering here; as though there were no essential distinction between the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal. When we argue that God would not suspend the eternal destiny of a soul upon the conduct and the determination of a brief earthly life, we have instances given us of great risks to which we are exposed, and great evils which we may incur, in this world; as though there were no difference between a partial loss and total destruction. When we say that the justice of God will not permit him to punish everlastingly those who, like the heathen, have never known Christ, we have instances given of those who have ignorantly burned themselves or have fallen down precipices. In all such examples, these reasoners overlook the essential distinction between the finite and the infinite. They forget that all finite evil can be made the means of a greater ultimate good, but that infinite evil cannot.
It is a curious fact, that those who are most Orthodox fall most easily into a very hard and dry naturalism. God is to them a king sitting on a throne in some far heaven outside of the world, not a spirit pervading it and sustaining it. He governs men from without by offering them rewards and threatening them with punishments, not by inward inspirations and influence. He teaches them from without by an outward Christ, an outward Bible, outward preachers, pulpits, creeds, Sabbaths, and churches; not by Christ formed within us, not by epistles and gospels written on the fleshly tables of the heart. The day of judgment is a particular time, when God shall sit on his throne, and all appear before him; [pg 468] not the perpetual spiritual sentence pronounced in each human soul by the divine law. And so heaven is a place where there is to be some singing of psalms, and such amusements as are here considered proper in Orthodox families; hell, another place, where souls are shut up, to suffer from physical fire, or at least from some external infliction. The doctrine taught by the Saviour in the first twelve verses of his first sermon, that the humble, the generous, the merciful, are already blessed, and have heaven now, does not appear to be at all comprehended. That heaven and hell are in this world already; that truth, love, and use are its essence, whilst falsehood and selfishness are the essence of hell,—these, though rudimental facts of Christianity, are commonly considered mere mysticism. But those who do not see all this have not seen the kingdom of heaven, and must be born again, into a new world of spiritual ideas, in order to see it.
3. The third and principal argument against the doctrine of everlasting punishment is, that it is inconsistent with the divine love to his creatures. It is impossible for God to manifest love to a human being by inflicting everlasting torment upon him. It cannot do him good, because, according to this theory, the period of probation is past, and he has no power now to repent. As far, therefore, as the man himself is concerned, it is gratuitous suffering—torment inflicted without any purpose. It cannot be said that God has any love for the soul which he is treating in this way. He has cast it off. To that soul, nevermore, throughout the ages of an everlasting existence, shall God appear as a friend, but always as an enemy.
We sometimes hear of a father who disinherits a child in consequence of some act of disobedience. In one of the most touching tragedies in the English language, a father refuses to forgive his daughter who had married contrary to his wishes. He leaves her to starve, and refuses to forgive her or to see her. No one approves of this conduct in the parent. But every Orthodox man, who believes in everlasting punishment, attributes an infinitely greater cruelty to God; infinitely greater, because the obstinacy of the human parent endures only during a short life, but the severity of God endures forever.
The force of this objection is such, that Dr. Adams has felt obliged to add to his tract on “Everlasting Punishment” another tract upon the text, “God is love,” endeavoring to show a consistency between the two. But he does this by substituting something [pg 469] else in the place of the last. It is curious enough, that a master in Israel should have written a tract upon the “love” of God, and should have substituted “benevolence” instead of it. In other words, instead of that fatherly love to every individual which is the essential fact revealed in the gospel, he gives us a general good-will towards the human race. Such a general benevolence he finds not inconsistent with the doctrine of everlasting punishment; for, if love be only general good-will, then, the greatest good of the greatest number being the object, there is nothing to complain of if a few are sacrificed for the sake of the rest. It is not, to be sure, easy to see how those who have safely reached glory, and are in no danger of relapse, can be benefited by the knowledge that their old neighbors and friends are in hell; but there may be some benefit which is not apparent. By quietly substituting, therefore, the idea of benevolence in the place of love, the difficulty may be evaded, which otherwise is unanswerable.
But what an entire confusion of ideas is this, which substitutes a general benevolence for a personal affection, good-will towards the race for love to the individual! It is, in fact, abolishing the idea of Father, and substituting that of Ruler. The kind ruler, actuated by benevolence, desires the good of all his subjects; but he does not love them as individuals. But the father loves the child with a wholly different feeling. The tie is personal, not general. It is one of mutual knowledge and mutual dependence. We cannot love one whom we do not know; but we can exercise benevolence towards him very easily. Benevolence depends wholly on the character of the benevolent person; but love is drawn out by the object loved. I do not love my child because I am benevolent, but because it is my child. The infant draws forth a host of feelings, before unknown, in the mother's heart. She does not love her infant because she is a benevolent woman, but because the infant excites her love. A man is benevolent towards the sufferers in Kansas, whom he has never seen; but he does not love them. He loves his wife, but is not benevolent towards her. Benevolence and love, therefore, are not only essentially different in their nature, origin, and manifestations, but so different as often to exclude each other.