What man knows constitutes his present world. All beyond that constitutes another world. He can imagine two modes in which his desire for a life after death may be gratified, a removal into the Unknown World, or a return into the Known World. With the latter supposition the restoration of the flesh is involved.
Upon the whole, our conclusion is, that in the original plan of the world it was fixed that man should not live here forever, but that the essence of his life should escape from the flesh and depart to some other sphere of being, there either to fashion itself a new form, or to remain disembodied. If those who hold the common doctrine of a carnal resurrection should carry it out with philosophical consistency, by extending the scheme it involves to all existing planetary races as well as to their own, should they cause that process of imagination which produced this doctrine to go on to its legitimate completion, they would see in the final consummation the sundered earths approach each other, and firmaments conglobe, till at last the whole universe concentred in one orb. On the surface of that world all the risen races of being would be distributed, the inhabitants of a present solar system making a nation, the sum of gigantic nationalities constituting one prodigious, death exempted empire, its solitary sovereign GOD. But this is pure poetry, and not science nor philosophy.
25 Lange on the Resurrection of the Body, Studien und Kritiken, 1836.
CHAPTER IV.
DOCTRINE OF FUTURE PUNISHMENT; OR, CRITICAL HISTORY OF THE IDEA OF A HELL.
A HELL of fire and brimstone has been, perhaps still is, the most terrible of the superstitions of the world. We propose to give a historic sketch of the popular representations on this subject, trace them to their origin, and discuss the merits of the question itself. To follow the doctrine through all its variations, illustrating the practical and controversial writings upon it, would require a large volume; but, by a judicious arrangement, all that is necessary to a fair understanding of the subject, or really interesting, may be presented within the compass of an essay. Any one who should read the literature of this subject would be astonished at the almost universal prevalence of the doctrine and at the immense diversity of appalling descriptions of it, and would ask, Whence arises all this? How have these horrors obtained such a seated hold in the world?
In the first place, it is to be replied, as soon as reason is in fair possession of the idea of a continued individual existence beyond the grave, the moral sense, discriminating the deeds, tempers, and characters of men, would teach that there must be different allotments and experiences for them after death. It is not right, say reason and conscience, for the coward, the idler, fool, knave, sot, murderer, to enter into the same realm and have the same bliss with heroes, sages, and saints; neither are they able to do it. The spontaneous thought and sentiment of humanity would declare, if the soul survives the body, passing into the invisible world, its fortunes there must depend somewhat upon its fitness and deserts, its contained treasures and acquired habits. Reason, judging the facts of observation according to the principles of ethics and the working of experienced spiritual laws, at once decides that there is a difference hereafter between the fate of the good heart and the bad one, the great soul and the mean one: in a word, there is, in some sense or other, a heaven and a hell.
Again: the same belief would be necessitated by the conception, so deeply entertained by the primitive people of the earth, of overruling and inspecting gods. They supposed these gods to be in a great degree like themselves, partial, fickle, jealous, revengeful. Such beings, of course, would caress their favorites and torture their offenders. The calamities and blessings of this life were regarded as tokens, revengeful or loving, of the ruling deities, now pleased, now enraged. And when their votaries or victims had passed into the eternal state, how natural to suppose them still favored or cursed by the passionate wills of these irresponsible gods! Plainly enough, they who believe in gods that launch thunderbolts and upheave the sea in their rage and take vengeance for an insult by sending forth a pestilence, must also believe in a hell where Ixion may be affixed to the wheel and Tantalus be tortured with maddening mockeries. These two conceptions of discriminating justice and of vengeful gods both lead to the theoretic construction of a hell, and to the growth of doctrines and parables about it, though in a different sort, the former illustrating a pervasive law which distributes men according to their deserts, the latter speaking of beings with human passions, who inflict outward arbitrary penalties according to their pleasure.
Thirdly, when the general idea of a hell has once obtained lodgment, it is rapidly nourished, developed, and ornamented, carried out into particulars by poets, rhetoricians, and popular teachers, whose fancies are stimulated and whose figurative views and pictures act and react both upon the sources and the products of faith. Representations based only on moral facts, emblems addressing the imagination, after a while are received in a literal sense, become physically located and clothed with the power of horror. A Hindu poet says, "The ungrateful shall remain in hell as long as the sun hangs in heaven." An old Jewish Rabbi says that after the general judgment "God shall lead all the blessed through hell and all the damned through paradise, and show to each one the place that was prepared for him in each region, so that they shall not be able to say, 'We are not to be blamed or praised; for our doom was unalterably fixed beforehand.' Such utterances are originally moral symbols, not dogmatic assertions; and yet in a rude age they very easily pass into the popular mind as declaring facts literally to be believed. A Talmudic writer says, "There are in hell seven abodes, in each abode seven thousand caverns, in each cavern seven thousand clefts, in each cleft seven thousand scorpions; each scorpion has seven limbs, and on each limb are seven thousand barrels of gall. There are also in hell seven rivers of rankest poison, so deadly that if one touches it he bursts." Hesiod, Homer, Virgil, have given minute descriptions of hell and its agonies, descriptions which have unquestionably had a tremendous influence in cherishing and fashioning the world's faith in that awful empire. The poems of Dante, Milton, and Pollok revel in the most vivid and terrific pictures of the infernal kingdom and its imagined horrors; and the popular doctrine of future punishment in Christendom is far more closely conformed to their revelations than to the declarations of the New Testament. The English poet's "Paradise Lost" has undoubtedly exerted an influence on the popular faith comparable with that of the Genevan theologian's "Institutes of the Christian Religion." There is a horrid fiction, widely believed once by the Jewish Rabbins and by the Mohammedans, that two gigantic fiends called the Searchers, as soon as a deceased person is buried, make him sit up in the grave, examine the moral condition of his soul, and, if he is very guilty, beat in his temples with heavy iron maces. It is obvious to observe that such conceptions are purely arbitrary, the work of fancy, not based on any intrinsic fitness or probability; but they are received because unthinking ignorance and hungry superstition will greedily believe any thing they hear. Joseph Trapp, an English clergyman, in a long poem thus sets forth the scene of damnation: "Doom'd to live death and never to expire, In floods and whirlwinds of tempestuous fire The damn'd shall groan, fire of all kinds and forms, In rain and hail, in hurricanes and storms, Liquid and solid, livid, red, and pale, A flaming mountain here, and there a flaming vale; The liquid fire makes seas, the solid, shores; Arch'd o'er with flames, the horrid concave roars. In bubbling eddies rolls the fiery tide, And sulphurous surges on each other ride. The hollow winding vaults, and dens, and caves, Bellow like furnaces with flaming waves. Pillars of flame in spiral volumes rise, Like fiery snakes, and lick the infernal skies. Sulphur, the eternal fuel, unconsumed, Vomits redounding smoke, thick, unillumed."
But all other paintings of the fear and anguish of hell are vapid and pale before the preternatural frightfulness of those given at unmerciful length and in sickening specialty in some of the Hindu and Persian sacred books.1 Here worlds of nauseating disgusts, of loathsome agonies, of intolerable terrors, pass before us. Some are hung up by their tongues, or by their eyes, and slowly devoured by fiery vermin; some scourged with whips of serpents whose poisonous fangs lacerate their flesh at every blow; some forced to swallow bowls of gore, hair, and corruption, freshly filled as fast as drained; some packed immovably in red hot iron chests and laid in raging furnaces for unutterable millions of ages. One who is familiar with the imagery of the Buddhist hells will think the pencils of Dante and Pollok, of Jeremy Taylor and Jonathan Edwards, were dipped in water. There is just as much ground for believing the accounts of the former to be true as there is for crediting those of the latter: the two are fundamentally the same, and the pagan had earlier possession of the field.