There are three great arguments in refutation of the endlessness of future punishment, as that doctrine is commonly held. The first argument is ethical, drawn from the laws of right; the second is theological, drawn from the attributes of God; the third is experimental, drawn from the principles of human nature. We shall subdivide these and consider them successively.
In the first place, we maintain that the popular doctrine of eternal punishment is unjust, because it overlooks the differences in the sins of men, launching on all whom it embraces one infinite penalty of undiscriminating damnation. The consistent advocates of the doctrine, the boldest creeds, unflinchingly avow this, and defend it by the plea that every sin, however trivial, is equally an offence against the law of the infinite God with the most terrible crime, and equally merits an infinite punishment. Thus, by a metaphysical quibble, the very basis of morals is overturned, and the child guilty of an equivocation through fear is put on a level with the pirate guilty of robbery and murder through cold blooded avarice and hate. In a hell where all are plunged in physical fire for eternity there are no degrees of retribution, though the degrees of evil and demerit are as numerous and various as the individuals. The Scriptures say, "Every man shall receive according to the deeds done in the body:" some "shall be beaten with many stripes," others "with few stripes."
The first principle of justice exact discrimination of judgment according to deeds and character is monstrously violated and all differences blotted out by the common dogma of hell. A better thought is shown in the old Persian legend which tells that God once permitted Zoroaster to accompany him on a visit to hell. The prophet saw many in grievous torments. Among the rest, he saw one who was deprived of his right foot. Asking the meaning of this, God replied, "Yonder sufferer was a king who in his whole life did but one kind action. Passing once near a dromedary which, tied up in a state of starvation, was vainly striving to reach some provender placed just beyond its utmost effort, the king with his right foot compassionately kicked the fodder within the poor beast's reach. That foot I placed in heaven: the rest of him is here." 18
Again: there is the grossest injustice in the first assumption or fundamental ground on which the theory we are opposing rests. That theory does not teach that men are actually damned eternally on account of their own personal sins, but on account of original sin: the eternal tortures of hell are the transmitted penalty hurled on all the descendants of Adam, save those who in some way avoid it, in consequence of his primal transgression. Language cannot characterize with too much severity, as it seems to us, the injustice, the immorality, involved in this scheme. The belief in a sin, called "original," entailed by one act of one person upon a whole immortal race of countless millions, dooming vast majorities of them helplessly to a hopeless torture prison, can rest only on a sleep of reason and a delirium of
18 Wilson's ed. of Mill's Hist. of British India, vol. i. p. 429, note.
conscience. Such a "sin" is no sin at all; and any penalty inflicted on it would not be the necessary severity of a holy God, but a species of gratuitous vengeance. For sin, by the very essence of ethics, is the free, intelligent, wilful violation of a law known to be right; and every punishment, in order to be just, must be the suffering deserved by the intentional fault, the personal evil, of the culprit himself. The doctrine before us reverses all this, and sends untold myriads to hell forever for no other sin than that of simply having been born children of humanity. Born totally depraved, hateful to God, helpless through an irresistible proclivity to sin and an ineradicable aversion to evangelical truth, and asked to save themselves, asked by a mockery like that of fettering men hand and foot, clothing them in leaden straitjackets, and then flinging them overboard, telling them not to drown! What justice, what justice, is here in this?
Thirdly, the profound injustice of this doctrine is seen in its making the alternative of so unutterably awful a doom hinge upon such trivial particulars and upon merely fortuitous circumstances. One is born of pious, orthodox parents, another of heretics or infidels: with no difference of merit due to them, one goes to heaven, the other goes to hell. One happens to form a friendship with an evangelical believer, another is influenced by a rationalist companion: the same fearful diversity of fate ensues. One is converted by a single sermon: if he had been ill that day, or had been detained from church by any other cause, his fated bed would have been made in hell, heaven closed against him forever. One says, "I believe in the Trinity of God, in the Deity of Christ;" and, dying, he goes to heaven. Another says, "I believe in the Unity of God and in the humanity of Christ:" he, dying, goes to hell. Of two children snatched away by disease when twenty four hours old, one has been baptized, the other not: the angels of heaven welcome that, the demons of hell clutch this. The doctrine of infant damnation, intolerably painful as it is, has been proclaimed thousands of times by authoritative teachers and by large parties in the Church, and is a logical sequence from the popular theology. It is not a great many years since people heard, it is said, the celebrated statement that "hell is paved with the skulls of infants not a span long!" Think of the everlasting bliss or misery of a helpless infant depending on the petty accident of whether it was baptized or not! There are hypothetical cases like the following: If one man had died a year earlier, when he was a saint, he would not have fallen from grace, and renounced his faith, and rolled in crimes, and sunk to hell. If another had lived a year later, he would have been smitten with conviction, and would have repented, and made his peace, and gone to heaven. To the everlasting loss of each, an eternity of bliss against an eternity of woe hung fatally poised on the time appointed for him to die. Oh how the bigoted pride, the exclusive dogmatism of self styled saints, self flatterers equally satisfied of their own election and of the rejection of almost everybody else, ought to sink and fade when they reflect on the slight chances, mere chances of time and place, by which the infinite contingency has been, or is to be, decided! They should heed the impregnable good sense and logic conveyed in the humane hearted poet's satirical humor when he advises such persons to
"Consider well, before, like Hurlothrumbo,
They aim their clubs at any creed on earth,
That by the simple accident of birth
They might have been high priests to Mumbo Jumbo."
It is evidently but the rankest mockery of justice to suspend an infinite woe upon an accident out of the power of the party concerned.
Still further: there is a tremendous injustice even in that form of the doctrine of endless punishment, the most favorable of all, which says that no one is absolutely foreordained to hell, but that all are free, and that life is a fixed season of probation wherein the means of salvation are offered to all, and if they neglect or spurn them the fault is their own, and eternal pain their merited portion. The perfectly apparent inconsistency of this theory with known facts is fatal to it, since out of every generation there are millions on millions of infants, idiots, maniacs, heathen, within whose hearing or power the means of salvation by a personal appropriation of the atoning merit of Christ's blood were never brought; so that life to them is no scene of Christian probation. But, waiving that, the probation is not a fair one to anybody. If the indescribable horror of an eternal damnation be the consequence that follows a certain course while we are on trial in this life, then a knowledge of that fact in all its bearings ought to be given us, clear, explicit, beyond any possibility of mistake or doubt. Otherwise the probation is not fair. To place men in the world, as millions are constantly placed, beset by allurements of every sort within and without, led astray by false teachings and evil examples, exposed in ignorance, bewildered with uncertainties of conflicting doubts and surmises, either never hearing of the way of salvation at all, or hearing of it only in terms that seem absurd in themselves and unaccompanied by sufficient, if by any, proof, and then, if under these fearful hazards they waver from strict purity of heart, rectitude of conduct, or orthodoxy of belief, to condemn them to a world of everlasting agony, would be the very climax of cruelty, with no touch of mercy or color of right.