The Destiny of the Soul: A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life

by William Rounseville Alger

that at the termination of the present state there is nothing to prevent the flowing of an equal bliss impartially over all. The substantive faculties and forces of the soul are always good and right: only their action is perverted to evil.13 This perversion will cease with the accidents of the present state; and thus death is the door to salvation. God's desires and intentions for his creatures, again they argue, must be purely gracious and blessed; for Nature, the Bible, and the Soul blend their ultimate teachings in one affirmation that he is Love. Being omnipotent and of perfect wisdom, nothing can withstand his decrees or thwart his plans. His purpose, of course, must be fulfilled. There is every thing to prove, and nothing, rightly understood, to disprove, that that purpose is the eternal blessedness of all his intelligent offspring after death. Therefore, they think they are justified in concluding, the laws of nature, God's regular habits and course of government, the normal arrangement and process of things, will of themselves work out the inevitable salvation of all mankind. After the uproar and darkness, the peril and fear, of a tempestuous night, the all embracing smile of daylight gradually spreads over the world, and the turmoil silently subsides, and the scene sleeps. So after the sins and miseries, the condemnation and hell, of this state of existence, shall succeed the redemption, the holiness and happy peace, of heaven, into which all pass by the order of nature, the original and undisturbed arrangement of the creative Father. This view is advanced by some on grounds both of revelation and reason. It is the doctrine of those Beghards who taught that "there is neither hell nor purgatory; that no one is damned, neither Jew nor Saracen, because on the death of the body the soul returns to God."14 But the proper doctrine of the Universalist denomination is founded directly on Scripture, and seems now to be simply the absolute certainty of final salvation for all. Balfour held that Christ, in obedience to the will of God, secures eternal life for all men in the most literal manner, by causing the resurrection of the dead from their otherwise endless sleep in the grave, a doctrine nearly or quite fossil now.15

It will be noticed that by this view salvation is an unlimited necessity, not a contingency, a boon thrown to all, and which no one has power to reject:

"The road to heaven is broader than the world,
And deeper than the kingdoms of the dead;
And up its ample paths the nations tread
With all their banners furl'd."

This theory contains elements, it seems to us, both of truth and falsehood. It casts off gross mistakes, announces some fundamental realities, overlooks, perverts, exaggerates, some essential facts in the case. There is so much in it that is grateful and beautiful that we cannot wonder at its reception where the tender instincts of the heart are stronger than the stern decisions of the conscience, where the kindly sentiments usurp the province of the critical reason and sit in judgment upon evidence for the construction of a dogmatic creed. We

13 Universalist Quarterly Review, vol. x. art. xvi.: Character and its Predicates.

14 Hagenbach, Dogmengeschichte, sect. 209, note 14.

15 See Ballou, Examination of the Doctrine of Future Punishment, pp. 152-157. Williamson, Exposition of Universalism, Sermon XL: Nature of Salvation. Cobb, Compend. of Divinity, ch. ix. sect. 3.

cannot accept it as a whole, cannot admit its great unqualified conclusion, not only because there is no direct evidence for it, but because there are many potent presumptions against it. It is not built upon the facts of our consciousness and present experience, but is resolutely constructed in defiance of them by an arbitrary process of assumption and inference; for since God's perfections are as absolute now as they ever can be, and he now permits sin and misery, there is no impossibility that they will be permitted for a season hereafter. If they are necessary now, they may be necessary hereafter. An experience of salvation by all, regardless of what they do or what they leave undone, would also defeat what we have always considered the chief final cause of man, namely, the self determined resistance of Evil and choice of Good, the free formation of virtuous character. The plan of a necessary and indiscriminate redemption likewise breaks the evident continuity of life, ignores the lineal causative power of experience, whereby each moment partially produces and moulds the next, destroys the probationary nature of our lot, and palsies the strength of moral motive. It is furthermore the height of injustice, awarding to all men the same condition, remorselessly swallowing up their infinite differences, making sin and virtue, sloth and toil, exactly alike in the end. Whose earnestly embraces the theory, and meditates much upon it, and reasons closely, will be likely to become an Antinomian. It overlooks the loud, omnipresent hints which tell us that the present state is incomplete and dependent, the part of a great whole, the visible segment of a circle whose complement overarches the invisible world to come, where future correspondences and fulnesses will satisfy and complete present claims and deficiencies. We reject this scheme, as to its distinctive feature, for all those reasons which lead us to accept that final view to which we now turn.

The theory of Christian redemption which seems to us correct, represents the good and evil forces of personal character, harmonious or discordant with the mind of God, as the conditions of salvation or of reprobation. Swedenborg, who teaches that man in the future state is the son of his own deeds in the present state, says he once saw Melancthon in hell, writing, "Faith alone saves," the words fading out as fast as written, because expressive of a falsehood! It is not belief, but love, that dominates the soul, not a mental act, but a spiritual substance. According as the realities of the soul are what they should be, just and pure, or what they should not be, perverted and corrupt, and according as the realities of the soul are in right relations with truth, beauty, goodness, or in vitiated relations with them, so, and to that extent, is the soul saved or lost. This is not a matter of arbitrary determination on one hand; and of helpless submission on the other: it is a matter of Divine permission on one hand, and of free, though sometimes unintelligent and mistaken, choice on the other. The only perdition is to be out of tune with the right constitution and exercise of things and rules. That, of itself, makes a man the victim of guilt and wretchedness. The only salvation is the restoration of the balance and normal efficiency of the faculties, the restoration of their harmony with the moral law, the recommencement of their action in unison with the will of God. When a soul, through its exposure and freedom, becomes and experiences what God did not intend and is not pleased with, what his creative and executive arrangements are not purposely ordered for, it is, for the time, and so far forth, lost. It is saved, when knowledge of truth illuminates the mind, love of goodness warms the heart, energy, purity, and aspiration fill and animate the whole being. Then, having realized in its experience the purposes of Christ's mission, the original aims of its existence, it rejoices in the favor of God. In the harmonious fruition of its internal efficiencies and external relations, all things work together for good unto it, and it basks in the beams of the sun of immortality. Perdition and hell are the condemnation and misery instantaneously deposited in experience whenever and wherever a perverted and corrupt soul touches its relations with the universe. The meeting of its consciousness with the alienated mournful faces of things, with the hostile retributive forces of things, produces unrest and suffering with the same natural necessity that the meeting of certain chemical substances deposits poison and bitterness. Perdition being the degradation and wretchedness of the soul through ingrained falsehood, vice, impurity, and hardness, salvation is the casting out of these evils, and the replacing them with truth, righteousness, a holy and sensitive life. To ransom from hell and translate to heaven is not, then, so much to deliver from a local dungeon of gnawing fires and worms, and bear to a local paradise of luxuries, as it is to heal diseases and restore health. Hell is a wrong, diseased condition of the soul, its indwelling wretchedness and retribution, wherever it may be, as when the light of day tortures a sick eye. Heaven is a right, healthy condition of the soul, its indwelling integrity and concord, in whatever realms it may reside, as when the sunshine bathes the healthy orb of vision with delight. Salvation is nothing more nor less than the harmonious blessedness of the soul by the fruition of all its right powers and relations. Remove a man who is writhing in the agonies of some physical disease, from his desolate hut on the bleak mountain side to a gorgeous palace in a delicious tropical clime. He is just as badly off as before. He is still, so to speak, in hell, wherever he may be in location. Cure his sickness, and then he is, so to speak, saved, in heaven. It is so with the soul. The conditions of salvation and reprobation are not arbitrary, mechanical, fickle, but are the interior and unalterable laws of the soul and of the universe. "Every devil," Sir Thomas Browne says, "holds enough of torture in his own ubi, and needs not the torture of circumference to afflict him." If there are, as there may be, two entirely separate regions in space, whose respective boundaries enclose hell and heaven, banishment into the one, or admission into the other, evidently is not what constitutes the essence of perdition or of salvation, is not the all important consideration; but the characteristic condition of the soul, which produces its experience and decides its destination, that is the essential thing. The mild fanning of a zephyr in a summer evening is intolerable to a person in the convulsions of the ague, but most welcome and delightful to others. So to a wicked soul all objects, operations, and influences of the moral creation become hostile and retributive, making a hell of the whole universe. Purify the soul, restore it to a correct condition, and every thing is transfigured: the universal hell becomes universal heaven.

We may gather up in a few propositions the leading principles of this theory of salvation. First, Perdition is not an experience to which souls are helplessly born, not a sentence inflicted on them by an arbitrary decree, but is a result wrought out by free agency, in conformity to the unalterable laws of the spiritual world. Secondly, heaven and hell are not essentially particular localities into which spirits are thrust, nor states of consciousness produced by outward circumstances, but are an outward reflection from, and a reciprocal action upon, internal character.