Then and there we see that the Christian doctrines of incarnation and atonement should properly have an unmistakable connexion both with our own lives, their needs and aspirations, and with truth we have come to know through men of science. Those doctrines are, to begin with, an explicit recognition of a promise of freedom which the force of emergent life has striven for and secured, and which men are called upon to realize for themselves. That men shall fulfil their destiny more and ever more of life, it seems, must become theirs. That is, more and more of the spirit and life of God must become in very fact, not merely their own, but themselves. This the Christian speaks of as the incarnation or the extension of the incarnation of God in man. And, plainly, there is nothing in the teaching of Jesus, or in his work and person, which implies that this process is mechanical or that, being spiritual, it can be inevitable. God in the nature of things, of himself, cannot—will not, if you like, it is the same—compel union with him. Therefore men can escape their destiny of union with God by rejecting his proffer of more and greater life. They have their fate in their own hands; they may choose amiss.
Then, the Christian says, that other aspect of the love of God, which in fact is only other because we speak of it as though it were and look at it in a special point of view, his atonement or reconciliation of man with himself, comes into play. Here, too, love seeks to win love, will invites the co-operation of will, and wisdom pleads. No mechanism, no compulsion, nothing arbitrary or even commanding. 'Come unto me,' he says. And every effort love can make that man may be won is made, even to that of the agony and death of the lover that the loved one may be rescued from slavery to self, and brought into the life of love and the liberty wherewith Christ would make him free.
A deepening enslavement by sin, or a growing liberty in vital union with the Christ of God—these are the alternatives put before us in the Christian religion. And again we see life—or shall we say God?—striving to give freedom, yet with no preordained success. As in the plants and beasts life found no open way for that advance, so, although in man the way was found, men can bring it to an end merely by desiring and seeking no more than gratification of the narrow interests of a self that is bounded by self-seeking. It seems that life can be as effectually checked by this as, in a lower order, it was checked by the coating of cellulose on the vegetable cell. It is possible for a man so to imprison himself in self as to shut out God, so to build a wall about himself as to cut off from his life that fountain of living waters on which its advance and true continuance depend. He contracts into an eddy, a circling stream narrowed within set boundaries of himself. He becomes as the lower beasts, but worse than they because he is no beast.
The Christian says that when this process of cutting off and shutting out reaches completion, the man is in hell. And the language of symbol and pictorial imagination has spent itself in trying to express what that really means. Naturally, the symbolism and the painting have varied with the character of imagination at different times and in different nations. What we must tell ourselves is that they are no more than this, and that they may well both falter and fail before a horror so extreme.
The shutting-down, the extinction, of a man—for this is what it amounts to—who is capable of an indefinite advance in freedom and life, in love and wisdom and knowledge—that is, in God and fellowship—is a catastrophe with which the blotting-out of all the mighty beasts of the past is incomparable. Consider, if he were the only man? Yet is he the less what he is because he is one of millions? For one man, the Christian says, Christ would die, though it is for all men that he died. 'The very hairs of your head are numbered.'
One man in hell—think of it. One man who might have been united with God in an influx of inexhaustible new life lifting him from order to order of glory—that is what the Christian sees and what leads him, or has led him often, to describe such a loss in terms from which we shrink to-day. But if we learn to see what it is the Christian means, can we say that he goes too far? Or shall we not say that if we had at our command words fit to depict his meaning they would go even farther? No doubt we see plainly the absurdity of material fires and the religious and psychological falsity of the picture of human beings vainly desiring God, when we know that, as has been said by a great Christian, 'the sun meets not the springing bud that stretches toward him, with half that certainty, as God, the Source of all good, communicates himself to the soul that longs to partake of him.' But the fact remains that to lose life in 'the second death,' to pass out of all fellowship whether with man or God, to shrink into an ever-shrivelling creature who cares for nothing outside its ever-narrowing and concentrating self-love, is for any live, loving, healthy-minded man or woman as terrible and repulsive a fate as ever a painter or poet or theologian of old times attempted to describe.
Yet it seems reasonable enough. If we will not live we shall not live. If God, the Christian says, is permitted by us to reconcile us with himself, he will reconcile us. If we do not bar out his fountains of life they will live in us as well-springs. We are wholly dependent upon receiving more of his life, but we cannot be compelled to receive it. We may even decline freedom and lose what we had of it, employing it amiss; it is not an inalienable character stamped upon us. We have grown into enough of it to be able to refuse to have more. 'Whosoever hath, to him shall be given; and whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that which he seemeth to have.'
CHAPTER X
A religion that is not founded in nature is all fiction