LEGAL ENFORCEMENTS NOT DIMINISHED.

THE common assumption, that law is absurd or impossible without penal enforcements, is not quite true, or is only true in a given case or condition. God himself acknowledges law even from eternity, though it has to Him no sanction over and above its own excellence. All upright beings do the same. Indeed a law propounded with a penalty, to a realm in perfect holiness, would even be an impropriety, or blamable offense to their feeling. Not so, when propounded to minds no longer capable of being swayed by the authority of beauty and excellence in their own right. For it is the misery and shame of bad minds under sin, that excellence and beauty, powerful as they still are over the sentiments of their higher nature not yet extirpated, are no longer sufficient, by themselves, to recover and restore the broken homage of their fall. They move on a point, too far above the plane of motivity occupied by sin, to control and subdue it. They are likely indeed, when embodied in Christ, to be felt more as a disturbance, than as an attraction. What is wanted therefore, in connection with his new salvation, is some John the Baptist going before, to prepare his way. The new moral power wants a force-power to precede; something which meets the selfishness of sin in its own plane, making the appeal, at first, to interest or precautionary prudence, by intimidations and appeals to fear. To have approving sentiments raised for law in the bosom of transgression, and so to have it kept in reverence, is highly important, or even necessary, but there is wanted, beside, a more rugged sort of argument, that of strong penal enforcements; such as may cut off delays, stop the idle debates of the head, and raise a point-blank issue with pride and willfulness that, being an issue of peril, can not be parried.

To be more exact, we have proposed for us, at this point, two distinct schemes of motivity, neither of which is properly and fully Christian; first the scheme that makes nothing of fear, and the lower motives addressed to prudence, counting wholly on such as lie in the ideal goodness and beauty of holiness itself; and secondly the scheme which, finding natural causes arranged for the penal chastisement of wrong, counts the arrangement a complete moral government in itself, beside which no other is wanted, or in fact exists.

The former scheme assumes that goodness and right are their own argument, able to rule by their own simple excellence. What is good for angels in their height of virtue, is declared to be good also for men in their sin. At any rate, as the argument goes, nothing less, or lower, is permissible any where; for what kind of excellence, or virtue is that, which is goaded by the impulsions of fear and threatened force? If any such thing is thought of, in this scheme, as conversion, the assumption is that evil will let go evil, and turn itself to good, simply for goodness' sake, without any thought or motive met in its own plane to dislodge it. Christ is more practical, and just as much more rational. He does not look on the world as being in a' state to be converted romantically, as by the mere attractions of goodness and beauty. A beginning is to be made, he clearly sees, with sin, at its own level; the level of guilty apprehension, fear, selfishly interested forecast of the future. His first thought is to block the way of transgression, by warnings and appeals of terror. Setting the gate of God's mercy and truth wide open, he does not expect the transgressors to enter, just because he sits there, in the lovely charms of goodness. He expects them to come in, only as he compels them to come in; sending out the rugged sheriffalty of law and penal enforcement, to grapple them, as it were, by the shoulder. It is nothing to him that the first motives felt, in such a case, are too low for any state of virtue. Enough that, by guiltiness, want, fear, interested feeling, struggling with the dreadful and appalling problems of life, he is able to get them arrested in evil, and that, when the arrest is made, consideration begun, willfulness broken, the nobler motives of admiring sentiment--love, beauty, sacrifice--may come into play, and work their captivating spells of goodness on the heart's devotion. No delicate philosophy detains him; if the lower motives appealed to are not fine enough for goodness, they are, at least, coarse enough for badness--just the fit evils to put in the way of evil, just the arguments it is able to feel, when it can be reached by nothing else. And so, by this very practical regimen, he is able to balk the progress of transgression, turn back the soul on thoughtfulness, so on repentance, so on the love of goodness and excellence for their own sake. And this to him more emphatically than to any other teacher of the world, is the only real state of virtue--dear to him specially in the fact, that, in being perfected as love, it casteth out the fear, in whose guilty intimidations it found the opportunity and date of its own beginning.

Thus it is that Christ, recognizing the fears as an original and profoundly rational function of souls, makes no scruple of appeal to them, even when his object is to consummate a character wholly superior to their active sway. He believes, we shall see, in strong penal enforcements, and puts them forward, clear of all delicate misgiving, to be the advance guard of his mercies.

The second scheme referred to holds a humbler key; it is wholly in the plane of prudence and natural retribution; delighting in the discovery that, according to the original outfit of life, the moral law, or law of responsible conduct, has a whole system or economy of causes put in company with it, to be its avengers and redress its violations. And this, it is conceived, is the complete account, or whole, of God's moral government. What we call punishment is the natural correction of our evils. Every sin, they say, is sure to be overtaken by its penalty; no trial, or judge, or judgment-seat, is wanted, the culprit carries his own hells of punishment with him, and every transgression kindles its own fires. And so it is conceived that motives of fear, prudence, and actual suffering, are the only arguments of virtue; which, of course never rises above the control of such, and really wants no other. Salvation itself, if we are to use the term, consists in simply backing out of our wrongs, because we are scorched by justice, or will be, in them. Saying nothing of the very ignoble and mean quality of such virtue, it is plain as it need be, that such kind of enforcement by natural causes, taken by itself, and not as a base for the working of higher motives, makes inevitably the most hopeless, helpless, least enforced, scheme of duty that can be conceived. The result of such a scheme is not any state of virtue, but a state of natural punition that is, without a peradventure, endless. For the penal causations take away, at once, the powers so to speak of obedience. When the soul breaks into sin, the laws of retribution begin forthwith to punish it, by throes of internal disorder, which no power of the will can stop. It is shaken out of equilibrium, out of the full natural possession of itself, out of its constitutional harmony, by the terrible recoil of its transgression. The passions, fears, convictions, sentiments, imaginations, are all set loose in a quarrel with each other, and the will can neither recompose the state of harmony, nor the mind itself accurately conceive the internal readjustments necessary to such harmony. The transgressor could as easily regather his money sown upon the Gulf Stream, as gather himself back out of the penal causations in which he is sweltering. The penal disorders and breakages will propagate, indirectly, other disorders and breakages, and the motions of life itself will be only "the motions of sins," propagating more sins. Even as a broken engine can not mend itself by running, but will only thresh itself into a more complete wreck. Setting his will to obey, as being now corrected by suffering--and he can do nothing more--his will can as little tame the soul's wild turbulences, or quiet the mob of its internal commotions, as it could the public anarchy of an empire. The exact difficulty now is, in fact, that the natural retributions are stronger as disabilities, than as motives, and are therefore no enforcement at all.

Now it is the merit, I conceive, of Christianity, that, of these two schemes of motivity, it holds exactly neither; or perhaps I should rather say that it comprises both together; viz., a standard of divine excellence and beauty, drawing men to goodness by the moral attractions of goodness itself; and a grand economy of penal causations in nature, by which evil done is confronted with evil to be suffered, and is thus forced back, on the consideration of that blessed authority which ought to be loved for its own excellence Only it is a matter of the highest consequence to add that, in comprising these two elements, Christianity holds them both with important additions, or variations, necessary to their effectiveness.

First, that the moral power of good, as expressed by the law, is to get an accession of moral power, in Christ, beyond that which naturally belongs to it as impersonal precept; for it is to be glorified and raised in power, by the miracle of the incarnation, and the sacrifice and supernatural ministry of Jesus. The moral power it gets in this way is to be itself a kind of supernatural person, invested with such life and feeling, by the methods of the cross, that, entering into natures disordered and broken by the penal retributions of sin, it may recompose them in heaven's order and harmony; so to be a true redemption. For it will redeem, in this manner, from the natural laws and causations arranged to serve as enforcements, and prevent these enforcements from issuing in results of eternal disability; as they otherwise would, in the manner just now stated. They were never intended, as retributions, to maintain a mere scheme of obedience by force--which is no obedience at all--but to work in with and toward this other and higher power, that is relatively supernatural, and brings the soul up finally out of their compulsions into a complete liberty in good.

Secondly, this being true, Christianity is able to press the enforcements on that side, with the greatest emphasis, and even to increase the responsibilities enforced. Taken as a scheme of retributive causations in nature, they sleep, as it were, in silence, to be discovered only as they are provoked. But Christianity brings them all out, in the bold announcement of them by a doctrine. And to make them felt, it puts them forward in the shape of positive enactments, to be executed against the transgressors, by a positive judicial sentence. Furthermore it makes the rejection of Christ, and the supernatural grace prepared by him, a great part of the sin to be answered for--just as it must be, in fact, regarding natural causes as the sole agents of retribution; for the greater advantages, and helps, and revelations of goodness and beauty, sin rejects, the greater will be its criminality and the deeper hold of it the fires of natural retribution will, of course, take. In this manner Christianity presses enforcements up to their limit, placing its own great mercies and captivating charms of good always along side of them, and allowing itself never to be detained by any delicate misgivings of philanthropy.

For there is no hardship now in severity; the hardest and sorest defect is really in the want of it. Taken by themselves, the penal sanctions of nature would be only a ministry of condemnation; they would kill and nothing more; now they condemn and slay to make ready for life; lifting their ominous flag of warning on the shoals of future wreck, to beckon the transgressor back on a revised consideration of his courses. Would it be a kindness if this flag were taken down?

It has been convenient, thus far, to speak of penal enforcements simply as compelling motives, or as warnings and intimidations addressed to prudential consideration. But they have a much deeper and more nearly basal office, which is commonly not observed. They have even a certain moral power in themselves, which is of a wholly different cast from that of Christ in the sacrifice, but which he contrives to unite with his own, by the sturdy severities of his doctrine. In our discussions, for example, of punishments in the civil state, and particularly of capital punishments, it appears to be taken for granted, that these two, the intimidation of crime, and the reclamation of the criminals themselves, are the only objects of penalty. Whereas the grandest, and most real, and deep-working office of punishment is the fearfully sharp sense it wakens of crime itself, by such tremendous severities or thunderclaps of extermination--wherein even the good, protective law can so utter itself and must, against the deeds of wrong that shake society. The moral conviction roused is the main benefit--that sensibility to order, and law, and right, that runs quivering through the bosom of all citizens, when the almost sacrilegious violence of justice turns upon the felon's life, commanding the scaffold and the rope to stop his breath! And precisely in the same way it is to be conceived, that strong and terrible retributions, not only serve as motive powers of interest in the government of souls, but have another and weightier office, in creating moral sensibility, or setting in moral conviction, as regards the sanctity of law and the dreadful criminality of sin. Without this, no visitation of mere gentleness and suffering sacrifice will make a salvation that has the true efficacy. The very subsoil of guilt requires to be stirred by God's terrors. They must not simply skim the surfaces of fear, but strike through into the deep underwork of moral conviction itself. All the better too, if we behold the terrible thunder-strokes of Providential severity falling on the head of whole communities, or nations, or specially on the head of the most deserving peoples; because it visibly is now, not sins, but sin, not any special crimes, but the comprehensive criminality of a state unrelational with God, that requires or instigates so great severity. Hence, the great common woes that fall on whole peoples, in what are called the severities of nature--the storms, fires, earthquakes, pestilences, famines, wrecks, orphanages of the world--the unspeakably appalling facts are known, and they have no other solution that is either satisfactory or tolerably sufficient. The language of Christ, applying all such things to the common guilt of mankind, shows in what manner they were understood by him. "Suppose ye that these Galileeans were sinners above all the Galileeans, because they suffer such things? or those eighteen, upon whom the tower of Siloam fell and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you nay, but except ye repent ye shall all likewise perish."

It appears then that Christ, coming to us in his sacrifice, to unbosom the love of God, and publish the free forgiveness of sins, is fully awake, nevertheless, to the sacred necessity of maintaining law by adequate enforcements, and ploughing up moral conviction by great Providential and judicial severities. Only the more fit subject of wonder is it, therefore, that so many teachers are disturbed by their very unnecessary concern for what they call the law; imagining that a free remission may somehow kill the law and contriving even schemes of punition for the Son of God himself, that they may save it! As if the supernatural grace he brings, to rescue from the penal retributions of God, were quite taking away the enforcements; which it, in fact, only makes effective. Most strange it is that, when they are going every way to bring counsel from afar for the saving of law, they can yet see nothing in two such facts as these--continually reiterated by Christ himself--facts almost as new and distinctive even as the forgiveness of sins by his cross; (1.) eternal punishment; (2.) the judgment of the world by himself. Publishing announcements like these, and making even love to thunder, in motives so appalling, is it to be feared that Christ is letting down authority, and obliterating the fixed lines of duty, by some unguarded license of mercy? Why the law never before got itself really uttered, and the grand awards of the future life never showed their true figure of majesty, till they were revealed in this fearful way of emphasis by Christ himself. Accordingly, to these two very remarkable points in the public teaching of Christ, considered as related to the enforcement of law, I now invite the reader's particular attention. And--

I. To the specially Christian declaration of future punishment, sometimes called eternal, or endless punishment.

I am well aware of the disappointment I may inflict on certain progressives, or disciples of the new gospel, that, in so free a handling of what is held by authority, I still give in to a doctrine of the future punishment that is so revolting to reason, and, as they will say, to thoughtful minds already so nearly outgrown. If they can allow any reason for the fact that does not imply a subserviency to prudential motives, let it be that I am thoroughly fixed in the purpose, and that on grounds of reason, never to make a gospel--either to have no gospel at all, or else to accept the gospel that is given me. I have been through all the questions, taken all the turns of doubt, suffered all the struggles of feeling in respect to this confessedly hard looking doctrine of future punishment; I have even learned, in these struggles, to pity the meagerness of any soul that has encountered no troubles and painful misgivings concerning it. Neither is this pity at all diminished but increased, rather, by the fact, that I am brought back finally to acquiesce in it myself, and even to look upon it as being probably a necessary factor of the Christian salvation. What else can we infer, when we find, as we shall by a little search, that our merciful Christ, he that comes in love, and saves by the sacrifice of his life, is the first distinctly responsible promulgator of it himself?

But, before proceeding to show this fact, let us attend to some considerations in which the doctrine may be duly qualified and cleared of the severities, by which it is made unnecessarily shocking to many.

We could well enough allow that the epithet "eternal" [αὶωνὶος] need not mean eternal, in the exact, The word "eternal" not very decisive. speculative sense. It is of no great consequence, that we insist on it as a term of duration logically infinite. Enough that we receive it practically, as giving that finality to thought, beyond which there is, for us, nothing to be meditated farther. It is very true that the same epithet is used respecting the duration both of punishment and of blessedness--"These shall go away into everlasting punishment, and the righteous into life eternal"--but it is surmised by some, without any great violence, that as we get only the slenderest impressions any way of the state of suffering called eternal, the intent of Christ may only be to shove our thought over on that sea, and let us get the measures of it by our long, long voyage afterward; that the punishment is called eternal as the life, because it is the punishment of the eternal state, and is best apprehended here, when taken as a practical finality for the mind.

I make this concession, partly because I have no care to press the matter so far as to make a bad eternity hang on the form of a word, and partly because it is sometimes argued, in the same way, that as the capacity and blessedness of the life are to be forever amplified by exercise, so also are the capacity and woe of the punishment. And this latter is almost certainly not true. It may even be argued, with a considerable show of evidence, that the immortality of the soul does not belong to its mere nature, but depends rather on the eternally imperishable nature of that on which it feeds--God, truth, duty, self-sacrifice, holiness--and that when it only knows and goes after the phantoms of condition, or of mere conventional and temporal good, it must finally die out, for the poverty of that soul-food which it takes for its life. What is sometimes called the doctrine of the annihilation, or literal destruction, of the wicked, is the same more coarsely conceived. A good many passages of Scripture, too, are cited for it, without any great show of violence; and a good many others, with only that common kind of violence which consists in taking literally what is figuratively given.

Rejecting, however, this annihilation theory as, plainly enough, not being the doctrine of Scripture, we still do observe, as a matter of fact, in this present life, that souls under sin are not amplified by their experience in it, as they are by their experience in good. Gaining vigor, it may be, for a little while, they finally begin to shrink in quantity, losing out capacity for both character and the higher kinds of suffering; a fact in which the scheme of purgatorial restorationism loses all show of evidence, or we may almost say of possibility. Every thing we see of sin, in the world of fact, shows it to be a desolating, extirpating power in souls; killing out, by degrees, even the faculties and possibilities of religion, and reducing, in that way, all the hopes and chances of restoration, down to the very last edge of life. Almost any thing, therefore, can be more easily believed, than that, dropping off that edge, with but half a nature left, transgressors are there to be converted and finally restored, by the mere smart of their pains--that which would distract their love-impulse if they had it, and can not do much to restore it if they have it not.

But while this diminution of quantity in souls under sin is fatal, as it certainly is, to any hope of purgatorial recovery, it does not go the length of proving their extinction, but gives exactly the point of view that yields the least exaggerated and truest impression of the Scripture view of punishment. Thus we observe that, for a little while, the human faculties appear to be invigorated by the struggles of passion, or selfish ambition; but that shortly they begin to be inevitably wasted in quantity, narrowed in volume and capacity, so as finally to produce the impression, that their intensity--as in cunning, hatred, envy, policy, and avarice--is getting to be a kind of intensified littleness; a fire still hot, but running low in fuel, and sure to be as much less considerable in its energy, as the substantive quantities of the soul are more diminished. So the wasting goes on doubtless hereafter as here, and the penal wear of bitterness and wrong continues. But it does not follow that the waste will operate a cessation of being, because there are faculties and powers not wasted. The memory is as faithful a recorder of what is bad, as it could be of what is good. The conscience, with its law of right, is not extirpated any more than the sense of time or space. The will is even confirmed by habit in a state of unsubduable capacity, and the will is the grand centralizing element of personality itself. The affinities for what is bad are as durable as they would be in good. The progressive diminution, therefore, is never to end in cessation, but may well be figured by the asymptote curve, which, as the mathematicians will even demonstrate, has the remarkable distinction of forever approaching a straight line even by a fixed law, yet never making coincidence with it. So, probably enough, it may be, and we may even take it as the true conception, that souls which have become only hacks of punishment, will forever continue in being, spinning along their lengths of mediocrity, intensified in points but not enlarged, and having their eternity as the protracted opportunity of their moral insignificance and hopelessness. Under the grand organic law, that faculties not used, or badly misused, are finally extirpated, their religious nature is likely to be nearly, or quite gone by. All the Godward summits of being and thought--aspiration, susceptibility for good, the sense of moral beauty, the power of realization by faith--are demolished, and a coarse, hard nature only remains, graveled by low animosities, without great sentiments, and rising never into any look of altitude, save when it is raised by the vehemence of its passions. Even the suffering that is left is that of a nature tapering down to a diminished grade of feeling, or abject continuity of consciousness, that is only the more desolate that it can not utterly die.

Holding this conception, we go clear, it will be seen, of that very shocking extravagance, which maintains the infinity of future punishment. Mere infinity of duration does not make the quantity infinite, as many so hastily assume; for, if there be a diminution of degree as there is an extension of time, the quantity will never exceed a given amount. So too, if the continuance be endless, not on the score of old sins long ago committed--the sins of the previous lifetime--but as being ordered to match, and measure, and punish, the continuance of new sins, freely committed and persistently adhered to, the eternal punishment so-called, may be only a stream of temporal retributions, appointed to match the stream of eternally recurring transgressions. As regards this matter of amount, or quantity, we can really have no very definite conceptions; for though the state of punishment be endless, we have no gauges of intensity that we can apply, and do not even know how far the continuance rests on the continuance of transgression.

At the same time, we do perfectly know, that the arguments often used to show that the punishment of sin ought to be, and therefore must be, infinite, are groundless--carried by a practice on words that plays them into inferences not contained in their meaning. Thus it is argued that the law of God has infinite value, and that sin therefore, being a violation of it, must be an infinite evil, worthy of an infinite punishment. The constitution of our government, I reply, has very great value, but it does not follow that any particular man's treason, however bold, is in exactly the same measure of consequence. The physical universe is infinite, but it does not follow that any man's infringement of its laws is an infinite infringement. Sometimes the argument is, that every sin heads a train of consequences that is endless, and is therefore infinite, requiring an infinite punishment. So does every most common, or trivial act, bring on after it an endless train of consequences that otherwise would not have happened; no man goes to his breakfast without this result, but it does not follow that his breakfast was infinite. Sometimes the argument is, that since the law of God is the best law possible, he ought, in true justice, to make the strongest expression of attachment to it that is possible; therefore that he ought to inflict the strongest possible punishment for the breach of it. But that strongest possible may be only a finite, carefully moderated punishment; for if God were to lay his omnipotence into the severity of it, he would only shock the sensibility of the public world addressed, by a cruelty visibly monstrous, and the suffering inflicted would have no expression at all that belongs to punishment.

The sober and rational fact, then, as regards the matter of endless punishment, is, that it is a finite retribution, laid upon the head of finite sin, and graduated in a general way by the demerit of it. The suffering state which it produces is described in figures that raise an impression of great severity; and there is no reason to believe that, take them as we may, we shall, at all, exceed the just realization of their degree. They will profoundly shock us, indeed, if we take them literally, and yet, so very slow are we to imagine a condition of unseen spiritual suffering, that we shall not, even then, raise a conception of the real misery that is at all adequate. All the greater and more reasonably conceived misery will it be, if we make no doubt that God is ready, at any future point in the run of it, to embrace, in everlasting reconciliation, any truly repenting soul. I say not any regretful soul, but any soul that is heartily turned to a new and eternally righteous life. For this will be the keen, all-devouring misery, that, with so many regrets, there is so little repentance, or even power of it; that the nature, now but half a nature, halting, as it were, on its clumsy and paralytic members, finds not how to rise any more forever. Strong enough to suffer, and wicked enough to sin, the tendrils of adhesion to God are dead, and it can not fasten itself practically to his friendship. Goodness it remembers but can not sufficiently feel. All its struggles are but heavings of the lower nature--pains of defeat that are only proving, by experiment, their own perpetuity.

Assuming all these qualifications of measure and degree, there is nothing left in the matter of endless punishment, by which we can fitly be disturbed, except that it does not bring out the kingdom of God, in that one state of realized unity, and complete order, which we most naturally desire, and think to be worthiest of his greatness and sovereignty. It certainly would be more agreeable, if we could have this hope; and many are resolved to have it without Christ's permission, if they can not have it with. They even make it a point of merit, to seize this honor bravely for God, on their own responsibility, and for it, if they must, defy the Scripture. I think otherwise, and could even count it a much braver thing, to willingly be less brave, and despite of our natural longings for some issue of God's plan that is different, follow still the lead of the Master.

We come back now from this rather long excursion, where we have been trying to settle our conceptions of the nature of the future punishment, and of the qualifications that may save it from a look of excess, to consider the relation Christ assumes towards it, in his vicarious sacrifice, and the free justification of sins. Observe then--

1. That while he undertakes, in this manner, a universal remission of sin, or even to freely justify every penitent transgressor before God, he has never yet thought, as far as we can discover, that he is putting God's law and justice in jeopardy, or raising any kind of theologic objection, such as now disturbs the concern of many. He does not even appear to think that he is here on any exclusively merciful errand; for though it is a signal distinction of his incarnate ministry, that he reveals the heart of God, and the dear cross hid in his love from eternity, he does not spare to reveal, as faithfully, His truth, and justice, and authority, and righteousness, and all that is required to fill out the majestic proportions of His character and government. He begins, thus, with the declaration that no jot, or tittle of the law shall fail; that no righteousness of scribe or pharisee shall be enough; and can not close his first sermon, without promulgating, several times over, the appalling doctrine of future punishment. This doctrine is quite as distinctively Christian as the forgiveness of sins. I do not, of course, imagine that the fact is new, but the doctrine is. The fact was in the law of natural retribution from the first, just as gravity was in the world before it was declared by science; for the penal disorders, once begun, are not reducible by us, and the trains of retributive causes started by transgression make up a series of propagations naturally endless. Besides, as we just now saw, the total disuse of the religious nature must, in a short time, extirpate all the higher powers and possibilities of religion. And when that is done, when the feasibility of the soul to good is gone by, what is left but a state of incapacity that is final?

Christ, then, brought forth into bold assertion, for the first time, the doctrine of eternal punishment; not as creating the fact, but only as declaring that which lies in the simply natural causalities of retribution. Under the old dispensation the published sanctions of law were temporal, or, if they were such as must naturally run over the border of this life into the next, they were not so conceived or represented, and never, in fact, got their motive power in being so recognized. Indeed, the future life itself is not distinctly conceived as a fact in the early Scriptures. We can see it irresistibly asserted ourselves, in such facts as the translation of Enoch and Elijah, less distinctly in the visitations of angels, visibly felt but unspoken in the longings of good men; but the holiest and best of patriarchs and wisest of teachers still said nothing of it, drew no motives from it. Farther on, expressions begin to be dropped, that show the fact struggling into formal recognition. And yet we find the question still on hand, between the Pharisees and the Sadducees, at the time of Christ's coming, whether there is any such fact of a second existence beyond this life--so completely temporal had been the cast of God's moral government, practically, down to this time. And here it is that Christ, announced by John as coming to lay the axe to the root, and thoroughly purge his floor, and burn up all the chaffy hypocrisies of a mere lifetime sanctity, with unquenchable fire, breaks on the world in his distinct, unflinching, never qualified, oft repeated, variously conceived, proclamation of eternal punishment. His most common way of phrasing the doctrine is derived, perhaps, from the destruction of unclean things by fire in the valley of Hinnom; or perhaps from the combustion of bodies there, as represented in the last chapter and verse of Isaiah. Under this figure, and others variously related, he describes again and again the outcast state of souls. Sometimes the tokens of pain that are added to waken apprehension, though of course not literal, are such as produce a heavy recoil in our sensibility. All the punishments of the Old Testament, even the curses of Ebal, are as dew in comparison. If he had come into the world to be himself the Nemesis of transgression, he could not have spoken words more appalling. The enforcement power was never before carried so far, and could not, even, in thought, be carried farther. There is no scruple in driving the pressure of interested motive to its last limit. Fear could quiver in the dread of no greater loss. And this, it will be noted, from Jesus, the Saviour of the world! he that is incarnated into the world's curse, and dies in his suffering ministry for it! Observe also--

2. That Christ, in these declarations of eternal punishment, never betrays one symptom of doubt, or delicacy, as if there might be some injustice, or over severity in them, such as needs to be carefully qualified. He plainly enough has no such struggles of mind on the subject, as we have. His most delicate, tenderly sensitive humanity gives no single token of being, either offended, or tried, by the fact of so great severities. It can not be that he is untroubled by questions on this subject because he is less tender of man's lot, or of God's honor, than we are, or because he is not far enough on in the world's progress, to have had our great theologic problems occur to him. Perhaps we shall not be able to solve this strangely unquestioning manner of his, but I strongly suspect that the secret of it lies in the fact, that he has a way of conceiving the matter and manner of eternal punishment, such as leaves our modern questions out of sight, and does not even allow them to occur. Perhaps he only thinks of the bad man as going on to eternity in his badness, and the laws of retribution, as going along with him, to keep his voluntary bad deeds company, much as they do here; regarding the malefactor as a malefactor still, and suffering, at any given moment, for being just what he is at that moment--that and nothing more. God has, in fact, put nothing of his pain upon him; he only takes it on himself, and there is really no more reason to be troubled about the severity of his lot than there is here in the retributions of this life.

He uses, it must be admitted, the most appalling figures--"outer darkness," "great gulf fixed," "thirst," "torment," "wailing," "weeping," "a worm that dieth not," "a fire that is not figures. quenched"--but he has no misgiving; probably because words of any kind are so impotent, in giving the due impression of any state unrealized, and need to be even violently overdrawn to answer their object. However this may be, it is quite evident that the tough questions of our modern philanthropism have either not arrived, or are quite gone by, and that notwithstanding his wonderfully intense love for mankind, his feeling still goes with the punitive order of God's retributions, adding even heavier emphasis from his own personal indignations. Again

3. It is a remarkable fact that one of the strongest evidences of the strictly superhuman character of Christ is contributed, or experimentally brought out, by the singular command he has over such, even now, as passionately abjure his doctrine. I make no assumption here that goes beyond the fact of their abjuration itself and the manner of it. They will deny that he asserted any such doctrine of punishment. But they will also admit that he testified, again and again, in all most varied and most pungent words of warning, to what sounds very much like it, and which being qualified. by no process of interpretation, are the very ipsissima verba of the doctrine; that he was the first decisive teacher in this strain; that he insisted much on the point and often recurred to it; and, whatever else may be true, is the practical promulgator and first founder, in that sense, of a something which has gotten footing as the doctrine, or has come to be the doctrine, of eternal punishment; Suppose now that I who write this treatise--a man in my common human figure--had done exactly the same thing, in the same way of precedence, and that, making many speeches on religious subjects, I sprinkle them, all through, as the four gospels are sprinkled, with these fiery denunciations of punishment; how many living men of the whole world, if I were to lead off in such a doctrine, would hear me for one moment with patience? They would not stop to find whether, by some elaborate and careful practice on my words, they could sift the offensive doctrine out of them. Such efforts at interpretation would themselves be an offense. Nothing but contempt, downright, instant, unhesitating contempt, is the due, they would say, of such a teacher. He is a man behind the age; a dark-minded fanatic, without feeling, or justice, or reason, representing God by the low severities of his own morbid nature. And yet what reverence is there to Jesus, in the promulgation of such doctrine! They that deny it most confidently will even strain themselves, to find words of honor and eulogy, in which fitly to applaud his virtues and embody their sense of his perfections. Meantime they go into careful examinations of what seem to be his manifold utterances of the doctrine of eternal punishment, and by laboriously ingenious constructions, which he could easily have made unnecessary, but never once remembered to make, they get the bad meaning wholly out of them. Having proved him thus to be, in fact, about the faultiest, loosest, teacher, in a matter of mere fact, that ever undertook to lead the world, they acquiesce in him perfectly; their reverence is complete!

They do not perceive, that they have done the difficult thing, and rejected the easy. How much easier, when they were detained by a reverence so profound for the manifestly superhuman character of Christ, treating him as they could no other being uttering such declarations, to believe that he was good enough and great enough to see the truth of them; too good, too great, as already proved to their feeling, to allow them any hope of improving his doctrine by the screws they put upon his words. The case is one where the text--"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord"--ought to suggest the query whether, possibly, God is not good enough, or good in a sense that is deep enough, to levy these fearful punishments, just because of his goodness; maintaining them as mysteries of beneficent rule whose scope and contents are to us inscrutable. Again--

4. A true Christian inquirer, struggling with a burdened feeling, under the huge difficulties of this question, will be very apt to meet with such kind of results, or effects, falling under his notice, in the case of those who deny the fact of eternal punishment, as to start a certain spiritual revulsion in him and persuade him that Christ had some sufficient, profoundly deep and true reason for his doctrine, whether we can find it or not. There is plainly enough no object in preaching this kind of salvation (which is no salvation, because there can be no destruction,) but to find a place of impunity in sin, or at least to loosen the yoke of obligation and make it comfortable. And that, when it is a fact, is about the most contemptible, lowest occupation a mortal can be in. And the fruit will correspond with the effort; for the followers of such a leading, it will be observed, range themselves, always and every where, on the side of laxity, or the side opposite to justice and punishment. They will refer all sin to circumstances, and take the blame away. Society is cruel, they will perceive, but wrong, never. But when they come to speak, or be spoken with, in regard to the great spiritual realities of the spiritual life and consciousness, they will scarcely fail to make a demonstration that is simply revolting. To converse successively, with only two or three persons, brought up in this denial of future punishment, and have the conversation turned upon loving God, I have more than once felt would suffice to cure any earnest, living Christian of his misgivings of future punishment, or push him by his most rugged and resolute doubts, whether he can solve them or not. Instead of conceiving of the divine love in that deep, tender way of sacrifice and justifying mercy, that belongs to the cross, they will rattle upon the words in a way so loose and light as to be even shocking. "Do I love God? How could I help loving him? God has never done any thing bad to me, and never wants to do any thing, but to make me happy, Yes, and if there were not so many people praying and supplicating dolefully, as if they were afraid of something, or God a being to be afraid of, I think we should all be happy." Under this gospel of impunity, there grows up a religion which is itself a kind of sauciness to God, as little relieved, as possible, by any subduing property. Beautiful charity! love that bearest all men's burdens! love that believest, hopest, endurest all things! love that can suffer an enemy! love that in Jesus suffered for a world of enemies! love that is born of God supernaturally in souls under evil! love that is fed and fuelled supernaturally, by Christ and his dear passion, inwardly revealed! what hast thou to do with this unchastened, brassy, dinning confidence, which asserts a religion without fear, lays a claim to happiness apart from all condition of repentance, and magnifies a God who, without maintaining any good of principle, consents to be only the convenience of all!

I draw this picture not for any purpose of odium, but simply because it suggests and so nearly justifies the suspicion, that Christ had a reason for his doctrine of eternal punishment, in the necessary and, to him, perceived wants of character itself. We can see, at a glance, that if there were no such future peril, and God were such a being that no fact of destruction were possible under him, then there could, of course, be no salvation, or Saviour. So far it was a point, intrinsically, of Christianity, to assert the doctrine of future punishment; for upon that basis only it stands, as a real salvation. But there seems to have been a deeper and more subtle reason, both for the fact of such punishment originally instituted, and for the assertion of it by Christ; viz., that, by these tremendous severities alone of God, could men be made to feel the cutting edge of principle enough to have it really get into their love, and makes it a principled love. Otherwise it would have no moral quality at all, but like that we have just described, would be only a brazen forwardness, in approving such a God as meets their liking; a God with. out terrors, concerned to get them into happiness, either with, or without, principles.

However this may be, it is not difficult to see how far the success and saving power of the gospel of Christ depend on these appeals to fear, and these cogent motivities of interest, by which he so unsparingly presses the world; for by these it is, and only by these, that he takes men at the point where they have any sufficient sensibility. By this appalling law-work he breaks their security, startles their negligence, rouses their guiltiness into a ferment, and calls out the question, what shall we do? Never, it is very true, does any one of these motivities enter into the staple of piety--they are spent when piety begins, or at least passed by accordingly as it advances. And yet these terrible severities--not too terrible, or appalling for the sturdy composure and hardness of sin--are just that fire in the rear, by which, as a more rugged constraint upon nature, the guilty are gathered to the spiritual drawing, or all-constraining loveliness and love, of the cross.

But Christ also adds enforcement, as we have said, to the law--

II. In the fact that he declares himself to be the final judge of the world. Having shown the divine nature travailing in sacrifice and suffering love for the world, and having proclaimed a universal end of God's penalties, to such as are joined to the law-precept, by receiving it in the embrace of his person, he must needs fortify his attitude, by some correspondent assertion of his divine eminence and authority; which he does by openly asserting his personal prerogative, as the final judge of the world. As he is the Saviour of mankind, so he is to be Judge of mankind--and Judge, because he is Saviour. For he distinctly intimates himself that he takes this necessary point of self-assertion, to restrain the presumption otherwise likely to be raised, in the coarse, blind feeling of men, by his great condescensions--"For the Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son, that all men should honor the Son even as they honor the Father." Again also, when he says--"And hath given him authority to execute judgment also, because he is the Son of Man." In other words, the very fact that he was become the Son of Man, humbled to the weakness of humanity, was itself a reason why his equilibrium of dignity should be saved, by the counter-weight of this tremendous office--an office all the more fit to such a purpose, that judges, in the civil state, are conceived to have no right of leniency, or mercy, being set for nothing but the exact application of law to the exact merits of causes; which having done, whether in the sentence of life, or of death, their official function ceases. And so Christ, having bowed himself to all humblest conditions of suffering and sorrow, that he might ransom guilty souls from their deserved penalties, ceases fully and finally from a relationship that would make him possibly no better, at last, than a convenience for men's sins, and takes his attitude of judgeship over them; waiving henceforth all the inclinings and soft connivings and tender flexibilities of his mercy, that he may be forever known as the arbiter and king of the worlds.

I do not undertake to settle, in this connection, precisely what is meant by the judgment of the world; whether it is to be literally a trial had in public assembly, or before the grand convocation of the worlds, or whether such representations given are only figures impressively drawn, to give, in the general, or by means of one general scene, what is passing and to pass in the innumerable and particular cases of souls, when they arrive, or come in to receive their personal awards and enter on their everlasting state. This, however, will be obvious that, if there were no work of grace or mercy on foot, no supernatural salvation, there would scarcely need to be any judge of the world. The transgressors would go to their exact lot of punishment just as stones under gravity fall to the ground. The grand penal order of nature would be at once judge and executioner, and they would sink to their true level, by inevitable laws, that find them out as exactly even, as God himself can know them.

But the judgment of the world under Christianity is made necessary, by the fact that, in a mixed experience under law and grace, where the penal order of nature is restricted, tempered, mitigated, by the supernatural interactions of grace, no punishment takes place in the exact manner and degree that it would under natural retribution, pure and simple. The laws of natural retribution continue, in one view, as at the first, and their operation continues, and yet their action has been so far modified hitherto by the interactions of a supernatural mercy--engaged all our life long to rescue us from them--also by the fact that a new matter of responsibility has come into their jurisdiction to increase, henceforward, the guilt of sin, and to intensify proportionally its desolating penal effects, that a supernatural judgment-seat is wanted, to settle the account of justice and distribute the allotments of souls. When so many diverse and mixed qualities of character are generated under the contesting powers of penalty and mercy, so many variously appearing, yet really similar, so many similarly appearing, yet really various, kinds of product, some tribunal of judgment appears to be wanted, to make the necessary discrimination of desert and order. It is a matter of no great consequence to know what is the exact grade of any man's demerit--let the laws of retribution settle that--but it is a matter of consequence where some are so bold in their conceit, and some are so dejected in their modesty and conscious lack of goodness, to have the great life-question of order and kind settled, by a solemn act of recognition or rejection.

The Christian gospel requires, in this manner, a judgment-seat, and in this office Christ himself asserts the authority that is given him. The subject is adverted to in a great many of his parables, and expressly set forth in many of his public discourses. In the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew he photographs the transaction in a scene of judgment formally conceived as universal. He comes, the Son of Man, to sit upon the throne of his glory. All nations are gathered before him, not to be graduated, but separated in kind, one from another, as sheep from goats. These he recognizes and calls, these he disowns and repels, all under the simple question, whether they are with him personally in his cause and with him in his sacrifice or not. Some who were too modest and poor in spirit, to have any feeling of confidence, are surprised by his welcome--"ye did it unto me"--asking, "when ministered we to thee?" And others who have always been assuming to maintain his cause, and half expecting him to acknowledge his great obligations to them, are as much surprised by his terrible sentence of rejection, "ye did it not to me." Thus before Christ's bar, as he himself conceives, the tremendous issues of life are to be finally determined--"These shall go away into everlasting punishment, the righteous into life eternal."

Furthermore how entirely compatible his love and suffering patience are, with all severest rigors of justice, will be seen in the impressions of his judgment office and day that are held by his followers. They call it the dies iræ, the great day of his wrath, not refusing to magnify the day as a day of great majesty and revelation, even "the revelation of the righteous judgment of God." They have plainly enough no such thought as that the justice of God, or the divine οργη has been satisfied and forever evened in its demands, by the sufferings of Christ. Nor have they taken up, it is equally plain, any such impressions of the merciful Jesus, the dear Christ of God, as makes it incompatible for him to be invested, some time, in these awful rigors of judgment. That righteous οργη, that deep instinct of justice, which dwells in every bosom of love, and without which love could never rise into the majesty of holiness, that wrath which had sometimes kindled so terrible a fire of animosity in the loving ministry of their Master, they expect to be revealed in his judgment proceedings, and they even appear to look upon him in it, with a dread the more appalling, that, as being the natural and necessary counterpart in character of so great sensibility and self-sacrifice, it should therefore be in correspondent measures. Hence the sharp and dreadful paradox they bolt upon us--in a form of words having such vindictive energy that there is nothing, as far as I know, in all human language to match it--"the wrath of the Lamb."

It is certainly most remarkable, considering how Christ himself is the first promulgator of eternal punishment, and is to be himself the judge of the world--revealing the terrible wrath-power of his kingdom, in so many ways and terms so appalling--that he should be conceived to have almost overturned God's law by his terms of mercy, and only not to have done it, by consenting to be an offering before the offended wrath of the law! So he compensated the law by the contribution of his sufferings, and satisfied the dues of justice. Why does it never occur to such as are taken by this kind of theologic contrivance, that after Christ has made due satisfaction to the wrath-principle of God's justice, there is still wanted, above all, some more tremendous sacrifice, to satisfy the wrath of the Lamb? Never before was the vindicatory principle in government so fearfully asserted as by him. When therefore he has made an end of pacification by his cross, what is to be provided that shall pacify him? Shall he satisfy his own wrath? Or is it possible that he should somehow justify without any satisfaction? And if that is possible, is not the whole scheme of satisfaction exploded, and the wrath-principle found to be itself compatible with mercy?

I assume it then, with confidence, to be a conclusion firmly established, that Christ, in preparing the free remission of sins, has not taken from God's law, or at all weakened, its necessary enforcements. Author himself and first adequate promulgator of the doctrine of eternal punishment, invested with all the honors and authoritative rights of the Supreme Judge of men; armed, in such capacity, with indignations equal to the lamb-like patience of his sacrifice--it is not by him, that men have the pressure of God's penal enforcements taken off. On the contrary, when before had the law such a pressure of enforcement in the plane of interest, as it has under Christ himself? When before were such thunderbolts dropped in the path of the fears? When had the misgivings of guilty conviction such earthquakes to feel heaving under ground? When were delay and neglectfulness cut short, by such hidden perils waiting for the spring? Why, it is even a full half the peculiar force of Christianity, that it brings the law of God into a pressure on the soul so nearly irresistible! It had before no motive in comparison. Christ preaches to the fears and the self-interested calculations of deliberative prudence, in a way so positive as to suggest no sense of scruple in him, and permit no evasion of doubt in us. He begins low down, at the underwork, we may almost say, of nature, and expects to regenerate, in the supernatural life of faith, only them whom he has first arrested and concluded in sin. The letter that killeth is his, as truly as the Spirit that giveth life.

No, if there be any thing in the gospel of Christ least of all to be apprehended, it is a discontinuance, or weakening of law. The law-power not only remains uninjured, to do its work of enforcement in souls, but it is brought closer to them and is made weightier and more imminent in its pressure, than ever before. Not only temporal motives but all the powers, in fact, of the world to come, are now crowded into its sanctions. And so little apprehension is there accordingly, in the New Testament, of any possible damage to God's law, or justice, that the immense theologic concern for it, which puts us to a strain of contrivance so pressing, is even most innocently overlooked. I do not even recall any single mention, by the New Testament writers, of the fact that Christ, in his death, was laying a necessary "ground" of forgiveness, or justification, without which it would not be safe, as a matter of law and sound government, to forgive. He comes to work out forgiveness, or rather to work it in--this is abundantly declared--but there is no syllable of reference to the fact that he is doing so much, or contributing so great suffering, to make forgiveness possible. There appears to be no suspicion as yet that this kind of meaning has only been foisted upon the word, and does not belong to it, but the discovery must ere long arrive. And yet, if the case were different, if there must be a loss to the law from the dispensation of forgiveness, and a compensation must be made to the law, what grander, more indisputable, compensation could be offered by Christ, than his new doctrine of eternal punishment, set home by the tremendous emphasis he gives it in the declaration, that he will be the Judge himself!

But there is a possible objection that requires to be noticed. Thus if natural causes, or causes in the scheme of nature, have been so arranged as to chastise and duly punish all sin, and then Christ intervenes by a movement supernatural, to work a release from these causes in the redemption of souls, and does actually deliver them, it appears, after all, that the enforcement of law is so far, at least, given up, or put bye. To this I answer, first, that the enforcement is no more given up than the law of gravity is given up when I sustain, by my will, a body that would otherwise fall to the ground; for in such a case, the law of gravity continues as truly as if it were left to its own way. And, secondly, that the force-power of nature was originally set, to work enforcement for the law of duty, just because and by means of a grace-power, supernaturally working with it and complementary to it. There is no greater mistake than to assume, as many do, that the law was put forward first to be maintained by enforcement, and then that the grace-power comes in afterward to displace it. The scheme of moral government was to be a double acting and essentially restorative scheme from the first, and the two great factors were to be coordinate, always going along by a correspondent development, and assisting each the other. And exactly this is what we find even in the facts of the New Testament; the side of retribution appears, according to our human judgment, to be intensified in about the same ratio as the side of grace. Neither is any thing more clear, than that the enforcement side depends on the gracious, quite as much as this on the other. For the retributive causes of nature, once beginning to run, and wholly left to themselves, put the subject down, at once, under a doom of complete disability, and cease to have any value as enforcements at all. No longer motives, they are simply manacles. But the moment a supernatural grace is felt coming in, as it did at the first, to bring hope and liberating help, the retributive causes become enforcements, just as they were meant to be. The doctrine of endless punishment, taken as put into words, was never any thing but a version of the fact, that retributive causes are naturally endless in their propagations; but the understanding was, and always has been, that a supernatural grace, going side by side, should even keep them in power, as they give power to it, and that so the grand joint product of justice and grace should be always preparing. The very last thing to be apprehended is that the forgiving side is going to prostrate the law side. The law could do nothing but create disability, in that it was weak, without the other. If there had been a law given which could have given righteousness, verily righteousness should have been by the law. But now the law is a schoolmaster for grace, and righteousness a free gift for the law. So between both there is salvation.

Besides the personal moral power of Christ, that which he obtains by his suffering ministry of love and sacrifice, gets a tonic efficacy how majestic, by the tremendous moral emphasis of his denouncements, and the energy he shows in being able to use force enough for his purposes; even as every great general gets the moral power to carry his will by a word, in the fact that he has been able to carry it by his previous championship of force, in fields more impressive than words.

In advancing this doctrine of punishment, I am well aware that some will call it the doctrine of Radamanthus, and that perhaps without concern to settle the question, whether Christ had any better title to respect than he. They have had a thought of God's beneficence, they will say, and they dare to believe in it. They believe that his Creatorship and counsel will be vindicated, as they only can, by results of universal order and happiness, such as he has put it in our hearts to desire. Perhaps I am as much exercised by the desire as they, but I can not take that desire as a proof. Our existence has been mixed with discord from the first, and, for aught we any of us know, this rough element belongs inherently to the highest attainable state of good. That their gospel of speculative philanthropism is carrying just now the vote of the world, more and more largely, is quite probable. But I have thought much, in comparison, of the older, more rugged, rougher gospel, and I feel obliged to say, that it looks most real, and capable, and great. There is nerve in this, and there is none in the other. Christ here takes hold of human nature as if he knew it, and had something great to do for it. He bears a look of mystery, greatness in counsel, and efficient rule, such as the God of the world visibly bears himself--He that has thunders, and tempests, and earthquakes, and wild waters, and death-dealing causes, hovering in silence, or ravening in terror, through all his works. The Christ, so carefully separated from his own reiterated fact of future punishment, has no grand governmental strategy, and bears no hand of mighty working any where. No man need ever be warned lest he "be offended in him;" for we find him offering only sweets for motivities, and bathing in soft odors and oily promises the obstinacy of sin. No I the Christ of the old gospel, he of eternal punishment, he of the judgment-day--the more I think of him, and of man, and the kind of Saviour man re quires to get hold of him, and rouse him out of his death-torpor in sin, the more clear it is that he, the terrible Christ, is the Christ we want. The other, I strongly suspect is a conceit of human opinion, representing only a phase or fashion of the time, that will be very soon gone by; while the real Immanuel, coming in much mystery, and raising many hard questions, and fitly called Wonderful, will be proving, in all time, his great power and beneficence, only the more sublimely; having quantities in him that are not from men, or in men's measures; breaking out visibly in great victories all down the ages, and reigning, as will finally be acknowledged, in a kingdom that shall have no end.

So far we accept the unquestionable future of revelation. As regards that ideal kosmos, in which our philanthropic friends propose to confer so much greater honor upon God, I will simply suggest, that they might less dishonor him, if they could allow that our present state is, in some true sense, a kosmos. God never made any state that was not. Inasmuch, therefore, as his future kosmos must, like the present, make room for the fact of liberty, who can be sure that there will not be in it jars and thunders of dissent, impossible to be excluded--shocks that will stir the tragic movement in feeling, and keep off the tameness of any such total elysium, or general Peace-Society state, as our speculative seers are wont to promise--even as the kosmos of matter rests in the perilous equilibrium and lively play of antagonistic forces?