Endless Punishment, In the Very Words of Its Advocates

With whips of fiery scorpions scourge their slaves,

And in their faces dash the livid waves.

Another aggravation in the torments of the damned, upon which many insist, is the rigid

confinement to which they are subjected. The Apostle speaks of the angels that kept not

their station as being bound in chains of darkness. It is a common circumstance with all the

guilty awaiting trial or punishment, to be bound or in some form restrained of their liberty.

But the damned are represented as suffering intolerable pains from this confinement. Jeremy

Taylor says: “The bodies of the damned, after the judgment past, shall be so straitened and

crowded together in that infernal dungeon that the Holy Scripture compares them to grapes

in a wine-press, which press one another till they burst.” And so says President Edwards:

“They shall be cast into the wine-press of the wrath of God, where they shall be pressed down

with wrath as grapes are pressed in a wine-press. God will then make appear in their misery

how terrible his wrath is, that men and angels may know how much more dreadful the wrath

of God is than the wrath of kings or any other creatures. They shall know what God can do

towards his enemies, and how fearful a thing it is to provoke him to anger.” The Rev. Isaac

Ambrose, who was a famous preacher in his day, has a sermon, as I remember, on the words

of our Savior respecting the tares, “Bind them in bundles to burn them,” which he made very

instructive. In the first place they were to be bound “in bundles,” each class of sinners by

itself. As Matthew Henry says: “Sinners of the same sort will be bundled together in the great

day; a bundle of atheists, a bundle of epicures, and a great bundle of hypocrites. Those who

have been associated in sin will be associated in shame and sorrow, and it will be an

aggravation of their misery.” This is an old doctrine, and can be traced back many ages.

Jeremy Taylor always finds an illustration of some barbarous character, and unfortunately

always concludes that the torments of hell must be vastly worse than the most cruel of

mortals ever conceived or had the power to execute. “Most barbarous,” he says, “was that

torment inflicted upon some unfortunate persons: they put certain rings of iron, stuck full of

sharp points of needles, about their arms and feet, in such manner as they could not move

without pricking and wounding themselves: then they compassed them about with fire, to the

end that standing still they might be burnt alive; and if they stirred, the sharp points pierced

their flesh with more intolerable pains than fire. What then shall be the torment of the

damned, when they shall lie eternally without dying and without possibility of removing from

the place designed them?” Rev. Mr. Ambrose imagined they would be so closely bound that

they could not move a limb, nor a muscle, not even of the eyelid; and that they would not

only be bound in bundles, but packed together like bricks in a kiln; and while in this helpless

and immovable position the breath of God should blow the fires of hell through and through

them, as the fire penetrates every part of the kiln and finally every particle of matter in it. It

is not easy for us to conceive the horrors of such a situation. “If an angel,” says Jeremy Taylor,

“should promise thee to be made an emperor, so you would lie in your bed one night in the

same posture, looking upwards towards heaven, how comes it to pass that thou canst not rest

one single night; it being such a torture to be still, without turning thyself? What would it be

if thou wert to remain in one position three or four nights? Thou hast little patience, since

a thing so small doth grieve thee. Far greater evils than these are prepared for thee in hell,

whither thou postest by running into so many sins. Consider what a couch is prepared for

thee in that abyss of misery; what feather-bed; what Holland sheets! Thou shalt be cast upon

burning coals, flames and sulphur shall be thy coverlets. Mark well, whether this bed be for

one night only. Yea, nights, days, months, and years, for ages and eternities, thou art to

remain on that side thou fallest on, without having the least relief to turn thyself to the

other.”

The learned Jesuit, Cornelius à Lapide, entertains the same opinion and has expressed

it in his commentary very clearly. “The wicked,” he says, “compingentur sicut halices et pisces

in vase (are packed like pickles and fish in a cask).” And this seems to have suggested to this

learned writer to inquire into the magnitude of hell, which he fortunately found means of

determining in the Revelation of St. John, xiv. 20, and soberly informs us that it is a cube in

form and just two hundred Italian miles on a side; and hence concludes with reason, that,

packed as he supposes, it has capacity sufficient to hold “multa milena millia millionum

damnatorum (many thousand thousands of millions of the damned)!” And there is evident

need of such dimensions in the world of woe, for if the teachings of orthodoxy prove true, it

is to be the final abode of far the larger part of the human family.

It hardly need be observed that since the torments of hell are of so many kinds, we should

not expect any great uniformity of representation, or indeed any strict consistency of

statement. One author takes one view of the subject, and another another. To one mind this

particular, form of punishment commends itself as most proper or most effective, and to

another that; and not unfrequently does the same person at different times, or perhaps under

different moods of feeling, use terms that are quite inconsistent with each other. While one

writer, for instance, represents the damned as bound hand and foot, another speaks of them

as being relatively free within the limits of hell. Thus Pollock says,—

Some wandered lonely in the desert flames,

And some in fierce encounter fiercely met.

Father Furniss, following St. Theresa, has hell filled with narrow cells where many of the

damned suffer some special torment alone. One girl is standing barefooted forever upon a

red-hot floor: a little child is in a red-hot oven: a boy’s blood in his veins, his brain, and the

very marrow of his bones, is boiling and hissing like a boiling teakettle: the rich man of the

Parable is smothering in a close coffin of solid fire, while others are tortured in various other

ways. Father Furniss possesses an active and vigorous imagination which seems admirably

fitted for his work, and if the horrors of hell have any moral virtue all Ireland should presently

be redeemed and regenerated.

It cannot be necessary to pursue this branch of our subject further. I have spoken only

of what might be called the physical sufferings of hell, and have only glanced at some of the

more prominent of these, and have necessarily omitted much said in ancient and modern

times that would aid in filling out the terrible picture; but, lest the description become

tedious, I will only add, in the words of President Edwards, that “every part of the body shall

be filled with fire. After the resurrection the body shall be cast into that great furnace, which

shall be so great as to burn up the whole world. These lower heavens, this air and this earth,

shall become one great furnace; a furnace that shall burn the earth, even to its very centre.

In this furnace shall the bodies of the wicked lie to all eternity, and yet live, and have their

sense of pain and torment not at all diminished. Oh, how full will the heart, the vitals, the

brain, the eyes, the tongue, the hands, the feet, be of fire; of this fire of such inconceivable

fierceness! How full will every member and every vein and every sinew be of this fire!” In the

realm of the physical, I do not see how one can go beyond this. Father Furniss may be more

specific; but for comprehensiveness and a great sweeping horror, let me commend our able

American metaphysician and theologian.

C H A P T E R IX.

QUITE ANOTHER CLASS OF SUFFERINGS.

THUS far, as the reader will remark, I have exhibited only those torments which may be

said to belong to our sensitive and animal nature, and most of which could be suffered

by a brute as well as a man. Fire will burn, and sights and sounds of horror will frighten an ox

or a horse as really, though perhaps not in precisely the same way or to the same extent, as

they would a human being. These animals can see and feel, taste and smell and hear, and

hence could suffer in hell or elsewhere somewhat as we should.

But man possesses another class of faculties that belong to him alone,—faculties of a

higher order, which are connected with his spiritual nature; such as reason, conscience,

religious and social affections, memory, hope, and fear. In these he can be hurt as truly and

perhaps as deeply as through his bodily senses. The pain is different of course, but hardly less

distressing. Men sometimes experience such calamities—loss of friends, reputation, wealth

—as to occasion so much pain as to rob life of its ordinary satisfactions, make existence here

a burden, and death a welcome guest.

Of these various miseries of which our spiritual nature is susceptible, the advocates of

endless punishment have not been wholly unmindful, though it must be confessed, I think,

that they have been urged with less frequency and power than those of a merely sensuous

character. This may be accounted for, no doubt, by two or three rather obvious

considerations. In the first place, the terms in which the doctrine of endless punishment is

supposed to be inculcated in the Holy Scriptures are uniformly, or almost uniformly, of this

outward and sensible kind, such as fire, furnace of fire, Gehenna of fire, lake of fire and

brimstone, darkness, chains of darkness, and the like. This would naturally suggest material

punishments to the thoughts and speech of men. Then, in the second place, there can be no

doubt, I presume, that these outward and material images, suggesting pains and sufferings

with which all are more or less familiar, are fitted to make a more immediate and deeper

impression upon the masses of men, whether lay or clerical, than those which belong more

properly to the higher part of our nature. One who has experienced the pain occasioned by

burning the hand or even a finger needs nothing more to aid him in conceiving something

of the torment of being cast alive into a furnace filled with raging fire, such as President

Edwards and others have so eloquently enforced. This makes the preaching of these physical

pains so easy and sometimes perhaps so effective. Coarse uncultivated men can without

difficulty proclaim such punishments, and people of the same class understand them. It is,

however, a problem how President Edwards, Jeremy Taylor, and some others that might be

named, who were neither coarse nor uncultivated, should have dwelt so much upon these

merely physical tortures, and insisted little in comparison, it seems, upon those that belong

to man as an intellectual and moral being. Not, indeed, that either of these eminent

preachers has wholly overlooked or neglected what addresses itself to the better side of our

nature, but that the physical is made, or appears, so much more prominent and striking that

it seems almost to overshadow everything else.

If souls may be conceived as entering that “world of woe,” bearing with them their

reason, their conscience, their memory, and their better affections, of which no one in this

world is wholly destitute,—in one word, if they are to enter there as they leave here,—the

consciousness that they “have missed the end of their existence,” as Rev. Mr. Oxenham

expresses it, that all their hopes are blasted, that even reformation is impossible, and that

nothing now lies before them but a dreary waste of being, without object or interest or

joy,—would not that alone, were there no material fires, no bodily torments, none of hell’s

horrors, soon make a hell sufficient to satisfy our loftiest conceptions of the demands of

justice, and erelong render existence itself an intolerable burden? But let us glance at some

of these more refined and spiritual sources of misery.

C H A P T E R X.

SUFFERINGS OF LOSS.

THE schoolmen divide punishments into those of sense and those of loss, the poena sensus

and poena damni. We have already considered to some extent those of the former class.

Among the latter are reckoned the loss of God, the loss of heaven, and consequently the loss

of happiness and everything desirable. This is a form of misery that has no physical element

in it. It stands connected only with our judgments, our conscience, and our emotions. It is

the simple recognition of what is, and what “might have been,”—of the present painful fact,

and the beautiful ideal, whose reality has forever vanished, and the memory of which remains

but to torture us with the sense of its loss. Our writers on the punishments of the world to

come generally speak first and chiefly of

1. The Loss of God.

They describe this as the greatest, the most deeply felt, of all our spiritual pains. “In hell,”

says Jeremy Taylor, “there is the pain of loss, and that so rigorous, that in depriving the

damned of one only thing, they take from him all good things; for they deprive him of God,

in whom they are all comprised. He who is condemned by human laws to the loss of his goods

may, if he live, gain others, at least in another kingdom, if he fly thither; but he who is

deprived of God, where shall he find another God? and who can fly from hell? God is the

greatest good, and it is therefore the greatest evil to be deprived of him, because evil is the

privation of good; and that is to be esteemed the greatest evil, which is the privation of the

greatest good, which is God; and must certainly, therefore, cause more grief and resentment

in the damned than all the punishments and torments of hell besides,” In a similar strain,

Rev. Christopher Love says: “The wicked in hell, they have this loss that they are deprived

of and banished from the favorable presence of God. And here saith St. Chrysostom, if there

were a thousand worlds, the loss of the favor of God is more than a thousand worlds. It is the

greatest torment of a damned man that he is without God. The presence of God makes

heaven to be heaven. The absence of God makes hell more hell than it is.” Father Miller tells

us, in his little book on Purgatory, that the unfortunate souls in that place of torment feel the

intensest desire to see God, and that absence from his presence is one of the bitterest

ingredients in their cup of sorrow; and Father Furniss represents the very devils in hell as

crying out, “I would gladly burn here for millions of years, if I could only see God for one

minute!”

All our Protestant confessions and catechisms make “separation from the comfortable

presence of God” a part of the miseries of the world to come.

But Dr. Watts seems to look upon this doctrine with some distrust; and it must be

confessed to involve questions and difficulties not always recognized, perhaps, nor ever easily

solved. “When an impenitent sinner is cast into hell,” says Dr. Watts, “we have abundant

reason to suppose that the evil tempers of his soul, and the vicious principles within him, are

not abated, but his natural powers, and the vices which have tainted them and mingle with

them, are awakened and enraged into intense activity under the first sensations of his

dreadful punishment.”

Now, I need not say that the misfortune and the sin of evil men in the present world is

that they have little or no perception of the divine character, and find no pleasure in his

society or in meditating upon his perfections and government. On the contrary, the wicked

are more inclined to say to God, “Depart from us, for we desire not a knowledge of thy ways.”

The more effectually they can banish him from their thoughts, the happier they fancy they

shall be; and the fool, to make his path less hazardous, says, in his heart, “There is no God.”

As Dr. Watts says: “Here in this life perhaps a profane wretch has imagined that he could live

well enough without God, and is content to have nothing to do with him in the way of

worship or dependence.”

From this state of stolid indifference or positive enmity towards God, what has awakened

the soul of the damned? He is no longer what he has been. He has come to see, not only that

there is a God, but that the ground of his own existence is in him, and that he is essential to

his happiness. This is a great change, and a change for the better. It is, in fact, the recognition

of the deepest need of his soul,—the first movement toward regeneration and a new life. Till

the soul feels this want of alliance with God, whether in this world or the next, the need of

something great and good and eternal to which it can attach itself and upon which it can

unreservedly depend, it will never truly feel after God nor find him. And when the sense of

this need comes to the soul, whether in heaven, earth, or hell, I cannot persuade myself that

the Father of souls will be deaf to its cry. He whose first and great command to all creatures

in the moral universe is, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,” can never be

indifferent to the feeblest motions of the soul towards obedience to that royal law. But, be

this as it may, nothing can be more obvious than the fact that if a soul, upon exchanging

worlds, comes to see its relations to God, and feel the need of him, it must have undergone

a change analogous to what one here experiences in conversion,—a change at least

necessarily antecedent to conversion, and closely connected with it,—and therefore furnishes

a complete refutation of the common doctrine that there is no change after death.

2. Sufferings from Loss of Heaven.

In the highest and most important sense, the loss of God, or entire separation from his

comfortable presence and aid, must be the loss of heaven, whether here or hereafter. The

consciousness of God’s love, the feeling of union with him, and that childlike confidence and

peace which these convictions produce, make all the heaven we have experienced, or can

properly conceive. This is the peace of God that passes all understanding. But in the thought

of most Christians heaven is not so much a state of purity and filial love and spiritual joy as

it is a place of outward beauty and sensible delights. It is difficult to exchange the gates of

pearl and the golden streets of our popular heaven for simple righteousness and peace and joy

in the Holy Ghost. Men tell us, therefore, what a loss the soul must suffer by its exclusion

from heaven, its glory and its felicities. But in order to feel this loss, let us consider that the

sinner must first know something what it is, and be in an intellectual and moral condition to

appreciate it. To deprive a savage of the conveniences and refinements of civilized life is no

deprivation to him, at least none that he is capable of feeling. Till he has undergone an

almost total change in his views and habits, till he has passed through a long course of

education, fitting him to use and enjoy these conveniences and refinements which civilization

brings in its train, they would prove a burden rather than a blessing to him. It is so also in

respect to what belongs to the moral and spiritual world. Were it possible for a hardened

sinner, with his grovelling tastes, inordinate passions, and brutal pleasures, to be translated

from earth or hell at once to heaven, where love excludes all hatred, where benevolence

transcends all selfishness, and where each finds his own happiness in the happiness of others;

where obedience to duty, personal righteousness, purity, and the worship of a God of all moral

excellence, of infinite holiness, is at once the law and the life of all souls, can we imagine our

sinner at home and happy there? The society would be very strange to him. Its spirit would

be foreign to all he is familiar with, and though surrounded by the blaze of its imagined

glories, he would sigh for his old haunts and his coarse and sinful pleasures. Such a sinner

must be converted; he must be renewed in the temper and spirit of his soul, before the loss

of heaven can be any loss to him. And our orthodox friends confess as much. Rev. Mr.

Swinden says expressly: “Though the wicked are not sensible in this life what it is to fall short

of heaven, yet after death, after the separation of soul and body, the eye of the understanding

shall be opened, and they shall then clearly discover what it is to be shut out of heaven, to

be deprived of the beatific vision, and to lose the fruition of all the glory, splendor, and

blessedness of it. They shall then to no purpose incessantly cry, ‘Lord, Lord, open to us.’”

But here again we mark a wonderful change in the wicked. In this world they did not

wish to hear of heaven. They put the very thought of it away from them. In the next, they

are represented as having come to understand the subject better, and to feel an intense

anxiety to enjoy what so lately they despised. But have they been brought to this appreciation

of heaven and its joys only to torment them? And, having been removed so far from what

they were, are we to suppose that they are to go no farther? May we not safely infer that they

will not only increase in their knowledge of heavenly things, but also grow into a temper that

will fit them to receive and enjoy them? One thing seems ethically clear, that men can

nowhere greatly desire and mourn the loss of what they hate. Most writers, therefore, reason

on the tacit assumption that the wicked in hell really understand what heaven is, and most

keenly feel their deprivation of it. “If Tully did so bewail his banishment from Italy,” says

Christopher Love, “that every time he looked toward Italy he fell a weeping, and if

Demosthenes took his banishment from Athens so heavily that every time he looked that way

he fell a weeping, how will the thought of this, that you are banished from heaven, grieve you,

if it should ever be your dismal lot to be cast into hell!” To this add what Jeremy Taylor says:

“What a grief it will be to see themselves deprived of the palaces of heaven, the society of

saints, and the happy country of the living, where all is peace, charity, and joy; where all

shine, all pleases, and all parts resound with hallelujahs! If the damned had no other

punishment than to see themselves banished among devils, into a place not far from heaven,

sad as night, without the sight or comfort of the sun or moon for all eternity, it were a

torment insufferable.”

We can easily understand how the damned would desire to be freed from the dungeon

of hell, as it is here represented, and from the uncomfortable society of devils; and it is equally

easy to understand how they would delight in “the palaces of heaven;” but they must undergo

a great change before they can find any satisfaction in “the society of the saints,” or enjoy

immoderately their “hallelujahs.” In a word, heaven and its employments and its pleasures

must be greatly changed from what all spiritually minded Christians believe them to be, or

sinners must be greatly changed in their tempers and tastes, their habits and life, before they

can really desire them or suffer the sense of any essential loss in being deprived of them. How

can two walk together except they be agreed? If sinners ever come to know God and heaven,

so as to love them and feel their loss, can we doubt that they must be on the way that leads

to them?

C H A P T E R XI.

THE PAINS OF MEMORY.

IF the sinner is to be punished in the future world, as orthodoxy teaches, it must be

presupposed that his personal identity is maintained, so that he shall consciously be the

same being there he is here, and know that the sins for which he suffers are sins which he

himself consciously and wilfully committed. To punish a man who after his crime had become

a maniac, would be as impossible in fact as it would be cruel in practice. We might make him

suffer any amount of pain, but unless he remembered his sin, and linked it with his suffering,

how could it, in any proper sense, be punishment?

That we are to be ourselves in the future world, is what every one believes, who has any

notion at all of our immortality. If I perish in death, and God is pleased to create another

being like me in the immortal world, what is that to me? And whatever difficulties the

metaphysician may have in determining in what our identity consists, nothing is more obvious

to our common apprehension than that memory is somehow associated with it. And we have

reason to believe that in the future world this faculty may be much more active and efficient

than it is here. There are many psychological facts which tend to prove that under some

extraordinary circumstances the memory, quickened and aroused, recalls events long

forgotten, and, with a rapidity that is simply amazing, gathers up in a moment the scenes that

have filled a life time. The story is told of a laborer, who, at work on the steeple of a church

or other object of great elevation, accidentally fell, and subsequently related that in the two

or three seconds of his fall, which he supposed must end in instant death, he passed in review,

as it seemed to him, all the actions of his life, and with a vividness and particularity such as

he never experienced before. Similar facts are mentioned in the case of persons drowned, who

were subsequently resuscitated. It may be no extravagance to suppose that, when entirely

freed from the clogs of the body, the soul in all its faculties may act with far greater ease and

effect than now, and that the memory may operate in such a manner as to enable them to

take in, with a clearness we little experience in the present life, every event as it passed, and

every feeling, thought, and purpose of our souls, so that our whole life, with all its coloring

of good and evil, will lie before our minds and in our memories as a nicely lined and tinted

map.

“The memory,” says Jeremy Taylor, “shall be another cruel tormentor of those miserable

sinners, converting all they have done, good or bad, into torments: the good, because they

have lost their reward; the bad, because they have deserved their punishment: the delights

also which they have enjoyed, and all the happiness of this life, in which they have

triumphed, (seeing that by them they fell into this misery,) shall be a sharp sword which shall

pierce their hearts; they shall be full of affliction, when they shall compare the shortness of

their past pleasures with the eternity of their present torments. What groans, what sighs, will

they pour out when they see that these delights lasted hardly an instant, and that the pains

they suffer for them shall last for ages and eternities; all that is past appearing but as a dream.

Let us tremble at the pleasures and felicity of this life, since they may turn into arsenic or

wormwood. The miserable wretch shall with great grief remember, how often he might have

gained heaven, and did not, but is now tumbled into hell; and shall say unto himself, ‘How

many times might I have prayed, but spent my time in play; but now I pay for it. How many

times ought I to have fasted, but left it to satisfy my greedy appetite. How many times might

I have given alms, and spent it in sin. How many times might I have pardoned my enemies,

and chose rather to be revenged. How many times might I have frequented the sacraments,

and forsook them, because I would not quit the occasion of sinning. There never wanted

means of serving God, but I never made use of them, and am therefore paid for all. Behold,

wretched soul, that entertaining thyself in pleasures, thou hast for toys and fooleries lost

heaven. If thou wouldest, thou mightest have been companion of angels; if thou wouldest,

thou mightest have been in eternal joy, and thou hast left all for the pleasure of a moment.

‘O accursed and miserable creature, thy Redeemer courted thee with heaven, and thou

despisedst him for a base trifle. This was thy fault, and now thou sufferest for it; and since

thou wouldest not be happy with God, thou shalt now be eternally cursed by him and his

angels.’”

At the final judgment, President Edwards says, “shall be brought to light the hidden

things of darkness; then shall all the wickedness of their hearts be made known; then shall

be declared the actual wickedness they have been guilty of; then shall appear their secret sins

that they have kept from the eye of the world; then shall be manifested in their true light

those sins that they used to plead for, and to excuse and justify. And then shall all their sins

be set forth in all their dreadful aggravations, all their filthiness will be brought to light to

their everlasting shame and contempt. Then it shall appear how heinous many of those things

were, that they in their lifetime made light of; then will it appear how dreadful their guilt is

in thus ill-treating so glorious and blessed a Savior.” “How shall we remain amazed,” says

Jeremy Taylor again, “when we shall see a number of our actions to be sins, which we never

thought to be such! And which is more, we shall find that to be a fault, which we thought

to be a laudable work; for many actions, which in the eyes of men seem virtuous, will then

be found vices in the sight of God: then shall be brought to light the works which we have

done, and those which we have left undone; the evil of that action we have committed, and

the good of that which we have omitted.” “What bitter and tormenting reflections will they

have concerning the folly they have been guilty of in their lives,” says President Edwards, “in

so neglecting their souls, when they had such opportunity for repentance; that they went on

so foolishly to treasure up wrath against the day of wrath, to add to the record of their sins

from day to day, to make their misery yet greater, and greater and greater; how they have

kindled the fires of hell for themselves, and spent their lives in gathering fuel! They will not

be able to help revolving such thoughts in their minds, and how tormenting they will be!”

It is undoubtedly one of the most perplexing facts, that memory is to survive the grave

and go with us through eternity. We shall never forget who we are nor what we have done.

And I beg those of the contrary part to reflect that this fact does not exclusively affect that

class of our race which we call “wicked.” The righteous, as we name them, have not been free

from sin, and some have in their time been great sinners. If David is to be himself in the

future world and carry his memory with him, will he not sometimes remember Uriah and his

deliberately providing for his being killed in battle? And especially if Uriah should chance,

as is very probable, to have died in “a natural condition,” as President Edwards expresses it,

or with some unrepented sin upon his soul, and now be in hell! Saul of Tarsus was a bitter

persecutor of Christians, and not only consented to the death of Stephen, but kept the

clothes of them that stoned him; and although he afterward became a Christian himself and

consecrated his life to building up what he had before sought to destroy, he never forgot his

enmity in persecuting the Church of God. When is he to forget it?

The tenacity of the memory in instances of great wickedness is finely illustrated in the

case of Joseph’s brethren. Years before they had conspired to take his life. This resolution was

finally changed, and he was sold as a slave to some Midianite merchants that chanced to be

passing. But in their distress in Egypt, so far away from the scene of their wrong-doing, and

with nothing but their trouble to remind them of their guilt, we hear them saying one to

another, “We are verily guilty concerning our brother, in that we saw the anguish of his soul,

when he besought us, and we would not hear; therefore is this distress come upon us. And

Reuben answered them saying, Spake I not unto you saying, Do not sin against the child; and

ye would not hear? Therefore, behold his blood is required.”

O Memory, how is the guilty to free himself from thy power? “What is written is written,”

said the angry Pilate of the superscription upon the cross to which, merely to please his Jewish

subjects, he had adjudged an innocent man. But this was as far as he would go in the way of

compliance. It was enough that he had prostituted his great office and committed a heinous

crime against justice and humanity. “What is written is written,” and it shall not be altered!

It is so with human actions. What is done is done, and it cannot be undone. Its record is

written on high and written in our memory, and neither prayers nor tears can obliterate a

single letter. Repentance and reformation do not alter the fact nor do they relieve us of the

sin. Divine pardon restores our filial relations with God and gives us a degree of peace, but

there stands the ugly fact still, and our own better dispositions and nicer sense of right and

wrong only make us the more alive to the feeling of the wrong done and deepen our regret

that we so sinned. O Memory, Memory, thou avenging power, how shall we escape thy

retributions? Where shall we find the Lethe whose waters we may drink and forget that we

have sinned? God may release us from all positive or outward torments, and as a loving father

receive us to his arms, but who shall deliver us from the sad memories of our past follies and

sins? “Thanks be to God who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

C H A P T E R XII.

PAINS OF AN UPBRAIDING CONSCIENCE.

CLOSELY connected with memory is conscience, that part of our moral nature which

distinguishes between right and wrong, which approves or condemns us according as our

actions are good or bad, and, without a revelation of the divine will, makes man a law unto

himself. Though wicked men here in this world may at times hush the voice of conscience,

and silence its upbraidings, we cannot doubt that the time must come in the future when this

will be impossible, and all men will be brought to see themselves just as they are. The

passions, that now urge them on in the path of wrong-doing, will then be still; reason, calm

and clear-sighted, will reassume her throne, and conscience, so long neglected and trampled

under foot, will again lift its voice in tones so commanding that they must be heard and

heeded. Every unholy passion indulged, every evil thought formed, every wicked deed done,

will then stand before us in all their deformity and sin. This revelation of sinners to

themselves, implying necessarily a great and most important change in their intellectual and

moral condition, cannot fail to be attended with inexpressible shame and self-condemnation.

Whether this change is to be effected suddenly, and as by miracle, or more slowly by the

natural process of education, is immaterial in respect to the final result. The dark and

hardened sinner, before he can feel the full torment of conscience, must have his moral

nature aroused and enlightened; he must see the beauty of holiness, and feel something of

the excellence of virtue and truth. In other words, he must, directly or indirectly, have been

lifted out of his depravity, his indifference to the welfare of his fellow-men, and his disregard

of God’s moral law. President Edwards, in accordance with the teachings of orthodoxy then

and now, maintained that “a natural man”—not a hardened sinner, imbruted by a long

course of transgression, but a man as he is born—“cannot have a true sight of sin, and of the

evil of it. A man cannot truly know the evil of sin against God, except by a discovery of his

glory and excellence, and then he will be sensible how great an evil it is to sin against him.”

To give to conscience its full retributive power, it must be awakened, enlightened, and

cultivated, and brought effectually under the highest Christian influences. A besotted, brutish

man, ignorant and unfeeling, cannot experience the exquisite pain that conscience is able to

inflict. His finer sensibilities are dead or unused, and must be quickened into life and activity.

Now, how much this necessarily implies, our orthodox friends do not seem to reflect. If,

as they say, there is no moral change after death, the wicked ought to be as hard and

insensible to the claims of truth and righteousness in the future state as they are in the

present. But in that case we exclude them from the possibility of some of the keenest

sufferings of which moral beings are susceptible. We leave them with consciences benumbed

and seared as with a hot iron. They neither see the enormity of their sins nor feel the

compunctions that the consciousness of guilt ought to bring. Yet, with an inconsistency

which is too obvious to need remark, our orthodox friends constantly insist that the damned

are to be tormented by a conscience as clear and sharp as that of the saints in heaven.

“In the midst of hell,” says Rev. Mr. Swinden, “there is another hell. There the wicked

shall be exposed to the intolerable anguish of an outraged conscience, the remorse of which

shall continually prey upon them for what they have done in their lives-time.” So says Calvin:

“Wherefore, miserable consciences find no repose, but are harassed and agitated with a

dreadful tempest, feel themselves torn asunder by an angry God, and transfixed and

penetrated by mortal stings; are terrified by the thunderbolts of God, and broken by the

weight of his hand, so that to sink away into any gulf or abysses would be more tolerable than

to stand a moment in such terrors.” “Besides these miseries and calamities,” says Jeremy

Taylor, “in the power of the soul is engendered the worm of conscience, which is so often

proposed unto us in Scripture as a most terrible torment, and greater than that of fire. Only

in one sermon Christ, our Redeemer, three times menaces us with the worm which gnaws the

consciences, and tears in pieces the hearts of the damned: admonishing us often that their

worm shall never die, nor their fire be quenched. For as the worm which breeds in dead flesh,

or that which breeds in woods, eats and gnaws that substance of which they are engendered,

so the worm which is bred from sin is in perpetual enmity with it, gnawing and devouring the

heart of the sinner with raging and desperate grief; still putting him in mind that, by his own

fault, he lost that eternal glory, which he might as easily have obtained, and is now fallen into

eternal torments, whence there is no redemption.” Speaking of the rich man in hell,

“tormented in this flame,” President Edwards says: “Here we are told that when the rich man

died, he lift up his eyes, being in torment; and he tells Abraham that he is tormented in a

flame; and it seems the flame was not only about him, but in him; he therefore asks for a drop

of water to cool his tongue. This doubtless is to represent to us that they are full of the wrath

of God, as it were with fire, and they shall there be tormented in the midst of devils and

damned spirits; and they shall have inexpressible torments from their own consciences. God’s

wrath is the fire that never shall be quenched, and conscience is the worm that never dies.

How much do men suffer from horror of conscience sometimes in this world, but how much

more in hell!” “Who knows how keen and bitter will be the agonies of an awakened

conscience,” says Dr. Watts, “and the vengeance of a provoked God. This sort of anguish of

spirit, with loud and cutting complaints, would destroy itself, and these inward terrors would

sting their souls to death, if there could be any such thing as dying there. Such sighs and sobs

and bitter agonies would break their hearts and dissolve their being, if the heart could break

and the being could be dissolved. But immortality is their dreadful portion,—immortality of

sorrows to punish their wicked and wilful abuse of time, and that waste of the means of grace

they were guilty of in their mortal state.” I need quote no more from our divines, who all

speak to the same purpose; but I cannot omit the testimony of that very orthodox poet,

Robert Pollock, who evidently intended to make his description impressive, and succeeded

in making it horrid and revolting.

I paused and looked;

And saw, where’er I looked upon that mound,

Sad figures traced in fire; not motionless,

But imitating life. One I remarked

Attentively; but how shall I describe

What naught resembles else my eye hath seen?

Of worm or serpent kind it something looked,

But monstrous with a thousand snaky heads

Eyed each with double orbs of glaring wrath;

And with as many tails, that twisted out

In horrid convolutions, tipped w ith stings;

And all its mouths that wide and darkly gaped,

And breathed most poisonous breath, had each a sting,

Forked, and long, and venomous, and sharp.

And in its writhings infinite it grasped,

Malignantly, what seemed a heart, swollen, black,

And quivering with torture most intense.

And still the heart with anguish throbbing high,

Made effort to escape, but could not, for

However it turned, and oft it vainly turned,

Those complicated foldings held it fast.

And still the monstrous beast with sting of head

Or tail tran sfixed it, bleeding evermore.

What this could image, much I searched to know,

And while I strove, and gazed, and wondered long,

A voice from whence I knew not, for no one

I saw, distinctly whispered in my ear

These words: This is the worm that never dies!

C H A P T E R XIII.

TORMENTS FROM MALIGNANT PASSIONS.

BESIDES all these torments and miseries, the damned in hell are represented as being the

victims of every kind of evil passion, fitted to increase their wretchedness, such as envy,

malice, hatred, and indeed whatever can in any way augment the horrors of their situation,

or add to their own or each other’s vexation. These malignant passions, it is said, “will be

exceedingly powerful in the future world,” and some represent them as increasing in violence

throughout eternity. There will be nothing in hell, it is said, to restrain these passions, but

everything to inflame them. “Who,” says Jeremy Taylor, “can express the strange and horrible

confusion, which shall inhabit the appetite of these wretched creatures? If all the disorders

of man’s life spring from his passions, what disorder must these miserable souls needs feel in

that part, what convulsions, what rage, what fury! Alas, that noble passion, love, the queen

of all the rest, the sun of life, that passion which might have made them happy forever, if they

had turned it towards God; that amiable object being razed out of them, the perpetual

aversion they have to love shall eternally afflict them; the passion of hatred shall be

outrageous in the damned, whence shall proceed their continual blasphemies against God,

and the perpetual curses and imprecations which they shall make against the creatures; and

if they have any desires, they shall be to see all the world partakers of their pains; their

aversion from all good shall be as much tormenting, as it is in itself execrable. Of joy there

must no mention be made in that place of dolor; but contrariwise of incredible sadness, which

shall oppress them without any consolation. The heat of anger shall redouble the heat of their

pains.” In hell, it is said, the damned will be filled with the greatest envy. “The sight of the

saint’s glory,” says Matthew Henry, “will be a great aggravation of the sinner’s misery.” So

Jeremy Taylor says: “The envy also which they bear towards those who have gained heaven

by as small matters as they have lost it shall much add to their grief.” “What a mass of woe,”

says Dr. Dwight, “must exist in the pangs of immortal envy!”

But it is not envy alone that is to torment the damned; they will also be filled with the

deepest hatred and malice. These malignant passions will become “permanent,” as Rev.

Joseph Cook would say, and form the controlling spirit in the life of hell. The damned will

hate universally; they will hate God, and hate Christ, and hate the blessed in heaven, and

hate the damned in hell, and hence they will become, as Dr. Dwight says, “the means of

extreme suffering to each other. None will have favors to bestow, nor a native amiableness

of character to invite esteem and love. Nor will any restraint operate so as to prevent the

heart from emptying out all its wickedness in the open day. Contempt, therefore, deceit and

hatred, will occupy the whole soul. The rage which here persecutes an enemy to the grave

and laments that it cannot follow him into the invisible world, may there pursue him through

eternity.” “The will,” says Jeremy Taylor, “shall be tormented with an eternal abhorring and

rage against itself, against all creatures, and against the Creator of all, and shall with an

intolerable sadness, anger, grief and disorder of all the affections violently desire things

impossible.” “There will be found among the damned,” says Dr. Watts, “a constant enmity,

and malice, and hatred, against the blessed God, which can never satisfy or ease itself by

revenge. It seems very strange indeed that a creature should design revenge against his

Maker, but thus it is in these dismal regions of hell. Every wicked man is by nature at enmity

with God, and in a state of rebellion; and when this enmity is wrought up to malice, under

a sense of his punishing hand, then arises that cursed and detestable desire of revenging itself

against its Maker.” The damned in hell will be filled, as Matthew Henry says, “with an

incurable indignation against God, themselves, and one another.” “They will gnash their

teeth,” says Christopher Love, “out of indignation against Jesus Christ.” In a word, they are

not only to indulge all malignant passions, but their mouths will be filled with curses and

blasphemies. Says Dr. Trapp:—

They fling

Tartarean rage towards heaven, against heaven’s king;

Against the Highest fiercely they blaspheme.

So also Pollock:—

And as I listene d, I heard those beings curse

Almighty G od, and curse the Lamb, and curse

The earth, the resurrection morn.

It is a little remarkable (since we have, as our orthodox neighbors insist, one clear

instance of a damned soul in hell,—I mean the rich man) that, instead of turning to him for

an example of the tempers and conduct of this class of human beings, they uniformly appeal

to their imaginations, and follow any fancies that may chance to occur to them. Now this rich

man in hell, and tormented, too, in that flame, indulges in no blasphemies, curses neither

God nor the Lamb, and exhibits neither envy nor malice towards poor Lazarus, in Abraham’s

bosom. And so far from having lost all humanity, and being filled with hatred towards all

mankind, and desiring nothing so much as to have them all partakers of his misery, this man

in hell was full of interest for the welfare of his five brethren, and anxious to have them

warned not to fall into the same calamity. Assuming, as the orthodox always do, that this is

a veritable account of a soul in hell, I would earnestly recommend its careful study.

But writers, preachers, and poets are not always in harmony with each other on this

subject, and, what is worse, not always self-consistent. They who at one moment represent

the damned in hell as little better than devils, hating and tormenting each other, at other

times find them loving, and though suffering agonies in their own persons, are made to suffer

immeasurably more by witnessing the torments of their families and friends! Thus, Jeremy

Taylor, after relating the horrible cruelty of Hyrcanus, as already mentioned, in crucifying

eight hundred persons, and while they were yet alive causing their wives and children to be

murdered before their eyes, “so that they might die, not once, but many deaths,” says: “This

rigor shall not be wanting in hell, where fathers shall see their sons, and brothers their

brothers tormented.” Now if the damned are as full of hatred and malice as is represented

above, this view of the torments of others, though their nearest friends, would be a pleasure

rather than a source of pain to them.

At other times, the wicked in the world of woe are represented as engaged in strife and

perpetual contentions. “Who knows,” asks Dr. Watts, “what the damned in hell will endure

from the endless brawls and bitter quarrels among themselves? What new contentions will

arise perpetually in such a country, where it is perhaps the practice and custom of the place,

and the nature of the inhabitants, for the most part to make everyone of their fellows as

uneasy and as miserable as they can? Oh, what mad and furious pride, and malice, and every

hellish passion will be raging almost in every bosom against all those who are near them, and

this in that dark prison, where all are intensely tormented!” And what Dr. Watts suggested,

Mr. Pollock clearly saw:—

And some in full encounter fiercely m et,

With curses loud and blasphemies that made

The cheek of darkness pale; and as they fought,

And cursed and gnashed their teeth, and wished to die,

Their hollow eyes did utter streams of woe.

C H A P T E R XIV.

SUFFERINGS OCCASIONED BY FEAR.

THE damned not only suffer dreadful torments, but are always in fear of still greater. “The

imagination,” says Jeremy Taylor, “shall afflict those miserable offenders, increasing the

pains of the senses by the liveliness of its apprehension. If in this life the imagination is

sometimes so vehement that it hurts more than real evils, in the other the torment which it

causes shall be excessive. Baptista Fulgosus recounts, as an eye-witness, that being a Judge

in a duel, one of the competitors made the other fly, but instantly fell down dead himself,

without any other cause than his imagination, for he received neither wound nor blow,

neither was any found upon his dead body. If in this life the imagination is so powerful in men

who are in health as to cause a sense of pain where none hurts, grief where none molests, and

death where none kills, what shall it be in hell, where so many devils afflict with torments,

preserving only life, that the pain of death may live eternally? And if we see some timorous

people with an imaginary fear tremble and remain half dead, there is no doubt but the

imagination of those miserable persons, joined with the horror of the place where they are,

will cause a thousand pains and torments.”

Closely connected with this consideration, and making a part of it, is the fact that there

are Two Hells.

One of these is for the disembodied soul, and precedes the resurrection, while the other

does not exist till after the resurrection of the body and the consequent union of soul and

body, as in the present life. The Presbyterian Catechism teaches that “the souls of the wicked

are at their death cast into hell, where they remain in torments and utter darkness, and their

bodies kept in their graves, as in their prisons, until the resurrection and judgment of the

great day. . . . At the day of judgment the wicked shall be set on Christ’s left hand, and, upon

clear evidence and full conviction of their own consciences, shall have the fearful but just

sentence of condemnation pronounced against them, and thereupon shall be cast out from

the favorable presence of God, and the glorious fellowship with Christ, his saints, and all the

holy angels, into hell, to be punished with unspeakable torments, both of body and soul, with

the devil and his angels forever.” President Edwards has drawn this doctrine out at length in

one of his sermons. “When a good man dies,” he says, “his soul is conducted by angels to

heaven. So we may well suppose that when a wicked man dies, his soul is seized by wicked

angels; that they are round his bed ready to seize the miserable soul as soon as it is parted

from the body. And with what fierceness and fury do those cruel spirits fly upon their prey;

and the soul shall be left in their hands. There shall be no good angels to guard and defend

it. God will take no merciful care of it; there is nothing to help it against those cruel spirits

that shall lay hold of it to carry it to hell, there to torment it forever.”

President Edwards does not attempt to locate hell, as many do, under the earth, or in its

centre, but says: “Departed spirits of wicked men are doubtless carried to some particular

place in the universe, which God has prepared to be the receptacle of his wicked, rebellious,

and miserable subjects; a place where God’s avenging justice shall be glorified; a place built

to be the prison, where devils and wicked men are reserved till the day of judgment. Here the

souls of wicked men shall suffer extreme and amazing misery, in a separate state, until the

resurrection. This misery is not indeed their full punishment: nor is the happiness of the

saints before the day of judgment their full happiness. It is with the souls of wicked men as

it is with devils. Though the devils suffer extreme torment now, yet they do not suffer their

complete punishment, and therefore it is said that they are cast down to hell and bound in

chains. . . . They are reserved in the state they are in; and for what are they reserved but for

a greater degree of punishment. . . . But yet they are in extreme and inconceivable misery;

they are deprived of all good; they have no rest nor comfort, and they are subject to the wrath

of God; God there executes wrath on them without mercy, and they are swallowed up in

wrath. . . . Those who go to hell never can escape thence; there they remain imprisoned till

the day of judgment, and their torments remain continually. Those wicked men who died

many years ago, their souls went to hell, and there they are still; those that went to hell in

former ages of the world have been in hell ever since, all the while suffering torment. They

have nothing else to spend their time in there but to suffer torment; they are kept in being

for no other purpose. The separate souls of the wicked, besides the present misery they suffer,

shall be in amazing fear of their more full punishment at the day of judgment. Though their

punishment in their separate state be exceedingly dreadful, and far more than they can bear,

though it be so great as to sink and crush them, yet this is not all; they are reserved for a

much greater and more dreadful punishment at the day of judgment: their torment will be

vastly augmented, and continue in that augmentation. Their punishment will be so much

greater there that their misery in this separate state is but as an imprisonment before

execution. . . . And if the imprisonment be so dreadful, how dreadful indeed will be the

execution! When we are under any great pain of body at any time, how do we dread the least

addition to it! its continuance is greatly dreaded, much more its increase. How much more

will those separate spirits that suffer the torments of hell dread that augmentation and

completing of their torment which there will be at the day of judgment, when what they feel

already is vastly more than they can support themselves; when they shall be, as it were,

begging for one drop of water to cool their tongues, when they would give ten thousand

worlds for the least abatement of their misery! How sinking will it be to think that, instead

of that, the day is coming when God shall come forth out of heaven to sentence them to a

far more dreadful degree of misery, and to continue them under it forever! What experience

they have of the dreadfulness of God’s wrath convinces them fully how terrible a thing his

wrath is; they will therefore be exceedingly afraid of that full wrath which he will execute at

the day of judgment; they will have no hope of escaping it; they will know assuredly that it

will come.

“The fear of this makes the devils, those mighty, proud, and stubborn spirits, to tremble:

they believe what is threatened, and therefore tremble. If this fear overcomes them, how

much more will it overwhelm the souls of wicked men! All hell trembles at the thoughts of

the day of judgment.

“When the day of judgment comes, they shall rise to the resurrection of damnation.

When that day comes, all mankind that have died from off the face of the earth shall arise,

not only the righteous but also the wicked. . . . The damned in hell know not the time when

the day of judgment will be; but when the time comes, it will be made known, and it will be

the most dreadful news that ever was told in that world of misery. It is always a doleful time

in hell; the world of darkness is always full of shrieks and doleful cries; but when the news is

heard that the day appointed for the judgment is come, hell will be filled with louder shrieks

and more doleful cries than ever before. When Christ comes in the clouds of heaven to

judgment, the news of it will fill both earth and hell with mourning and bitter crying. We read

that all the kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him, and so shall all the inhabitants

of hell, and then must the souls of the wicked come up to be united to their bodies, and stand

before the Judge. They shall not come willingly, but they shall be dragged forth as a

malefactor is dragged out of his dungeon to execution. They were unwilling when they died

to leave the earth to go to hell; but now they will be much more unwilling to come out of hell

to go to the last judgment. It will be no deliverance to them; it will be only a coming forth

to their execution. They will hang back, but must come; the devils and damned spirits must

come up together. The last trumpet will then be heard; this will be the most terrible sound

to wicked men and devils that ever was heard.”

President Edwards then gives a very circumstantial account of the last judgment, and of

the final sentence pronounced upon the wicked: “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting

fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.” This sentence, he says, “will be pronounced with

awful majesty; and there shall be great indignation, and dreadful wrath shall then appear in

the Judge and in his voice, with which he shall pronounce the sentence; and what a horror

and amazement will these words strike into the hearts of the wicked, on whom they shall be

pronounced! Every word and syllable shall be like the most amazing thunder to them, and

shall pierce their souls like the fiercest lightning. The Judge shall bid them depart from him;

he will drive them from his presence, as exceedingly abominable to him, and he shall give

them the epithet accursed; they shall be an accursed company; and he will not only bid them

depart from his presence, but into everlasting fire, to dwell there as their only fit habitation.

And what shows the dreadfulness of the fire is, that it is prepared for the devil and his angels;

they shall lie forever in the same fire in which the devils, those grand enemies of God, shall

be tormented. When this sentence shall be pronounced, there shall be in the vast company

at the left hand, tremblings, and mourning, and crying and gnashing of teeth, in a new

manner, beyond all that ever was before. . . . Then the sentence shall be executed. . . .

Immediately upon the finishing of the judgment and the pronouncing of the sentence will

come the end of the world. The frame of this world shall be dissolved. The pronouncing of

that sentence will probably be followed with amazing thunders, that shall rend the heavens

and shake the earth out of its place. Then shall the sea roar, the rocks shall be thrown down,

and the mountains shall rend asunder, and there shall be one universal wreck of this great

world. Then shall the heavens be dissolved, and then the earth shall be set on fire. As God

in wrath once destroyed the world by a flood of water, so now shall he cause it to be all

drowned in a deluge of fire; and the heavens being on fire, shall be dissolved, and the

elements shall melt with fervent heat, and that great company of devils and wicked men must

enter into those everlasting burnings to which they are sentenced. In this condition they shall

remain throughout the never-ending ages of eternity. Their punishment shall then be

complete, and it shall remain in this completion forever. Now shall all that come upon them,

which they so long trembled for fear of, while their souls were in a separate state. They will

dwell in a fire that never shall be quenched, and here they must wear out eternity.”

This doctrine is beautifully set forth by Rev. Mr. Spurgeon, the great Baptist preacher of

London: “When thou diest,” says he, “thy soul will be tormented alone; but at the day of

judgment, thy body will join thy soul, and then thou wilt have twin hells; thy soul sweating

drops of blood, and thy body suffused with agony. In fire exactly like that we have on earth

thy body will lie, asbestos like, forever unconsumed; all thy veins roads for the feet of pain to

travel on; every nerve a string on which the devil shall forever play his diabolical tune of

‘Hell’s Unutterable Lament’”

C H A P T E R XV.

THE DAMNED SUFFER UNFRIENDED AND

UNPITIED.

WHAT adds greatly to the miseries of the damned is that they have no friend in the

universe, and no one who can sympathize in the least degree with them, or feel the

slightest pity for them in their distresses. This seems to me one of the saddest of all the sad

features of hell-torments. “It is some comfort in misery,” says Christopher Love, “to be pitied

by a friend. And it is one of the wonderful things of this world that there is no one so utterly

forlorn as to find no pity in circumstances of distress. The worst of men still have some friend

who, if no better than themselves, can yet feel for their calamities, and would gladly relieve

their pains.” But in hell, if orthodoxy is true, all humanity is extinct. Every feeling of love or

sympathy or kindly regard is dead. As Rev. Thomas Boston says: “There, natural affection will

be extinguished. The parents will not love their children, nor children their parents. The

mother will not pity the daughter in the flames, nor will the daughter pity the mother. The

son will show no regard to his father there, nor the servant to his master, where every one will

be roaring under his own torment.”

But this is far from being the worst of the case. It was said long ago that “the dark places

of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty;” and it might not seem strange if the darker

places of hell were so. But what is unspeakably more surprising and lamentable, heaven itself

has lost all its charity! “In hell,” says Christopher Love, “you shall lose all kind of pity. God

shall not pity you. The godly shall not pity you. It is the speech of Austin [Augustine], Nec

Creator nec creatura ulla erga damnatos afficientur sympathia (Neither Creator nor creature shall be affected with any sympathy towards the damned in their torments). Here if thou art in

misery, there is pity shown thee, but in hell there is none to pity thee, and so thy misery is the

greater.” Upon this point all orthodox writers agree. “Though they have so many companions

in hell,” says President Edwards, “yet they are no comfort to them, for there is no friend, no

love, no pity, no quietness, no prospect, no hope.” Again: “They will be in a most dreadful

condition; they will have no friends. God will be their enemy; angels and the spirits of the just

will be their enemies; devils and damned spirits will be their enemies. They will be hated with

perfect hatred; will have none to pity them, none to bemoan their case, or be any comfort to

them.” Once more: “They will not be able to find any to befriend them and intercede with

God for them. They had the offer of a mediator often made them in this world; but they will

have no such offers in hell. None will befriend them in hell; all there will be their enemies.

They will have no friend in heaven; none of the saints or angels will befriend them; or if they

should, it would be to no purpose. There will be no creature that will have any power to

deliver them, nor will any ever pity them.”

President Edwards has a whole sermon devoted to this thought, in which, with much

iteration, he affirms “that the torments of the wicked in hell are no occasion of grief to the

saints in heaven.” He shows, in the first place, that heaven and hell will be so near each

other, or in some other way, that the saints will see the punishments suffered by the damned;

and that the damned will also see the happiness of the saints in glory. But while this vision

of the joys of heaven will greatly aggravate the torments of the damned, the sight of their

torments will not in the slightest degree lessen the felicities of heaven. “The two worlds of

happiness and misery,” he says, “will be in view of each other. Though we know not by what

means nor after what manner it will be, yet the Scriptures certainly lead us to think that they

will some way or other have a direct and immediate apprehension of each other’s state. The

saints in glory will see how the damned are tormented; they will see God’s threatenings

fulfilled, and his wrath executed upon them. . . . The miseries of the damned in hell will be

inconceivably great. When they shall come to hear [perhaps bear] the wrath of the Almighty

poured out upon them without mixture, and executed upon them without pity or restraint,

or any mitigation, it will doubtless cause anguish and horror and amazement beyond all the

sufferings and torments that ever any man endured in this world, yea, and beyond all extent

of our words or thoughts. For God, in executing wrath upon ungodly men, will act like an

Almighty God. The Scripture calls this wrath God’s fury and the fierceness of his wrath.”

In the second place, President Edwards tells us that the inhabitants of heaven will

understand vastly better than it is possible for us now to do, how terrible these torments of

the damned really are. “The saints in glory will see this,” he says, “and be far more sensible

of it than now we can possibly be. They will be far more sensible how dreadful the wrath of

God is, and will better understand how terrible the sufferings of the damned are.”

But this vision, this knowledge of the condition and miseries of the damned, will be the

source of no regret, excite no sympathy, occasion them no pain. “This will be no occasion of

grief to them,” he says. “They will not be sorry for the damned; it will cause no uneasiness or

dissatisfaction to them.” And he proceeds to show why it cannot, and why it ought not, to

produce any sorrow, or be the cause of any grief to the saints. “That seeing the wrath of God

executed upon the damned should cause grief in the saints in glory is inconsistent with that

state of perfect happiness in which they are. There can no such thing as grief enter, to be an

alloy to the happiness and joy of that world of blessedness. Grief is an utter stranger in that

world. God hath promised that he will wipe away all tears from their eyes, and there shall be

no more sorrow.”

Besides, the saints will have no love for the damned. “The sufferings of the damned will

be no occasion of grief to the heavenly inhabitants,” says President Edwards, “as they will

have no love nor pity to the damned as such. . . . For the heavenly inhabitants will know that

it is not fit that they should love them, because they will know then that God has no love to

them, nor pity for them, but that they are the objects of God’s eternal hatred. And they will

then be perfectly conformed to God in their wills and affections. They will love what he loves,

and that only.”

In conclusion, he warns sinners that if they perish at last, their condition will be

“destitute of any comforting consideration.” “You will have none to pity you,” he says. “Look

which way you will,—before or behind, on your right hand or left, look up to heaven or look

about you in hell,—and you will see none to condole your case, or to exercise any pity

towards you, in your dreadful condition. . . . You will have no pity from the created inhabitants

of heaven. . . . God will exercise no pity towards you. If you might have his pity in any degree,

that would be of more worth to you than thousands of worlds. That would make your case

to be not without comfort and hope. But God will exercise no pity towards you. He hath

often said that his eye shall not spare, neither will he have pity. You will see nothing in God,

and receive nothing from him but perfect hatred and the fierceness of his wrath; nothing but

the mighty falls or outpourings of wrath upon you every moment; and no cries will avail to

move God to any pity, or in the least to move him to lighten his hand, or assuage the

fierceness and abate the power of your torments. . . . Jesus Christ will have no pity on you.

Though he had so much love to sinners as to be willing to lay down his life for them, and

offers you the benefit of his blood while you are in this world, and often calls upon you to

accept them, yet then he will have no pity upon you. . . . You will find none that will pity you

in hell. The devils will not pity you, but will be your tormentors, as roaring lions or

hell-hounds, to tear you in pieces continually. And other wicked men, who shall be there,

will be like devils; they will have no pity on you, but will hate and curse and torment you.

And you yourselves will be like devils; you will be like devils to yourselves, and will be your

own tormentors.”

Dr. Dwight draws a most fearful picture of the desolation, abandonment, and misery of

the damned. “It is evident,” he says, “that there can be no confidence in the regions of

misery. The wretched inhabitants of those regions will know all around them to be enemies

and deceivers. Amid the vast multitudes not an individual will be found possessed of either

natural affection or benevolence or sincerity. This will probably be one of the most painful

and wearisome among all the ingredients of future woe. . . . The miserable inhabitants of hell

will have no God, no Savior, no virtuous friends, no parents, no relatives, before whom they

may spread their calamities with the hope of being heard, or in whose hearts or hands they

may find refuge from the bitterness of woe. . . . Thus, while the inhabitant of that melancholy

world looks around him, when he casts his eyes abroad through the universe, he will perceive

that it contains no friend to him. In the midst of millions he is alone, and is sure of being

loathed, rejected, and shunned by every being in the universe of God. Not a sigh can he

breathe, not a tear can he shed, not a sorrow can he unfold, not a prayer can he utter, with

the hope of being befriended, heard, or regarded!”

What a scene of loneliness and desolation! In the midst of millions, and yet alone.

Surrounded by those of our kind, and yet none to love or pity or care! To sigh, to weep, to

pray, and yet to feel and know that in the wide universe, from the dog that we fed to the

Creator who made us, there is not one solitary being who hears or heeds us! If there is such

a hell as this, what worse to a sensitive and social being is there to be conceived? But poets

unite with our theologians in this doctrine. Thus Pollock:—

Their hollow eyes did utter streams of woe,

And there were groans that ended not, and sighs

That always sighed, and tears that ever wept,

And ever fell, but not in m ercy’s sight.

Mercy is dead in heaven as well as in hell. I do not wonder, therefore, that Dr. Young

should represent one of the damned as crying out

And this, my help! my God, at thy decree!

Nature is changed, and Hell should succor me.

But what is strangest of all here is the wonderful agreement and harmony existing in the

tempers and conduct of these two worlds. Heaven and hell have finally come to think and

feel and act alike. God hates the damned in hell, and so does the Devil. Angels and saints

hate them, and so do wicked spirits and wicked men! Was there ever anything like this seen

before? Or could any mortal have rationally dreamed that in the process of the ages God and

the Devil should thus come to agree? And the conversion seems unfortunately to have taken

place on the wrong side. It is not the Devil who has become better, more just, more merciful,

more humane, but—

C H A P T E R XVI.

THE SAINTS REJOICE IN THE MISERIES OF THE

DAMNED.

IT seems terrible enough that the saints in heaven should have lost their Christian

tenderness and sympathy, so as to feel no pity for the damned in hell, and be perfectly

indifferent to their torments! The Christian religion makes our second duty the love of our

fellow-men. And our Savior himself teaches that it is not enough to love our friends and

those who love us, but, in order to be his disciples and the children of God, we must love our

enemies, bless them that curse us, do good to them who hate us, and pray for such as

despitefully use us and persecute us. God is said, even in the Old Testament, to be good to

all, and his tender mercies to be over all his works; from which it would be no violent

inference that if there is a hell, such as orthodoxy describes, it cannot be wholly beyond the

range of his goodness, nor utterly without any reflection of the divine mercy. But our great

Teacher would not leave a point like this to an inference; he therefore declares plainly that

God “is kind to the unthankful and to the evil,” and, with so many instances of goodness and

mercy in the world about us, still affirms that “there is none good but one, that is, God,”—

none so steadily, universally good; none good without variableness or shadow of turning;

none good without limit and without end. And his children are required to be like him.

When, therefore, we are told that God and good angels and saints in heaven have ceased

to feel pity for any individual of the human race, it becomes a trial of Christian faith; but

when the matter is carried still farther, and we are required to believe that these saints—to

say nothing of God and Christ and the blessed angels—actually rejoice in the damnation of

their fellow-men, and find an increase of their own felicity in the miseries of those of their

own kind, our faith stumbles, and we refuse to believe. Nature is not changed. God is God,

and goodness is goodness still; and Christian love is not devilish hate, and the felicities of

heaven are not created by beholding the torments of hell!

“God shall not pity you,” says Christopher Love, “but shall laugh at your destruction, and

mock when your fear comes. The godly shall not pity you, but they shall rejoice to see God’s

power and God’s glory in your damnation. . . . When thou art scorching in thy flames, when

thou art howling in thy torments, then God shall laugh at thy destruction, and then the saints

of God shall sing and rejoice that thou art a vessel of his justice, and so his power and wrath

are made known in thee.” So Rev. Mr. Boston says: “None were so compassionate as the

saints on earth during the time of God’s patience. But now that time is at an end. Their

compassion on the ungodly is swallowed up in joy in the Mediator’s glory, and his executing

of just judgment, by which his enemies are made his footstool. Though sometimes the

righteous man did weep in secret places for their pride, and because they would not hear, yet

then he shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance, he shall wash his feet in the blood of the

wicked. No pity shall then be shown to them from their nearest relations. The godly wife shall

applaud the justice of the Judge in the condemnation of her ungodly husband. The godly

husband shall say amen to the damnation of her who lay in his bosom. The godly parents shall

say hallelujah at the passing of the sentence against their ungodly child; and the godly child

shall from his heart approve the damnation of his wicked parents,—the father who begat him,

and the mother who bore him.”

On this point, as on the preceding, President Edwards is painfully express and full. We

have seen how, in his theology, saints in glory and the damned in hell are to see each other,

and be acquainted with each other’s condition; and how the saints are to find “no occasion

for grief,” or to feel any pity in the miseries of their fellow men. The picture would have been

dark and revolting enough had he stopped here, and would have suggested far more

difficulties than orthodoxy could ever explain. But he chose to go farther, or, I ought rather

say, the necessities of his creed urged him much farther. These necessities required him to

affirm, not only that the saints in heaven will feel no sorrow for the damned in hell, but that

the torments of the damned will prove a source of sublime and never-ceasing joy to them.

And what his creed required, that President Edwards said without reservation, and

endeavored to justify. The saints are not only to rejoice in the damnation of the wicked, but

the miseries of hell are forever to enhance the happiness of the blessed in heaven! “They will

not be sorry for the damned,” he says; “it will cause no uneasiness or dissatisfaction to them;

but, on the contrary, when they have this sight, it will excite them to joyful praises. . . .

Therefore the damned and their misery, their sufferings and the wrath of God poured out

upon them, will be an occasion of joy to them. . . . When the saints in glory, therefore, shall

see the doleful state of the damned, how will this heighten their sense of the blessedness of

their own state, so exceedingly different from it!. . . When they shall see the smoke of their

torment, and the raging of the flames of their burning, and hear their dolorous shrieks and

cries, and consider that they, in the mean time, are in the most blissful state, and shall surely

be in it to all eternity, how will they rejoice!”

We should do the intelligence of President Edwards great injustice were we to assume

that he did not see the unnatural and abhorrent character of this doctrine. To be utterly

indifferent to the miseries of any of our fellow-beings, however vicious or criminal, betrays a

condition of mind and heart that is far enough from being commendable, even in “natural

men,” to say nothing of those touched by the divine charities of the gospel; but that the saints

in heaven should be so lost to all the better feelings of our nature as to rejoice in view of the

unspeakable torments of the damned in hell shocks human sensibilities, and outrages

common sense. Yet orthodoxy can hardly avoid this issue. And President Edwards meets it

like a man, avowing it without reservation, and earnestly endeavoring to persuade himself

and others that, bad as it looks and bad as it is, it is still the most amiable, the sweetest,

divinest thing imaginable, the very perfection of piety, the maturest blossom of celestial

holiness. Next to being willing to be damned one’s self is the grace of rejoicing in the

damnation of one’s neighbors. He who can do either of these gives full proof that he is no

longer “a natural man,” and is therefore fit for heaven. In favor of such an abomination,

President Edwards summons more considerations than he would deem sufficient to establish

the most important and useful truth, and urges them with a zeal worthy of a better cause.

As God is the author of hell-torments, so the saints in glory are wholly conformed to his

will. What he loves they love, and what he hates they hate. Now, he can have no love to the

damned, or he could not inflict upon them such dreadful, unintermitted, and endless

torments. He must hate them with a perfect hatred, and desire to do them all the evil he can,

with no ulterior object and without end. In this, therefore, his saints should be in complete

harmony with God. They should desire what he desires and delight in whatever he does. “The

saints in heaven,” says President Edwards, “will be perfect in their love to God; their hearts

will be all a flame of love to God, and therefore they will greatly value the glory of God, and

will exceedingly delight in seeing him glorified. The saints highly value the glory of God here

in this [world], but how much more will they do so in the world to come. They will therefore

greatly rejoice in all that contributes to that glory. The glory of God will, in their esteem, be

of greater consequence than the welfare of thousands and millions of souls.”

Now it happens, according to orthodoxy and President Edwards, that “God glorifies

himself in the eternal damnation of ungodly men. God glorifies himself in all he doth; but he

glorifies himself principally in his eternal disposal of his intelligent creatures; some are

appointed to everlasting life, and others left to everlasting death.” And it appears as if, in the

orthodox view, it is a matter of the profoundest indifference whether souls are damned or

saved. God reaps an equal harvest of glory in both cases. He is glorified in men’s salvation,

and he is glorified just as really and just as much in their damnation. “Men who bring forth

no fruit to God,” says President Edwards, “may yet in suffering destruction be useful.

Although they be not useful in anything they do, yet they may be useful in what they may

suffer, just as a barren tree, which is no way useful standing in the vineyard, may be good fuel.

God can find use for the most wicked men; he hath his use for vessels of wrath, as well as for

vessels of mercy.” Our author has, indeed, a whole sermon, the object of which is to

demonstrate that the wicked are “useful only in their destruction,” and at the same time to

show in how many ways this endless destruction is to contribute to the glory of God and the

happiness of his saints. It seems a little remarkable, certainly, that under these circumstances

the thought of saving sinners should ever have occurred, since God would have gained all the

glory in their damnation that he could promise himself in saving them; so that the great end

he had in view—his own glory—would have been equally attained without the humiliation,

sufferings, and death to which Christ so unprofitably subjected himself.

The reader cannot fail to be interested in following President Edwards in his discussion

of this delightful topic, and seeing what inexhaustible sources of satisfaction his saints find

in the endless torments of their fellow-creatures. “It will be an occasion of their rejoicing,”

he says, “as the glory of God will appear in it. The glory of God appears in all his works; and

therefore there is no work of God, which the saints in glory shall behold and contemplate, but

what will be an occasion of rejoicing to them. God glorifies himself in the eternal damnation

of ungodly men.”

The saints in heaven, he tells us, “will rejoice in seeing the justice of God glorified in the

sufferings of the damned. The misery of the damned, dreadful as it is, is but what justice

requires. . . . They will greatly rejoice to see justice take place, to see that all the sin and

wickedness that have been committed in the world [except their own] is remembered of God,

and has its due punishment. The sight of this strict, immutable justice of God will render him

amiable and adorable in their eyes. They will rejoice when they see him who is their Father

and eternal portion so glorious in his justice.”

And this leads President Edwards to say: “Then there will be no more difficulties about

the justice of God, about the absolute decrees of God, or anything pertaining to the

dispensations of God towards men. But divine justice in the destruction of the wicked will

then appear as light without darkness, and will shine as the sun without clouds, and on that

account will they sing joyful songs of praise.”

Certain it is that the saints will have nothing to complain of in God’s dispensations

towards themselves. Entirely freed from all punishment, delivered by sovereign grace from the

damnation they deserved, taken into God’s special favor, and assured of endless felicity, they

would be most unreasonable beings if they still found fault with the divine treatment of them.

And when we add that in addition to their own happiness they are permitted to behold the

unspeakable torments of the damned, and to rejoice over them, their case appears enviable,

and I should think it very strange if they found any “difficulties about the justice of God, or

about the absolute decrees of God.” Could they conceive of anything more fully in their

favor?

I can easily imagine how glad a human being would be, who, justly sentenced to the

scaffold, or to be burnt at the stake, should receive a full pardon and be permitted not only

to live but to go free. I strive to imagine how one “bound over to the wrath of God and curse

of the law, and so made liable to death, with all miseries, spiritual, temporal, and eternal,”

would feel, if delivered from this awful condition, and made partaker of the glories and joys

of heaven. Our love of happiness, out dread of misery, will easily help us to interpret to our

own souls something of the joy one would experience in such a translation from darkness to

light, from death to life. But this natural feeling does not at all meet the case of President

Edwards. His saints, not content with being saved and blessed themselves, are required to

rejoice in the damnation of their fellow-men! It is not enough that they are happy; they must

be glad to see their neighbors miserable; nay, their happiness is to be forever augmented by

the torments of others of their race.

To see the enormity of all this, let us suppose that there are two men, brothers, if you

please, who are guilty of the same capital offence, and condemned to the same punishment

by fire. What should we think, if one, having been so fortunate as to obtain pardon, should

attend the execution of the other, and instead of exhibiting any tokens of grief or pity, should

merely dance and sing, as he witnessed the sufferings of his brother; and in the language of

President Edwards, should “rejoice to see justice take place,” rejoice to see the guilt of his

brother remembered, and have its due punishment? Would not every man think this

pardoned brother a wretch, not only without ordinary human feeling, but a monster of

depravity? Yet this monster, so callous, so inhuman, would be an angel by the side of

President Edwards’s “saints in glory.” For what would be the sufferings of a human being for

a few minutes at most in an earthly fire, in comparison with an eternity of torments in the fire

of hell! The rich man in Hades remembered his five brethren, and desired that they might

be warned, so as not to fall into like misery with himself. President Edwards’s saints not only

have no pity upon their brethren, but rejoice in their most horrible torment.

“They will rejoice in it,” says President Edwards, “as it will be a glorious manifestation of

the power and majesty of God. God will show his own greatness in executing vengeance on

ungodly men. . . . God will show his glorious power in destroying these enemies. . . . The

power of God is sometimes spoken of as very glorious, as appearing in the temporal

destruction of his enemies. . . . Moses rejoiced and sang when he saw God glorify his power

in the destruction of Pharaoh and his host at the Red Sea. But how much more will the saints

in glory rejoice when they shall see God gloriously triumphing over all his enemies in their

eternal ruin. Then it will appear how dreadful God is, and how dreadful a thing it is to

disobey and condemn him. It is often mentioned, as a part of the glory of God, that he is a

terrible God. To see the majesty and greatness and terribleness of God, appearing in the

destruction of his enemies, will cause the saints to rejoice; and when they shall see how great

and terrible a being God is, how will they prize his favor! how will they rejoice that they are

the objects of his love! how will they praise him the more joyfully, that he should choose

them to be his children, and to live in the enjoyment of him.”

It might not be amiss to reflect that when Moses sang over the destruction of Pharaoh

and his hosts, he had as little thought of their endless damnation as he had of the

Westminster Confession of Faith or the power of the Pope. And it would do no harm to

remember also that when Moses desired to see the glory of God, God was graciously pleased

not to call attention to his naked power, his wrath, or terribleness exhibited in the

destruction he was able to accomplish, but chose rather to make “all his goodness pass before

him.” Even under the Law goodness was more glorious than omnipotence itself!

But beyond all this very narrow and selfish joy, the saints will find occasion for rejoicing,

“as they will have the greater sense of their own happiness by seeing the contrary misery. It

is the nature of pleasure and pain, of happiness and misery, greatly to heighten the sense of

each other. Thus the seeing of the happiness of others tends to make men more sensible of

their own calamities; and the seeing of the calamities of others tends to heighten the sense

of our own enjoyments. When the saints in glory, therefore, shall see the doleful state of the

damned, how will it heighten their sense of the blessedness of their own state, so exceedingly

different from it! When they shall see how miserable others of their fellow-creatures are, who

were naturally in the same circumstances with themselves; when they shall see the smoke of

their torment and the raging of the flames of their burning, and hear their dolorous shrieks

and cries, and consider that they, in the meantime, are in the most blissful state and shall

surely be in it to all eternity, how will they rejoice!”

Not to do President Edwards any injustice, I must allow him to explain his own doctrine

fully. “Hereby the saints,” he says, “will be made the more sensible how great their salvation

is. When they shall see how great the misery is from which God hath saved them, and how

great a difference he hath made between their state and the state of others, who were by

nature, and perhaps for a time by practice, no more sinful and ill-deserving than any, it will

give them a greater sense of the wonderfulness of God’s grace to them. Every time they look

upon the damned it will excite in them a lively and admiring sense of the grace of God in

making them so to differ. . . . The sight of hell-torments will exalt the happiness of the saints

forever. It will not only make them more sensible of the greatness and freeness of the grace

of God in their happiness, but it will really make their happiness the greater, as it will make

them the more sensible of their own happiness; it will give a more lively relish of it; it will

make them prize it more. When they see others, who were of the same nature and born under

the same circumstances, plunged in such misery, and they so distinguished, oh, it will make

them sensible how happy they are. A sense of the opposite misery in all cases greatly increases

the relish of any joy or pleasure.”

This seems to me little better, let me confess, than moral madness. The man, saint or

sinner, who could find happiness thus in the misery of his fellows, ought evidently to be

somewhere else than “in glory.” It would betray a nature so perverted and callous that he

would be an object of the profoundest pity or the sharpest indignation of his race.

Now, as the torments of the damned are “unspeakably, inconceivably great,” it follows,

upon the reasoning above, that the sight of them must be the source of a vast, measureless

joy, an exquisite and perpetual delight; and hence the greater the miseries of the damned in

hell, the greater the happiness of the saints in heaven! In this ungodly world, where

fortunately we have few approximations to this kind of sainthood, practices founded upon

this doctrine of President Edwards would not only be thought strange and inconsistent with

the lowest conceptions of morality, but absolutely revolting. We call the rabble brutal that

gathers about the scaffold on which the most guilty wretch pays the penalty of his crimes, if

they exhibit any tokens of joy at his sufferings, or even of levity. Yet they ought to shout and

sing for very delight, since seeing his misery should heighten their happiness! What would the

community think of a party of young people who should gayly prosecute the most innocent

amusements, while one of their companions, ay, or any human being, was known to be dying

in an adjoining room, in full hearing of their hilarity and mirth, and whose expiring groans

mingled every moment with their pleasures? What would the world say of a company of

learned orthodox divines, who should sit enjoying a sumptuous dinner, while a house across

the street was on fire, and its unhappy inmates were perishing in the flames, and filling the

whole neighborhood with what President Edwards would call “their dolorous shrieks and

cries”? And what should we think of their humanity, not to say their religion, if they were

afterwards to tell us what a zest the horrors of this scene gave to their entertainment, and to

assure us that never before did they eat a dinner with such perfect satisfaction, since the

miseries of their neighbors added amazingly to their enjoyment? If President Edwards’s

doctrine is good for heaven, it ought to be tolerable on earth.

It is easily seen that on this theory hell, with its horrible torments, is a necessary foil for

the glories and joys of heaven. Heaven without hell by its side would be heaven no longer;

and were it not for the torments of the damned, President Edwards’s saints would lose more

than half their happiness. Which reminds me of a remark of Goethe, that there were some

in his time “who thought there would be no pleasure in being Christians, if all the heathen

were not to be roasted eternally.”

President Edwards finds another consideration which greatly fortifies his position. The

Apostle, in one of his epistles, told his Christian brethren that all things were theirs, from

which the President generously infers that “the saints in heaven possess all things as their

own, and therefore all things contribute to their joy and happiness. . . . All things in the world

to come, or in the future and eternal world, are the saints’; not only life, but death, men and

angels, and devils, heaven and hell, are theirs, to contribute to their joy and happiness.

Therefore the damned and their misery, their sufferings and the wrath of God poured out

upon them, will be occasion of joy to them.”

But while proving and illustrating this important doctrine, President Edwards meets with

one objection. He was always asserting that the devil and his wicked angels hate the damned,

and rejoice in their torments; and now it appears that God and good angels and the saints in

heaven are in perfect harmony with the devil in this, and do the same thing! “God has no

love to them, nor pity for them,” but, on the contrary, “they are the objects of his eternal

hatred.” In like manner the devil has no love to them, nor pity for them, but they are the

objects of his eternal hatred. The coincidence is remarkable, and would somewhat stagger

ordinary men; but to President Edwards it presented no considerable difficulty. He explained

the striking similarity of temper and conduct on the principle that extremes are apt to meet.

God and the saints in glory hate the damned out of an exuberance of goodness, out of a

transcendent holiness; the devil and his angels, on the contrary, hate them, and rejoice in

their damnation out of a wicked and malignant feeling; just as Dr. Adam Clarke says the

effects of extreme heat and cold, frost and fire, are the same. The streams come from different

fountains, but flow in the same channel, and, unluckily for the damned, prove equally bitter

and fatal.

The difficulty is somewhat increased, as President Edwards is obliged to confess, by the

circumstance that “Christ, by many precepts in his word, hath made it our duty to love all

men. We are commanded to love wicked men, and our enemies and persecutors.” Then

Paul’s love to his countrymen was so great that he declared he could wish himself accursed

from Christ for the sake of his brethren and kinsmen according to the flesh. The good angels,

too, take an interest in human welfare; and are said to rejoice over any sinner that repents.

That Christ loved sinners may be safely inferred from the single fact that he died for them;

and the Apostle affirms the same of God himself, when he says that “he spared not his own

Son, but delivered him up for us all,” and commended “his love toward us, in that while we

were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” It is the commandment of God that we should not only

love him supremely, but love our neighbor as ourselves. In the time of our Savior the Jews had

come to explain this as meaning only that we should love our neighbor, but hate our enemy.

“This gloss,” says the learned Dr. Lightfoot, “came from hell, not from heaven; from Satan,

not from God.” Our divine Master not only corrected their error, but defined the

commandment: “I say unto you, Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; do good to

them that hate you; and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you.” And he

enjoined this upon them that they might be the children of their Father in heaven, who is

good to all, making his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sending rain upon the just

and the unjust. From all which we may confidently infer, not only that the spirit of the

Christian religion is benevolent, but that God is good, and loves his enemies, and therefore

cannot hate them, and curse and endlessly torment them, as orthodoxy teaches.

All this President Edwards seems willing to allow—with some pretty serious exceptions,

certainly—so far as the present world is concerned, but denies that it holds at all with respect

to the future. Here in this momentary life the saints are required to love their neighbors, and,

indeed, to love the wicked; but as soon as they attain to “glory,” the moment they reach

heaven, the scene changes, and what was the most sacred duty in this world falls away, and

is a duty no longer! Speaking of this love of enemies, which Christ clearly makes the

distinctive mark of his disciples, President Edwards says: “This command doth not extend to

the saints in glory, with respect to the damned in hell; nor is there the same reason that it

should. We ought now to love all, and even wicked men; we know not but that God loves

them. However wicked any man is, yet we know not but that he is one whom God loved from

eternity; we know not but that Christ loved him with a dying love, had his name upon his

heart before the world was, and had respect to him when he endured those bitter agonies

upon the cross. We know not but that he is to be our companion in glory to all eternity.” Is

not this to place the second commandment of the law on very narrow and insecure grounds?

As I read the Scriptures, we are under obligation to love our neighbor because God

commands it; and I conclude that God commands it because it is right; or, if one chooses to

go further, God requires us to love our fellow-men because He himself, who is the standard

of all moral excellence, loves them. According to orthodoxy, our duty to love the wicked rests

upon our ignorance. We are to love them because we do not know that God does not love

them, and that Christ did not die for them, and that they may not be saved! This is an

unconscious confession on the part of orthodoxy of the superior moral power of Universalism.

That teaches, without any reservation or doubt, and as fundamental truths, that God loves

all men, and that Christ died for all, and hence that we all ought to love one another and

perform the works of a genuine and universal benevolence.

But President Edwards’s difficulties do not end here. If a part of the human race is

ultimately to be damned to all eternity, and the saints do not know who they are that are

thus to be lost, that happy ignorance can hardly belong to God; and it becomes a very serious

question why he should command his saints on earth to love those whom he hates and

proposes to damn forever; or, to change the statement, why Christ should enjoin it upon his

disciples to love and bless and pray for and do good to those whom he himself did not love

and for whom he did not die. Here is one of the mysteries which orthodoxy should endeavor

to explain. Would God have his children on earth better and more benevolent than himself?

Would Christ require his disciples to go beyond their Head? He said it was enough that the

disciple is as his Master, and the servant as his Lord. He could hardly wish his followers to be

better than the Author and Finisher of their faith, to love where he hates, to bless where he

curses, and do good where he does the contrary.

According to President Edwards, there is to be a great, an unaccountable difference in

the moral government and Christian temper between this and the future world. While, as he

confesses, “we are commanded to love wicked men, and our enemies and persecutors” here,

“this command doth not extend to the saints in glory with respect to the damned in hell.