How shall we characterize the doctrine of endless torture as the destiny of most of those who have lived, and are living, on this planet? I prefer to let another writer speak of it. Mr. John Morley uses the following words: "The horrors of what is perhaps the most frightful idea that has ever corroded human character,--the idea of eternal punishment." Sismondi, the great historian, heard a sermon on eternal punishment, and vowed never again to enter another church holding the same creed. Romanism he considered a religion of mercy and peace by the side of what the English call the Reformation. --I mention these protests because I happen to find them among my notes, but it would be easy to accumulate examples of the same kind. When Cowper, at about the end of the last century, said satirically of the minister he was attacking, "He never mentioned hell to ears polite, " he was giving unconscious evidence that the sense of the barbarism of the idea was finding its way into the pulpit. When Burns, in the midst of the sulphurous orthodoxy of Scotland, dared to say, "The fear o' hell 's a hangman's whip To haud the wretch in order," he was oily appealing to the common sense and common humanity of his fellow-countrymen.
All the reasoning in the world, all the proof-texts in old manuscripts, cannot reconcile this supposition of a world of sleepless and endless torment with the declaration that "God is love."
Where did this "frightful idea" come from? We are surprised, as we grow older, to find that the legendary hell of the church is nothing more nor less than the Tartarus of the old heathen world. It has every mark of coming from the cruel heart of a barbarous despot.
Some malignant and vindictive Sheik, some brutal Mezentius, must have sat for many pictures of the Divinity. It was not enough to kill his captive enemy, after torturing him as much as ingenuity could contrive to do it. He escaped at last by death, but his conqueror could not give him up so easily, and so his vengeance followed him into the unseen and unknown world. How the doctrine got in among, the legends of the church we are no more bound to show than we are to account for the intercalation of the "three witnesses" text, or the false insertion, or false omission, whichever it may be, of the last twelve verses of the Gospel of St Mark. We do not hang our grandmothers now, as our ancestors did theirs, on the strength of the positive command, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."
The simple truth is that civilization has outgrown witchcraft, and is outgrowing the Christian Tartarus. The pulpit no longer troubles itself about witches and their evil doings. All the legends in the world could not arrest the decay of that superstition and all the edicts that grew out of it. All the stories that can be found in old manuscripts will never prevent the going out of the fires of the legendary Inferno. It is not much talked about nowadays to ears polite or impolite. Humanity is shocked and repelled by it. The heart of woman is in unconquerable rebellion against it. The more humane sects tear it from their "Bodies of Divinity" as if it were the flaming shirt of Nessus. A few doctrines with which it was bound up have dropped or are dropping away from it: the primal curse; consequential damages to give infinite extension to every transgression of the law of God; inverting the natural order of relative obligations; stretching the smallest of finite offenses to the proportions of the infinite; making the babe in arms the responsible being, and not the parent who gave it birth and determined its conditions of existence.
After a doctrine like "the hangman's whip" has served its purpose,--if it ever had any useful purpose,--after a doctrine like that of witchcraft has hanged old women enough, civilization contrives to get rid of it. When we say that civilization crowds out the old superstitious legends, we recognize two chief causes. The first is the naked individual protest; the voice of the inspiration which giveth man understanding. This shows itself conspicuously in the modern poets. Burns in Scotland, Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, in America, preached a new gospel to the successors of men like Thomas Boston and Jonathan Edwards. In due season, the growth of knowledge, chiefly under the form of that part of knowledge called science, so changes the views of the universe that many of its long-unchallenged legends become no more than nursery tales. The text-books of astronomy and geology work their way in between the questions and answers of the time-honored catechisms. The doctrine of evolution, so far as it is accepted, changes the whole relations of man to the creative power. It substitutes infinite hope in the place of infinite despair for the vast majority of mankind. Instead of a shipwreck, from which a few cabin passengers and others are to be saved in the long-boat, it gives mankind a vessel built to endure the tempests, and at last to reach a port where at the worst the passengers can find rest, and where they may hope for a home better than any which they ever had in their old country. It is all very well to say that men and women had their choice whether they would reach the safe harbor or not.
"Go to it grandam, child;
Give grandam kingdom, and it grandam will Give it a plum, a cherry and a fig."