• Introduction - To the American Reader
• Preface to the Fifth Edition
• Author's Preface
• CHAPTER 1. Future Punishment Is Eternal.
• CHAPTER 2. Eternal Death
• CHAPTER 3. Testimony Of The Old Testament.
• CHAPTER 4. Testimony Of The New Testament.
• CHAPTER 5. The Greek Of The New Testament.
• CHAPTER 6. The Primary Sense Of Terms Vindicated.
• CHAPTER 7. The Illustrations Of Scripture.
• CHAPTER 8. The Resurrection Of The Wicked.
• CHAPTER 9. The Divine Justice.
• CHAPTER 10. The Extinction Of Evil.
• CHAPTER 11. Examination Of Particular Texts.
• CHAPTER 12. Distinctions In Future Punishment.
• CHAPTER 13. Theories Of Punishment And Christian Missions.
• CHAPTER 14. Some Objections Answered.
• CHAPTER 15. The Apostolic Fathers. Clement Of Rome.
• CHAPTER 16. Justin Martyr.
• CHAPTER 17. Irenaeus, Martyr And Bishop Of Lyons.
• CHAPTER 18. Rise Of The Theory Of Eternal Life In Hell.
• CHAPTER 19. Tertullian.
• CHAPTER 20. Rise Of The Theory Of Universal Restoration Origen.
• CHAPTER 21. Conclusion.

The Duration And Nature Of Future Punishment

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By HENRY CONSTABLE, A.M.
Prebendary of Cork

Fifth Edition - 1875

CHAPTER XIII

Theories of Punishment and
Christian Missions

THE question of future punishment cannot be considered at all adequately without giving marked attention to its influence on the question of missions to the heathen—the duty and the privilege of the Christian Church. The religious world is much indebted for having its attention drawn to this feature of the question by the Rev. Edward White, in a very able paper on "Missionary Theology." ¹ We will endeavour to follow out the line of reflection which he has initiated.

2. It strikes us almost immediately that the natural influence of the general acceptance of the theory of Origen would be to put a total stop to missionary effort as needless and positively injurious to those whom it was meant to benefit. The guilt of the heathen for sins here committed we are taught in Scripture to be small, and their punishment to be proportionably light. There appears therefore to be little occasion to send the Gospel to them for the purpose of saving them from suffering hereafter. That, at the worst, will be light; while their rejection of the Gospel offers would expose them to many stripes.

3. Nor can it be said by the Universalist that the future and eternal bliss of a single one of the heathen depends in the remotest degree on his here hearing and accepting the Gospel of Christ. His immortality is, with the Universalist as with the Augustinian, already secure. He is one of a deathless race. His soul is immortal: his body will be raised incorruptible at the resurrection. If he has not in this life heard the Gospel of Christ he will hear it in the intermediate state. He will hear it then, apparently, under far more favourable circumstances than he could possibly hear it here. It will not be preached to him by men themselves stained by sin and full of imperfection, but by men from whom all the stains of sin shall leave been purged away. There will not then be the thousand difficulties of one kind or other which here so effectually hinder the progress and the force of truth. In that coming age, of which the Universalist dreams, it is difficult to see how a single being could hesitate for a moment to embrace that Gospel of Christ which is to bring him from the realms of pain to the realms of joy. We see not any imaginable motive with the Universalist to send Christ's Gospel to the heathen, save only his Master's command, which to him comes enforced by no apparent reasons which make it urgent and pressing. We enquire whether Universalism has ever afforded a zealous missionary to heathen lands. If it has, we think he must be a man of different passions from those of other men. If Universalism had been the creed of Christ and His apostles, we do not believe that the command "Go, teach all nations," would either have been uttered or obeyed. The deadening, dispiriting influence of this theory on Christian missions is in itself enough to overthrow it.

4. The objection which lies in this respect against the theory of Origen, does not, we fully concede, lie against that of Augustine. The advocates of the latter have, no doubt, a great, powerful, overwhelming, motive to obey their Master's command and send the Gospel to the heathen. But their theory contains within itself an element fatal to its success. They offer the Gospel of salvation mixed up with a theory that necessitates and almost justifies its rejection. They present the God of justice, love, and mercy, in a light which makes Him appear devoid of every one of these qualities. And they themselves by their line of argument upon this question virtually confess that they do so.

5. For it will be remarked by those conversant with this controversy that whenever Augustinian advocates come forward with the smallest show of argument in defence of the justice of their theory of eternal agony, they sedulously confine their argument to the case of those who have sinned against light and grace. One would imagine from their writings that there were no men in the world who had not had the offers of mercy made to them over and over again, and pressed upon them with all the earnestness of love, as Christ Himself, with His heart of love and His words of earnestness, pressed it upon the men of his generation.

6. Bunyan, in his "Visions of Hell," pictures the lamentations of a lost soul: "I know I cannot, must not die; but live a dying life, worse than ten thousand deaths; and yet I might once have helped all this and would not. O, that is the gnawing worm that never dies! I might have once been happy; salvation once was offered me, and I refused it: had it been but once, yet to refuse it had been a folly not to be forgiven; but it was offered me a thousand times, and get (wretch that I was) I still as oft refused it." And such is the general tone of Augustinian theorists. They speak, as the cause of endless misery, of sinners, amid God's wondrous long suffering and pleading with them, still persisting obstinately in rebellion.²

7. These men ignore the vast majority of mankind. They forget that in the times before Christ revelation was confined to a petty race in a corner of Syria. They forget that in the times since Christ salvation has not been offered to or heard of by one in one hundred of mankind. Now there can be no doubt that the end of the ungodly, be they heathen, Jew, or Christian, is the very same. It is death, destruction, perishing. In the circumstances attendant on this there will be a marked distinction, but the end of all will be the same. If death then be, as many tell us, eternal misery, they represent eternal misery as inflicted upon countless myriads who never heard the Gospel of Christ, who never heard the very name of that God against whom they ignorantly sinned. With such a creed, how are they to present the God and Father of Jesus Christ to the heathen mind?

8. A Christian missionary proceeds to India to preach there the Gospel of Christ. It is the old story of Paul at Athens, disputing with Jews and devout persons and all comers, be they philosophers or illiterate men. At Lucknow, or Delhi, or Benares, our modern missionary meets the Brahmin. He addresses him as Paul addressed the Epicureans and Stoics of Athens: "Whom ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you."

Brahmin: "What is your message to us?"

Missionary: "Life from the dead to all who believe in and obey Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father."

B.: "That sounds well. What is this life you offer in Christ? what is this death from which you promise deliverance?"

M.: "The life I offer you in my Master's name is spiritual life—a new heart, loving God, and all that is good, and consequent happiness for ever. The death from which Christ will deliver you is spiritual death, i.e. moral pollution, its consequent misery, and the eternal anguish and suffering which God will inflict on all who believe not the Gospel of His Son Jesus Christ."

B.: "When and where will your God inflict this death upon unbelievers?"

M.: "It is already begun through the sinner's own sin; but God has prepared a place where He will complete what is here only begun. That fearful place is hell, where all unbelievers shall suffer throughout an eternal existence pain inflicted for their sin and unbelief"

B.: "You say, 'for their unbelief." Then this hell of yours can be only for those who reject the Gospel of Christ."

M.: "No. Hell is for all your fathers of the past times; at least for all of them who sinned against such light and knowledge as they were possessed of."

B.: "That would include, I fear, the vast majority of my fathers. If this is true, it is a terrible message that you bring us. You say that all the past generations of India will suffer pain as a punishment from your God for all eternity! Tell me plainly for what they must suffer a punishment infinitely beyond all the punishment that has ever been inflicted by the cruellest tyrants of earth?"

M.: "They will certainly thus suffer for eternity, but their sufferings will be much lighter than are inflicted upon those who refuse God's offer of salvation."

B.: "Greater or less, you speak of a punishment which, if inflicted on but one person for all eternity, would exceed in amount all the punishments which have ever been inflicted in this temporal life upon all the criminals against human laws."

M.: "Yes. If we consider what eternity is, I must confess that it is so."

B.: "I ask, then, for what will your God inflict this most appalling punishment?"

M.: "We are sprung from one father, the first man, Adam. God made with him a covenant which included his posterity. Adam violated this covenant; and thereby involved all his posterity in the death he brought upon himself."

B.: "You say, then, that because Adam sinned, his children, who had nothing to say personally to his sin, will suffer pain for all eternity, and this by your God's arrangement!"

M.: "Yes."

B.: "Then those who have died before they could know the difference of good or evil are all to go to this fearful hell! You include the infant as well as the adult! Is this the God whom you tell me to love and adore?"

M.: "I do not think that infants will be included. At least I cannot affirm positively of them. It may be that God will exempt them, and save them through Christ, though they never heard of His name."

B.: "Then you must allow that you do not think the mere fact of being descended from Adam sufficient to justify the awful punishment of which you speak!"

M.: "I should rather omit this matter as one on which sufficient light has not been shed to justify me in speaking positively. I would rather speak of such heathen as have come to years of understanding, and in those years have sinned against their knowledge of what was right. You cannot deny that there have been multitudes of such."

B.: "I deny it not. Nor do I deny that punishment is due to crime. Nor do I deny that if crime has gone unpunished in this world it would be but just to punish it in another."

M.: "You are coming over to my view. That is what my God will do. No sin has met with sufficient punishment here, therefore He will punish it, if unforgiven, hereafter."

B.: "I quarrel not with punishment. I only speak of its amount. I do not see that any fault of my father's could merit the amount of punishment you speak of, and therefore I ask you to tell me particularly for what it is they are thus to suffer? You do not surely say that your God will inflict more punishment on the sinner than he deserves!"

M.: "No. My God is the judge of all the earth and He can do no injustice or wrong."

B.: "It is well. Then for what is He to condemn my ancestors to unending pain?"

M.: "For those sins of which you allow them to be guilty."

B.: "Yes, but I affirm the punishment to be too great."

M.: "They sinned against my God, who is infinite, and no punishment for sin against such a God can be too great."

B.: "But they never heard of His name: they never knew His laws: their offence, as against Him, was purely one of ignorance!"

M.: "Yes: but He placed within them a conscience which should condemn them when they did what they knew to be wrong, and their going against conscience was in fact, going against His voice within them."

B.: "But they did not know it was His voice!"

M.: "That I allow."

B.: "And you affirm that your God will punish men with pain for all eternity for an offence against His voice, when they did not, and could not, know it to be His voice!"

M.: "I do. This is the arrangement of His world, with which no creature of His hand may dare quarrel." B.: "I was not taught from infancy to believe in your God, and what you now tell me of Him makes me resolve never to believe in Him. You come to reason with me about your God, and you thereby allow that I am capable of forming a just opinion of Him. Indeed, if I were not capable, there would be no use in your disputing with me. I have formed my opinions of Him from what you, His servant, have told me of Him. I reject Him as a monster of injustice and cruelty. You tell me of the cruelties of what you call this heathen land! There are, it may be, and have been, with us many cruel men, but none so cruel as your God. You speak to me of the cruelty of Juggernaut's worship! I regard it not from your point of view; but, say the worst you could of it, it compares not with the cruelty of your God. What! To inflict endless agony on myriads of men who never heard of Him, or of His laws! With us the worst of crimes is thought sufficiently punished with the loss of life. But your God thinks that the smallest crimes against His laws—for surely sins of ignorance are small—can be punished with no less a punishment than endless existence in misery! Justice! No: but the foulest injustice, with which no injustice of any of the old rulers of our land, whom you Christians have displaced, can compare. Your God has no excuse. Could he not remove out of life those who have ignorantly sinned! That were easy for Omnipotence to do. Then He does not choose to do so. He prefers to sustain them in an endless life of pain! You tell me of His love! But His love I cannot see while this black stain rests upon His character. You tell me He has doomed all the past millions of India to eternal agony either for Adam's wilful sin, or for their own sins of ignorance, or for both together! Then I will have naught to do with such a God. I prefer mine to yours."

9. Conversations such as this do not rank among imaginary "Dialogues of the Dead:" they are dialogues of living men. In Siam, a priest came to an American missionary and asked, how long His God tormented bad men in a future state? When answered, "For ever," he replied, "Our God torments the worst of men only one thousand years, so we will not have your American God in Siam."³

10. Have not the Brahmin and the Siamese priest the best in such an argument? How can minds like theirs judge in any other way? Yet the theology which they reject is the current theology of Christendom! This is part of the Gospel we send to heathen lands. Can we wonder at its rejection? Is it not the wonder that our missions should have met even with the small success they have? Is their success not proof of the Divine power of that religion which, weighted with the Augustinian hell, can make any progress at all? No other religion but Christianity could sustain itself for a generation with such a load upon its back.

11. Give to the millions of India and of China the Gospel which was preached by Christ, and Paul, and John—Life from the dead. Give to life and death the only senses which these poor heathen have ever attached to them. Life is to them precious—the most precious of all things: even for a year of this poor life they would give all they have. Put before them eternal life in Christ. Tell these poor perishing creatures who have no hope, that "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." Tell them that in a world over which God rules the ungodly can have no abiding place, but that the very vilest are invited, just as they are, to come to Jesus Christ, and to His and their loving Father, and through the Spirit of grace to receive a new heart and a new spirit to qualify them to enjoy the endless life which Christ bestows. Tell them this, and you tell them of what shocks no sense of justice, and of what appeals to the innermost chord even of their degraded being. Life! Life for ever! No more to die! No more to dread the approach of that death from which human nature shrinks with dread and aversion because it was not made for death! Here is a prize for a poor heathen offered him in Jesus Christ! Here is a message of love from the God of heaven! Here is a token of affection that shows that the Judge of all the earth is its Father too, and has a Father's heart even for the poor outcast of India and China! The heathen of the day may sigh, may be even perplexed at the thought, why God did not send to his fathers the message of peace He sent to him. But, in His not having sent it, he can see no injustice; for no terrible future, such as the Augustinian missionary summons up from the depth of his hell, looms before his forefathers, rude or civilized, of the ages that have gone before. The Creator withdraws the life He gave. No man can say that is unjust. Man takes life from the creature he gave no life to: much more may God take what He bestows. But to him and to his age has come the message of life from God, and he can hail it as to him a message of pure love and mercy which may well touch his heart, fire his intellect, nerve his purpose, make him feel what he never did before, the heir of immortality, through the Saviour of the world.

12. Here is something, we think, for us to lay to heart. Here is a solemn question for our missionaries and our missionary societies. The Brahmin of India has condemned the theology of Augustine. Let us condemn it too; and take and send to the dark places of the world the theology of apostolic times. We may then speak boldly to the heathen ear. The Christian missionary need no more stand rebuked by the sophist of India.