• 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 VII

The Illustrations of Scripture

THAT the wicked will come to an end and cease to exist in hell, we have seen to be the direct teaching of Scripture in what we have called its legal terms. We have submitted those terms to every possible test, and seen that they can fairly bear no other interpretation than that which we have put upon them. But these terms by no means exhaust our argument. We will find our conclusion supported in many other ways. We now proceed to support it by drawing our reader's attention for a short time to the illustrations of Scripture.

2. The illustrations of Scripture on the subject of future punishment are very numerous, are presented in every variety of aspect, and are every one of them harmonious with the rest. We will compare them with the illustrations selected by men who hold every variety of opinion as to the future of man—from the Augustinian, who gives to the wicked an endless life of anguish, to the Epicurean, who holds that there is no future life for any man at all. We have no hesitationin saying that the illustrations of Scripture, so varied, so numerous, so harmonious, are by themselves sufficient to denude this great question in our favour. They overthrow alike the theory of eternal misery and of universal restoration. It may be remarked that the advocates of these opposite errors are wonderfully chary in their reference to this leading feature of Scripture. We do not wonder that, holding their views, they almost pass it by in total silence. We will not however permit them to do so.

3. We find in the Old Testament the following illustrations of future punishment:— The wicked shall be dashed in pieces like a potter's vessel; they shall be like the beasts that perish, like the untimely fruit of a woman; like a whirlwind that passes away; like a waterless garden scorched by an Eastern sun; like garments consumed by the moth: they shall be silent in darkness; like a lamp put out; like a dream which flies away. The wicked shall consume like the fat of lambs in the fire; consume like smoke; melt like wax; burn like tow; consume like thorns; vanish away like exhausted waters.

4. The illustrations of the New Testament are of the same unmistakable character. The end of the wicked is there compared to fish cast away to corruption; to a house thrown down to its foundations; to the destruction of the old world by water, and that of the Sodomites by fire; to the death and destruction of natural brute beasts. They shall be like wood cast into unquenchable flames; like chaff burnt up; like tares consumed; like a dry branch reduced to ashes.

5. Such are the illustrations of Scripture. These are the images which God has selected from the world that is open to our inspection, in order to let us know what shall happen to the ungodly hereafter. We have no hesitation in saying that they are, one and all, irreconcilable with both Augustine's and Origen's theories of hell. If it was true, as both these theories insist, that the wicked never cease to exist, these illustrations would be every one of them, not merely unsuitable, but positively false. The wicked will not be, according to either theory, like the beasts that perish, or a whirlwind that passes away, or garments consumed by the moth. They will not, according to them, consume like the fat of lambs in the fire, or consume into smoke, or melt like wax. They will not be like wood cast into quenchless flames, or like chaff burnt up, or like tares consumed, or like a dry branch reduced to ashes. All these lose their form, substance, and organization, and become as though they had never been, which the wicked never do according to the theory of their eternal misery or their ultimate restoration. The illustrations of Scripture are therefore fatal to both views alike. Every one of its images points, not to the preservation of being in any state, whether good or evil, but to the utter blotting out of existence and being and identity.

6. Let us now compare these illustrations of Scripture with those of ordinary writers, and see if the comparison does not fully bear out our view. We will first examine the images which writers who hold the theory of eternal misery select as suitable to illustrate their theory. We will take our examples from the writings of the Christian fathers Augustine and Tertullian, both of them men of great power of mind and force of language. Is it not most significant that these men, perfectly familiar with the illustrationsof Scripture, turn away from them as unsuitable to their purpose, and select with much pains, from a survey of nature as it was understood by them, a series of illustrations not only absent from Scripture but of a nature diametrically opposed to those of Scripture. According to Tertullian, the wicked will be like mountains which burn but are not consumed; like a body struck by lightning whose organization is uninjured and itself not reduced to ashes. According to Augustine, the wicked will be like worms that exist in hot springs; like salamanders which are not destroyed in the fire; like diamonds which are indestructible in scorching heat; like Vesuvius and Etna which burn but do not consume. These are not the illustrations of Scripture. They contradict those of Scripture. According to Scripture the wicked will not be like the salamanders, or boiling-water worms, or burning mountains, of Tertullian and Augustine. They will, on the contrary, be destroyed, consume away, be reduced to ashes, as the fat of lambs, or the dry wood and thorns.

7. There is one illustration in Scripture which we have sometimes wondered has not been laid hold of by the Augustinian theorists as an illustration of their view. It is an exact and complete illustration of it. It represents substance as burning in fire but remaining perfectly unconsumed. We refer to the burning bush seen by Moses in the Wilderness of Horeb.* It exactly illustrates the Augustinian theory—that the wicked will burn in the fire of hell, but not be consumed by it.

8. Apposite as this illustration is, familiar as it is, we do not know that it has ever been used by any Augustinian writer. They have doubtless often thought of it with this view, and examined it verycarefully; but, somehow, one and all of them pass it by. Why? It must be unsuitable after all or surely they would all have used it over and over again. But this illustration, so familiar to us all, which we have admired since first we heard in childhood the grand story of Moses, the man of God, is an illustration in its way subversive of Augustine's fearful hell. The burning bush was a miraculous sign. It tells us, therefore, that without the miraculous interposition of God no substance could burn with fire without being consumed. And it also by its significant language, "burnt but was not consumed," points to the opposite language in which Scripture speaks of the end of the wicked in that fire which does consume and reduce then to ashes. The burning bush was emblematic of the children of God who passed through a fire which did not consume them: it is not emblematic of the lost who enter into a fire which kindles upon them and consumes them, because God does not put forth his almighty power to save them from its devouring flame.

9. We have seen what kind of illustrations the advocates of eternal life in pain select as suitable to their theory. We will now draw attention to the fact that the advocates of this view, when not sufficiently careful, and when desirous to express beyond any doubt their sentiments, by showing what the wicked are not like, constantly contradict the very illustrations which Scripture has selected to show what they are like. "God has not made us," says the Christian father, Athenagoras "like bearts that perish;" and Mr. James Grant repeats the old father's renunciation of a scriptural illustration in still more emphatic terms, by telling us that, from the idea that the wickedshould become like beasts that perish, his "very soul tunns away with abhorrence."¹ The celebrated author of "The Night Thoughts," one of the great masters of the English tongue, rejects disdainfully another of the illustrations of Scripture:—

"To toil, and eat,

"Then make our bed in darkness,"

in his description for that state of non-existence of the wicked against which he directs a considerable amount of poetry but no logic. It is by one of the illustrations of Scripture that the greatest of French thinkers, Pascal, has expressed that idea of annihilation against which he strenuously reasons, asking whether it is cause of joy to be told that "our soul is nothing but a puff of wind or smoke." We have thus the Augustinian theorists insisting that the illustrations which Scripture uses of the end of the ungodly are exactly and unmistakably illustrative of their destruction or annihilation.

10. Having seen how the advocates of eternal evil unconsciously contradict the illustrations of Scripture, we will now show how men who held the Epicurean notion of the utter extinction of being at death, or who, though not holding it themselves, wished to describe this Epicurean idea, have used the very same illustrations which the Scripture uses for the destruction of the wicked after judgment. Thus an illustration of Scripture referred to in the last paragraph is that the wicked "shall consume like smoke." This we are told by Plato was the usual illustration used by Epicurean theorists to express their idea that after death the entire being and existence of mancame to an end. It vanished, according to them, "like a breath of wind or smoke." Accordingly we find the Epicurean poet, Lucretius, using this very illustration:—

"As the smoke disperses into the air,

So believe that the soul also is dissolved."

The ending of the wicked "in darkness" or "night" is another illustration in common use in Scripture. It is the illustration which Titus uses in his address to the Roman soldiers when he speaks of "souls that wear away in and with their distempered bodies, on which comes a subterranean night to dissolve them to nothing." It is also the very illustration which the Epicurean poet, Catullus, uses when he exhorts his mistress to catch at each pleasure of life because there was no bright hope of any after existence:—

"Let us live, and love, my Lesbia,
Suns can set and come again
For us, once our brief day has sunk,
Is only the sleep of an endless night."

This is also the very image which that consummate master of language, our own Tennyson, uses to express the same idea:—

"T'were best at once to sink to peace
Like birds the charming serpent draws,
To drop head-foremost in the jaws
Of vacant darkness, and to cease."

And another of our great English writers, Thomson, uses the same illustration when he makes his heroine to prefer death to Roman bondage, even though persuaded that,

"It were a long dark night without a morning."

The comparison of the destruction of the wicked toa dream or vision that flies away is also an illustration of Scripture. We find the very same illustration used by Homer in one of those moods of his when he abandoned the Platonic idea of the immortality of the soul for the Epicurean idea of its dissolution:—

"Like fleeting vision passed the soul away."

Once more we find in one of the Apocryphal books that the most usual illustrations of Scripture to describe the end of the wicked were the very ones used by Epicurean theorists: "We are born of nothing," they said, "and after this we shall be as if we had not been: for the breath in our nostrils is smoke, and speech a spark to move our hearts, which, being put out, our body shall be as ashes, and our spirit shall be poured abroad as soft air, and our life shall pass away as the trace of a cloud, and shall be dispersed as a mist, which is driven away by the beams of the sun. For our time is as the passing of a shadow."² We thus see that when Epicurean theorists would describe their theory of annihilation they can find no better or stronger illustrations to describe it by than those which the Bible uses for the final destruction of the wicked; and that when the great masters of our English tongue wish in the most appropriate and most striking language to describe the Epicurean theory, they are forced to borrow the very illustrations which Scripture from first to last uses when it speaks of the end of the wicked in hell.

11. A little industry could multiply examples of this kind a hundred-fold. They show us unquestionably,that the illustrations of Scripture are by themselves sufficient to overthrow the false systems both of Augustine and Origen. They all teach, as the universal law of language proves, that the end of the wicked, after they have been raised to judgment, and to stripes few or many according to desert, is to vanish into that nothingness which the Epicurean falsely taught would be the end of all men upon death. Every one of them point, not to the preservation of life in any condition, whether miserable or happy, but to the loss of all life, the utter blotting out of existence. Scripture does not use the illustrations of Epicurus to describe the theory of Plato. This our opponents of the Augustinian and Universalist schools say that it does. This monstrous satire upon Scripture they do not scruple to assert in favour of theories begot by human error mingled with divine truth.

12. How are our opponents to got over these illustrations of the Word of God which is to judge them at the last day? What can the Augustinian theorist say of them. He finds it said that the wicked shall be like the beasts that perish; that they shall consume like thorns; that they shall be burnt up like chaff; that they shall be reduced to ashes like a dry branch! What is his comment on these vivid emblems? He tells us that they are strong poetic figures! We see nothing to object to this, and merely ask him of what are they strong poetic figures? After an immensity of talk, we find him replying that they are poetical figures representative of the very opposite to that which they teach. The wicked perishing like beasts, means that they are never to perish, and are exceedingly unlike beasts: the wicked, consuming likethorns, means that they never will consume at all, and will never bear the remotest resemblance to thorns which have been consumed: the wicked being burnt up like chaff, means that they are never to be burnt up, and that they will never be like chaff that has been burnt up: and their being reduced to ashes like a dry branch, means that they cannot by any possibility be reduced to ashes, or bear the faintest likeness to a dry branch which has been thoroughly consumed! Whether such a handling of God's Word as this is deceitful or not, let our readers and our opponents judge.

13. And how do Universalists avoid the force of these illustrations? In a manner no way more creditable or more ingenuous than the Augustinian reasoners. They apply those illustrations which Scripture directs against the persons of the wicked to their sin. They do not deny that "perishing" and "being destroyed" indicate certainly that something will cease to exist. That something is, however, not the sinner himself; but his sin. It is thus that one of the latest of the advocates of this view, the author of "Future Retributive Punishment," puts his case: "As the result of awful chastisement, the second death, all the myriads of the ungodly, their former defiant aspirations to be as gods, unaccountable, independent, being utterly 'destroyed;' their expectations indulged in being this life 'perished,' 'broken to shiners,' 'burnt up as chaff, ' shall themselves be brought to bow and submit to Christ."³

14. Our readers will not fail to mark here the striking and wholly unwarranted departure from the language of Scripture. The Scripture says that it isthe ungodly themselves who shall be destroyed and perish like chaff burnt up in the fire: the Universalist says it is the "aspirations and expectations" of the ungodly which shall thus perish, while they themselves are preserved. We deny him the right thus flagrantly to tamper with Scripture. If man may be allowed thus to alter it, he may make it speak anything he pleases. We characterise such a treatment as simply a barefaced and impudent alteration of the Word of God by man.

15. If anything further were required to expose this view it would be found in the language of Scripture as it addresses itself to those who are here brought to God through Jesus Christ. The chastening and the trials of this life are to them precisely what, according to the Universalist, the sorer chastisement of the second death will be to the ungodly. These are the "fires" and the "waters" through which they pass in their subjugation of the "expectations" and "aspirations" which possessed them likewise. But is such a process ever described in Scripture as their "destruction," or their "perishing," or their being "burnt like chaff?" Never. We ask the Universalist to produce one such comparison. We read of their becoming "dead to sin," of "the body of sin being destroyed," of their "crucifying the old man," and similar phrases indicative of the destruction of evil within them while they themselves were undestroyed, but we never once read of such terms applied to them as are invariably applied to the punishment of the ungodly hereafter. Nay, the very contrary language is applied to them: "We went through fire and through water," the people of God say, but they add "Thou broughtest us out into a wealthy place;" for He whom they serve has pledged His word to every one o them, "When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee; when thou walkest through the fire thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee."⁴ There is no speech about their being destroyed or consumed like chaff in that "fiery trial" which purifies them for the kingdom of their Father. The "bush which burned with fire and was not consumed" is the emblem of God's people in their chastisement: the "withered branch" which is consumed and burned up is the emblem of the ungodly in their future punishment. Surely these opposing emblems do not illustrate processes identical in their nature. Surely they point to results as different as light from darkness, or as life from death.