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we are no more justified in characterizing the latter as above, than we would be in making his Heaven a colorless monotony of bliss, should he define it as permanent subjection to the good. Further reflection will, however, establish our correctness, we think, and leave us free of this possible criticism. We are sure that the Boston Lectureship preaches a heaven of growth and progress in common with the general thought of christendom. It is significant that there should be so general a harmony here, and so much difficulty in settling on a definition and conception of perdition. We should note one thing in particular in Mr. Cook's position. His definition of perdition excludes all sinners from it who have not yet reached permanent subjection to sin, and as this permanence cannot be certainly decided as attained this side of death, there is no certainty that perdition has any territory on earth. At the most, all earthly sinners are but possible citizens in the making for a perdition in the future life. But in a state of permanent blessedness, it is conceded, that " a constant process of perfection," as Lotze says, is going on. All the soul's faculties are increasingly employed in the extension of knowledge and variety of experience of life and joy. The spirit maintains relationship with all the incident forces of finite and Infinite being, subjective and objective. The resulting multiplication of blessed consequences will continually correspond.

Permanent blessedness, therefore, means life still enlarging, still abiding amid the universe of things, to which it remains gladly responsive.

This alleged scientific perdition, on the other hand, is a prison of habit bolted forever against change, or freedom, or variety of taste, or variety of gifts. No star here can differ from any other star in damnation. "Permanent subjection to guilt and sin and their consequences," means not only fixed life of evil, but loss of desire and freedom, of ability and opportunity, and all inducement by the play of incident forces to do or be other than bad. Here is no possibility of high treason. All prisoners are in one cell. Stable fidelity

to Mr. Cook's personal satan receives no reward in change or modification of treatment, or a shortened term.

But are we just in thus seeking to hold Mr. Cook to a nondeveloping perdition by his terms? We thinks so, and expect to show that by all the light which the sciences of nature and mind give us, no such state of perdition is either probable or possible in the universe.

But suppose, however, this perdition has a law of progress in evil, a growth in the piling up of vaster" magnitudes" of guilt and sin. With this we shall find the Lecturship in another strait where it is sheer presumption and against all science and experience, to assert certainty about any soul ever becoming hopelessly lost. For, if a soul just entered into a future perdition can there go on multiplying sins — what fol lows? Why this all ideas of permanence must inevitably be rendered uncertain. For to sin the soul must retain the power and freedom of choice. Liberty to sin is liberty not to sin; and where and as long as this liberty lasts, there are, and will continue, conscience and God. In such continued conjunction of things it is a swaggering defiance of all science to affirm the certainty of a permanent subjection to sin. Choice remaining, it is simply blasphemy to think of God as maintaining the soul in such liberty without Himself doing anything, or the soul having any environment and relations where shall play incidental forces looking to the calling of such power of choice into exercise, save in the one choice of perpetual evil. If there is here at first only homogeneity of life and conduct, this will tend to pass into the heterogeneous, and the latter into greater heterogeneity. And in each and every change of the soul's life there must continue, and precede it, an environment which makes this change possible, as well as the continuance of the maintained integrity of the soul's faculties and endowments, on which the environment ever makes a demand. Hence under universal law of either physical or ethical being, so far as science yet affords us any reliable data, the assumption that there may be an increase of sinning in a future existence carries with it all the subjective and objective conditions of both sin and righteousness, and leaves at the very worst the final destiny of the dead sinner undecided,

with all the presumption, however, on the side of the triumph of righteousness, since the conditions leave God and all the universe of good still aggressively opposing the sinner's career and soliciting him to choices of good.

Mr. Cook vividly sets forth the condition under which, he affirms, some souls attain permanence of bad character. In his 181st lecture he says:

"1. Some act of man's free will must go before God's entrance into the soul. Man is to open the door.

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2. That man has natural power to do this and a corresponding responsibility.

3. That God's knocking invites, inspires, persuades, and enables man to do this act.

"7. That God stands at all doors knocking.

11. That every refusal to open adds to man's guilt and peril, and that there must be on the part of the unyielding soul a refusal for every knock, and that this knocking is incessant, and that so the guilt and peril of evil choices mount swiftly to vast magnitudes.'

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Mr. Cook does not say it is certain that any soul before death becomes fixed in evil. That perhaps would not be "preachable" doctrine-belonging to that part of Calvinism which even Mr. Cook has left behind. To affirm to a congregation of sinners that some of them had already become permanently bad, would be the assertion before them that there is no Holy Spirit and no Atonement for them, which would be an impeachment of the claims of the Gospel as now almost universally interpreted by Christendom. But Mr. Cook does not hesitate to draw the line through the point of death. Here certainly, he claims that sound scholarship and science declare, there arises the perpendicular wall of permanence. Up to this line of death the state of the sinner has been one of free will, natural power to open the door, corresponding responsibility, and God's incessant knocking. Now, if the "vast magnitudes" of guilt which with the sinner have been increasing up to the time of death, continue to grow after death, then after death the conditions of their growth must continue the same as before death. That is, freedom, moral

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discernment and ability, responsibility, and God's still incessant multitudinous knockings to have the door opened. What sort of a perdition would this be? The very one with which we are all so familiar every day. It would be the projection of all the essential spiritual characteristics and environments. of the soul's present state into the after-death life. Such a perdition cannot be scientifically called a “permanent subjection to guilt and sin," while the assumption that these conditions will exist in the future with the sinner, and that the sinner is certain to remain forever uninfluenced by them for good, is to imply the idiocy of God. The mind revolts at the absurdity of God still keeping up His knocking after the door has been permanently bolted. But that magnitudes of guilt may there increase, God's unceasing knocking is an absolute prerequisite. Withdraw the knocking of God, and we have, as at first, on the assumption of the immortality of the sinner as held by Mr. Cook, a perdition that cannot increase in guilt or suffering, an absolute stand-still of being.

According to Lotze, the reality of things can only be conceived as in a multitude of relations. This standing in relations to other things gives to a thing its reality. And the nature of this reality, again, can neither be consistently represented as a fixed and hard substance, nor as an unalterable something, but only as a fixed order of recurrence of continually changing events or impressions (Ency. Brit.). This conception of the physical universe as related to our minds, holds no less good as a conception of our present and future selves as related to each other and to the environment of the spiritual universe.

Any rational guess as to the destiny of an assumed immortal mind must spring from this fact of actuality, that the soul is always in relations, and in relations which are not negative and fruitless, but positive and productive and diversified.

Couple with this state of things the omnipresent, sole Supreme Reality, the Highest Good, which is the enswathing Medium by and in which the whole universe of things and their relations have their actuality, and we have before our

mind a condition of pregnant relations which forbids the thought of the permanence of the bad. That permanence can rest only on the reverse assumption, that the universe sprang from the womb of Omnipotent Evil. However real the existence and stubbornness of a bad character, or the laws. by which such bad character has been attained, this state of things cannot continue only under the double or complimentary conditions of a mind, on the one hand lost to all susceptibility to change, and on the other hand the non-activity upon it of all its relations, including that of the Supreme Reality, the Highest Good. Or, if it be said that such a mind retains susceptibility to the influences of relations, then these relations must be such as to ever pour in upon it only baneful influences. Thus permanence of bad character requires an immortal mind gifted with powers of thought and ever in the midst of the universe of influential things, yet with only thoughts of evil. This could only be considered as certain on the assumption that the mind is endowed with evil possibilities alone, and that the entire immortal environments were of only evil influence. But precisely the reverse of this are the facts which all rational faith and actual knowledge present before us. Those who talk of permanence of bad character seem wholly to overlook the intrinsic nature of mind and its surroundings. Mind is spirit in full endowment of reason and its companion gifts of God as here contemplated. It is not possible to conceive of it as existing unresponsive to the perpetually influential relations of other things and beings, and the All-Sustaining Highest Good. Mind in a living universe must itself keep alive, and in a beneficently governed universe it will be itself beneficently effected in the end. Richmond Fisk, D.D.

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