Part 6 (1/2)
This is one of the Royal texts of Scripture. It is inexhaustible, like the G.o.d who inspired it. It has fulfilled itself again and again, at different epochs. It fulfilled itself specially and notoriously in the first century. But it fulfilled itself again in the fifth century; and again at the Crusades; and again at the Reformation in the sixteenth century. And it may be that it is fulfilling itself at this very day; that in this century, both in the time of our fathers and in our own, the Lord has been shaking the heavens and the earth, that those things which can be shaken may be removed, as things that are made, while those things which cannot be shaken may remain.
All confess this to be true, each in his own words. They talk of this age as one of change; of rapid progress, for good or evil; of unexpected discoveries; of revolutions, intellectual, moral, social, as well as political. Our notions of the physical universe are rapidly altering, with the new discoveries of science; and our notions of ethics and theology are altering as rapidly. The era a.s.sumes a different aspect to different minds, just as did the first century after Christ, according as men look forward to the future with hope, or back to the past with regret. Some glory in the nineteenth century as one of rapid progress for good; as the commencement of a new era for humanity; as the inauguration of a Reformation as grand as that of the sixteenth century.
Others bewail it as an age of rapid decay; in which the old landmarks are being removed, the old paths lost; in which we are rus.h.i.+ng headlong into scepticism and atheism; in which the world and the Church are both in danger; and the last day is at hand.
Both parties may be right; and yet both may be wrong. Men have always talked thus, at great crises in the world's life. They talked thus in the first century; and in the fifth, and in the eleventh; and again in the sixteenth; and then both parties were partially right and partially wrong; and so they may be now. What they meant to say, what they wanted to say, what we mean and want to say, has been said already for us in far deeper, wider, and more accurate words, by him who wrote this wonderful Epistle to the Hebrews, when he told the Jews of his time that the Lord was shaking the heavens and the earth, that those things which were shaken might be removed, as things that are made--cosmogonies, systems, theories, prejudices, fas.h.i.+ons, of man's invention: while those things which could not be shaken might remain, because they were according to the mind and will of G.o.d, eternal as that source from whence they came forth, even the bosom of G.o.d the Father.
”Yet once more I shake, not the earth only, but also heaven.”
How has the earth been shaken in our days; and the heaven likewise. How rapidly have our conceptions of both altered. How easy, simple, certain, it all looked to our forefathers in the middle age. How difficult, complex, uncertain, it all looks to us. With increased knowledge has come--not increased doubt: that I deny utterly. I deny, once and for all, that this age is an irreverent age. I say that an irreverent age is one like the age of the Schoolmen; when men defined and explained all heaven and earth by a priori theories, and cosmogonies invented in the cloister; and dared, poor, simple, ignorant mortals, to fancy that they could comprehend and gauge the ways of Him Whom the heaven and the heaven of heavens could not contain. This, this is irreverence: but it is neither irreverence nor want of faith, if a man, awed by the mystery which encompa.s.ses him from the cradle to the grave, shall lay his hand upon his mouth, with Job, and obey the voice which cries to him from earth and heaven--”Be still, and know that as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than thy ways, and my thoughts higher than thine.”
But it was all easy, and simple, and certain enough to our forefathers.
The earth, according to the popular notion, was a flat plane; or, if it were, as the wiser held, a sphere, yet antipodes were an unscriptural heresy. Above it were the heavens, in which the stars were fixed, or wandered; and above them heaven after heaven, each tenanted by its own orders of beings, up to that heaven of heavens in which Deity--and by Him, be it always remembered, the mother of Deity--was enthroned.
And if above the earth was the kingdom of light, and purity, and holiness, what could be more plain, than that below it was the kingdom of darkness, and impurity, and sin? That was no theory to our forefathers: it was a physical fact. Had not even the heathens believed as much, and said so, by the mouth of the poet Virgil? He had declared that the mouth of Tartarus lay in Italy, hard by the volcanic lake Avernus; and after the unexpected eruption of Vesuvius in the first century, nothing seemed more clear than that Virgil was right; and that men were justified in talking of Tartarus, Styx, and Phlegethon as indisputable Christian ent.i.ties. Etna, Stromboli, Hecla, were (according to this cosmogony) in like wise mouths of h.e.l.l; and there were not wanting holy hermits, who had heard, from within those craters, shrieks, and clanking chains, and the howls of demons tormenting the souls of the endlessly lost.
Our forefathers were not aware that, centuries before the Incarnation of our Lord, the Buddhist priests had held exactly the same theory of moral retribution; and that, painted on the walls of Buddhist temples, might be seen horrors identical with those which adorned the walls of many a Christian Church, in the days when men believed in this Tartarology as firmly as they now believe in the results of chemistry or of astronomy.
And now--How is the earth shaken, and the heavens likewise, in that very sense in which the expression is used by him who wrote to the Hebrews?
Our conceptions of them are shaken. How much of that mediaeval cosmogony do educated men believe, in the sense in which they believe that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, or that if they steal their neighbour's goods they commit a sin?
The earth has been shaken for us, more and more violently, as the years have rolled on. It was shaken when Astronomy told us that the earth was not the centre of the universe, but a tiny planet revolving round a sun in a remote region thereof.
It was shaken when Geology told us that the earth had endured for countless ages, during which continents had become oceans, and oceans continents, again and again. And even now, it is being shaken by researches into the antiquity of man, into the origin and permanence of species, which--let the result be what it will--must in the meanwhile shake for us theories and dogmas which have been undisputed for 1500 years.
And with the rest of our cosmogony, that conception of a physical Tartarus below the earth has been shaken likewise, till good men have been fain to find a fresh place for it in the sun, or in a comet; or to patronize the probable, but as yet unproved theory of a central fire within the earth; not on any scientific grounds, but simply if by any means they can a.s.sign a region in s.p.a.ce, wherein material torment can be inflicted on the spirits of the lost.
And meanwhile the heavens, the spiritual world, is being shaken no less.
More and more frequently, more and more loudly, men are asking--not sceptics merely, but pious men, men who wish to be, and who believe themselves to be, orthodox Christians--more and more loudly are such men asking questions which demand an answer, with a learning and an eloquence, as well as with a devoutness and a reverence for Scripture, which--whether rightly or wrongly employed--is certain to command attention.
Rightly or wrongly, these men are asking, whether the actual and literal words of Scripture really involve the mediaeval theory of an endless Tartarus.
They are saying, ”It is not we who deny, but you who a.s.sert, endless torments, who are playing fast and loose with the letter of Scripture.
You are reading into it conceptions borrowed from Virgil, Dante, Milton, when you translate into the formula 'endless torment' such phrases as 'the outer darkness,' 'the fire of Gehenna,' 'the worm that dieth not;'
which, according to all just laws of interpretation, refer not to the next life, but to this life, and specially to the approaching catastrophe of the Jewish nation; or when you say that eternal death really means eternal life--only life in torture.”
Rightly or wrongly, they are saying this; and then they add, ”We do not yield to you in love and esteem for Scripture. We demand not a looser, but a stricter; not a more metaphoric, but a more literal; not a more contemptuous, but a more reverent interpretation thereof.”
So these men speak, rightly or wrongly. And for good or for evil, they will be heard.
And with these questions others have arisen, not new at all--say these men--but to be found, amid many contradictions, in the writings of all the best divines, when they have given up for a moment systems and theories, and listened to the voice of their own hearts; questions natural enough to an age which abhors cruelty, has abolished torture, labours for the reformation of criminals, and debates--rightly or wrongly--about abolis.h.i.+ng capital punishment. Men are asking questions about the heaven--the spiritual world--and saying--”The spiritual world?
Is it only another material world which happens to be invisible now, but which may become visible hereafter: or is it not rather the moral world--the world of right and wrong? Heaven? Is not the true and real heaven the kingdom of love, justice, purity, beneficence? Is not that the eternal heaven wherein G.o.d abides for ever, and with Him those who are like G.o.d? And h.e.l.l? Is it not rather the anarchy of hate, injustice, impurity, uselessness; wherein abides all that is opposed to G.o.d?”
And with those thoughts come others about moral retribution--”What is its purpose? Can it--can any punishment have any right purpose save the correction, or the annihilation, of the criminal? Can G.o.d, in this respect, be at once less merciful and less powerful than man? Is He so controlled by necessity that He is forced to bring into the world beings whom He knows to be incorrigible, and doomed to endless misery? And if not so controlled, is not the alternative as to His character even more fearful? He bids us copy His justice, His love. Is that His justice, that His love, which if we copied, we should call each other, and deservedly, utterly unjust and unloving? Can there be one morality for G.o.d, and another for man, made in the image of G.o.d? Are these dark dogmas worthy of a Father who hateth nothing that He hath made, and is perfect in this--that He makes His sun s.h.i.+ne on the evil and on the good, and His rain fall on the just and on the unjust, and is good to the unthankful and to the evil? Are they worthy of a Son who, in the fire of His divine charity, stooped from heaven to earth, to toil, to suffer, to die on the Cross, that the world by Him might be saved? Are they worthy of that Spirit which proceeds from the Father and the Son, even that Spirit of boundless charity, and fervent love, by which the Son offered Himself to the Father, a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world--and surely not in vain?”
So men are asking--rightly or wrongly; and they are guarding themselves, at the same time, from the imputation of disbelief in moral retribution; of fancying G.o.d to be a careless, epicurean deity, cruelly indulgent to sin, and therefore, in so far, immoral.
They say--”We believe firmly enough in moral retribution. How can we help believing in it, while we see it working around us, in many a fearful shape, here, now, in this life? And we believe that it may work on, in still more fearful shapes, in the life to come. We believe that as long as a sinner is impenitent, he must be miserable; that if he goes on impenitent for ever, he must go on making himself miserable--ay, it may be more and more miserable for ever. Only do not tell us that he must go on. That his impenitence, and therefore his punishment, is irremediable, necessary, endless; and thereby destroy the whole purpose, and we should say, the whole morality, of his punishment. If that punishment be corrective, our moral sense is not shocked by any severity, by any duration: but if it is irremediable, it cannot be corrective; and then, what it is, or why it is, we cannot--or rather dare not--say. We, too, believe in an eternal fire. But because we believe also the Athanasian Creed, which tells us that there is but One Eternal, we believe that that fire must be the fire of G.o.d, and therefore, like all that is in G.o.d and of G.o.d, good and not evil, a blessing and not a curse.