'Where God unmakes but to remake the soul He else made first in vain--which must not be,'
is, I cannot but feel, in flat contradiction to the whole tone of the New Testament.
It is no doubt true that there is in the New Testament an expectation of a final unity of the whole universe in God, and that we find it hard to conceive the relation of lost souls in hell to this final unity. Certainly all legitimate avenues of dim conjecture that a very limited revelation allows to be kept open, ought to be kept open. Certainly we know in part--the partialness of our knowledge can hardly be exaggerated. But we must be true to both elements in what is disclosed to us; and Dr. Martineau has reminded us[3] how deeply 'the belief in a separate heaven and hell, and a corresponding distribution of men into only two classes of good and bad, friends and enemies of God,' though 'at first sight nothing can appear more unnatural and defiant of all fact,' is yet bound up with 'the inward look' of moral evil and the fundamental reality of moral choice. In fact it seems to be true to say that a really Christian Theism, and a really Christian doctrine of human freedom, are inseparable from the belief in the possibility of wilful sin leading to final ruin.
'It is appointed unto men once to die, and after that the judgement'; and this judgement in the case of those of us who have wilfully hardened themselves, or remained loveless and love-rejecters, in face of the real offer of God to man in Christ Jesus, is a divine condemnation which takes effect in an eternal punishment, the bitterness as well as the justice of which the soul realizes, and which--if it does not necessarily mean an everlasting continuance of personal consciousness--is yet final and irreversible, and unspeakably awful[4].
[1] _Summa_, pars. 1, qu. 75, art. 6, 'Respondeo dicendum, quod necesse est dicere, animam humanam, quam dicimus intellectivum principium, esse incorruptibilem.'
[2] See Dr. Agar Beet's _Last Things_ (Hodder and Stoughton, 1898), pp. 194 ff, and Gladstone's _Studies Subsidiary to Butler_ (Oxford, 1896), part ii. pp. 260 ff.
[3] See _Types of Ethical Theory_ (Oxford, 1885), ii. pp. 60 ff.
[4] The only passage in the New Testament which strongly suggests an _everlasting_ persistence of personal consciousness of pain, is Rev. xx. 10, 'Shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.' This is explicit enough. But I am persuaded that all the numbers and expressions for periods of time in the Apocalypse are strictly symbolical. 'A thousand years,' 'forty and two months,' 'three days and a half,' 'day and night for ever and ever,' are expressions which have to be translated into some moral equivalent before they can be made the basis of literal teaching. Thus 'day and night for ever and ever' describes in a picture the _completeness_ of the final overthrow and the anguish of the enemies of the Lamb. The symbolical character of the expression is further indicated by 'the beast' and 'the false prophet'--themselves symbolical figures--being with the devil the subjects of the torment.