The generally professed belief of the Protestant world as embodied in their published creeds is that the great mass of mankind are destined to an eternity of suffering. That this eternity is to be one of bodily pain--of “torment “--is the literal teaching of Scripture, which has been literally interpreted by the theologians, the poets, and the artists of many long ages which followed the acceptance of the recorded legends of the church as infallible. The doctrine has always been recognized, as it is now, as a very terrible one. It has found a support in the story of the fall of man, and the view taken of the relation of man to his Maker since that event. The hatred of God to mankind in virtue of their “first disobedience” and inherited depravity is at the bottom of it. The extent to which that idea was carried is well shown in the expressions I have borrowed from Jonathan Edwards. According to his teaching,--and he was a reasoner who knew what he was talking about, what was involved in the premises of the faith he accepted,--man inherits the curse of God as his principal birthright.
What shall we say to the doctrine of the fall of man as the ground of inflicting endless misery on the human race? A man to be punished for what he could not help! He was expected to be called to account for Adam's sin. It is singular to notice that the reasoning of the wolf with the lamb should be transferred to the dealings of the Creator with his creatures. “You stirred the brook up and made my drinking-place muddy.” “But, please your wolfship, I couldn't do that, for I stirred the water far down the stream,--below your drinking-place.” “Well, anyhow, your father troubled it a year or two ago, and that is the same thing.” So the wolf falls upon the lamb and makes a meal of him. That is wolf logic,--and theological reasoning.
How shall we characterize the doctrine of endless torture as the destiny of most of those who have lived, and are living, on this planet? I prefer to let another writer speak of it. Mr. John Morley uses the following words: “The horrors of what is perhaps the most frightful idea that has ever corroded human character,--the idea of eternal punishment.” Sismondi, the great historian, heard a sermon on eternal punishment, and vowed never again to enter another church holding the same creed. Romanism he considered a religion of mercy and peace by the side of what the English call the Reformation.--I mention these protests because I happen to find them among my notes, but it would be easy to accumulate examples of the same kind. When Cowper, at about the end of the last century, said satirically of the minister he was attacking,