the laity remain free to range over the statements of the Bible, and are not bound to shut their eyes to inconsistencies and contradictions. They will not be slow to see that the great body of the clergy do not preach "hell-fire;" as, indeed, no one with full practical conviction believes in it. They will be able to distinguish the warning of a due recompense for all sin from the threat of an indiscriminate vengeance against all sinners. They will remember further that, while their teachers speak to them generally of God's absolute justice, as well as his infinite love, the dogma of endless reprobation is yet asserted judicially to be the doctrine of the church to which they belong; and finally, they will learn that a body of men maintain in the letter a dogma which they do not in reality believe; and sooner or later they will act upon this knowledge.

In a few years the contrast will be more startling than it is now. There yet live some who do not shrink from putting forth this doctrine in its most uncompromising form. Men of great power, the spell of whose eloquence has not yet been broken, draw out the picture in its minutest details, knowing that its strength lies in concrete images, not in unsubstantial generalities. There yet remain some who seem eager to maintain with Bishop Bull, that all who die with any sin not repented of "are immediately consigned to a place and state of irreversible misery,—a place of horrid darkness, where there shines not the least glimmering of light or comfort."* Such of course are the logical re

sults of the alternative which severs all men at the hour of death into two classes, and fixes accordingly their irrevocable doom. But when the Bishop of Natal asks, "In point of fact, how many thoughtful clergy of the Church of England have ever deliberately taught, in plain outspoken terms, this doctrine ?" the answer must be given, that some whose names stand among the highest in the land have set it forth in more glaring colours than he has himself ventured to imagine. It is the duty of all who know this to be the case, to show simply under what forms this doctrine is sometimes presented to English children, and what conclusions are boldly drawn from axioms which utterly contradict them.

Nowhere, perhaps, is the alternative of which we have spoken more forcibly stated than in a sermon by Mr. Newman on the Individuality of the Soul.+ Even over a dogma to which, in Dean Milman's words, all have a tacit repugnance, his singlehearted earnestness sheds some light and comfort, if not for the dead, yet for the living. Knowing that for the good and the wicked eternal life and eternal death are already here begun, he

* Sermon iii., Works, vol. i. p. 80, Oxford, 1846.

+ Parochial Sermons, vol. iv. sermon vi.

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insists that the sinner is at present under God's eternal wrath, and not merely that he will be so at some future time. Yet he shrinks not from complying with the inexorable demands of his system. The invisible line divides all mankind into these two classes; and, at the moment of their death, all who die unsanctified and unreconciled to God pass at once into a state of endless misery. But he did not fail to see how little men generally believed that every one who lives, or has lived, is destined for endless bliss or torment;" and how the popular convictions of Protestants open the door of hope far more widely than the Purgatory of the Church of Rome. If a theology so lax rises in part from their inability "to conceive it possible that they should be lost," he does not forget that it is partly accounted for by natural affection. "Even the worst men have qualities which endear them to those who come near them;" therefore they cling to the memory of the past, and derive from it a vague hope, which they do not care to sift too strictly. But death not merely fixes the doom of the sinner; it changes his nature, not in degree only, but in kind. "Human feelings cannot exist in hell." Others have not hesitated to draw out the many inferences involved in this axiom: Mr. Newman drew from it simply a warning to fight the Christian's battle more earnestly, and to hate the sin against which the wrath of God is eternally burning. In that church where he professes to have found both refuge and solace, he has to propound a more merciful doctrine. The two classes* remain; but the way of penitence and of hope is open to vast numbers who, in the strict belief of Anglicans, would be shut up with the sinners. Thus far, in his new home, he has been removed some steps at least from "the house of bondage."

The full meaning of Mr. Newman's axiom cannot be comprehended until we bring before ourselves the various shades of

• The tests laid down by Mr. Newman, the Bishop of Oxford, and others, are clear enough. The only question is as to their application. This exhaustive classification has reference to the tares and wheat, the sheep and goats, in the parables of our Lord. Mr. Jowett (on the Epistle to the Romans, &c., vol. i. p. 416, Essay on Natural Religion) will not say in which of these two divisions we should find a place for the majority of mankind, "who have a belief in God and immortality," but "have nevertheless hardly any consciousness of the peculiar doctrines of the Gospel ;" who "have never in their whole lives experienced the love of God, or the sense of sin, or the need of forgiveness," but who are often "remarkable for the purity of their morals," for their "strong and disinterested attachments" and their "quick human sympathies;" and of whom "it would be a mistake to say that they are without religion." Theologians would not share Mr. Jowett's hesitation. These men, although members of the church outwardly, do not die consciously in the faith of Christ, and they must therefore be shut out for ever from the presence of God. But they are just the men of whom Protestants speak as having "gone to heaven," although their theory consigns them to a very different doom.

character which are included under the class of impenitent sinners. One effect of such theology is to paralyse the will for action where action is most of all needed. If such a line of severance exists, there must be those in heaven who were very nigh to hell, and some in hell who were very near to heaven. To tell the young that there are millions in endless torments who have failed in sight of the goal, millions who have only not won the prize, millions who have been all but saved, is not likely to supply the readiest motive to be up and doing. The hardness of the conflict is yet further increased by theories on postbaptismal sin, which tend practically to put it almost beyond the reach of pardon; and faults which, if committed before receiving the sacrament of regeneration would be of but little moment, avail to crush down the soul of the baptised for ever. But as long as the exaggeration consists in making still more narrow the strait road which leads to life, no other difficulty arises than the thought that God, who is all-merciful, lays on his weak creatures a burden which they are scarcely able to bear. When, however, we compare the teaching of one man with that of others on this subject of eternal punishment, we begin to see that their doctrines not merely represent the Divine Being as implacably revengeful and utterly unjust, but rest on axioms which entirely contradict each other, as well as certain articles of faith in which all alike profess their belief. Newman grounded his description of the doom of sinners on the maxim that human affections cannot exist in hell; the teaching of the Bishop of Oxford on this subject rests, or rested, on a very different idea.

Mr.

In a sermon preached in the parish church of Banbury, on the 24th of February 1850, the Bishop of Oxford dramatised the day of judgment. He was preaching especially to the

* We have not hesitated to make use of notes, taken (approvingly) at the time, of a sermon which certainly cannot be charged with prophesying smooth things. A discourse addressed specially to children on their confirmation may be more fitly alleged as a specimen of ordinary parochial teaching than a sermon preached before a University audience. Yet the two sermons on "The Revelation of God the Probation of Man," preached by the Bishop of Oxford before the University in 1861, are entitled to all the credit due to the sermon at Banbury for plainness of speech. We cannot even enter on an examination of the equivocal sophistry which runs through these sermons. We content ourselves with remarking that, on evidence which has been much called in question, he makes a young man of great promise, and much simplicity of character, die "in darkness and despair" before he had "reached the fullness of earliest manhood." The alleged cause is indulgence in doubts,-of what kind we are not told. Yet there is some difference between the promulgation of an impure Gnosticism and doubts on the accuracy of the Mosaic cosmogony. Unquestionably the bishop is referring to doubts of the latter kind; and we can only say, that to condemn to endless torments a young man of good life because he doubted whether the sun and moon really stood still at Joshua's bidding, is almost worse than to consign to the same fate the school-girl of the Banbury sermon.

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children who had on that day been confirmed by him; and he judged rightly, that nothing could enable them to realise the state of the lost more vividly than a series of portraits representing the several classes of impenitent sinners in judgment. But inasmuch as the example of the worst sort of mankind would be of little practical use, he sought his warnings chiefly from those on whom the world would be disposed to look favourably. The poet, the statesman, and the orator, the scholar and philosopher, the moralist, the disobedient child, the careless youth, were each in their turn described as standing before the judgment-seat. No touch was wanting in each case to complete the picture; and if the object was to awaken the passion of fear, the preacher's effort could fail only with those who saw that the picture was inconsistent with the constantly recurring statement, that hell contains nothing but what is simply and utterly evil. As addressed to the young, his words ought not to do violence to a sense of right and wrong, probably in most of them sufficiently weak, or tend to lower and confuse ideas respecting the Divine Nature which were already sufficiently inadequate. How far the sermon was likely to produce such a result may perhaps be determined by taking a few of the examples brought forward. After describing the death of the impenitent,-sometimes in torment, sometimes in indifference, more often in self-deceit,-the Bishop of Oxford depicted them before the judgment-seat, still possibly deceiving themselves, until the delusion is ended by the words which bid them go into the lake of fire. "What," he asked, "will it be for the scholar to hear this, the man of refined and elegant mind who nauseates every thing common, mean, and vulgar, who has kept aloof from every thing that may annoy or vex him, and hated every thing that was distasteful?... How, again, shall it be with many of whom the world thinks highly, who are rich and well-to-do, sober and respectable, benevolent and kind? Such an one has been esteemed as an excellent neighbour; he has had a select circle of friends whom he has bountifully entertained; and when he dies, there is a grand funeral, and it is put upon his tombstone that he is universally lamented. What is the Scripture comment on all this?-in hell he lifted up his eyes, being in torments." He placed his hearers by the deathbed of the rich man. "See, in the house of Dives there are hurrying steps and anxious faces. Dives is sick, and his neighbours are sorry, because he has been a good neighbour to them, polite and hospitable, and ever ready to interchange the amenities of life. Dives is sick, and his brothers are sorry, because he has been a kind brother to them, and now they must lose his care and see him no more. Soon all is over. The body lies in state. His friends come together and attend it to the

tomb, and over it is placed the recording tablet stating him to be a very paragon of human virtues. And while this is going on upon the earth, where is Dives himself? suffering in torments, because in his lifetime he had received his good things." But more terrible still (and chiefly as being addressed to children) was the picture of a school-girl cut off at the age of thirteen or fourteen. In her short life she had not seldom played truant from school, had told some lies, had been obstinate and disobedient. Now she had to bid farewell to heaven and to hope, to her parents, her brothers and her sisters. What was her agony of grief, that she should never again look on their gentle faces, never hear their well-known voices! All their acts of love return to her again-all the old familiar scenes, remembered with a regret which no words can describe, with a gnawing sorrow which no imagination can realise. Henceforth she must dwell among beings on whom there is no check or restraint. The worst of men are there, with every spark of human feeling extinguished, without any law to moderate the fury of their desperate rage. To complete the picture, the lost angels were mingled with this awful multitude, in torment themselves and the instruments of torturing others. They stood round their human victims, exulting in their agonies and increasing perpetually the sting of their ceaseless anguish. The bodies of men as well as their souls were subjected to their fearful sway. "The drunkard they seized and tortured by the instrument of his intemperance, the lustful man by the instrument of his lust, the tyrant by the instrument of his tyranny."

These descriptions involve some curious and not very consistent conclusions; but chiefly perhaps they suggest that the difference between the ninth and the nineteenth centuries is not very great after all. The demonology of the Bishop of Oxford is almost more minute and elaborate than that of Bede or William of Malmesbury." But, leaving this, we have to mark that in this scheme, as in that of Mr. Newman, (1) all mankind are divided into two classes at the hour of death, and (2) that hell is the abode of nothing that is not utterly evil. But it goes beyond the teaching of Mr. Newman in asserting (3) that hell is a chaos of unrestrained passion, (4) that all its inhabitants may attack one another at will, and (5) that all, whom we should be disposed to judge most leniently, retain their better characteristics, and remain, in short, precisely what they had been on earth.

On a subject of such fearful moment every statement should be sifted with all sobriety and earnestness. It might be not

* Bede, iii. 19; Malmesbury, ii, 2. The details of bodily torment inflicted by demons run into images which have their ludicrous as well as their fearful side. See Milman's Latin Christianity, book xiv. ch. ii.