and have observed the moral fixedness of character acquired by persistent continuance in a course of moral conduct. This is a consideration not to be lost sight of in our discussion of the penal consequences of sin. Nothing of real value in determining the true doctrine of New Testament writers is secured by a minute study of the terms Hades, Gehenna, Tartarus, death, punishment, destruction, and perdition. One may use any of these words without thereby endorsing the particular or peculiar opinions maintained by a sect or by a few individuals. One of the earliest epistles attributed to Paul declares that those who know not God and refuse to obey the gospel of Christ "shall suffer punishment, even eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might" (2 Thess. i, 9). Here the idea of future penalty does not depend upon a single word, or upon any mere form of expression. The entire context touching "the revelation of the Lord Jesus from heaven with the angels of his power in flaming fire, rendering vengeance to them that know not God" may be treated as highly imaginative and rhetorical. There is room for differences of opinion in a minute exegesis of the passage; but one thought which on any rational interpretation stands out conspicuously is the certain penal destruction of the disobedient when the Lord Jesus appears in judgment against them. In another epistle we find the following more general declaration: "We must all be made manifest before the judgment-seat of Christ; that each one may receive the things done through the body, according to what he hath done, whether it be good or bad" (2 Cor. v, 10). However much of metaphor may lie in the phrase "judgment-seat of Christ" (a matter to be elsewhere treated), one main thought is emphasized beyond question, namely, that every man is destined to receive recompense of his deeds after he has completed his earthly life-work in or through the body. If he have done what is bad, penal consequences must follow. This Pauline doctrine is in strict accord with the teaching of Jesus in the Gospels. We cannot mistake the significance of his warning in Mark viii, 38: "Whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of man also shall be ashamed of him, when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels." In the sublime picture of judgment in Matt. xxv, 31-46, the unrighteous are represented as driven away from the throne of his glory, pronounced "accursed," and sentenced to "the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels." In Matt. x, 28, he says: "Be not afraid of them that kill the body, but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in Gehenna." There can be no doubt as to the obvious import of these texts in their bearing on the future punishment of human sinfulness. In the gospel of John (viii, 21-24), Jesus says to the unbelieving Pharisees: "I go away, and ye shall seek me, and shall die in your sin: whither I go ye cannot come. .. Ye are from beneath; I am from above: ye are of this world; I am not of this world. I said therefore unto you that ye shall die in your sins: for except ye believe that I am, ye shall die in your sins.” To die in their sins was evidently to become separated from Christ and to become incapable of coming unto him. Such hopeless separation goes over with the sinner into the world of personal conscious existence beyond death. And this accords with the teaching of Jesus in his description of the rich man, who "died and was buried, and in Hades lifted up his eyes, being in torments" (Luke xvi, 23). He saw Lazarus afar off in Abraham's bosom, and prayed that he might be sent to cool his tongue and ease his anguish in the flame; but he is admonished that he had received his good things in his lifetime, and that between himself and the abode of Lazarus and the blessed dead "there is a great gulf fixed," so that none are able to cross over from one place to the other. This entire portraiture of the future state of the dead is in noticeable harmony with the idea of different apartments or abodes in Hades, of which we read in the later Jewish apocalyptic writings. A condition of anguish and torments is set over against one of comfort and blessedness, with an impassable chasm between. Thus far Jesus seems clearly to recognize and sanction the current doctrine of his time touching future reward and punishment. Whatever else this account of the rich man and Lazarus may teach, it most obviously sets forth the doctrine of retribution in the manner of conscious personal anguish after the death and burial of the body. Another fearful intimation of the penal consequences of sin beyond the present life is given in the language of Jesus concerning his betrayer, whom he calls in one place (John xvii, 12) "the son of perdition," and of whom he says in another (Matt. xxvi, 24), "good were it for him if that man had not been born." Such language is incompatible with any thought of a possible blissful immortality. It is to be explained rather as confirming the doctrine of irretrievable ruin of the soul by wickedness. This doctrine is stated in unmistakable terms in Rev. xxi, 8: "The fearful, and unbelieving, and abominable, and murderers, and fornicators, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, their part is in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone; which is the second death." From these various scriptures, as well as from many others of like character not necessary to adduce, it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that the New Testament writers and Jesus himself held and intended to inculcate the doctrine of future punishment for the sins of this earthly life. The bitter consequences of sin, according to these scriptures, torment the sinner beyond the grave. They are essentially penal and are accordingly conceived as "the judgment of God according to truth against them that practice unrighteousness"; they are a divine visitation of "wrath and indignation, tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that worketh evil," the absence and the opposite of "glory and honor and incorruption and eternal life" (Rom. ii, 3-11). 8. Inferences Touching the Nature of Future Punishment. If we inquire further as to the real nature of these penal consequences of sin in the world to come we can only speak by way of inference and suggestion. The popular concepts of "Hell" and "eternal perdition" have been in great measure derived from imaginative pictures of poets and apocalyptists, and contain a vast accumulation of crass notions which are no essential part of true scriptural doctrine. The biblical writers employ striking metaphors and not infrequently indulge in extravagant descriptions when they are simply recording personal experiences of the present life. So the psalmist in his personal trouble and sorrow cries out (cxvi, 3), 1 The cords of death compassed me, Even Paul in the midst of peril and persecution cites the language of Psa. xliv, 22, as descriptive of his feeling (Rom. viii, 36): For thy sake we are killed all the day long; He protests in 1 Cor. xv, 31, that he is dying daily. When we find such language employed in describing personal affliction in the present life, we may well presume that in portrayals of future existence and of the fearful expectations of judgment after death, even stronger language would be used. When we separate the real 1 The doctrine of the finality of life's spiritual decisions has no necessary connection with ideas of punishment which were once current, or with those realistic pictures of hell and crude conceptions of the retributive awards of divine justice with which it has been burdened. The harrowing, materialistic ideas of the pains of the lost which were natural to times in which life was rougher and more cruel, are a witness to the deep sense of the perils and terrors of sin. But they form no part of the doctrine itself. It has to be relieved of all such accessories. It has to get the benefit of that finer moral sense, those higher and purer ideas of judgment and punishment, those humaner feelings, that deeper insight into the intrinsic nature of things, which are the results of the gradual informing of men's minds with the spirit of Christianity.-Salmond, The Christian Doctrine of Immortality, p. 662. Edinburgh, 1895. kernel of thought from the drapery in which the biblical writers present this subject, the nature of future punishment for sin will be conceived as involving a variety of elements. The sure penal consequence of persistent transgression is to harden the heart, sear the conscience, and create a fixedness of evil character which it is impossible to change. Thus the willful transgressor stands committed to eternal sin (Mark iii, 29; Heb. vi, 4-6; x, 26, 27). This involves exclusion from the presence and fellowship of God and of all his holy ones (Matt. vii, 23; xxv, 41; 2 Thess. i, 9), and it implies a sort of communal depravity entailed perpetually by contact and association with spirits of wickedness (Matt. xxv, 41; Rev. xxi, 8). Such conditions must needs be thought of as attended with more or less suffering of anguish and despair (Matt. viii, 12; xiii, 42, 50; xxiv, 51; xxv, 30; Mark ix, 48; Luke xiii, 28). Thus we may interpret such terms as the "unquenchable fire" (Mark ix, 43); the anguish and torment ascribed to the rich man in Hades (Luke xvi, 23, 24), and "the lake that burns with fire and brimstone" (Rev. xxi, 8). For God himself, in the execution of righteous judgment upon the wicked, is spoken of as a consuming fire that fearfully seizes and devours his enemies (comp. Exod. xxiv, 17; Deut. iv, 24; ix, 3; Psa. xcvii, 3; Isa. lxvi, 15; Dan. vii, 10, 11; Heb. xii, 29). 9. Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, Tartarus. The use of the names Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, and Tartarus in connection with the future punishment of the wicked has naturally led to the belief that there is a local prison in which the criminals of the moral world are to be confined forever. In the later Jewish literature this appears as a doctrine generally accepted, and the local abodes of the righteous and the sinners are divided off into various compartments. The use of these terms in the New Testament accords with this idea. Hades includes a place of torment separated by a great gulf from "Abraham's bosom" (Luke xvi, 23). The "Gehenna of fire" clearly connotes a place as well as a condition of penal woe (Matt. v, 22; xviii, 9; Mark ix, 43-48), and the horrible torment is fearfully depicted in the apocalyptic passage where the idolatrous worshipers of the beast are said to be "tormented in fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, .. and the smoke of their torment is going up for ages of ages" (Rev. xiv, 10, 11). The concept of locality also attaches to the allusion to Tartarus in 2 Pet. ii, 4, whither it is said the sinning angels were cast down, and committed to pits (opos) of darkness. In Luke viii, 31, the demons dread to go away "into the 1 'Here the imagery is derived directly from the book of Enoch where the prison of the fallen angels is similarly described. See Enoch, x, 5, 13; xxi, 7-10. abyss," which is another name for the abode of evil spirits (comp. Rev. ix, 1, 2, 11; xx, 1, 3). The language employed in all these scriptures is plainly in harmony with the prevalent belief in a place of torment for wicked men and angels, and the words of Jesus in Matt. xxv, 41-"Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels"-are to be explained in accordance with the current ideas of the Jewish people of that time. But while this was the common belief of that time, it need not be maintained as an essential element of the teaching of Jesus and of the New Testament that Gehenna is a place, or that the future punishment of sin is physical in its nature, and therefore confined to some definite locality. In using the language of his time a great teacher does not necessarily commit himself to all the ideas which popular imagination associates with certain words and names. The one idea of penal suffering as the certain result of sin is the fundamental thought in all such allusions to Gehenna and its perpetual fires. In Rev. xx, 14; xxi, 8, the state of everlasting torment is called "the lake of fire," and "the second death." As death was the original penalty of sin (Gen. ii, 17), and the condition of a depraved sinner is one of spiritual death (Eph. ii, 2; Rom. vii, 10, 13; 2 Cor. ii, 16; 1 John iii, 14), so the ultimate doom of the wicked is appropriately called the second death. And so, perhaps, the idea of a resurrection unto condemnation and eternal abhorrence (John v, 29; Dan. xii, 2) is best understood as a kind of second sentence and penalty of death. The sinful soul, projected into its own depraved conditions of existence beyond the death of the body, experiences as the necessary result of its own wickedness a second and deeper realization of its spiritual death. Whilst, therefore, we have no sufficient knowledge to deny the possibility and reality of local and physical conditions after death, we are under no compulsion to interpret literally such terms as "fire and brimstone," and "Gehenna, where their worm dieth not." The extensive use of metaphor and symbol in the biblical writings, the large amount of apocalyptic elements therein, and the necessities of figurative speech to convey ideas of the spiritual and unseen admonish us to seek the essential thought that is embodied in these figurative terms rather than adopt a literal method of interpretation which would in many instances involve manifest absurdity. 10. Degrees of Penalty. If, now, we conclude that the penal consequences of sin extend beyond this life, and are in their inmost nature the legitimate result of habits and character fixed on the human spirit by persistent acts of opposition to what is |