Those who so argue surely forget what their words involve if true. They involve a serious reflection on the Creator (a) who permits His children, made in His Image, to descend to such an abyss of degradation that only an endless hell can restrain them from sin; and Who, (b) knowing this, yet conceals, or permits to be concealed, from the vast majority of men this necessary antidote to sin; and Who, (c) in the Old Testament, gave a special revelation of Himself, and said nothing or almost nothing of it. And this favorable link cry of danger has been used against every improvement, moral, social, or scientific.
Can a single sin be named which it has banished from our midst?
Having premised this, I meet the objection frankly by saying – look at the verdict of history. Its answer is decisive. Never did lust and vice in every guise so rage and riot as when in the middle ages this dogma was most firmly held. Hellfire bred a veritable hell on earth. Those who talk of Universalism as Antinomian do not face the facts of history. Better were it if they did so, and then were to look at home, and remember the awful danger of teaching a creed whose fruits are so often those well described in the following striking words, in which a Roman Catholic Priest states twenty years’ experience in the Confessional : « The dogma of hell, except in the rarest cases, did no moral good. It never affected the right persons. It tortured innocent young women and virtuous boys. It appealed to the lowest motives and the lowest characters. It never, except in the rarest instances, deterred from the commission of sin. It caused unceasing mental and moral difficulties. *** It always influenced the wrong people, and in a wrong way. It caused infidelity to some, temptations to others, and misery without virtue to most. » – R. Suffield.
What, I ask, has the dogma of endless pain and sin really effected? Has it checked the growth of heathenism in our cities? Has it kept the artisan in the fold of Christ? Has the Gospel of fear evangelized thoroughly a solitary English family?
What wonder, so long as we preach to the fallen a God, nominally loving, but in fact a God whose acts towards myriad’s of His children would excite horror even amid the outcast, and the lost
Hellfire is preached inside the Church, while outside the baptized harlot plies her trade, and the burglar weaves his plot. Ineffective always, such teaching is more than ever so in these days, because the intelligent are by it forced into open revolt; and because experience clearly teaches that gigantic penalties go hand in hand with gigantic crimes, and penalties diminished to a reasonable amount with diminished sin. Such has been the result in our penal code. Such has been the result in Norfolk Island, in Western Australia , in Germany , in Spain, etc. Excessive terrorism provokes not alone incredulity but mirth. Even in days far more credulous than ours, Satan, in the religious dramas, soon subsided into a clown; his appearance provoked shouts of laughter.
True Universalism deters from sin, because it preaches a righteous retribution with unequaled force and certainty: on this its creed largely hinges. Restoration is taught because of retribution, a fact on which too much stress cannot be laid. « Thou, Lord, art merciful for Thou renders to every man according to his work. »- Ps. lxii. 12.
Probably the way in which most people satisfy their own minds, when doubts arise as to the endless nature of future torment is this: « Endless pain and torment is but the result of sin freely chosen and finally persisted in by the sinner ».