• Introduction - To the American Reader
• Preface to the Fifth Edition
• Author's Preface
• CHAPTER 1. Future Punishment Is Eternal.
• CHAPTER 2. Eternal Death
• CHAPTER 3. Testimony Of The Old Testament.
• CHAPTER 4. Testimony Of The New Testament.
• CHAPTER 5. The Greek Of The New Testament.
• CHAPTER 6. The Primary Sense Of Terms Vindicated.
• CHAPTER 7. The Illustrations Of Scripture.
• CHAPTER 8. The Resurrection Of The Wicked.
• CHAPTER 9. The Divine Justice.
• CHAPTER 10. The Extinction Of Evil.
• CHAPTER 11. Examination Of Particular Texts.
• CHAPTER 12. Distinctions In Future Punishment.
• CHAPTER 13. Theories Of Punishment And Christian Missions.
• CHAPTER 14. Some Objections Answered.
• CHAPTER 15. The Apostolic Fathers. Clement Of Rome.
• CHAPTER 16. Justin Martyr.
• CHAPTER 17. Irenaeus, Martyr And Bishop Of Lyons.
• CHAPTER 18. Rise Of The Theory Of Eternal Life In Hell.
• CHAPTER 19. Tertullian.
• CHAPTER 20. Rise Of The Theory Of Universal Restoration Origen.
• CHAPTER 21. Conclusion.

The Duration And Nature Of Future Punishment

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By HENRY CONSTABLE, A.M.
Prebendary of Cork

Fifth Edition - 1875

CHAPTER IX

Tertullian

IN Athenagoras, Tatian, and the spurious works attributed to Clement of Rome, we have the earliest known advocates of the theory of eternal life in hell. From their writings we gather the marvellous power which the introduction of the Platonic dogma of the soul's immortality had upon the doctrine of punishment. But this theory required a more powerful advocacy than that of men of small or evil repute in their day. It found its required advocate in the person of Tertullian. A master of the Latin tongue, a powerful reasoner, of a vehement nature and a vivid imagination, he was well suited to impress an idea on an age disposed to accept it; and, spite of his heresies, spite of his strange hallucinations, he left the lasting impress of his mind upon the church of succeeding times. Accordingly, the theory of eternal torments culminated in the second century in this fierce African theologian. He did not hold it more plainly than Athenagoras and Tatian, but he impressed it with a power to which they were strangers, and be freed it from some of their statements which would expose it to animadversion. The weight of his personal character altogether exceeded anything to which they could lay claim. The grounds, therefore, on which such a man based his theory, the arguments by which he supported it, and the conclusions to which these led him, well deserve a separate chapter.

2. From the perusal of Tertullian's works we gather three great axioms or principles of his which influenced and moulded his entire teaching on the question of future punishment. The first two were philosophical dogmas, for which he pretended little authority from Scripture: the third was his idea of the meaning of a common scriptural term, which meaning was, undoubtedly, imposed upon his mind as the true meaning from his previous reception of the philosophical dogmas referred to. His three principles were: first, the immortality of the soul; second, the distinction which he drew between what be called "divine fire," and "common fire;" thirdly, the sense which he placed upon the scriptural term "unquenchable." On each of these we will say a few words, required in order to exhibit the tone of mind ruling at this period, and subsequently among the fathers of the Church.

3. While Tertullian plainly and unequivocally rejected a portion of Plato's teaching on the nature of the soul, he held its inalienable immortality just as strongly as Plato did. He rejects the Platonic idea that souls are unborn and uncreated, and so exist from eternity. In opposition to this he taught that they were created substances, having a beginning in time. ¹ But while he thus differed from Plato on the past existence of the soul he was at perfect accord with him as to its future existence. Once born and created it possesses a life of which it is never under any change of circumstance to be deprived. It thenceforth possesses an existence like that of God. Plato's dogma is the watchword of Tertullian— "Every soul is immortal." Beyond any question the theory as held by Plato was far more reasonable than as held by his Christian disciple; for that which can have no end could scarcely have had a beginning. However, the unfortunate stand-point of Tertullian, at once a Christian and a Platonist, compelled him at whatever sacrifice of consistency and logic to deny a main feature of the Platonic theory. On the future eternity of the soul he was however firm. It could not, with him, die, or cease to exist. Fallen or unfallen, upright or wicked, redeemed or reprobate, it possessed an immortal life.

4. In his ignorance of the Hebrew language Tertullian tries to gain authority for his opinion from the account of the creation of man given in Gen. 2:7. He considers that when man is there said to "become a living soul" his immortality is expressed. He ought to have known that the same expression was applied in Gen. 1:20, 21, to the lower creatures. The account that "God breathed" into man the breath of life is strongly relied on by him. His laboured and inconsistent deductions from this, trying to keep clear of Plato, and yet at the same time retain a part of Plato's view, shows us the utter fallacy of the ground he took. He thus in one place defines the soul: "The soul we define to be sprung from the breath of God, immortal, possessing body, leaving form, simple in its substance, intelligent in its own nature, developing its powers in various ways, free in its determination, subject to the changes of accidents, in its faculties mutable, rational, supreme, endued with an instinct of presentiment, evolved out of one (archetypal) soul. Tertullian evidently considers the soul to have been made out of some part of God—His breath. From the quotation already given appears the difficulty of his so defining the soul as to be consistent at once with this divine origin and its condition as seen in fallen man. Hence he calls it at once sprung from the breath of God and immortal, and yet subject to changes of accident and to mutability! His difficulties still further appear a little after. He is speaking of Plato's opinion of the soul as "immortal, incorruptible, incorporeal, invisible, incapable of delineation, uniform, supreme, rational, and intellectual." Tertullian justly observes of this "What more could Plato attribute to the soul, if he wanted to call it God?" Conscious however of his own dangerous proximity to Plato's view from his theory of the origin of the soul from the breath of God, he draws a distinction after the following fashion: "We," he says, "who allow no appendage to God (in the sense of equality) by this very fact reckon the soul as very far below God; for we suppose it to be born, and hereby to possess something of a diluted Divinity and attenuated felicity, as the breath of God, though not, His Spirit; and although immortal, as this is an attribute of Divinity, yet, for all that, passable, since this is an incident of a born condition, and consequently from the first capable of deviation from perfection and right, and by consequence susceptible of a failure in memory." ²

5. It is surely pitiable to hear a man of Tertullian's ability talking in this way. His efforts to combine human philosophy with divine truth only land him in hopeless perplexity. What is his distinction between God's breath and God's spirit, when both are evidently belonging to the being of God, it is difficult to see. He asserts a difference, but does not attempt to explain it. His view of the soul, as in its immortality Godlike and in its mutability but like any other creature of time, and as thus possessed of "diluted Divinity and an attenuated felicity," is ridiculous in the extreme. We may well call what he considered philosophic theology but attenuated, diluted, emasculated Platonism. But such was his opinion of the nature of the soul. While he considered it in its intellectual and moral nature as mutable and capable of all evil, he considered it in its physical capacity as possessed of an immortality equal to that of God, and to be itself a part of the divine substance.³

6. Tertullian, however, did not rely solely, or probably chiefly, either on the scriptural or the philosophical arguments supposed to establish his ideas of the soul. He knew that while a few Platonic philosophers held a theory in one respect like his, though in other respects wholly unlike, the great mass of philosophers and the vulgar multitude, regarded his and Plato's ideas as mere fanciful figments.⁴ Indeed, he himself, while at one period he lauds the arguments of Socrates and Plato on the immortality of the soul, in other moods treats them with something very much approaching contempt. "All the wisdom of Socrates at that moment," he says, "proceeded from the affectation of an assumed composure, rather than the firm composure of ascertained truth. For by whom has truth ever been discovered without God?" While of the famous demon of Socrates he speaks in anything but flattering terms: "They say," he observes, "that a demon clave to him from his boyhood—the very worst teacher certainly."⁵

7. But Tertullian was not without supernatural aid of his own. Speaking modestly of himself, he says: "We too have merited the attainment of the prophetic gift." And he had also a valuable coadjutor to supply any deficiency in his own gift, or to confirm his testimony by a second witness. "We have now amongst us," he tells his opponents, "a sister, whose lot it has been to be favoured with sundry gifts of revelation." On the strength of his own and his spiritual sister's prophetic gifts, he expounds the mystery of the condition and qualities of the soul, and attributes to it form and limitation, length, breadth, and height, colour and substance, eyes, ears, fingers, bosom, tongue, and other members, and maintains against Plato that the possession of all these does not at all endanger the soul's immortality.⁶

8. Besides this great fundamental axiom of the immortality of the human soul, which led him into an hundred absurdities, and which he supported by philosophy, Scripture, and personal revelation, Tertullian had another idea which guided him to his view of future punishment. It was that strange philosophical opinion which in our chapter on Justin Martyr we have noted as commonly held at that period, of an essential difference between two supposed kinds of fire. "The philosophers," he says, "are familiar as we with the distinction between a common and a secret fire. Thus that which is in common use is far different from that which we see in Divine judgments, whether striking as thunderbolts from heaven, or bursting up out of the earth through mountain tops; for it does not consume what it scorches, but while it burns it repairs. So the mountains continue ever burning; and a person struck by lightning is even now kept safe from any destroying flame. A notable proof this of the fire eternal! A notable example of the endless judgment which still supplies punishment with fuel! The mountains burn and last. How will it be with the enemies of God?"

9. It is most instructive to mark the grounds on which the theory of eternal anguish found admission to the Church. Christian divines now accept the conclusion which such men as Tertullian arrived at, while they are sadly ignorant of the steps by which those conclusions were reached. We just look at a certain dogma as very ancient, and commonly received in remote times, while we do not study the current ideas and mode of thought of those remote times which brought about the general acceptance of the dogma. Thus the two axioms or principles which we have just considered led Tertullian easily and irresistibly to his theory of punishment. The wicked are in hell! They cannot die there! Why? Oh, the soul is immortal. But what of the body? Must it not consume under the action of the fire as here it would when exposed to such an influence? No. We have even here fire which does not consume, because in the very act of consuming it reproduces what it consumes. Such is the lightning from the skies; such are the flames of Etna and Vesuvius. All philosophy accepts this, and it cannot be denied. Such is the fire of hell! Consequently the body of the wicked cannot be consumed in it. It will scorch, and pain, and agonize, through all eternity, because through all eternity it nourishes and supplies that bodily substance which it scorches, and pains, and agonizes, but never consumes? "From its very nature it directly ministers to them incorruptibility." The devouring flame supplies its inexhaustible fuel! Roaring, crackling, raging, scorching, paining, in the lurid vaults of hell, it supplies the bones, and marrow, and blood, and flesh, round which it roars, and crackles, and rages, with a noise as loud as the shrieks and wailings of the damned. Such was the philosophical theory which forced Tertullian to his view of future punishment.⁷ Men now laugh at the philosophical dogma. They accept the diabolical conclusion which was based upon it! Tertullian was infinitely more reasonable than they.

10. There is a feeling, natural even to fallen men, tenderly cherished and nurtured by the Gospel of Christ, which might have interposed and forbid the conclusion of Tertullian, even though it had no logic or no dogma to present. It is the feeling of pity and of mercy which is implanted in us by our Maker.

"Wilt thou draw near the nature of the gods?

Draw near them then in being merciful."

In our comparatively humane age, this feeling is ever rebelling against the dogma of endless misery. Supposed to be the doctrine of God's Word—taught to us at our mother's knee and preached to us by men whom we look upon as ministering in God's stead—loudly proclaimed as the church's faith always, in every place, and by all the faithful accepted, save by a few miserable heretics—spite of all, mercy is ever raising her powerful protest in our midst. From the depths of the heart of such men as Tillotson, and Watts, and Butler, and Taylor, and Barnes, come ever welling up the irrepressible feelings of anguish, dismay, and almost madness, at the thought of that which they feel themselves compelled to believe. Grand old Luther looked at Dante's and Tertullian's hell, and groaned out, "It is the highest act of faith to believe that God is merciful."

11. But such a feeling was faint and low in Tertullian's bosom, and probably in Tertullian's age. It was an age of cruelty—it was the age of the heathen games, when women and children feasted their eyes at the sight of the blood flowing from the gladiators wounds. It was the age of heathen persecution, when Christians were exposed to wild beasts and burned in fires, for refusing to deny their Lord. The cruelty of the age was reflected in such minds as that of Tertullian. For the present sufferings of the church he consoled himself, not as Paul did by the thought of the "far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory" which should succeed the "light affliction which was but for a moment," but by the grim reflection that he should behold his persecutors suffering what they had inflicted, yea, incalculably more. "How shall I admire," says the stern African, "how laugh, how rejoice, how exult, when I behold so many proud monarchs and fancied gods groaning in the lowest abyss of darkness; so many magistrates who persecuted the name of the Lord, liquifying in fiercer fires than they ever kindled against the Christians; so many sage philosophers blushing in the red-hot flames, with their deluded scholars!" Such was the spirit engendered in Tertullian. And so the conclusion which the strictest logic led him to from what he supposed to be indisputable facts was not counterbalanced by any pleading of mercy. Eternal misery was his intellectual creed, and his heart rejoiced at the prospect of it. ⁸

12. We have seen the grounds which led the ablest of the earlier teachers of endless misery to his conclusion. They were the philosophical figments of the immortality of the soul and of the nature of what was called divine or secret fire. These two dogmas, operating on a callous heart, led him to the creed for which he contended so strenuously. When we lay aside the philosophical figments we lay aside also the horrible conclusion against which all our heaven-born sentiments of pity revolt. It only remains for us to show the alteration and perversion of scriptural language to which this conclusion led Tertullian and his contemporaries, as it has led every one of their followers from that day to this. It led him, and all his school, to these two things: first, in their descriptions of future punishment, to introduce a language not merely strange to, but contradictory of that of Scripture; secondly, to pervert the sense and meaning of those words which the Spirit of God has used in Scripture to set forth the doom of the lost.

13. And, first, Tertullian introduces into his descriptions of future punishment a nomenclature not only novel to, but contradictory of, the nomenclature of Scripture. Thus he speaks perpetually of the "incorruptibility" of the wicked, body and soul, in hell: of the wicked, as much as of the righteous, he affirms "immortality: " he speaks of man as made out of "the substance" of God : of the soul as a "divine nature," and "an eternal substance!" Of the soul of the wicked he tells us that it stands in no need of "salvation," being already "safe" by its essential immortality: and of the bodies of the wicked he affirms that they will in the day of resurrection obtain "salvation" through Christ! "Eternal life," he tells us, will be their lot. "Destruction," he says, cannot happen to the soul, while the bodies of the wicked will be rescued from "destruction" in the resurrection!⁹ It is quite plain to any reader of Scripture that this language is never applied to the wicked in Scripture but that it contradicts the scriptural language which is used of them.

14. We will show from a single example the serious nature of this use of language by Tertullian. Every reader of Scripture knows that there is no more usual description of the punishment of the wicked than that they will be "destroyed," or suffer "destruction" in hell. Tertullian had a very clear and very decided meaning for this word "destruction," to which we would request the particular attention of his modern followers. He knew that "destruction" meant what we affirm it to mean, viz., the annihilation of organized being. Thus in one place he tells us that it was by this phrase that Epicurus conveyed the idea of the utter cessation of existence at death. In another place he tells us that destruction differs altogether from change, that whereas to be changed "is to exist in another condition," to be destroyed "is altogether to cease to be what a thing once was," to cease to have "existence," to be identical with "the annihilation of any substance." In another place he tells us that the condition of the body in the grave, when it has seen corruption, is "destruction; and that if God were to leave the body for ever in this condition it would be His abandoning it to everlasting destruction. "¹⁰ With Tertullian's clear view of the meaning of destruction, it only remained for him, in consistency with his view of future punishment, to deny that the wicked will be destroyed; he has accordingly plainly done so. Of the soul of the wicked he tells us that we are "to believe it 'lost,' not in the sense of destruction, but of punishment, that is, in hell."¹¹ We would draw the attention of the Augustinian theorists to this. Tertullian, who knew the meaning of the word, is compelled, in order to carry out his views, to contradict the Scripture. In what does he differ from his modern followers? In this, that while he contradicts the language of Scripture, they, when they do not, as they are constantly doing, exactly imitate him in his contradiction, do what is just as bad, pervert the language of Scripture from its natural and proper sense.

15. We will now give an example which shows that the theory of Tertullian compelled him, knowingly and confessedly, to alter the proper sense of some of the most common terms of Scripture to a non-natural and improper sense. What we mean is this, that Tertullian knows and acknowledges that certain words used in Scripture to express future punishment have properly a certain meaning: that the theory of punishment which he holds and believes to be scriptural does not permit these words to be understood in their proper meaning: and that consequently they are to be understood in some improper and unnatural sense. The proper inference, we contend, would have been that the theory which required such violence to be done to the language of Scripture was unscriptural; but the veil of philosophy was on Tertullian's heart, and he could not see this.

16. Tertullian is commenting on our Lord's words in Matt. 10:28: "Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both body and soul in hell." Tertullian very properly makes "kill" in the first clause of this verse to correspond with "destroy" in the second. He also very properly says that what God is here declared to be able to do He will do to the wicked in hell. He also knew the true and proper sense of the words "kill" and "destroy." His meaning for the latter we have already shown. We will now show what he means by "dying," or "death," a word so warped from its proper sense by the modern imitators of Tertullian. These say that "death" means "some condition or change of life," generally supposed to be a change for the worse. But how does Tertullian define it? "The word dead, " he says, "expresses simply what has lost the vital principle by means of which it used to live. Now the body is that which loses life, and as the result of losing it becomes dead. To the body therefore the term dead is only suitable."¹² We thus see that Tertullian held that the terms "to die," "to be destroyed," "death,"—all of them with him synonymous—were not at all suitable for the soul, and could only with propriety be affirmed of the body after death and until resurrection.

17. Here then came Tertullian's perplexity. He was in a strait between his correct knowledge of the meaning of words and a theory of punishment which he was persuaded was true. These troublesome words, which he knew could not suitably be applied to the soul at any time, or to the risen bodies of the wicked after resurrection, he, must needs confess were applied in Scripture to both body and soul of the wicked! What was he to do? He could not blot them out of Scripture. He could not deny that both body and soul would be killed and destroyed by God in hell. He could not deny that the only suitable sense of these words was that body and soul would be annihilated and cease to exist. What was he to do? Give up his theory! No. What then? Put a forced, improper, unsuitable sense on the words of Scripture, and then justify this by saying that the theory of Scripture demanded that its words should not be understood in their suitable sense, but in an improper, forced, unnatural, and unsuitable sense! This is what he has done. He is still keeping Matt. 10:28 in view, and supposing an opponent to argue from it that the wicked would cease to exist in hell. "If, therefore," he says, "anyone shall violently suppose that the destruction of the soul and the flesh in hell amounts to a final annihilation of the two substances, and not to their penal treatment (as if it were to be consumed not punished) let him recollect that the fire of hell is eternal, expressly announced as an everlasting penalty; and let him then admit that it is from this circumstance that this never-ending killing is mere formidable than a merely human murder, which is only temporal."¹³

18. This reasoning of Tertullian is well worthy of consideration. You will remark that he does not attempt to deny that the proper meaning of the "destruction of the soul and flesh in hell" is "the final annihilation of the two substances." He could not do this; for he knew well that that was the proper meaning of the words, as he had himself taught in a hundred places. But his theory of hell, which he thought that of Scripture, forbid him to allow to the words their proper sense. Up came to his mind his theory of the immortality of the soul and its endless sufferings, and therefore he must deprive the language of Scripture of its proper force. "The fire of hell is eternal," he says, putting on the eternity of the fire the sense which his theory of the soul required, and therefore the words of Scripture must needs be taken in a non-natural sense!

19. And mark also what underlay the whole of his reasoning upon this subject. He supposes the loss of existence by one who might have had it for ever as no punishment! In one place he distinguishes "destruction" from "punishment," as if destruction were not punishment. He here distinguishes "being killed," "being destroyed," "being consumed," from punishment, as though they were no punishment! Mark his words "as if they were to be consumed, not punished"! Consuming, depriving of existence, and that an eternal existence, was no punishment in Tertullian's eyes! Unless the flesh was scorching, the blood bubbling, the marrow boiling, in the consciousness of the wretched sufferer, the African thought that there was no punishment! But our main point here is that Tertullian confesses that his theory of future punishment forces him to pervert the language of Scripture. To our minds this is the plainest condemnation of a theory which requires a sacrifice of the most vital kind. Abandon the true interpretation of the words of Scripture on one great question and where can you uphold it. Tertullian's treatment of its language is the condemnation of his system. In order to uphold the dogma of eternal misery and evil, we will not consent to the introduction of a principle of interpretation which would involve our Bible in a maze of inextricable confusion and obscurity.

20. Tertullian's admirable reasoning upon another great question should have prevented his fearful abuse of language when discussing that of future punishment. As strongly as we condemn his argument on the latter, we praise his truly noble argument "On the Resurrection of the Flesh." To our minds it is far the best thing that has been written on the subject. Here, indeed, his master-mind shows itself, for he is putting forth its great powers upon the side of truth. But here he takes the precisely opposite ground to that which he takes in his argument on future punishment. The specious artifice of the heretics in attributing to the phrases of Scripture a "figurative and allegorical " meaning he exposes with a master's power. He will none of it.¹⁴ And yet Tertullian should have remembered that they were only reasoning on the resurrection as he was accustomed to reason on the punishment of the wicked, i.e. altering the meaning of words from the ordinary and proper sense to one which was unnatural, or, at best, secondary and figurative. He should have remembered that the heretical meaning of "death," as "ignorance of God"—of "resurrection," as being "re-animated by access to the truth," as "bursting forth from the sepulchre of the old man," as "escaping out of this world, which is the habitation of the dead," had at least as much scriptural warrant as his interpretation of "death" as "misery," and "destruction" and "consuming," as "pain and anguish."

21. One word more on the language of Tertullian and his fellows, ancient and modern. They, one and all, in their descriptions of future punishment, introduce a language which, to say the least of it, is absent from Scripture. When they mean to set forth beyond mistake what they hold, they tell us that the soul is immortal and cannot die; that the bodies of the wicked will be raised incorruptible and immortal; that the wicked will never die, never perish, never be consumed, never be destroyed, etc. To appearance, this language contradicts that of Scripture: at all events this language is never applied in Scripture to the wicked. What does it arise from? Surely the language of Scripture is sufficient to express the doctrine of Scripture. God meant us to understand His mode of punishment. Surely He has explained it sufficiently and beyond ambiguity in His Word. Whence then the necessity for that Augustinian language which is never found in Scripture? Whence the necessity to introduce language which so far at least as sound goes gives the lie to the language of the Bible? Is not the source of this new language to be found in a new doctrine? The terms of the Scripture are not able to express the theory of Augustine.

22. Well indeed it is for us that the Bible does not speak as these men speak. If it did, it would afford ground for the denial of its inspiration, which all the dissenters from its authority have never been able to discover. If it were to say that the wicked "shall die," and "shall not die," "shall live for ever," and "shall not live for ever,"—"shall be consumed," and "shall not be consumed,"—"shall be destroyed," and "shall not be destroyed,"—"shall perish," and "shall not perish,"—"shall come to an end," and "shall not come to an end,"— vain would be our most strenuous efforts to maintain its authority. Then, indeed, the ungodly would laugh at its threats. But this is what all our Augustinian theorists are doing in every pamphlet and work they put forward. Mr. Grant does so over and over, and vindicates the practice.

23. Having seen the grounds on which Tertullian arrived at his view of future punishment, it only remains for us to notice his use of this dogma. As in his arguments for his theory he is more forcible than his predecessors; so in his description of the endless agony of the lost he throws them completely into the shade. He does not draw any discreet veil over his scene of punishment. Without asserting that he took a positive delight in the contemplation of it, though his own words could justify our saying so, he at least depicts its fancied circumstances with a minuteness and a force that have only been surpassed by the imagination of Dante, or the agonizing details of a Romish Friar or a Protestant Revivalist.¹⁵ Nor do we say that he was wrong if his theory were but true. No amount of terror, horror, disgust, that could possibly be awakened here in the human mind could be too great, if only by it a single soul could be persuaded to fly from this wrath to come. The modern delicacy that tells us that there is such a hell, but that good manners, or regard for feeling, should lead us to conceal its naked and terrible aspect, is false delicacy which risks eternity rather than give pain for a moment. Tertullian certainly was not guilty of this spurious delicacy. He believed in eternal torments, and he drew faithful pictures of them. With him, hell was a scene where endless slaughtering (aeterna occisio ) was being endlessly enacted: where the pain of dying was to be ever felt in its terrible acuteness; but never the relief which death could bring: for death, according to him, could not enter into that region of endless life. And God was the author and inflictor of this everlasting butchery!

24. A terrible scene in English history comes up to our view. The Duke of Monmouth has laid his head upon the block. The executor, in his agitation, has struck a blow which pains but does not deprive of life; and the ill-fated son of Charles raises his head and looks reproachfully at the man whose want of nerve only had made him act the part of cruelty. Such is the picture which Tertullian represents as being enacted throughout eternity. Such is the picture which all his school draw of hell and its people. In Pollok's most awful and most unscriptural language they are "dying perpetually, yet never dead."

25. Let us look fairly and boldly at this. It was the root, and basis, and justification, on the theory of man's immortality, of the theory of Origen. No man can deny that God is able to destroy what He was able to create. No man can deny that God had a power to choose whether He would inflict death upon the sinner or an endless life of agony. Which would he choose—the gentler or the more fearful doom? Will you say the latter? Why? there must be a reason. Is it to please Himself? He repudiates this kind of character.¹⁶ His mode of dealing here contradicts it: where pain is sharp it is short. Is it to please his angelic or redeemed creation? They are too like Himself to take pleasure in such a course. Did no pity visit the Creator's bosom, they would look up into his face and plead for mercy? Is it to terrify from sin? To terrify whom? Not the lost: they are handed over for ever to blasphemy and evil. Is it then to terrify the unfallen, and preserve them from sin? Would it? What is sin? Is it not preeminently alienation from God? What would alienate from Him so completely as the sight or the knowledge of such a hell as Tertullian taught? Pity, horror, anguish, would invade every celestial breast. Just fancy a criminal with us. He has been a great criminal. Let him be the cruel murderer: the base destroyer of woman's innocence and honour the fiendish trafficker in the market of lust: the cold-blooded plotter for the widow's or the orphan's inheritance. Let him be the vilest of the vile, on whose head curses loud, deep, and many, have been heaped. He is taken by the hand of justice. All rejoice. He is put to death! No; that is thought too light a punishment by the ruler of the land. He is put into a dungeon: deprived of all but the necessaries of existence: tortured by day and by night guarded, lest his own hand should rid him of a miserable life: and all this to go on till nature thrusts within the prison bars an irresistible hand, and frees the wretched from his existence. Now what would be the effect upon the community of such a course? The joy at the criminal's overthrow, once universal, would rapidly change into pity, into indignation, into horror, into the wild uprising of an outraged nation to rescue the miserable man from a tyrant worse than himself, and to hurl the infamous abuser of law and power from his seat. And this is but the faintest image of what a cruel theology would have us believe of our Father which is in Heaven! Nature steps in, in the one case, and says there shall be an end. Omnipotence in the other puts forth its might to stay all such escape. Forever and forever! Millions of years of agony gone, and yet the agony no nearer to its close! Not one, but myriads to suffer thus! Their endless cries! Their ceaseless groans! Their interminable despair! Why heaven and earth and stars in their infinite number—all worlds which roll through the great Creator's space—would raise one universal shout of horror at such a course. Love for God would give way to hatred. Apostacy would no longer be partial but universal. All would stand aloof in irrepressible loathing from the tyrant on the throne, for a worse thing than Manichaeism pictured would be seated there—the one eternal principle would be the principle of evil.