• 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 XI

Examination of Particular Texts

IN our survey of Scripture heretofore, we were unable to give to some individual texts that attention which from their prominent place in this controversy they deserve. We now proceed to do so. The texts we refer to are texts which are most commonly and most boldly advanced by Augustinian theorists in proof of their view. We think a fair and candid examination of them will show that instead of supporting they condemn their view.

2. We will first consider Mark 9:44. Speaking here of hell, and of those who will be consigned to hell, our Lord most solemnly, and with threefold repetition, pronounce their doom—"Their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched." It is on this text that Augustine, in his "City of God," mainly relies for his view,¹ and this is perhaps the text of all others which is most boldly put forward as establishing it. Instead of supporting, however, it contradicts it plainly. This solemn declaration of Christ is not an original saying of His, but is quoted word for word from Isaiah 66:24. We will give it with its context. Speaking of the redeemed of the earth, Isaiah says, "They shall go forth, and look upon the carcases of the men that have transgressed against Me; for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched; and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh." A moment's glance shows us that both the worm and the fire are alike external to and distinct from the subject on which they prey; and also that what both prey upon are not the living but the dead. "The allusion," says Bengel, "is to dead bodies which are the food of the worm and the funeral pile." Isaiah frequently uses the image of "the worm;" but it is always in connection with death. What he means in 52:8: "The moth shall eat them up like a garment, and the worm shall eat them like wool," is what he means when he speaks in 66:24, of the fire and the worm consuming the carcases. This fearful image conveys the idea, not of life, but of its opposite, death, and of hell, as the cleanser of God's world by the utter and eternal destruction of the wicked. These most solemn words of the prophet, so solemnly endorsed by Christ, assert a state of eternal death and destruction, not one of eternal life in hell, as the destiny of transgressors in the world to come. They are fatal alike to the theories of Augustine and Origen.

3. Isaiah 33:14: "Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? Who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings?" is very often brought forward in proof of the eternity of future misery. Many have doubted whether this refers to future punishment at all. For our part we are satisfied to suppose that it does. If it does, it affords very valuable proof that the eternity which it affirms of future punishment does not refer to any eternity of life in misery; but to the eternal extinction of life, the irrevocable loss which the wicked will bring upon themselves. This is seen from the context of the passage. They who are spoken of in the 14th verse are the people of the 12th verse, who "shall be as the burning of lime: as thorns cut up shall they be burned in the fire." The "everlasting burnings," then, are burnings whose effects are endured throughout eternity. They have cut off a life which shall never be restored again. They are God's solemn warnings, repeated throughout Scripture, that Origen's theory of a restoration at some future period from hell is a false and delusive dream.

4. Poole's comment on this passage ought to be a very instructive one. It shows us, on the testimony of an opponent, that the interpretation we put on such phrases as "everlasting burnings," "unquenchable fire," etc., viz., as signifying a destruction and death from which there is no recovery, is readily accepted by Augustinian theorists as a proper and natural interpretation. Poole thus paraphrases this verse: "How shall we be able to abide the presence, and endure, or avoid the wrath of that God who is a consuming fire; who is now about to destroy us utterly by the Assyrians, and will afterwards burn us with unquenchable fire." Here Poole supposes the "everlasting burnings" of the verse to mean both the destruction inflicted by the Assyrians in this life, and that which God will inflict on sinners hereafter; or, in other words, he tells us that "everlasting burnings" need not suppose everlasting life in misery; but that they find a suitable sense in the utter cutting off from life which man inflicts upon his fellow man here. We are not, therefore, even in the judgment of own opponents, putting any forced or unnatural meaning upon Scripture, when we put this very sense upon such phrases wherever we find them: Poole puts upon them two senses, one of which is as different from the other as it is possible to be.

5. We now come to the famous passages in the book of Revelation. Driven hopelessly from the plainer parts of Scripture, the advocates of eternal life and misery in hell think that they have in this mysterious and highly-wrought figurative book at least two passages which authorise them to change numberless passages in the rest of Scripture, and some even in the book of Revelation itself, from their plain and obvious meaning to one that is forced, unnatural, and often false to all the laws of the interpretation of language. We would suppose that the natural way would be to interpret by the already-gathered sense of the great body of the earlier Scriptures one or two difficult and figurative passages in this, probably, the last-written of the books of Scripture. But this is not the way with our opponents. They take a text or two in the very end of the Bible, and by them interpret a thousand passages written long before. No matter what may be the apparent meaning of these earlier and far more numerous passages, they must all be made to square with the text from Revelation! The first written, the more numerous, and the plainer Scriptures, must be interpreted by one or two last-written and figurative passages! Unless this extraordinary canon of interpretation is rigidly enforced, the Augustinian hell must be abandoned as a myth.

6. The passages in question are these. Of the worshippers of the beast, we are told in the former of them, that "They shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb: and the smoke of their torment ascendeth up forever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night:" in the latter passage we are told that "The devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever."

7. We will not dwell upon the fact that it is a very disputed question even among Augustinian theorists, whether the former of these passages refers at all to future punishment. Elliott has no hesitation in referring Rev. 14:10, 11, together with the kindred passage in Rev. 19:3, to a temporal judgment, viz., the swallowing up by volcanic fire of the territory of Rome in Italy.² We only refer to this to show our readers how readily Augustinian theorists admit that our interpretation of such passages is a natural and proper one. We are not insisting that Elliott is correct, or otherwise, in his application. We will here take the passages in their usual application, as indicating God's judgments hereafter upon fallen spirits and wicked men. For our part we are persuaded of the perfect propriety of applying the very same terms to judgments inflicted in this world and the next, because those judgments are essentially the same in their character. All through the sacred writings judgments here and hereafter are described by the same expressions.³ It is for those who suppose these judgments to be essentially different in character to explain how they are properly represented by identity of phrase.

8. The sense we would put upon the passages in Revelation is, that they convey in highly-wrought figures suitable to the character of the entire book, only the old idea which we have already gathered from the rest of Scripture, viz., that the punishment of all consigned to hell will be of an eternal nature, and that its fearful effect—the plunging of its subjects into death and destruction—will ever remain visible to the redeemed and angelic worlds. We will not try to establish this sense by examining the force of each word. We deny that language so highly figurative is capable of any such dialectical analysis, or that such is the manner in which we ordinarily interpret language of the kind. We will rather turn to similar language elsewhere and show that the interpretation put upon it even by our opponents both justifies and demands the interpretation we put on the passage from Revelation.

9. We will first turn to a passage in Isaiah from which there can be little doubt that the imagery of Revelation is borrowed. Dean Alford calls it its "fountain head."⁴ Isaiah is describing the judgments brought by God upon the land of Idumea. He says: "The land thereof shall become burning pitch: it shall not be quenched day nor night; the smoke thereof shall go up for ever." Here, as in Revelation, we have the smoke of God's judgments described as going up for ever. But will the advocates of Augustine's hell tell us that if we went to Idumea we should see people who had been suffering pain from some period subsequent to Isaiah's prophecy to the present time? The poetical figure of a perpetual furnace of burning pitch and ever-ascending smoke conveys the idea of perpetual desolations, but not at all of endless life in pain. The present condition of Edom is the explanation of the poetic figure: its cities have fallen into ruin: the whole land is a desert.⁵ Here is Poole's comment on the text: "It shall be irrecoverably ruined, and shall remain as a spectacle of God's vengeance to all succeeding ages." The "burning pitch," the "unquenchable fire," the "smoke ascending for ever," is reduced to this sober hue in the language of prose. As Poole, the Augustinian, interprets Isaiah, so do we interpret those passages in Revelation which are borrowed from Isaiah. We interpret Scripture by its own analogy.

10. We next tern to Jude, 7v: "Even as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire." Here is another passage of Scripture, of equally strong language and very similar terms to those found in Revelation. In what does the suffering of the Sodomites here spoken of consist? It certainly does not in the first place refer to anything they suffer, or may be supposed to suffer, in Hades; for the condition of the Sodomites in Hades is never alluded to in Scripture, and is therefore no warning example set before man to learn from. It does not, in the second place, refer to any suffering of theirs in hell; for hell is to them, as to all sinners, a future thing; whereas what the text speaks of is something which they were suffering when Jude wrote, and had suffered before he wrote, and which had long been a plain and palpable warning to the ungodly of this earth. Not referring to these, it is very evident what it does refer to. It means that punishment, open to human sight, which began when the fire from heaven descended on the guilty cities, and which has remained in force through all the succeeding generations down to our own time, and will continue while the earth remains. It is their overthrow in the days of Lot, and their abiding condition ever since, which are here placed before the ungodly as an example of what hereafter awaits them if they imitate Sodom. This view is not first presented by Jude. It is frequently met with in the older Scriptures, and we are therefore guided by Scripture itself in putting this interpretation upon it.⁶ Many indeed of the ablest of our opponents, led by the natural force of the passage, and apparently unaware of the force of their own admission, put on it the same interpretation that we do. They say that the fire which consumed Sodom and Gomorrah was an eternal one, "because it was eternal in its effects." Neither of the two cities ever was, nor ever will be, built.⁷ We could only wish that they who give so just an interpretation of the "eternal fire" of Sodom would give the same explanation of the eternal fire of hell. Let both be eternal, as being "eternal in their effects."

11. What then, has been and is the state of Sodom? In the days of Abraham, four rich and populous cities flourished in the plain of Jordan. On a sudden, fire descended from heaven, and, after a period of terror, regrets, and pain, the inhabitants were deprived of life. They and their works were burnt up; and this ruined, lifeless, hopeless condition has remained to the present time. "The smell of the fire is still over the land," says Tertullian. The whole transaction conveys the idea of conscious pain for a time, followed by ruin and death for ever. This is, according to Scripture, to "suffer the vengeance of eternal fire."

12. We have then as our first use of the passage of Jude a scriptural guide to the interpretation of all similar language, and in especial of those passages in Revelation which we have been considering. "The smoke of torment ascending up for ever," and the being "tormented for ever," applied to the subjects of future punishment, are phrases not more indicative of endless life and pain in hell than is the phrase "suffering the vengeance of eternal fire," applied to the punishment of the Sodomites, indicative of their having lived in pain from Abraham's day to ours. Even that word "to torment," basanivzw, on which so much stress is laid, does not carry out the requirements of our opponents. It is as applicable to things without life as to living things. It is the same Greek verb which describes the "tossing" of the boat in Matt. 14:24; and the "torment" of the lost in Revelation. It is used, according to Schleusner, not only for actual pain inflicted, but for death produced by such pain. In this sense it is peculiarly applicable to future punishment, and carries out the idea, common to the kindred passages we have considered, of pain severe and terrible for a time followed by the destruction of life.

13. But this passage from Jude serves another purpose of equal value in this controversy. It lays down the great principle that the judgments of God upon individuals or nations, in destroying them here for sin, is the pattern and example of that destruction which He will inflict on them hereafter for sin. If we had indeed but this one passage, we might perhaps hesitate to draw so important a conclusion from it; but it is the teaching of many other Scriptures. It is our Lord's teaching where, speaking of the Galileans, whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices, and of the eighteen upon whom the tower in Siloam fell and slew them, he adds the warning "Unless ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish," i.e. perish in the same way. And St. Paul enters largely into the history of the sins of and judgments upon Israel in the wilderness, in order to tell us that those very things which happened to them are examples of what will happen to us hereafter if we imitate them in transgression.⁸ And this accounts for a large portion of Scripture which would otherwise be unintelligible, but which on this principle is intelligible and plain; namely, the inextricable blending together of judgments, some of which appear to refer to this life and some to the next, while all are spoken of in similar language. On our theory, this is quite natural and explicable. The slaying of the Galileans by Pilate essentially resembles the death of the wicked in hell. So does the falling of the three and twenty thousand in the wilderness, and the destruction of others by the bite of the serpent, resemble the destruction of the sinner hereafter. The circumstances of the future doom will of course vary from those "examples," just as they vary from one another; but in all its issues it will be identical, viz., the destruction of life. How these are "examples" of the doom of sinners on the Augustinian hypothesis we leave it to Augustinian advocates to settle. How the loss of existence resembles endless existence, and falling resembles never falling, and being destroyed resembles never being destroyed, is for our opponents to justify on some peculiar theory of Augustinian interpretation which would enable us to put on every word of Scripture the exactly opposite sense to that which it bore in ordinary language.

14. Before concluding this chapter, it will be well to say a few words on the term "unquenchable fire," so often applied to the fire of hell. It is a most significant phrase, and deserves attention; but it does not signify what the Augustinian theorist imposes upon it as its meaning. It signifies the very reverse. It is a word in common use now, and was a word in common use both in Scripture and profane writings. If the reader will look into a dictionary he will find that an unquenchable fire is a fire which cannot be extinguished until it has consumed all on which it preyed and it then goes out of itself for want of fuel. The classical scholar will remember the famous passage of Homer where the Trojans hurl "unquenchable fire" upon the Grecian ships. Eusebius calls the fire which had been kindled around a martyr's body and burned on till it consumed him to ashes an "unquenchable fire." Unquenchable fires constantly break out among us; but none of them go on burning for ever. Their simple meaning is that they do not go out and cannot be put out till they have thoroughly done their work of destruction. It is in this very way that the term is constantly used in Scripture itself. When God in one place declares that His anger would be poured out upon man and upon beast, and upon the fruit of the ground, and "shall burn, and shall not be quenched," and in another that He will "kindle a fire in the gates of Jerusalem, and it shall not be quenched," He means that His wrath was to continue till man and beast were destroyed, and the fire was to continue till the gates of Jerusalem were consumed.⁹ Then wrath ceased, because it had fully spent its force; and the fire went out, because it had eaten up all on which it could prey. So we are to understand that "unquenchable fire" which is the terrible fate of the lost. Their fire is never quenched. It preys upon them with ruthless force. No cries on the part of the damned arrest it: no prayers ascend from the redeemed for the sin which they know to be unto eternal death. No feelings of pity on God's part interfere to check its course. It burns on, consuming, preying, reducing, until it has consumed and burnt all. When it has spent its force, it dies out for want of food, leaving behind it the endless sign of the destruction which it has brought on fallen archangel, and angel, and man. This is the second death. But we can bear to look upon it because it is death. We are not looking upon a picture which would overturn reason and banish peace from all who beheld it. Life has left the realms of the lost. The reprobate felt, but do not continue to feel, the consuming flames. These prey upon the dead until dust and ashes cover the floor of the furnace of hell.¹⁰

15. In Origen's view of the future, a view far more widely spread than many suspect, we see the real cause of the emphatic, repeated, awful declarations of the eternity of future punishment. That view, so pleasing to human nature, so cherished in the sinful heart, was the view against which the Spirit of God laid down in Scripture the warnings of an everlasting destruction and an unquenchable fire. Even in the face of these Scriptures, men are found who dare to teach that there will be a restoration from hell. Far more than Augustine's theory does the view here advocated root out this false delusive hope. So long as men believe that life is not extinguished in hell, so long they will nourish hope. Milton pictures such a hope as visiting in hell the hearts even of the fallen angels—

"Suppose God should relent,
And publish grace to all!"

Impossible indeed it is to shut out such thoughts from the mind on the theory of the immortality of the lost. Men will cherish the idea that somewhere down through the ages, when the groans of hell have been beating sadly, ceaselessly, at the gates of heaven, the message of mercy and deliverance may be sent down, even as He used to send it of old to Israel, groaning beneath the bondage of Egypt, Philistia, and Canaan. "We are the clay, and Thou our potter; and we are all the work of Thy hand," would—men will think when they think what God is—rise up from hell to the throne a plea of power some time in that eternal age during all of which life must last. Death extirpates all such hopes. "Corruption has a hope of a kind of removal, but death has everlasting ruin."¹¹