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THE KING’S - BUSINESS
patties us beyond the grave, is clear from Abraham’s words to him: “Son, remem ber” (Luke 16:23-25). Could any material torments be worse than the moral torture of an acutely sharpened conscience, in which memory becomes remorse as it dwells upon misspent time and misused talents, upon omitted duties and committed sins, upon opportunities lost both of doing and of getting good, upon privileges neg lected and warning rejected? It is bad enough here, where memory is so defective, and conscience may be so easily drugged; but what must it be hereafter, when no expedients will avail to banish recollec tion and drown remorse? The poet Star- key stimulates our imagination . in the awful lings: “All that hath been that ought not to have been, That might have been so different; that ,now Cannot but be irrevocably past. Thy gan grened heart, Stripped of its self-worn mask, and spread at last Bare, in its horrible anatomy, Before thine own excruciated gaze;” while Cecil puts the matter in a nutshell when he writes: “Hell is the truth seen too late.” Again, what material pain could equal the moral torment of intensified lusts and passions finding no means of gratification, insatiable desires that can have no provi sion for their indulgence,.or if indulged, all the pleasure gone while the power remains? Surely, such expressions as the undying worm and the unquenchable fire represent, not pious fictions, but plain facts; and we may be sure that the reality will exceed, not fall short of, the figures employed, as in the case of the blessedness of the redeemed. The woes thus pro nounced are more terrible than the thun ders of Sinai, and the doom denounced more awful than that of Sodom; but we should never forget that these terrible expressions fell from the lips of Eternal Love, and came from a heart overflowing
with tender compassion for the souls of men. 3. W hat did Christ teach as to th e conti nuity of future retribu tion ? Is there any solid basis in His recorded words for the doctrine of eternal hope, or the shadow of a foundation for the idea that all men will eventually be saved? Much has been made of the fact that the Greek word “aionios” (used by our Lord in Matt. 18:8 and 25:41, 46, and translated “everlasting” in the Authorized, and “eter nal” in the Revised, Version) literally means “age-lottg” ; but an examination of the 25 places in which it is used in the New Testament reveals the fact that it is twice used of the Gospel, once of the Gospel covenant, once of the consolation brought to us by the Gospel, twice of God’s own Being, four times of the future of the wicked, and fifteen times of the present and future life of the believer. No one thinks of limiting its duration in the first four cases and in the last, why then do so in the other one? The dilemma becomes acute in considering the words of our Lord recorded in Matt. 35:46, where pre cisely the same word is used concerning the duration of the reward of the righteous and the retribution of the wicked, for only by violent perversion and distortion can the same word in the same sentence pos sess a different signification. Again, it is sometimes urged that, as salt has a puri fying power, the words, “everyone shall be salted with fire,” in Mark 9:49, have this significance in the case of future punish ment; but the context clearly shows that its preserving power is alluded to, for the passage speaks of the undying worm and the unquenchable fire. Besides, if the Divine chastisements are ineffectual here in the case of any individual, when there is so much to restrain men and women from wrong-doing, how can they be expected to prove effectual in the next world, with all these restraints removed, and only the society of devils? It is cer tainly somewhat illogical for those who
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