The New View of Hell/Chapter 2

by Benjamin Fiske Barrett

II.

THE OLD DOCTRINE OF HELL.

MORE than a hundred years ago, Swedenborg announced the end or consummation of the first Christian Church or Dispensation, and the commencement of a new one. Repeatedly, and in the calmest and most emphatic language, did he declare that the Lord had manifested Himself to him in person; had opened his spiritual senses; had permitted him to see and converse with the denizens of the other world as men see and converse with each other; had vouchsafed to him a clear understanding of the spiritual and true meaning of the Sacred Scripture; and had authorized and directed him to make a new revelation of heavenly truth for the instruction of all Christians and for the benefit of mankind.

Up to this time comparatively few have openly embraced this new revelation. Yet its power has been seen and its influence felt in the gradual and steady modification of the old theological beliefs, which has been going on in nearly all of the sects for the last hundred years. This is admitted by some of the keenest observers and most advanced thinkers in all the churches. Says a learned critic of rare candor in the New York Independent (March 18, 1869):

"More than any other form of religious thought, Swedenborgianism is a leaven 'hid in three measures of meal.' To a careless reader of ecclesiastical statistics, the Swedenborgian Church would seem to be one of the least of the great household of faith. To a careful student of religious thought, it appears to be among the most important. It has made very few converts from the faith of orthodoxy; but it has materially modified that faith. . . . As a little salt changes the contents of a large vessel of water, so Swedenborgianism, seemingly lost in the great multitude of churches, has more or less modified the form of faith of all."

And this very candid writer, and careful observer of the theological and religious tendencies of these new times, specifies some of the modifications already wrought in the old theological beliefs by the teachings of Swedenborg. After referring to the old doctrines of the Trinity, the Atonement, and the Sacred Scripture, and showing how these have been already modified by the writings of the Swedish seer, he concludes his list of specifications thus:

"The church [meaning all the so-called orthodox denominations] holds fast to the solemn truth, which no one has ever taught more vividly than Christ himself, that after death is the judgment, and after judgment heaven and hell; but it has accepted, unconsciously, from Swedenborg, his teaching that every man carries heaven or hell in his own bosom; and remits to the Past the fearful pictures of Edwards and his cotemporaries, of literal torments and a remorseless and pitiless God."

And with equal truth and plainness (though with a little less candor, perhaps, in not hinting at the real cause) the distinguished pastor of Plymouth Church (Brooklyn), said in a sermon on "Future Punishment" preached some months ago: "that the educated Christian mind of all lands, for the last hundred years [note the period] has been changing" in regard to the nature of punishment in the great Hereafter.

"It is certainly true," he continues, "that theories have been changing from gross material representations [of hell], more and more in the direction of moral representations. It is very true that this subject is not preached as it used to be—not as it was in my childhood. It has not been preached so often, nor with the same fiery and familiar boldness that it used to be. Multitudes of men who give every evidence of being spiritual, regenerate, devout, laborious and self-denying, find themselves straitened in their minds in respect to this question, and are turning anxiously every whither to see whence relief may come to them. There has been a profound change [within the last hundred years, observe] in the sentiment of Christendom in regard to those gross representations of future punishment, which were handed down to us from the past." And he gives, as among the reasons of those gross representations, "the mediæeval literalization of the Bible figures."

Now, to judge correctly of the need there was of a new revelation a hundred years ago, we should go back to the time when Swedenborg wrote, and see what were the then accepted teachings upon the various points of Christian theology. Since that time the beliefs of Christians have, through the light of the New Dispensation (which is "as the lightning that cometh out of the east and shineth even unto the west"), become so modified, that, on many subjects, they bear but little resemblance to those held previous to that time. Very few are aware of the changes in theological opinion that have taken place in nearly all the churches during the last hundred years, and that are still going on at a rapid pace; and fewer still are aware of the cause of these changes.

Take, for illustration, the doctrine concerning hell, or the future punishment of the wicked. At the time Swedenborg wrote, the commonly received doctrine in all the churches was according to the literal teaching of the Bible. It was believed and taught for Christian verity that hell is literally a lake of fire and brimstone;—a place created by the Lord at the beginning for the express purpose of inflicting upon all who die in their sins as much suffering as infinite ingenuity could possibly devise. It was held that sinners, after death, were to be cast alive into this burning lake by order of the Supreme Judge of the universe, as criminals on earth are cast into prison by order of the judges of criminal courts. And that they were always to remain there, perfectly conscious, indued with the most exquisite sensibility to pain, forever burning yet never consumed, writhing and groaning in eternal agony. And as if this were not torment enough, the gross imaginations of religious teachers often added other horrors equally revolting. Mr. Buckle, in his History of Civilization in England, speaking of the clergy of the seventeenth century—especially the Scotch clergy—and their view of hell and its torments, says:

"In the pictures which they drew, they reproduced and heightened the barbarous imagery of a barbarous age. They delighted in telling their hearers that they would be roasted in great fires and hung up by their tongues. They were to be lashed with scorpions, and see their companions writhing and howling around them. They were to be thrown into boiling oil and scalding lead. A river of brimstone broader than the earth was prepared for them; in that they were to be immersed. . . . Such were the first stages of suffering, and they were only the first. For the torture, besides being unceasing, was to become gradually worse. So refined was the cruelty, that one hell was succeeded by another; and, lest the sufferer should grow callous, he was, after a time, moved on, that he might undergo fresh agonies in fresh places, provision being made that the torment should not pall on the sense, but should be varied in its character as well as eternal in its duration.

"All this was the work of the God of the Scotch clergy. It was not only his work, it was his joy and his pride. For, according to them, hell was created before man came into the world; the Almighty, they did not scruple to say, having spent his previous leisure in preparing and completing this place of torture, so that, when the human race appeared, it might be ready for their reception. Ample, however, as the arrangements were, they were insufficient; and hell not being big enough to contain the countless victims incessantly poured into it, had, in these latter days, been enlarged. But in that vast expanse there was no void, for the whole of it reverberated with the shrieks and yells of undying agony. . . . Both children and fathers made hell echo with their piercing screams, writhing in convulsive agony at the torments which they suffered, and knowing that other torments more grievous still were reserved for them." (Vol. II. pp. 294, 295.)

Now every statement that Mr. Buckle here makes, finds ample confirmation in the works of distinguished theologians of that period and some of the previous centuries. Rutherford in his Religious Letters, speaking of the future punishment of the wicked, says: "Tongue, lungs and liver, bones and all, shall boil and fry in a torturing fire" (p. 17);—"a river of fire and brimstone broader than the earth." (p. 35.) And Boston, in his Human Nature in its Fourfold State, treating of this same subject, says: "They will be universal torments, every part of the creature being tormented in that flame. When one is cast into a fiery furnace, the fire makes its way into the very bowels, and leaves no member untouched: what part then can have ease when the damned swim in a lake of fire burning with brimstone?" (p. 458.) And Rev. Thomas Halyburton, in his Great Concern of Salvation, says: "Consider, Who is the contriver of these torments. There have been some very exquisite torments contrived by the wit of men, the naming of which, if ye understood their nature, were enough to fill your hearts with horror but all these fall as far short of the torments ye are to endure, as the wisdom of man falls short of that of God." (p. 154. Edinburgh edit., 1722.)

Such was the generally accepted doctrine concerning hell in all the Christian churches at the time Swedenborg wrote. Such, too, had been the doctrine for centuries previous, as we learn from Christian writers and Christian artists. These latter aimed to embody or represent upon canvas the prevalent Christian thought of the period in which they lived. Thus Michael Angelo, in his picture of the Last Judgment, tells us more plainly than words could tell, what idea Christians of his day had of the future punishment of the wicked. Truly did Mr. Beecher say in one of his sermons not long ago:

"If you will take this picture, you will better understand what was the real feeling of the age in which he lived on the subject of reward and punishment, than by reading any amount of theological treatises. Let any one look at that; let any one see the enormous gigantic coils of fiends and men; let any one look at that defiant Christ that stands like a superb athlete at the front, hurling his enemies from him and calling his friends toward him as Hercules might have done; let any one look upon that hideous wriggling mass that goes plunging down through the air—serpents and men and beasts of every nauseous kind, mixed together; let him look at the lower parts of the picture, where with pitchforks men are by devils being cast into caldrons and into burning fires, where hateful fiends are gnawing the skulls of suffering sinners, and where there is hellish cannibalism going on—let a man look at that picture and the scenes which it depicts, and he sees what were the ideas which men once had of hell and of divine justice. It was a nightmare as hideous as was ever begotten by the hellish brood itself; and it was an atrocious slander on God. . . . I do not wonder that men have reacted from these horrors—I honor them for it." (Plymouth Pulpit for Oct. 29, 1870.)

And this bold and eloquent divine further adds in the same discourse:

"To allow such a stream of human existence to be fed and renewed in every generation, which was pouring over the precipice at the rate of thirty millions a year, into such torments as the old method of representation presented to us, and at the same time to teach that God was a loving Father—these two things have seemed so difficult to multitudes of persons, that they have fled from the attempt to reconcile them, and have abandoned all belief in them."

And how does Mr. Beecher himself reconcile them? Or how does he understand and interpret the language of the Bible which refers to the future state of the wicked? He frankly confesses his own blindness and confusion here. He don't know what to make of this language. "It goes to my heart to say these things," he says—i. e. the things he finds in the Bible. "Yet it is there, and if I am faithful to my whole duty I must preach it. As a surgeon does things that are most uncongenial to himself, so sometimes do I. And I do this with tears and with sorrow. It makes me sick."

It is plain, then, what was the old and universally received doctrine among Christians concerning hell at the time Swedenborg wrote.

Very few, however, believe this doctrine now. The light that has been flowing into all minds from out the new angelic heavens for the last hundred years, has so clearly revealed its hideousness, that you will hardly find an intelligent Christian of any denomination now-a-days, who does not reject it. Most people have no rational and clearly defined doctrine to take the place of the old; but this latter nobody now accepts.

The old doctrine, therefore, being such as we find it— so irrational and monstrous and cruel in itself—so utterly repugnant to every true Christian feeling and to every just conception of the character and government of God—is it unreasonable to suppose that the Divine Being would some day vouchsafe a further revelation to his children on this subject? If there ever was a subject on which the minds of men were in utter and impenetrable darkness, and on which, therefore, a further revelation was needed, is it not the very subject we are considering? And at what time should we expect the revelation to be made, other than that when it seemed most necessary—the time of densest spiritual darkness, when such preposterous ideas as to the nature of hell and future punishment as those I have here presented, were generally taught and accepted for revealed truth?