sin" ("Dogmatics," p. 209, § 110). This moral fatality is simply the confirmed sinful character, making the man insensible to all motives to repentance and to all the gracious influences of God's Spirit. Julius Müller says: "The way of return to God is closed against no one who does not close it against himself." Dr. Norman McLeod says: "Let the fairest star be selected, like a beautiful island in the vast and shoreless sea of the azure heaven as the future home of the criminals from the earth; let them possess in this material paradise whatever they most love and all that it is possible for God to bestow," that is, upon them persisting in sin; ". . . let them exist there forever, smitten only by the leprosy of hatred to God, and with utter selfishness as their all-prevailing purpose; then, as sure as the law of righteousness exists, on which rests the throne of God and the government of the universe, a society so constituted must work out for itself a hell of solitary and bitter suffering to which no limit can be assigned except the capacity of a finite nature" (quoted by H. C. Haydn, “Death and Beyond," pp. 154, 159). Edwin Arnold ascribes a similar idea to Gautama Siddartha : Showing how birth and death should be destroyed, No hell but what he makes, no heaven too high Light of Asia, Bk. viii. p. 27. Byron describes this self-torment and exemplifies it: And dost thou ask, what secret woe I bear, corroding joy and youth? . . To zones, though more and more remote, The blight of life, the demon Thought. What is the worst? Nay, do not ask; Man's heart and view the Hell that 's there. Childe Harold, Canto i. (To Inez.) Accordingly, as I have shown in Chapter VII., if a person's chief end in life is the gratification of selfish desires, Pessimism is the logical conception of human life and life is not worth living. 3. The penalty of sin consists, further, in the moral isolation of the sinner from his fellow-men, and the privation and evil which this brings on him in accordance with the constitution of the moral system. By selfishness a person isolates himself from his fellow-men in the moral system and thus puts himself into antagonism to them. It tends to division, alienation, and enmity between man and man as inevitably as it involves alienation from God and enmity against him. The selfish person wishes to use other persons for his own advantage, or at least to crowd them out of his way. The principle on which he acts is the principle of antagonism and enmity. Its tendency to this result has been manifested in all the history of the world. Poverty, the evils of selfish competition and of selfish combination, war, tyranny, fraud, injustice, and nearly all the evils which afflict society would cease if selfishness should cease and love to God and man reign in the hearts and regulate the lives of all. Selfishness is also in direct revolt against the moral government of God. If it had power commensurate with its disposition, it would depose God, subvert the moral system and reign in God's stead. But the selfish life, because it involves enmity against God, can issue only in frustration and defeat. The universe is constituted under the law of love. Every attempt to attain well-being in at life of selfishnes. must fail. According to the constitution of the universe all things in it work together for good to them who love God and man, and for evil to them who live in selfishness. 4. The penalty comprises also the privation of physical good and the suffering of physical evil which the sinner brings on himself by his sin through the physical constitution of the universe. The physical system is subordinate to the ends and uses of the spiritual and moral system. God uses its agencies both for the moral discipline of rational persons, and for the punishment of those who sin. It is not true that physical want and suffering are always penalties for sin. They may be incidental to the education and discipline of those who have not sinned. We can say that any particular physical privation or suffering is a penalty for sin only when we can trace the connection and know that sin has occasioned the privation or suffering. Such are the physical effects of drunkenness and licentiousness, of luxurious self-indulgence, and the penury which results from idleness and improvidence. Here opens a wide range of facts in which it comes under our observation that sin is punished by physical evils coming on the sinner in accordance with the constitution of the physical system. And because we know that the physical system is constituted and evolved according to the truths and laws of Reason and for the realization of its archetypal and ideal ends of perfection and well-being, we must infer, what the scriptures also teach, that all the powers of the physical system, working together according to the constitution of the system, must tend, in their general scope and ultimate issues, to bring good on all persons who live lives of Christian love, and evil on all who live in selfishness.1 5. The penalty for sin comprises exclusion from heaven, and the privation of good and the suffering of positive evil which this implies and which is set forth in the scriptures. This is a necessary inference from the principles already established. There is nothing in the fact of death which changes the essential character of sin, nor the moral constitution of man, nor the constitution of the universe, nor the character of the person nor the law of its formation and development. Therefore there is nothing in death which can arrest the punishment of sin. The punishment is the necessary shadow of the sin as it obtrudes itself into the light of the eternal Reason and obstructs the rays of its eternal wisdom and love. As R. W. Emerson expresses it : "Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit which unsuspected ripens in the flower of pleasure which concealed it." In accordance with these principles it is certain that every one who persists in sin without repentance till death will begin the life after death a sinner; that he will be punished in the future life so long as he persists impenitent in sin; that, according to the law of moral continuity, persisting in sin, he will come, if he has not reached it before death, to a character so confirmed in sin that no moral influence will induce him to change; that the penalty which I have indicated will continue 1 "The essential good of a person is the perfection of his being, his consequent harmony with himself, with God the supreme Reason, and with the constitution of the universe; and the happiness necessarily resulting" ("The Philosophical Basis of Theism," Prof. S. Harris, p. 271.) inseparable from the sinful character; and that this will be true, whatever privations and evils may be incurred in the life after death, transcending the limits of our present knowledge. We can form no definite conception of the nature of the physical evil which may enter into the punishment of sin in the world to come, because we know so little of "that body which shall be" and of its environment. The significance of the biblical representations of unquenchable fire, the immortal worm, and the like, as emblems, need not be restricted to physical suffering, but may equally, or even only, denote the spiritual evil coming in and from sin. But we must infer that the physical environment, whatever it may be, must be there, as it is here, a medium for the education of the righteous and for the punishment of transgressors; that sin there as really as here will be in contradiction to the constitution of the universe, and that all the forces of the universe, there as here, in their unity as a system and in their ultimate tendency, will work together for the good of them who love God and their neighbors, and for evil to all who live in selfishness and sin. The Bible teaches that some will never turn from selfishness to God in penitential trust and service. But as to the question of fact, what will be the actual results of God's gracious action redeeming men from sin, the attempt to answer it must be postponed till after we have studied the history of God's redemptive action and his revelation of himself therein as recorded in the Bible, and all the teachings of Christ, "who illuminated life and immortality through the gospel" (2 Tim. i. 10).1 1 Rev. Charles A. Allen, in the "Unitarian Review," quotes the words of another, "The insight of conscience and the sense of sin are the source, and not the fruit, of religious fear, and whatever is fabulous in the scene on which it looks is but a distorted shadow cast from the truest light"; and says: "It is the radiant light of this intense and holy ethical feeling of Christianity that casts the distorted shadow; and we must confess that this shadow was inevitable, simply because no other symbolic picture seemed adequate to express to the religious imagination the distinctive Christian feeling of the infinite and everlasting gulf between sin and holiness. . . . Any one who will look beneath the logical forms of statement which theologians have given to this popular doctrine and penetrate to the spiritual fact of human experience that is hid within, can read the deeper meaning of the doctrine. But, if the Unitarians, in dropping the doctrine, lose also the Christian sentiment which it was meant to express, they miss the central truth of the Christian Gospel." VOL. II. - - 31 IV. INFERENCES AND EXPLANATIONS. - This doctrine of the divine punishment of sinners corrects misconceptions, removes difficulties and objections and gives a clearer and deeper insight into its significance and its practical power. 1. It throws light on the nature and necessity of probation. Probation is inseparable from the education, disciplining, and development of finite persons in a moral system. God does not put men on probation simply for the sake of trying them, but because he is aiming to develop and perfect them by education and discipline; and trial or probation is inseparable from the process. Because they are finite they must begin undeveloped and characterless, and must by their own free action form their own characters, right or wrong, in love or selfishness. God in giving them his law and in all his loving dealings with them aims to educate, discipline, and develop them to the formation of right characters of love like his own and to the realization of the highest possibilities of their being. In this process of education and development they are necessarily on probation. Under the gracious influences of God's teaching and discipline they must determine by their own free wills whether they will obey or disobey his law of love, whether they will trustfully follow his heavenly drawing, or resist it in self-sufficiency and self-will. If any of them disobey and resist, and so alienate themselves. from God, they are condemned. But God still remains gracious and seeks the sinners with heavenly influences to draw them back to trust and serve him in the life of love. Then they are necessarily again on probation under God's gracious seeking of them, and must decide either penitently to accept his grace and enter on the life of love, or to resist and reject it and persist in selfishness and disobedience. Thus it is inseparable from the process of education, discipline, and development of a finite person in a moral system under the government of God, that he be on probation or trial. He must by his own free will determine his own action and form his own character. And the probation or trial will continue till by persistence the person's character has become fixed so that moral influences will never induce him to change. If it is fixed in selfishness, he is no longer on probation but under final condemnation in fixed alienation from God. If his character is fixed in love, |