ARTICLE VI.

FUTURE PUNISHMENT OF THE WICKED AS REVEALED IN THE OLD TESTAMENT.

BY PROF. HENRY COWLES, D.D., OBERLIN, OHIO.

THIS Article will assume that future punishment is taught clearly in the New Testament. It proposes to inquire whether it be taught also in the Old; and if so, how.

If taught by Christ and his apostles in the New Testa ment, it is certainly true, and therefore does not need the endorsement of the Old Testament to establish its truth. Yet our question has real interest and importance, notwithstanding. The opinion is somewhat current that future punishment is not taught in the Old Testament; and it is proposed to infer from this silence that the doctrine is not in any wise fundamental; that religion can be maintained without its aid; and perhaps that gospel ministers may do good work for truth and righteousness without preaching or even believing it. Hence one reason among many for our inquiry into the Old Testament teaching (or silence) as to future punishment.

Our question carries us back to the beginnings and the earlier stages of divine revelation. We may fitly suppose that the problem of making a written revelation to man lay before the divine mind in thought and plan before it became an act. In this problem the special point now before usthe future doom of the wicked-was included, and the question how to reveal it to any good moral purpose, must have involved two main points, viz. (1) How to make men understand it; (2) How to make them believe it.

A moment's thought will show that both these points are thoroughly vital; for unless it be understood, it could be no revelation at all, and could have no moral force. Moreover,

if understood intellectually, yet if it were not so revealed as to enforce belief, it would be even worse than worthless, serving only to harden human hearts in their sin and madness. We shall need to hold these points well in mind. throughout this discussion.

It may require some little reflection to suggest the real difficulties of this problem in both these aspects. Let it be considered that the doom to be revealed lies in another world, not in this; a world that none of the race has ever seen, and none are expected to see till the time of needing a written revelation of it shall have passed forever. The problem, then, is to get into the human mind some ideas pertaining to an unknown world a world with which our present life may not be rich in helpful analogies. In so far as the revealing of this truth depends on written words, single terms-e.g. death, hell, Gehenna - it will be entirely essential that these words have an intelligible meaning. But any just apprehension of their meaning must start from and be built upon things known, not things unknown. That is to say, the case requires the framing of what may be called a new language, in the sense of old words with new meanings. It were of no use to import a language from the other world, i.e. to bring down to man the terms and phrases which the holy angels may use of the doom of the lost, or which Satan and his fellows may use in speaking of their prison-home and its torments. What could we learn from their vocabulary, supposing them to convey their thought in words of their own? The case is somewhat like giving the people of the great Sahara the ideas which the Laplanders readily express under the words snow, ice. The men of Sahara would need more help than these words. To comprehend and convey these ideas they must learn a new language; and this language must be built (as best it might be) upon analogies with things within their knowledge and experience.

A little attention to this will show the necessity (in a revelation of things in the other world) of taking up some word or words which have a meaning in our earthly experience,

and applying them in a corresponding yet special sense, to the things God would teach men of the world to come.

Thus the necessary conditions of the great problem before the revealing mind will show why the progress of this reve lation in the earlier stages was of necessity slow; and also why it was in many points imperfect. In the light of them we can appreciate the wisdom of the course God has in fact taken, both to make men understand and to make them believe the future doom of the wicked.

If that doom is exceedingly dreadful the only sensible way of revealing it in single words is to seize upon some one word or more, well known in human experience, expressing some fact or event most appalling and terrible, and make it the basis of the revelation. No word fills these conditions so well as the word "death." Before this experience all human hearts recoil as before no other. This word is therefore wisely put in the foreground of this revelation. Applied to the next world it must have a modified sense; but it will be a sense analogous. We need not look under it for dissolution; we must find under it pain, suffering; elements appalling and terrible. Other ideas may be brought in from other analogies; banishment, darkness, despair; the central word and idea still being death. "The soul that sinneth shall surely die."

This bears on the first point of the problem, viz. to make men understand proximately the real sense of the sinner's future doom. To make them believe this doom to be certain, we can think of nothing so pertinent and forcible as analo gous visitations of judgment on the wicked in this world. Such great facts as the flood, the fire on Sodom, the swallowing up of Korah and his company, had a wonderfully startling and impressive power. They proclaimed to a sinful world: It is a fearful thing for the wicked to be in the hands of a holy God! To his incorrigible enemies, he is a consuming fire, even a jealous God! These visitations terribly justified the inference made by Peter: "If God spared not the angels that sinned..... if he spared not the old world.

but saved Noah, bringing in a flood upon the world of the ungodly, . . . . if he turned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes, making them an example to those who should after live ungodly, then the Lord knoweth how to reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished (2 Pet. ii. 4-9). Ah, indeed, "he knoweth how "; there can be no lack of agencies and powers; and what is not less vital, there can be nothing in his pitying love which will forbid such inflictions of righteous judgment as the case may in his view require.

This, then, in general, meets the second great condition of a successful revelation of the sinner's future doom, viz. to make men believe it; to impress them with its absolute certainty. It will be noticed, moreover, that these foregoing examples of retributive judgment on the guilty, in time, answered to some extent a double purpose - not only compeling belief, but illustrating the nature of the doom. They helped to explain, as well as to impress and enforce conviction.

THE OLD TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.

We study the Old Testament doctrine of future punishment at great disadvantage to ourselves unless we first settle the question, Did the writers and first readers of the New Testament believe in a future existence? If not, there could have been to their thought, no future punishment for the wicked, and, indeed, no future retribution at all.

On the other hand, if they did believe in a future existence, their minds would be fully open to that tremendous inference,-A God who cuts down the outrageously wicked before their time in this world will have judgments for them far more terrible in the world to come! In the minds of both good men and bad, this inference would be simply inevitable, provided they thought of both good men and bad as still living on after death, and as having to do with the same great and holy God there as here.

We shall have occasion to notice how strongly this inference lay upon their souls; how manifestly it colors their language; how surely therefore it indicates their belief.

One word on the general question before we open the Scriptures. Let it not be deemed a begging of the question to say thinking men believe in a future existence naturally. It is one of their early, not to say instinctive, beliefs. This is, perhaps, partly due to a love of existence and dread of annihilation; partly to a natural sense of fitness that a being of such powers as man should be presumed to have been created to live on beyond this very short life, and to do more of the work he is so manifestly fitted for and to fill out the legitimate results of living far more perfectly; and more than all the rest, that the just rewards of living well or ill may have other and larger scope for their realization than this world affords. It will seem to thoughtful minds that better justice ought to be done to both the good and the bad than this earth provides for and awards. Therefore, men will say, and will feel it with almost resistless force,- There ought to be, there must be, a future life where retribution for the deeds of earth will level up the strange inequalities of this earthly state, and not leave our sense of justice outraged and bleeding over the otherwise never righted wrongs of earth. Whatever scepticism appears on this point may be put to the account of a personal dread of future retribution, often taking this peculiar form; Everybody else ought to have a future retribution, though for myself I greatly choose annihilation rather than the consequences of an after life, and shall hope for it.

Hence the history of the race shows that the masses have always believed in some sort of future existence. Their mythologies and superstitions show this, for heathen gods by thousands and myriads have been deified men. The worship and reverence paid to ancestors (as in China) bears the same testimony. Necromancy, almost if not quite universal through all the earlier ages (to say nothing of more recent times), rests on the nearly universal belief in future exist ence. It would be supreme folly to pretend to evoke the spirits of the dead if the dead had no spirits, if the universal belief were that "death ends all." All these superstitions