they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; and shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.

ן

2

The "furnace of fire" is here the same as the "Gehenna of fire," and Gehenna whose "fire is not quenched." " In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus we have seen that fire symbolizes the infliction of suffering. Even without an express declaration of our Lord, we might reasonably infer that it must have the same significance here. Why the fact of the resurrection should change the nature of the symbol we cannot see. But the Saviour himself explains what he means. "There," he says, "shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth." Where? Plainly in the furnace of fire, and as the effect of being cast into it. But wailing and gnashing of teeth represent misery, not annihilation. To argue from the effect of literal fire upon literal tares is wholly irrelevant. We can only take from the symbol the general idea of perdition, leaving its manner to be defined by the declarations of Scripture. The final doom of the wicked is quite as often represented by the figures of casting away, as bad fish; casting out into the outer darkness; 4 shutting out of a feast; and with this very addition: "there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth," or its equivalent: "there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth;" in all which passages the idea is manifestly that of rejection and banishment from God's presence, with the misery that accompanies such a condition, and this is perdition, in the most awful sense of the word.

5

3. Mark. 9: 43-48. "If thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched," etc. The passage in Isaiah from which the form of words: "where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched," is borrowed, has already been considered at large.

8

3 Matt. 13: 47-50.

4 Matt. 22: 13; 25: 30.

5 Luke 13: 25-28.

6 Isa. 66: 24.

The Jews understood it, as we have seen, of the final doom of the wicked in Gehenna; and whatever may have been the primary reference of the words (which can never have been meant to be taken literally of the carcasses of the wicked), our Lord here applies them to the final judgment. In this application their meaning is too plain to be mistaken. An unquenchable fire (πûρ äσßeσTOV) is nothing else but a fire that cannot be quenched. But the phrase admits of manifold applications, which must be determined each from the nature of the subject. In a city an unquenchable fire is at once understood to be one that must burn till the city is consumed. But this addition (which is also a limitation) does not belong to the phrase itself. We supply it from the known office of fire in a burning city. Suppose, now, that the rich man in Hades, instead of petitioning for a drop of water, had asked that some one might be sent to quench the flame in which he was tormented, and Abraham had answered, "It is an unquenchable fire;" this could mean nothing but a fire in which he must suffer without end, because there the office of fire is torment. The man who should argue from the use of the phrase, as applied to a bundle of tares or a burning city, that it must mean a fire which must burn till it had annihilated the rich man, would be thought to be out of his senses. Just so in the passage under consideration, the fire that never can be quenched is the fire that produces "wailing and gnashing of teeth." To be cast into such a fire is to suffer without end. And precisely because it is a symbolic, and not a literal fire, it is joined with the worm "where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched"- that is, where the worm and the fire, both symbols of divine vengeance, prey upon their victim without end. This truth is one of the deepest concern to every man, and well worthy of a solemn three-fold repetition from the lips of our Lord.

4. Account of the last judgment.' Here we have first the sentence of the wicked: "Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels ;" and

1 Matt. 25: 31-46

2

then the explicit definition of this everlasting fire as everlasting punishment: "These shall go away into everlasting punishment." Our author says with reason: "This is the most important of all the passages supposed to affirm the eternal suffering, and to imply the immortality, of the lost." We may add that it is our Lord's solemn announcement of the doom of the wicked at the last day. On a subject of such momentous interest it might have been expected that he would use plain and simple language, and we find that he has actually done so. That meaning which lies upon the face of his words, and must naturally have been apprehended by his hearers, is the meaning which he intended; not some recondite sense ingeniously drawn from learned philological discussions. Now the Jews of our Lord's day were familiar with the idea of Gehenna as a prison of fire prepared for the punishment of the wicked. It has been shown that they understood it to be a place of pain and misery. The very distinctions made by some of their doctors—a purifying process of fire for the middle class, twelve months' punishment for common sinners, and eternal punishment for those guilty of certain great crimes these distinctions, whether they were, or were not known to our Lord's hearers, show how deep-seated and universal was the idea of hell-fire as an infliction of penal suffering. When, therefore, our Saviour announced to them that at the final judgment the wicked should be sentenced to everlasting fire, and moreover defined this to mean that they should suffer everlasting punishment, what could they understand but that they should undergo eternal punishment in the proper sense of the words in the eternal fire of hell?

Our author explains eternal fire to mean, not a fire which burns forever, but "that which destroys utterly and forever."3 This interpretation is in itself forced and unnatural, and for this reason to be rejected. We never think of describing the duration of a fire by that of its effects. No man would call a fire perpetual, because it had reduced a city to perpetual destruction. The alleged example from Jude: "suf

1 v. 41.

2

p. 187.

8

p. 202.

fering the vengeance of eternal fire," is not in point. It is not the material cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, but their guilty inhabitants, that suffer the vengeance of eternal fire, of which the fire that consumed them and their dwellings was an awful symbol.' But, aside from its unnaturalness, the interpretation now under consideration is directly contradicted by Scripture. It will not be denied by any be liever in revelation (and with unbelievers we are not concerned in the present review), that "the everlasting fire that was prepared for the devil and his angels" is the same as the lake of fire and brimstone mentioned in Rev. 20: 10. But we are expressly told that the devil shall be cast into this lake," where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night forever and ever." The lake of fire, then, and the torment of the devil and the beast and false prophet, who are in it, endure forever and ever. When, now, our Saviour pronounces the sentence of the wicked: "Depart from me, ye cursed, into the everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels," what could his hearers understand, but that they should have their portion with the devil and his angels, and suffer the same punishment with them? If the punishment of the devil and his angels is, to be "tormented day and night forever and ever," what a strange and illogical conclusion to say that they who have their portion with them in the same lake 2 are to be, not tormented, but annihilated.

The author argues that "eternal punishment" may be understood in a wholly negative sense to denote, not suffering, but the privation of eternal life by annihilation. To this we answer:

First, the idea of punishment is essentially positive. It consists in the infliction of penal evil, although the form of this evil may be that of privation of good; for, to a sentient being, the loss of good is a positive evil.

1 The passage Isa. 34: 9, 10 is still less pertinent. For there it is not annihilation but desolation that is set forth; and this desolation (figuratively represented as a turning of the whole land into brimstone and burning pitch, whose smoke goes up forever) is a perpetual desolation.

2 See Rev. 20: 15; 21: 8.

Secondly, the punishment endures so long as the inflic tion of the evil endures, and no longer.

Thirdly, the infliction may last so long as there is a subject to receive it, and it must cease with the cessation of the being of that subject.

The above is only an analysis of the common idea of punishment, to which common usage is always conformed. The man who is deprived of his liberty for a year, as a penal infliction, is punished for a year. The man who is deprived of liberty for life, is punished for life. The punishment of the man who is deprived of life for his crimes, ceases, so far as man is concerned, with the cessation of his earthly being. To say that he is punished till the final resurrection would be absurd, although the effect of his punishment will last till that time. Eternal death, in the sense of banishment from God and all good with the misery necessarily belonging to such a condition, is an intelligible idea, and that is also eternal punishment. Eternal death as the penalty of sin, in the sense of annihilation, is also an intelligible idea, but that would not be eternal punishment. The death itself (in the sense of non-existence) would be eternal, but the punishment would be its own limitation. It must cease when there was no longer a being to receive it. We can as well conceive of a man as punished a thousand years before he begins to be, as a thousand years after he has ceased to be. These distinctions, which have their foundation in common sense and sound philosophy, are recognized in common usage. Why should one who is contented to take the language of Scripture in its plain and obvious sense, seek to

The author has failed to adduce any pertinent example of the contrary usage. The passage, for example, in Ezek. 32: 24, 25, 30, where the dead are said to have borne their shame (y, and they have borne their shame) with them that go down to the pit, probably refers to the ignominy that has come upon their name on earth. But, however this may be, these dead are represented here, as in the kindred passage in Isa. 14: 9, 10, as living and conscious spirits. See verses 31, 32, where Pharaoh, who is himself one of them, is represented as seeing them, and being comforted at their arrival in Hades. For the scene is certainly laid in Hades (v. 21), though there is a perpetual blending together of the graves where their bodies lie, and Sheol where their souls are gathered.