THE words of a friend whom we respect and love often have a power to carry conviction which would not be possessed by the most logical and irrefragable arguments, if they were not backed by the gentle persuasiveness of personal affection. The listener receives them as a man receives a visitor who comes with a letter of introduction from some one whom he greatly esteems: they have every chance of reaching the centre of the intelligence because they come with a favourable recommendation from the will. This advantage does not interfere with the impartiality of the judgment; it does not warp the decision of the intellect; it only enables arguments, which otherwise would pass unheeded, to obtain a fair hearing, and ensures a patient consideration for doctrines or opinions which would otherwise be dismissed abruptly.
So it was with the good influence exercised by Saville over Cholmeley. Cholmeley knew his friend's ability and the unprejudiced calmness of his judgment. He knew that he had made great sacrifices for conscience' sake: during the hours they had spent together he had been struck with the spirit of peaceful happiness, of which his conversation and demeanour gave the clearest proofs. He could not help contrasting it with the trouble and perplexity of his own mind. In his friend, solid unshaken convictions; in himself, shifting, unsteady opinions. In his friend a consistency of belief, an unity of thought; in himself, a mass of inconsistency which he could not conceal from himself, and a variety of hypotheses which clashed most uncomfortably one with the other from time to time. In his friend, definiteness of conception and clearness of statement; in himself, indefiniteness, mist, obscurity. In his friend, a set of principles which governed all the details of his daily life and gave the tone to all his actions; in himself, no principles worth the name, but a series of guesses to some of which he firmly held, though to the large majority he gave only a sort of half assent, and accepted them provisionally, until he found something better. Above all, in his friend, a continual cheerfulness, an unfailing peace, a most delightful habit of throwing off troubles or looking at the bright side of every thing, which strangely contrasted with his own fits of gloominess, his critical spirit, his tendency to fix upon the unfavourable side of persons and of things. All this impressed him more and more during the fortnight that they were together, and he recalled again and again the well-known words of the Philosopher: "To those who know there is a sweeter life than to those who seek."
After they had parted company, the words and the influence of his friend seemed to sink in more deeply even than when they were together. Once more the familiar words of the Ethics recurred to his thoughts: "If truth," as Aristotle says,{1} "is one, and error many, if there is only one way of being right, and countless ways of being wrong," there can be little doubt that Saville is right and I am wrong. He puts before me a consistent, compact, logical system to which I can only oppose objections and difficulties which would engage in internecine strife if they were not occupied in attacking the common foe of Theism, besides many evasions which in my heart I often do not accept. How can I deny the force of his reasoning, so different from that of the well-meaning Theists whose panoply had always some convenient gap where I could thrust in my spear. He appeals to my reason, and my reason cries out within me that he has truth on his side. He is moderate and sensible; he does not urge as conclusive arguments which do not really prove; he does not abuse me or tell me that I am wilfully blind; he does not hurry me; he tells me to wait and think and pray."
So weeks ran on, and Cholmeley did not neglect the advice, and moreover made a good resolution to fight against the storm of passion which had from time to time swept him away, and to avoid the company of those who might lead him into his former evil ways. It was not an easy resolution to keep, but he kept it nevertheless, and found that as in former times the indulgence of passion had helped gradually to obscure and obliterate the belief of his early years, so now the successful struggle seemed to dissipate the mist and gradually to clear his mental vision of the fatal haze that had shut out Heaven from his sight. Gradually he began to say to himself, "I wish I believed. I think I believe. I see good reason why I should believe," and unconsciously he found himself uttering the words, "O my God, help me to believe." Yet from time to time there was a reaction. The difficulties of belief seemed insuperable; the objections he had so often urged against belief, and which he thought would sleep quietly in their graves, slain by the sword of logic and of a growing faith, came out of their tombs and haunted him like horrible spectres, crying aloud in his ears, and challenging him to banish them if he could. After several days' perplexity he sat down on one of those occasions an wrote the following letter to his friend:
Inner Temple.My dear Saville, -- I have been thinking a great deal, since returning to London, about the various subjects we discussed together. I think I can accept the conclusion to which your arguments lead. I really can honestly say from the bottom of my heart, "I believe in God," but it is indeed from the bottom of my heart, in that my belief lies concealed deep down, quite out of sight, without any sensible realization of it. It has to struggle up through a host of foes which threaten to choke it on its way. The old objections come out of their lurking-places and oppose it with vivid and menacing hostility. I know they are old objections, but I do not think I ever found a satisfactory answer to them. Perhaps you will tell me I ought to gulp them down, and make an act of faith in God quite irrespective of them and ignoring them, but somehow I cannot do this with any satisfaction. I am still an inquirer, and an inquirer is bound to face the foe, not to avoid him. My chief difficulties are these:
- How is all the misery and wretchedness in the world compatible with the infinite goodness of God?
- How can a just and merciful God have created Hell?
- How can such a God leave hundreds and thousands without any means of knowing or loving Him, surrounded by vice and crime and paganism, so that practically without any fault of their own, or comparatively little, they are sure to lose their souls?
- How can He have created those whom He knew, in virtue of His omniscience, would be utterly miserable to all eternity?
I hope you will not think, because I put forward my difficulties, that I am lapsing into my former scepticism. On the contrary, I begin to see, as I tell you, the light in the distance with an ever increasing clearness; only before I arrive there I have these obstacles to surmount, these spectres to slay which I have so long harboured, and which haunt me still. I must get rid of these before I arrive at any final decision. I am sure you will be patient with me in my search after truth and after God. May I run down and have a talk with you in the course of the next week or so?
Saville, in reply, invited his friend to come and stay for a couple of days at his modest Presbytery. "You are a nice fellow," he said to him on his arrival, with familiar banter, "to expect of a poor hard-worked priest a solution of some of the deepest mysteries that can be found in Heaven and earth." But they soon fell to discussing the subject that was uppermost in the minds of both, and it was Saville who opened fire.
"I remember," he said, "when we were at Oxford, some Biblical difficulties were once started at a dinner party at Balliol. Some one who was present, and who had been arguing against the possibility of solving them, was asked in that case how he could in reason accept the Bible as the inspired Word of God? 'In reason?' was the answer, 'I don't accept it in reason, I swallow it down like a pill.' You seem to think, Cholmeley, that I want you to do the same with Theism, to swallow it like a pill, to gulp it down with all difficulties, soluble and insoluble. I want nothing so ridiculous and so impossible. All I want you to do is to accept what your reason deliberately approves. I don't want you to accept anything which really runs counter to your reason."
"But does not the Catholic Church teach that faith comes in and sets aside reason, reversing its decisions and compelling it to accept propositions against which it indignantly protests?"
"Most certainly not," said Saville, warmly, "if it did it would cease to be the teacher of Truth and would become a teacher of abominable lies. Faith, it is true, takes the place of reason, and in this sense may be said to set it aside -- it affords a higher sanction to that which reason approves as true. But if you mean that it contradicts reason, or runs in the teeth of reason, or condemns what reason approves as true, or approves what reason condemns, you must have a very strange idea of the relations existing between reason and faith."
"My dear Saville, I always regarded the Catholic Church as the most consistent and reasonable religion in the world, but I never knew it went so far as this. Even now I don't see how you can possibly maintain that it is reasonable in its account of the attributes of God. I am quite at a loss, for instance, to know how you can make out any case, on grounds of reason, for the mercy of a God who fills the world with misery and kindles the eternal flames of Hell."
"Wait a little," was the answer, "there are one or two preliminary remarks I should like to make. First of all, I want to show you that it would be rather absurd and unreasonable if these difficulties did not exist. So far from being an obstacle to my belief in a God, I find in them a confirmation of it."
"What on earth do you mean?"
"I mean that if God is an Infinite Being, He belongs, in virtue of His infinite Nature, to a different order of things from all finite beings, and therefore it would be quite unreasonable to expect that we should fully understand the Divine method of government, or should be able to see the motive causes which underlie the action of God."
"Is not this to fall back on the 'mystery trick,' and to tell us that we must shut our eyes and admire in God what we should condemn in an ordinary man?"
"No, it is not; because while I admit the mystery and the inscrutable character of the ways of God, I deny altogether that you can find in the action of God, as known to us, anything incompatible with the absolute perfections of an Infinite Being. Nay, I go further, and say that whenever the Divine action appears to compare unfavourably with the action which would be expected of a perfect man, the difference arises from the necessity of the case, from the fact that the one is Infinite and the other finite, that the one belongs to a higher and the other to a lower order of being."
"Do you really mean to allow the action of the Being of the Higher Order compares unfavourably with that of the lower? Is not this simply to degrade God below the level of man, not to place Him above it?"
"My dear Cholmeley, I never said that the Divine action compares unfavourably with that of man. I only said that it appears to do so. Let me illustrate what I mean by an example which is very much to our point. You allow that a man ought to aim at being as merciful as he possibly can, that there should be no limit to his mercy as long as it does not interfere with his duties of justice to others."
"Yes, of course he ought. The more merciful the better as long as it is the genuine article, mercy real and true."
"Yet the most perfect of men can only show a limited amount of mercy, however perfectly he may cultivate the virtue."
"That follows from the limitation of his finite nature, it is no fault of his. Yet he is bound to go as far as he can in exercising mercy."
"Well, now, transfer your thoughts from finite man to the Infinite God. He has all perfections to an infinite degree, has He not?"
"Of course He has."
"And therefore is a God of infinite mercy -- an All-merciful God if you like. There is no end to the mercy He can pour forth from the treasure-house of His Divine Nature.
"I do not see the drift of your argument."
"Why, it is simply this. The merciful man who seeks to imitate a perfect ideal exerts to the utmost his faculty of mercy, he throws into his merciful actions all the mercy at his disposal. In so far as he fails of this he is not perfectly merciful. A merciful God, inasmuch as He has an infinite store of mercy, cannot exert it to the utmost on His finite creatures. Their very finitude limits His mercy. He must, from the very nature of the case, draw the line somewhere. He never can exert to the utmost His faculty of mercy."
"Yes, that is true enough, but what then?"
"Well, then you get this contrast. A perfectly merciful man is bound to be as merciful as he can; a perfectly merciful God cannot be as merciful as He can. The one is under an obligation to exert his faculty of mercy to the utmost, the other cannot possibly exert His faculty of mercy to the utmost. Stop where He will, He can always add fresh mercy and this without end."
"That seems to me true and reasonable. But if there is this necessary limit to the mercy of God, where is it to be drawn? Is it determined by the Divine will, or by the nature of those on whom it is exercised?"
"Don't be in a hurry. I want you first of all to appreciate the shallowness of the common objection that a merciful God, in virtue of His infinite mercy, is bound to be unlimited in His mercy, and if He is not He contrasts unfavourably with a merciful man, whereas it is just the opposite. I assert on the contrary that a merciful God in virtue of His infinite mercy must limit that mercy in its external exercise, else He would not be God but only a sort of man on a big scale. After this comes the question, What is to set the limit to His mercy? and to this I answer that the only possible limit is the will of God Himself. If God's action were determined by anything outside of Himself He would not be God. At the same time it is true to say that God's mercy is in some sense limited by sin, and by the punishment of sin which justice demands. Even among men the mercy of a ruler must have limits. He would become an object of contempt to his subjects if he went on forgiving every sort of offence against his authority, without any restriction. But what is any offence against human authority compared with the offence against Divine authority involved in sin? It is because we do not appreciate the nature of sin, because we cannot understand its vileness, its hideousness, its almost infinitude of evil, that we do not appreciate the wonderful patience of God, His astonishing forbearance with sinners, His reluctance to punish them as they deserve, His almost extravagant liberality in the bestowal of His mercy."
"Yes, but if He has this unlimited mercy at His disposal, is He not bound to exercise it very liberally?"
"No, not bound. In virtue of His Divine Nature he must be perfectly just, but the line of strict justice once passed, the amount of mercy to be bestowed must depend simply and solely on the will of God Himself. In point of fact, He does bestow mercy with Divine generosity. He opens the treasures of His love and lavishes it upon his children without stint, and I had almost said without limit. They deliberately outrage and set Him at nought, and He winks at the offence. They rebel against Him, and instead of punishing them as they deserve He seeks to win them back by the sweet suggestions of His grace. They return unkindness for His goodwill and insult for His fond affection, and yet He does not turn them off, but exercises a God-like ingenuity in seeking out means to gain their love. I confess, Cholmeley, the longer I live the more I am astonished, not at the limits of God's mercy, but at its unbounded extent. I am unable to understand how He, the God of Justice, can go the lengths that He does in showing forbearance with the most ungrateful and most rebellious. But all this is done of His own gratuitous longsuffering and compassion. If He were to draw the line after the first deliberate mortal sin, or at all events very far short of where He draws it in point of fact, we should have no reason to complain, and He would be none the less a God of infinite love."
"Saville, I don't think I quite agree with you. In my own case I allow it is true, and I wonder at God's forbearance with such a perverse ungrateful brute as I have been. But in the case of others I do not see the force of your remarks. I am inclined to think God is very hard on a great many."
"I dare say you do," rejoined Saville, "for the very simple reason that your own case is the only one in which you have any knowledge of the facts. I never found any one yet who when he talked honestly did not confess the same as you do about himself, however loud in his denunciation of God's hard treatment of others. As for myself, it is one of the mysteries of the universe how God has almost compelled me to love and serve Him by the graces and favours He has heaped upon me."
"Yes, but you deserved them. Don't shake your head. However, I don't want to dispute that point. But I do dispute the generosity of God to all the poor wretches who grow up in vice and filth and misery. I cannot understand even the justice -- not to say the mercy -- displayed to the poor children who never have a chance of virtue. Is it generous, is it fair to let them be reared amid every sort of iniquity, and then to punish them eternally because they copy the example of their elders and live a life of crime and vice and immorality, when they have never known anything higher or better, and have sucked in iniquity almost with their mother's milk."
"My dear Cholmeley," answered Saville, "don't dress up a spectre and then find fault with its ghastly ugliness. You are getting indignant about a perfectly imaginary case. If God punished those who had never had a chance of virtue, because they did not practise it, He would indeed be unjust. If a single human being ever lost his soul and was miserable to all eternity, except through his own fault, he would indeed be an unanswerable argument against the goodness of God, nay, against the whole Theist position. You are building up an edifice that lacks all foundation. Your accusation against God is based not on what is the case, but on what you fancy must be the case. In point of fact there is not one of all those who have died in enmity with God who will not have to confess that he has been treated not only justly but generously."
"How do you know this? It seems to me that you have no more right to assert it than I have to deny it."
"In that case we are both arguing in the dark, and you at least have no right to bring your assertion as an argument against God. My counter assertion is worth as much as yours, even if we are both talking at random. But in point of fact I am not talking random. I am speaking from facts within the circle of my own knowledge. Take one of them with which you ought to be familiar. Once upon a time there was a child brought up among robbers and trained himself to the same lawless life. His career of crime ended in his apprehension and conviction, and he was sentenced with one of his companions to die a shameful death. What chance had such an one of saving his soul? If you had known his history and seen him led out to execution cursing and blaspheming, you would have said: 'Poor fellow! what chance has he had?' Yet this man died the death of a saint and went straight to Heaven, and is commemorated in the Roman martyrology on the day on which our Lord died side by side with him on Calvary."
"Yes, but this was a single and exceptional case."
"Another of your gratuitous assertions; and I do not hesitate to add a false one too. I think there are indications, I do not say proof positive, that at the last moment of life God makes an offer of mercy to all who have not already deliberately and wilfully barred the way to His grace. It is a fact which experience has proved to be true in a great number of well-authenticated instances, that before the soul quits the body the whole of life flashes in an instant before the mental vision. At that moment I believe that every one has a last chance of submitting to God, of choosing Heaven or Hell, and that many a poor outcast, steeped to the neck in vice and all abominations, nevertheless at the last has the grace to make that necessary act of submission and sorrow for sin which opens the door of Heaven and crowns the soul in reward for that one flash of repentant thought with the joy of Heaven to all eternity. The epitaph of the poor fox hunter:
Between the stirrup and the ground
He mercy sought and mercy found,
might, I fancy, be written in other words over the grave of many a poor thief and prostitute."
"But is not this a demoralizing doctrine and one which would encourage men in vice?"
"Why, Cholmeley, you were just now arguing against God's mercy, and now you are turning round and saying that He is too merciful. No, it's not demoralizing, for the simple reason that he who perseveres deliberately in sin, trusting to this last chance, will lose the power of availing himself of it. It will not help the hardened reprobate -- but it will help, nay, it will save hundreds and thousands of those whom the world regarded as hopeless. 'The last will be first and the first last!' Heaven will have strange surprises for us. The Day of Judgment will among other ends serve as a complete justification of the Providence of God. It will show us how every one who ever came into the world had not one chance but many; how no soul will be lost except through its own fault, and how the punishment, terrible as it will be, will be altogether short of what was deserved."
"There you come on another of my difficulties. I do not see how a momentary action can ever deserve a punishment which is eternal. There is no proportion between the two. It is not just (to say nothing about mercy) to visit an offence which is past and gone in a moment with misery that lasts for ever."
"I am a little surprised to hear you urge such an objection as this. I know it is a very common one, but I think, if I may say so, that it is scarcely worthy of your intelligence. The moral character of an action is not measured by its duration, nor do its consequences depend on this. There may be an immeasurable intensity of guilt in a look or a movement or a thought. A single word or glance may create a permanent and irredeemable breach between two bosom friends. Some acts are of their own nature irreversible -- suicide, for instance. The final act of impenitence is a sort of moral or spiritual suicide. It is a deliberate wilful rejection of God, and that to all eternity. It is a renouncing of His friendship for ever. It is a conscious act of permanent separation from Him with all that such a separation involves. Is it not fair and just that after such a deliberate act (the last, too, after many similar ones going before) the man who makes it should be taken at his word?"
"Well, yes, I think it is, whenever he thoroughly knows what he is doing. But what are we to say of those who commit sin out of sheer ignorance that it is sin? of those whose vicious education has so perverted their conscience that they are not to blame, or scarcely to blame, for their rejection of Truth or for their breaches of the moral law?"
"My dear Cholmeley, you need not be alarmed about the fate that will be dealt out to those who sin, not through malice, but through ignorance. No human being will be separated from God to all eternity unless in this life, out of sheer malice and in the full consciousness of the guilt of what he was doing, he deliberately turned his back on God, outraged His Majesty, rebelled against His dominion, and rejected His love. For such, and for such only, is the misery of Hell reserved for ever."
"Really, Saville," said Cholmeley, "you make Hell quite reasonable. Still I do not see how a merciful God could create such a place as Hell at all."
"I do not admire your assertion that God creates Hell. There is a sense in which it is true, but it seems to me more true to say that man creates it for himself. Hell is the necessary consequence of a complete separation from God. It is the agony of an intense longing after Him joined with an intense hatred of Him; of an unsatisfied craving after One whom we know to be the Source of all possible joy and happiness, and whom we have for ever forfeited through our own fault. It is the agony of an immortal soul and an immortal body craving after an activity which they never can again enjoy, beating against the bars of their moral prison-house; it is the agony of a struggle between desire and hatred, the desire never to be fulfilled, the hatred utterly feeble and futile, except to heap up misery and anguish on him in whose breast it dwells. Look at the intensity of misery that follows in this life from disappointed love: see how the torment is increased if love and hate be mingled together. See how the anguish becomes still more unendurable if it is the result of the folly or guilt of him who experiences it. Why men look upon all else as insignificant as compared with this. What do they reck of bodily pain or physical torment side by side with this mental and moral agony? It often leads to madness, idiocy, suicide. Yet all this is by reason of a disappointment, the effects of which they know will at most last but a few years. How then can we ever estimate, how can we form any idea of the torture of a separation in which each element of pain is multiplied indefinitely, and which moreover is to last for ever and for ever. Why the pain of immersion in a seething mass of metal would be a joke compared with the pain which is the necessary and natural result of separation from God."
Cholmeley sat silent for a few minutes. "Yes," he said, "that is all true, and certainly gives me quite a new face on the question of Hell. But two objections occur to me. If this is so, why do Catholic writers lay the chief stress on the physical torments of Hell? on the lake that burns with fire and brimstone? on the flames that feed upon the bodies of the lost without consuming them? on the darkness and the red-hot prison-house and the different kinds of punishment inflicted on the various senses. If all this is of minor importance, why put it in the forefront?"
"My dear Cholmeley, you must be aware that a wise man who desires to persuade his audience chooses not the arguments which have the greatest weight in themselves, but those likely to tell the most on those he is addressing. Now the mass of men are able thoroughly to appreciate physical pain. They know it by experience; but few of them can estimate the intensity of moral suffering. And if they can, yet they cannot realize how all possible anguish is involved in the loss of God. Fancy a preacher addressing an ordinary half-educated or uneducated congregation as follows: 'My brethren, picture to yourselves the misery of losing God; of being His enemy for ever; of having no chance of ever beholding the Beatific Vision; of being cut off from Him who is the Source of all joy and happiness and delight.' What impression would this make on a popular audience? The ordinary sinner would comfort himself by thinking that he had been separated from God the greater part of his life without any very painful results, and he could not understand a state of things where the consequences would be the intensity of anguish described by the preacher. Very different is it with physical suffering. Tell a man, educated or uneducated, to thrust his finger into the flame of a candle and hold it there if he can; tell him to try and realize the effect of being plunged into the stream of molten metal that pours out from the furnace of an iron foundry, and remaining there with a body capable of the anguish but incapable of death. Ask him whether any sinful enjoyment or bodily pleasure is worth the chance of such a fate as that to all eternity, and you will produce a very different effect: his imagination and memory will come into play and he will dread the lesser agony with a fear which with God's grace very often will have the most salutary effects on his after life."
"True enough," said Cholmeley, "Do manus, I give in. But my other difficulty is more serious. If separation from God is far worse than being plunged into a sea of molten fire, how is it that men who are separated by the greatest possible distance in this life have such a very comfortable and happy time of it? I know pious people say that they are very miserable under the surface and have no real peace of heart, but are consumed by a secret despair; but all I can say is, that if they are, they have a wonderful power of concealing it and putting on a mask of gladness. Why some of the cheeriest men I know have thrown off God altogether."
"Quite so," said Saville. "I myself always feel inclined to be impatient when good men talk rubbish about the misery of the wicked. Do not mistake me. The wicked are utterly miserable in that they have in them the root of all misery; but thousands of those who have forsaken God are certainly not conscious of their misery. They are prosperous, self-satisfied, contented with themselves and all around. They have their qualms and dark moments, and their happiness is not of the highest type; but on the whole their lives are often very pleasant ones. You ask how this can be, or rather since this is true, how the chiefest misery of Hell can be enmity with God and separation from Him. Let me answer by a parallel case. "Suppose that a man were to be shown a number of photographs of a very beautiful person, all of which resemble her more or less. He reads her works, admires the pictures she paints and the wood-carvings she executes, he has also some correspondence with her. Do you think that such communications as these would, under ordinary circumstances, engender in him a very intense feeling of love?"
"No, I don't suppose it would."
"Or that it would cause him great sorrow or misery if he quarrelled with this friend?"
"No, he would not, I fancy, take it to heart."
"But now suppose that he was brought into contact with her and had the opportunity of realizing the intensity of her unrivalled beauty, the grace, the majesty, the winning gentleness, the sweet attractiveness of her nature, if he found in her the realization of his highest ideal and one who would satisfy all the cravings of his heart, if he conceived for her in spite of himself a love which made the world beside colourless and distasteful to his nature and all the longings of his heart, would not this make all the difference? Would not the appreciation of her perfect loveliness fill his heart with a yearning inexpressible to be with her all his life long? Would not separation from her cause a degree of misery proportioned to the delight and happiness that he knew her society would bring him? Would not dark despair come over his soul if she cast him off for ever, and that through his own fault, with expressions of hatred and contempt?"
"Yes, certainly, but what then?"
"Apply this to God. Here on earth we see and admire God in His works, but Him we see not, and so we know not what it is to lose Him. But at the judgment we shall see His Divine Beauty, not in the beatific vision, but under the transparent veil of the glorified Humanity of the Incarnate Son of God, and beholding this we shall yearn after God with an unspeakable yearning, and the knowledge of what we have lost through our own fault will fill us with intolerable anguish. This will be the worm that dieth not, far worse even than the fire that never will be quenched."
Cholmeley made no answer for some time. At length he said, "My dear Saville, if all Theists were like you, with a reasonable and sensible explanation of the dogmas of religion, I think the agnostics and atheists would have a bad time of it. Now I see why you would not allow that God created Hell. But there seems to me one consequence from your theory which is not exactly orthodox. If the agony of Hell is a sort of necessary consequence of the loss of God, and not a positive infliction on God's part, what becomes of the physical fire of Hell? You don't mean, I imagine, that the agony is simply mental and moral, and there is no physical agony, and that the fire is merely metaphorical, and not real?"
"No, Cholmeley, the fire is real fire; and in this real fire the bodies of the enemies of God will be tortured to all eternity But when we speak of real fire, we do not mean fire with all the characteristics of the fire known to us upon earth. On earth fire has to be continually fed with some combustible material, whereas the fire of Hell needs no such food for its maintenance. It will never fade away or be extinguished. On earth again fire gives light, whereas in Hell there will be nothing but the blackness of darkness for ever. On earth fire ministers to our comfort and happiness, it is only under certain circumstances that it is a source of pain, whereas in Hell it will do nothing but torment."
"But in this case, how can you call it real fire? Does not St. Thomas say that the fire of Hell is identical in nature with the material fire that we are familiar with on earth?"
"He says that at least it is the same in its effects. That is to say, the pain it inflicts is of the same kind as the pain produced upon our material bodies by material fire here on earth, in so far as anything in this life of dulled perception, limited as it is by the finite and perishable character of our mortal bodies, can correspond to that which belongs to the quickened and intensified life of a body which is imperishable and immortal. As here no pain is so intolerable as the pain of fire, so in the next world the pains of Hell will not only surpass all the agony endured by those who suffer the most in this life, but all the agony that we can picture to ourselves if we multiply a hundred times over all the pain that mortal man is capable of enduring. But we must not wander from our subject."
"I do not think we are wandering. The nature of hell-fire was one of my difficulties against the existence of God. You have done a great deal to remove the difficulty. But there is one point that you have overlooked. It may be true that in Hell the bodies of the lost will be tortured by a real fire after their bodies are restored to them at the Judgment, but how can it be so now? How can the fire which is of a nature adapted to affect the material body, and the soul only through the medium of the body, torture the immaterial soul, separated as it is from its body until the resurrection ?"
"I am glad you reminded me of what is a very real and very reasonable objection. It is one that it is difficult to answer. It always must remain to some extent a mystery which we cannot explain."
"Saville, I thought you had done with talking of mysteries. I am not fond of mysteries. They always seem to me like an evasion of a difficulty that we cannot solve."
"My dear Cholmeley, please don't talk nonsense. If the recognition of mysteries that we cannot solve is the evasion of a difficulty, we have no alternative but to give up the world unseen altogether, and fall back into the slough of materialism. Even then, besides the contradictions in which we shall involve ourselves, we shall scarcely be free from those mysteries to which you object. Nature is full of mysteries. The material world is rife with them. We cannot get rid of them; and our only chance of reconciling ourselves with them is to confess the fact, and allow that the explanation is beyond us."
"But is not this to run counter to our reason?"
"Not at all. It is essentially in accordance with reason. Take the case in point. You ask how the material fire can possibly affect directly the immaterial soul? I answer by another question. If this impassable gulf separates the material from the immaterial, how is it that the immaterial soul suffers with the sufferings of the material body? My nerves are out of order, and my soul is tormented by empty fears, anxieties, scruples, self-reproach. My liver is deranged, and my hopes for time and eternity seem black and hopeless. Dyspepsia lays hold of my digestive powers, and I lose all the brightness of my soul and all the energy of my immaterial intelligence."
"That is because body and soul are united together into one perfect whole. They are not separate like the tormenting fire and the soul which it torments. There is not therefore the same difficulty in understanding how one can affect the other."
"Not the same difficulty! There seems to me a much greater one. If the immaterial cannot affect the material, how much less can it be united to it! If there is such a gulf between them that the action of the one cannot reach the other, how far stranger and more mysterious is the uniting together into one composite whole of the material body and immaterial soul! Surely, Cholmeley, if you believe yourself to be a composite being made up of the gross slime of earth and Divine fire from Heaven, harmonized into a wondrous unity, you are believing in what is a hundred times stranger and more surpassing our power of imagination, than when you admit the power of the element of fire (whatever it may be) when supernaturalized and freed from its earthly grossness, to affect the souls of men when they exist for a time apart from the body."
"Well, if you put it that way, it is reasonable enough. I certainly do believe in the union of body and soul, and I know by experience how each is affected by the other. So I suppose I may as well believe in the power of the fire to affect the soul without more ado."
"You may indeed, especially when you remember that it is not mere earthly fire that torments the spirits of the lost, but a fire suited to and in unison with the world in which it exists. But have you any further difficulties on this subject?"
"Yes I have. I want to ask you whether Hell is a state or a place? I have read some very funny story about a man seeing the soul of one of his friends shot out of Mount Vesuvius, only to fall back again into the volcano. I know this is only a kind of pious pleasantry, but unless I am mistaken, learned theologians have seriously maintained that Hell is situate in the centre of the earth. Of course it may be so, there is nothing in the nature of things to render it impossible; but it seems to me rather a gratuitous assertion. We are told that the earth will one day be burned up, and to create a new world as the permanent abode of the lost is surely a still more unnecessary hypothesis. Altogether, the whole notion is mediaeval and childish."
"I would not call it childish, nor particularly mediaeval. It is true that it is put forward by theologians as a probable opinion, and that some of them lay great stress on the fact that it is a place. And a place it must be when we come to think of it, because the bodies of the lost will be there, and bodies necessarily imply some sort of local abode. But this assigning to Hell of a place in the centre of the earth, seems to me to be an expression which is virtually true, and which conveys a true idea to the popular mind. It is meant to impress upon us the depth of the dungeon, the absence of all light and of all liberty, the intensity of the scorching withering heat, the complete oblivion which will be the lot of those who have separated themselves from God. It is like many other dreadful things which are said of Hell and which are true, inasmuch as the very worst that can be said of it is contained in the far more dreadful reality. Thus it is a prison, inasmuch as a prison implies a complete loss of liberty. It is a prison-house of fire, inasmuch as fire implies the worst kind of torture imaginable. It is, moreover, a lake, or pool of fire, inasmuch as the torturing element surrounds and encompasses those who suffer in it. It is, moreover, a place of darkness, in that no ray of light breaks in on the hideous monotony of eternal misery of the lost. The unhappy beings there are said to shriek and howl and pour forth incessant cries of anguish, and gnash their teeth, and beat their breasts, and blaspheme God -- not that these expressions need be literally and actually true, or that there will be really any sounds to break the silence of never-ending despair, but because these modes of giving vent to intolerable agony are the common means by which men on earth convey to their fellows the intensity of their anguish, and therefore they are the nearest approximation which is possible to human language, an expression of the condition of the lost in Hell."
"But that makes all these terms a kind of metaphor."
"No, it does not. There you make a philosophical blunder very common among all who have not carefully studied the distinctions of Catholic philosophy. In a metaphor we apply to one order of things an idea which properly belongs to another. We use an expression, for instance, of things immaterial, which is limited in its strict sense to things material. Thus if I talk of "walking steadily along the road to Heaven as a synonym of perseverance in virtue, I am introducing a metaphor. The idea of walking is an idea belonging to things material, so too is road. But when I use an expression which conveys an idea applicable literally to its object, there is no metaphor. Thus when I call Hell a prison, there is no metaphor, because a prison simply means a state of involuntary confinement, and it is literally true of the lost that they are compelled to remain there very much against their will. Hell is a prison in the proper sense of a word because it is a prison in its effects, and those confined there are prisoners, even though there are no, doors, no bolts, no locks. Walls and bars and bolts are not essential to a prison. Blackwell's Island in the Hudson is none the less a prison because those confined there are not shut in by any material appliances. When I speak of the lost as being plunged in a lake or pool of fire, I am again using the words in their literal, not their metaphorical sense, because the suffering to which they are condemned is in its effects literally the same as that of being immersed in fire. It is true that there are many expressions used of Hell which are on the borderland between the literal and the metaphorical, but this does not affect my main contention, which is that the eternal punishment of the lost includes in itself all the suffering which we describe by the terms employed."
"Do you extend this to what is called in Scripture 'the worm that dieth not'?"
"I think the more common opinion is that this is a metaphor. I am glad you reminded me of it, because it brings out clearly the distinction between the metaphorical and the literal. The worm of remorse gnaws the soul just as a material worm gnaws the body: there is therefore the necessary transference from the material to the immaterial order which constitutes a metaphor. But the 'fire that shall never be quenched' is material fire, and works its effect on the soul in quite a different way. The one causes mental anguish, the other physical; the one produces suffering which in this world acts independently of the body, the other suffering which here on earth acts on the soul through the body. But really we must not allow ourselves to run off into subjects which bear rather remotely on our main thesis. What we are discussing is whether there is in the idea of Hell anything incompatible with the infinite perfections of God."
"Don't grudge me the digression, Saville; you have opened my eyes on a good many points where I was all in a muddle before. But there still remain two difficulties unsolved. Even if Hell be in accordance with reason and the necessary result of offending God, I don't see why this world should be so full of misery -- a misery too which falls, or seems to fall, indiscriminately on good and bad alike, on the innocent and the guilty, on the spotless child and the hardened reprobate. I have often read Mill's words with a sort of sympathy:
Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve, such as the ingenious cruelty of a Nabis or a Domitian, never surpassed. All this, Nature does with the most supercilious disregard, both of mercy and of justice, emptying her shafts upon the best and noblest, indifferently with the meanest and worst; upon those who are engaged in the highest and worthiest enterprises, and often as the direct consequence of the noblest acts; and it might almost be imagined as a punishment for them.{2}
How do you reconcile all this with the justice and mercy of God?"
"My dear Cholmeley, let me ask you a question in return. If some one were to offer you £10,000 a year and perfect health, a successful career, and a long and happy life, on condition of your receiving with patience one stroke of a lash,should you consider the bargain a hard one, or condemn the justice or mercy of him who inflicted the blow, even though for a moment it was rather painful?"
"Of course not; but a momentary blow is very different from the protracted misery that many suffer for long years."
"Yes, and a life of wealth and happiness is, still more different from an eternity of happiness in Heaven. Why, if we had to endure ten thousand years of the keenest suffering imaginable, instead of some seventy years at most of mingled joy and sorrow, our bargain would be a most magnificent one. Even then it would be an ocean compared with a drop, an unending vista of peffect joy compared with a vanishing fit of sorrow."
"That is all very true, but, if God is omnipotent, why should there be any sorrow at all?"
"Tell me, Cholmeley, have you never experienced, when some pain ceases, that the departure of the pain is in itself a pleasure? The relief is a sort of satisfaction, apart from any positive enjoyment that takes its place."
"Certainly I have often observed this."
"So that when pleasure succeeds pain there is a double source of delight: the presence of the pleasure and the absence of the pain experienced before."
"Yes, that is undeniable."
"Apply this to the case in point, and remember that in Heaven there will be always present to us the same leaping of the soul, the same exulting delight that took possession of us when first we exchanged the sorrows of life for the joys of Heaven. There will be no fading away of the joyous memory of sorrow past, but to all eternity there will be the double element of delight, in that 'there shall be no more sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain,' and that in addition to this there will be the chalice full to the brim of all the happiness that our soul can possibly contain. If there had not been the previous pain one of these elements of joy would be absent, and God, if He gave us a painless life, would be bestowing upon us what would not be such an unexceptionable boon after all. Mind, I do not say that this is the only, or the chief reason why we have to endure sorrow and pain on earth, but it is a reason quite sufficient to answer your difficulty."
"You are most ingenious, Saville, in turning all my objections to arguments in your own favour. I suppose, according to you, the more miserable a man is here, the more he will appreciate the absence of any sort of misery or suffering in Heaven. That ought to be a consolation when a poor fellow is in trouble. But I have still one shaft more in my quiver. If you give me a satisfactory answer to my last difficulty, I am quite ready to give in for good and all."
"I know what you are coming to, to the objection which is, at first sight, of all objections the most formidable. You are going to challenge the mercy of a God who creates men whom He knows, in virtue of His foreknowledge, will lose their souls, and suffer to all eternity the torments of Hell."
"Yes, that is just what I was going to say."
"But you will be glad to hear that the very fact that God does not look forward, does not alter the arrangements of His providence because the perverse will of men frustrates His intentions of mercy towards them, is one of the proofs of His Divinity."
"How can that be?"
"I think I can make it plain to you. Let me first ask you, what is the rule which governs the actions of a good man?"
"I suppose you would say that it is conscience, or right reason, or the will of God as known to him."
"Should you not also say, that he also ought to calculate the effect of what he is about to do, and shape his course accordingly?"
"This is only a secondary motive, for how can we ever tell whether the results of what we do will be good or bad?"
"You would not allow that a good action always produces good results, and a bad action bad results?"
"Saville, I think you are trying to catch me. I am not an utilitarian. We ought to act in many cases altogether independently of results, and look at our actions in themselves."
"Very good. But are there not very frequent instances in which our only guide, or our chief guide, must be the results we foresee as probable?"
"Yes, of course there are. But this is only where there is not anything in the nature of the action which decides its character for good or evil."
"Then there are two kinds of actions. In the first we are determined by the goodness or badness of the action in itself; in the second by its probable consequences."
"Yes, and the probable consequences give the character of goodness or badness to the action."
"In the former class, I look at the action, perceive its character, and accept it for its own sake; in the second, I look at the action, forecast its consequences, and accept or reject it according to the nature of those consequences. In the one case there is an immediate apprehension of the goodness or badness of the action in the other there is a far more elaborate process. I have to look forward, and calculate, and take into account all sorts of circumstances which may affect the results of my action. I have to test its consequences as far as I can, and if my first impression in favour of it is reversed by my more careful consideration of what seems likely to follow from it, I have to confess that I was a little premature, and was mistaken in approving to myself what I have subsequently learned to disapprove. Now suppose that you have had presented to you an action good in itself, but which seems likely to have prejudicial consequences, what then?"
Cholmeley seemed puzzled, but after a moment's thought recovered, himself. "Saville," he said, "you twitted me the other day with a fallacy in which a disputant put an impossible case, and then challenges his adversary to explain it. It seems to me that this is what you are doing now, and I answer you with your own scholastic phrase, Nego suppositum. I deny the possibility of your supposition: an action good in itself and under all possible circumstances cannot have bad consequences, at least in the long run.
"But do not many actions good in themselves produce very unfortunate results?"
"No, Saville, I do not believe that they do. These unfortunate results spring, not of the good action, but of some other cause which intervened and hindered the original action from producing its natural and proper fruit."
"And if this intervening cause was a voluntary agent, on whom do you imagine these unfortunate results would chiefly fall?"
"To tell the truth, Saville, I am inclined to think that the, sufferer ought to be, and would be, the interposing agent, especially if there was any wrong-doing on his part by which he frustrated the original tendencies of the good act."
"Would the original doer still keep the beneficial results properly belonging to his act?"
"I think he would keep some of them, though perhaps not all."
"And the action would not be a failure in itself?"
"I do not think it would. Even the evil consequences entailed on him who had marred it would be an act of retributive justice which a wise man would not altogether regret."
"Now let us transfer our thoughts from man to God. You will allow that every action of God is good in itself."
"Of course it is."
"And therefore its consequences must be good?"
"Yes, it must."
Cholmeley saw that he had been led on to answer his own objection, and wisely determined to carry the war into the enemy's country. But he did so with rather a faint heart, for he saw that he had already conceded implicitly what he still professed to attack.
"Saville," he said, "you seem to me to be assuming the very point you profess to prove. First you say that the action of God is good in itself, and then that it must be good in spite of the evil consequences that follow from it, just because it is good in itself. I suppose you want me to admit that in itself it is rather a desirable thing that a poor sinner should be miserable to all eternity. I answer that the action of God may become bad, or at all events less good, because of the consequences, whatever its previous character apart from these consequences."
"Then you would assert that the action of God, like that of man, sometimes depends on the consequences to which He looks forward, inasmuch as they mar the character of the action which is good in itself."
"Perhaps I was wrong in saying that God's action is always good in itself, for He differs from man in this, that He can always look forward to the most remote consequences of His action, and surely if He foresees that these consequences would be unfortunate, He would in virtue of His mercy prevent them, even though they might be but the just punishment of evil deeds done by one who brought the evil results on himself through his own fault."
"But in this case what is the alternative you would suggest?"
"I think a God of mercy, foreseeing as He does the consequence of creating this or that individual, would abstain from the act of creation when He foresees that the man would, even though it be through his own fault, lose his soul and be eternally miserable in Hell."
"The process, then, I imagine would be this: First, God would propose to create some human being; next He would look forward to his, future destiny; if the vision was one of happiness prepared for him, He would carry out His design, but if He foresaw that eternal damnation would be the lot incurred He would turn aside from His proposal and create some one else instead."
"Why not?"
"Why for the very simple reason, my dear Cholmeley, that God is perfect and your theory would make Him essentially imperfect. Your attempt to build up an All-merciful God would make Him to be no longer God."
"I don't see how that follows."
"It follows from the change you would introduce into the counsels of God. Would it not be unworthy of God to propose to Himself the act of creation, which is good in itself and suitable to His Divine Providence, then afterwards to confess that, owing to the unfortunate results which on second thoughts He had found would follow from the proposed action, He determined to reconsider the matter and abstain from the creative act?"
"Well, certainly, when put in that way it does seem rather ridiculous."
"Yet this is the only possible alternative to my assertion that the plan of God's Providence necessarily is to do that which is good in itself independently of consequences; or, to speak more correctly, of every other consideration save that the action is good, and therefore must from the very nature of things have consequences which are also good. These consequences must ultimately further the design of God in the universe He has created, which primarily is and must be the glory of God and nought else."
"But how can the misery of the lost further God's glory?"
"Not their misery, but the evidence they afford of God's unspeakable hatred of sin. This is the fact that is proclaimed by an eternal Hell, that God hates sin with a hatred that has no bounds or limits. Thus God is glorified even by the unhappy career of one who through his own fault lives in sin and dies in misery. 'God hath made all things for Himself yea, even the wicked for the evil day.' "
"I suppose this is what you meant by saying that the consequences of God's action always must be good because His action is good in itself?"
"Yes, God's part in the history even of the lost is all good, and therefore the consequences must in themselves be good. Even to the unhappy man who forfeits Heaven, the only element of evil is that which he himself has introduced. To all eternity, in spite of himself, he will have to cry out: 'The works of the Lord are perfect, and all His ways are judgments: God is faithful and without any iniquity, He is just and right.'{3} But I think you must have had enough of theology for the present."
"I have certainly had enough to think about for some time to come. How can I ever thank you sufficiently, my dear Saville, for your patient explanation of difficulties which I dare say seemed to you unreasonable?"
"Unreasonable! not a bit of it. They are difficulties sufficient to puzzle the wisest of men. Nothing but the grace of God and the light He is ready to give to all who ask for it, would ever supply a satisfactory solution of them. I am very glad if I have been any sort of use to you in your search after Truth. But do not forget that he who searches by the light of reason alone carries but a sorry torch. God must help you if you are to find that which you seek."
"I know that, Saville, and you may reckon on my neglecting no means within my reach. Even at the risk of assuming the question to be proved, I will pray God in His boundless mercy to have mercy upon me and aid me in my quest."
"So do, and God speed you."
. . . . .
A few weeks later Saville received from his friend a letter, in which he asked where he would find the best summary of Catholic doctrine. Saville sent him the Penny Catechism, and told him to read it from cover to cover. "Do not trouble yourself about any more elaborate works. If there is anything in it you do not understand, I shall be very pleased to explain."
Another week passed, and Cholmeley wrote back as follows:
"I was amused at your sending me the Penny Catechism. I rather expected you to tell me to read Perrone or parts of St. Thomas. But I have done as you told me, and I firmly believe every word of it... I don't see how a convert to Theism, if he wishes to be consistent and logical, can stop short of the only form of Theism which is perfectly reasonable and consistent. You have convinced me of the foundation being true, and I told you from the first that the foundation laid, I did not expect much difficulty about the superstructure."
Saville's heart leaped within him at reading his friend's letter, and it was not long before Cholmeley was once more housed in the quiet presbytery. A few more talks, no longer arguments but simple instructions in Christian doctrine, and he found himself anxious that his reception into the Church should be no longer delayed. Saville was willing enough: heard his confession, received him into the Church before dinner, and as they sat by the fire that evening, Cholmeley gave vent to his thoughts as follows: "Saville," he said, "I often heard converts say that they found a new meaning in Holy Scripture after they became Catholics. There are a couple of texts that are running in my head and of which I think this is true. 'Old things have passed away, behold all things have become new.' 'Whereas I was blind, now I see!' "
{1} Cf. Arist. Eth. ii. 5, 14: esthloi gar haplôs, pantodapôs de kakoi.
{2} Essays on Religion, p. 29.
{3} Deut. xxxii. 4.