Since preaching the above Sermon I have read Canon Farrar's volume, "Eternal Hope." With much that this book contains I cannot at all agree. Anything that comes from the pen of such a well-known writer of course deserves respectful consideration. But I must honestly confess, after reading "Eternal Hope," that I see no reason to withdraw anything I have said in my Sermon on "Eternity," and that I laid down the volume with regret and dissatisfaction, unconvinced and unshaken in my opinions.
I can find nothing new in Canon Farrar's statements. He says hardly anything that has not been said before, and refuted before. To all who wish to examine fully the subject of the reality and eternity of future punishment, I venture to recommend some works which are far less known than they ought to be, and which appear to me far sounder, and more Scriptural, than "Eternal Hope." These are "_Horbery's Enquiry into the Scripture Doctrine of the Duration of Future Punishment_," "_Girdlestone's Dies Irae_," the Rev. C. F. Childe's "_Unsafe Anchor_" and the Rev. Flavel Cook's "_Righteous Judgment_." "_Bishop Pearson on the Creed_," under the head "Resurrection," and "_Hodge's Systematic Theology_," vol. iii. p. 868. will also repay a careful perusal.
The plain truth is, that there are vast difficulties bound up with the subject of the future state of the wicked, which Canon Farrar seems to me to leave untouched. The amazing mercifulness of God, and the awfulness of supposing that many around us will be lost eternally, he has handled fully and with characteristic rhetoric. No doubt the compassions of God are unspeakable. He is "not willing that any should perish." He "would have all men to be saved." His love in sending Christ into the world to die for sinners is an inexhaustible subject.--But this is only one side of God's character, as we have it revealed in Scripture. His character and attributes need to be looked at all round. The infinite holiness and justice of an eternal God,--His hatred of evil, manifested in Noah's flood and at Sodom, and in the destruction of the seven nations of Canaan,--the unspeakable vileness and guilt of sin in God's sight,--the wide gulf between natural man and his perfect Maker,--the enormous spiritual change which every child of Adam must go through, if he is to dwell for ever in God's presence,--and the utter absence of any intimation in the Bible that this change can take place after death,--all, all these are points which seem to me comparatively put on one aside, or left alone, in Canon Farrar's volume. My mind demands satisfaction on these points before I can accept the views advocated in "Eternal Hope," and that satisfaction I fail to find in the book.
The position that Canon Farrar has taken up was first formally advocated by Origen, a Father who lived in the third century after Christ. He boldly broached the opinion that future punishment would be only temporary; but his opinion was rejected by almost all his contemporaries. Bishop Wordsworth says,--"The Fathers of the Church in Origen's time and in the following centuries, among whom were many to whom the original language of the New Testament was their mother tongue, and who _could not be misled by translations_, examined minutely the opinion and statements of Origen, and agreed for the most part in rejecting and condemning them. Irenaeus, Cyril of Jerusalem, Chrysostom, Basil, Cyril of Alexandria, and others of the Eastern Church, and Tertullian, Cyprian, Lactantius, Augustine, Gregory the Great, Bede, and many more of the Western Church, were unanimous in teaching that the joys of the righteous and the punishments of the wicked will not be temporary, but everlasting."
"Nor was this all. The Fifth General Council, held at Constantinople under the Emperor Justinian, in 553, A.D. examined the tenets of Origen, and passed a synodical decree condemnatory of them. And for a thousand years after that time there was an unanimous consent in Christendom in this sense." (Bishop Wordsworth's "Sermons," p. 34.)
Let me add to this statement the fact that the eternity of future punishment has been held by almost all the greatest theologians from the time of the Reformation down to the present day. It is a point on which Lutherans, Calvinists, and Arminians, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Independents have always, with a few exceptions, been of one mind. Search the writings of the most eminent and learned Reformers, search the works of the Puritans, search the few literary remains of the men who revived English Christianity in the eighteenth century, and, as a rule, you will always get one harmonious answer. Within the last few years, no doubt, the "non-eternity of future punishment" has found several zealous advocates. But up to a comparatively modern date, I unhesitatingly assert, the supporters of Canon Farrar's views have always been an extremely small minority among orthodox Christians. That fact is, at any rate, worth remembering.