ENDLESS TORMENT REFUTED, AND “EVERLASTING PUNISHMENT” EXPLAINED.
(Continued)
The armies of the goat-nations being gathered before Him, their torment (basanismos, not kolasis) begins. They are permitted to have no rest, or truce, day nor night. The war having commenced, is carried on unceasingly; so that no overtures of peace are listened to, and none will be granted, until the powers that threw down the gauntlet are exterminated. Finding every avenue closed, the conflict becomes, with them, the resistance of despair. Hail, pestilence, fire, and sword, inflict the ‘physical pain,’ or torment, of the kolasis or punishment. The ‘mental pain’ can more easily be imagined than described. It will be torment of mind and body to the goats and the exiles among them, unassuageable by art or man’s device; and will continue till the war is ended by the extermination of them all, when death and corruption will have consummated their fate; for so it is written, ‘He that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption’—Galatians 6: 8; which is made by the apostle, in the same text, the contrary to ‘life everlasting.’ Here is the passage complete.
‘Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.’
Here is age-life opposed to corruption; and vice versa. If then, the tormentists will have aioonios to indicate continuance without end, here is corruption contrasted with endless life. I admit the age-life is endless; because it is life manifested through incorruptible body. The tormentists also claim that the punishment is as endless as the life, because aioonios is associated with it as well as with life. Granted. What then? That the corruption is endless, and the subjects of it, consequently, mere dust for ever; for a resolution into dust is the consummation off the corrupting process. This is punishment everlasting in its effects.
But when does the torment of the age-punishment terminate? We have said at the end of the premillennial war. But it may be asked, when is that? When the Beast shall have been slain, and his body consumed by the burning flame; a memorial of which is predicted to continue in these words off the text before us—Ho kapnos tou basanismou autoon anabainei eis aioonas aioonoon; ‘the smoke of their torment ascends to ages of ages.’ Now, previous to the commencement of the tormenting war, we have seen that Rome falls into the abyss like a millstone into the sea. In other words, she sinks like Sodom into the fiery chasm beneath her. This is a cause of great rejoicing to the resurrected apostles and prophets, and other saints; because it is God’s avengement of them upon her—Revelation 18: 20-21, 24; 19: 2. They are represented as praising God on account of her overthrow, saying ‘Alleluia!’ It is then added, ho kapnos autees anabainei eis tous aioonas toon aioonoon—‘the smoke of her ascends to the ages of the ages.’ Hence, I conclude, that the volcanic smoke mounting from the abyss in which Rome, the holy city of the goats, shall have been engulfed, is thenceforth regarded as the memorial of their judgment, as the Dead Sea has been hitherto of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the other cities of the plain. Rome’s volcanic smoke is the smoke-memorial of their torment. The reader will observe that, it is not the torment that is said to continue to the ages of the ages, but the smoke thereof. The torment ceases with the war: but the memorial of it continues to the end of the Age; that is, for a thousand years, at the termination of which the ages of the ages will be introduced.
To this it may be objected that, in the twentieth of the Apocalypse it is said, ‘they shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever;’ and that this continuance is affirmed of the tormenting, and not of smoke.’ True. But the text does not refer to the same event. It relates to what is to happen a thousand years after Rome’s destruction, and the judgment of the goat-nations. It has reference to the time, called ‘a little season,’ during which SIN exalts itself among the nations. The text affirms concerning the fate of the Sin-Power and its adherents, summarily styled ‘the devil,’ and says that, ‘the devil who deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the Beast and the False Prophet (were destroyed,) and they (the deceived) shall be tormented day and night to the ages of the ages.’ From this we learn, that the last war that earth will ever know, is to be waged on the same territory, where the premillennial ‘devil and his angels’ encountered their fate; secondly, that the tormenting of the postmillennial devil and adherents, is to be concurrent with the alternations of day and night; thirdly, that it is to continue during ‘the little season,’ which terminates at the epoch when the nightless Ages of the ages begin. This postmillennial torment will probably be shorter than the premillennial one. The sulphurous fumes of Rome’s catastrophe commingle with the torment of the postmillennial insurgents; and disappear in the same consummation. The ‘rest of the dead’ awake to life and judgment in the ‘little season;’ and they who deserve the fate share in its torment; while the righteous inherit the renovated earth during ‘the ages of the ages,’ which begin when the torment ends, and are interminable. This ‘little-season’ judgment is the final judgment of scripture, and has nothing to do with the Age-punishment of Matthew twenty-fifth. It is the end of the Day of Christ which begins with the establishment of the ‘great white throne,’ and terminates in bringing forth from the grave the sleeping dead whose names are not written in the Book of Life, and casting them into the lake of fire where the devil is destroyed—Hebrews 2: 14. The Age-punishment binds him; the final judgment annihilates him, and by consequence death.
Mr. C. remarks that the Lord in using the word kolasis indicated what sort of punishment he meant. This may be granted so far as this, that the punishment was not to be taken in the sense of paideia, which is the chastisement of a father for the correction and improvement of his children. There is no Age-paideia; paideia is now—the discipline God’s accepted children are subjected to in the times of the Gentiles. They are not subjected to kolasis; because kolasis is for dogs, and swine, and goats, not to reform them, but to exterminate them. There is nothing reformatory in kolasis, because it is punishment unto death by violence, the apprehension of which is called kolasis in 1 John 4: 18, as well as the punishment itself.
But, the radical idea of kolasis is not torment, though so rendered in English in the text just quoted. It is repression, keeping within bounds, checking, curbing, restraining; as, archei tou harmatos kai koladzei tas toon hippoon hormas, ‘he guides the chariot and curbs the impetuosity of the horses.’ The Age-punishment is to repress the wickedness of the nations, and bind the Sin-Power; a process which affords scope for the recompensing of resurrected evil doers according to their deeds. If the Lord had said, ‘ these shall go away into endless basanismos,’ that would have been delivering them over to eternal pain, or torment; and have implied their conscious existence in torment without end. But kolasis does not. The kolasis may even be endless, but consciousness is not therefore necessarily implied; because, as we have seen in Uzzah’s case, there was punishment without probably the least bodily, or mental pain.
We learn, then, the peculiar fate of the subjects of Age-punishment, as far as it can be learned from a word, not from kolasis, but from basanidzoo, which indicates the kind of kolasis, or punishment, they shall endure. Revelation 14: 10 says, ‘he shall be tormented (basanistheesetai) in fire and brimstone;’ and ‘the smoke of their torment (basanismou) shall ascend.’ These words come from basanos, which signifies ‘a species of stone from Lydia, which being applied to metals was thought to indicate any alloy that might be mixed with them, and therefore used in the trial of metals; hence examination by the Lapis Lydius, or by torture.’ Thus it came to stand for torture, torment, severe pain, &c., and is so used in the New Testament. The basanism of the goats and exiles is the examination of them by torture, so as to make the survivors of the goat-nations confess that Jesus is Lord. —To basanise nations (the verb which signifies to apply a touchstone; to inflict torment; and in the passive voice, to be tormented, pained, &c., by diseases, or anything else) implies great loss of individual life, but not necessarily the extinction of the national polities themselves. This appears from the use of the word in the following text—
‘It was given to the Locusts that they should not kill the men who have not the seal of God in their foreheads, but that they should be tormented (basanisthoosi) five months: and their torment (ho basanismos) was as the torment (basanismos) of a scorpion when he striketh a man. And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it: and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.’ —Revelation 9: 5.
This was kolasis by basanismos, or punishment by torment that lasted ‘five months’ of years without abatement.
Now it is well understood by the best interpreters of prophecy, that the Locusts represent the Saracen invaders of the Greco-Roman territory, styled ‘the earth.’ The history of their career illustrates the torment to which they subjected their enemies. They were not to kill, or extinguish the Greco-Roman dominion; that was reserved for their successors, the Euphratean Cavalry, or Turks; but they were to harass the catholic idolaters—Revelation 9: 20-21—with all the calamities of a fierce tormenting war. —From this use of the word, then, in the Apocalypse, it is evident, that the torments, or basanisms, it predicts before and after the Future Age, with whose terrors the evil-workers who partake in the premillennial and postmillennial resurrections, are to be overwhelmed, are wars of the most terrific and destructive character, in which ‘men shall seek death, and shall not find it,’ until the purposes of God are fully accomplished upon them.
If the reader have read attentively what has gone before, it will be evident to him, that whatever ‘destructionists’ may have done in Mr. C’s estimation, he is decidedly wrong in accusing me of having ‘formed a direct issue with Jesus Christ on the subject of eternal punishment.’—Jesus taught the torment of corruptible persons by war and pestilence, in the Age-punishment to be inflicted by himself and company. I believe this. Mr. C., and most other sectarians teach, the torment by material fire and mental anguish of disembodied ghosts in a spirit-world hell burning with brimstone to be inflicted by an immortal personal Devil eternally. He calls these notions, ‘the sanctions of the gospel;’ and by help of his peculiar logic, would palm them upon his contemporaries as the doctrine of the Bible! ‘Destructionists’ do not believe a word of it; because it is mere pagan foolishness, and opposed to scripture and reason. Mr. C., the great modern champion of eternal ghost-torment, feels his weakness in regard to scripture. Hence, he makes very little use of it. Look at his ‘Life and Death’ speculation, and indeed, at all his writings, and behold what ‘a famine of the word’ they present. They are full of reasonings, but his dialogisms are not scriptural analyses of scripture; but speculations of his brain, styled by Paul, ‘the thinking of the flesh’ (which ‘divines’ say, cannot think; for with them it is what they call ‘the soul,’ that is, ‘the thinking I’ that cogitates;)—the cogitations of a mind, darkened by tradition, and vaunting itself in its logic, philology, and science; so that, ‘not having the Spirit’—‘not knowing the Scriptures’ which exhibit the mind of the Spirit—it brings forth nothing but sophistry and vain conclusions. And the worst of it is, that there is no cure for our unfortunate friend, the supervisor; at least so long as he continues to repudiate ‘Moses and the Prophets’ as a sort of effete almanac of old Jewish times! This is the chief source of all his errors, he is ignorant of the Law and the Testimony; and therefore he cannot speak according to them; and as a necessary consequence, ‘there is no light in him;’ and even that which may be supposed to be in him, becomes mere darkness visible. All the logic, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, and all the science in the world, will not compensate an expounder of the New Testament for ignorance of the meaning of the Old. He can neither understand the gospel, nor ‘the sanctions of the gospel.’ If Mr. C. would talk rationally about punishment, he must humble himself, and as a little child begin to learn what ‘the Gospel of the Kingdom’ is. There is no getting along in the work of interpretation without this. He is floundering up to his neck in the bogs of old paganism, in which he will be assuredly suffocated, if he accept not the friendly hand extended to him by those ‘Destructionists’ who understand ‘the gospel promised through the prophets in the Holy Scriptures.’ And what we say of Mr. C. we affirm of all eternal ghost-tormentists. We speak of him more particularly, because he is their Magnus Apollo in this country. If we make goose of him, they all become goslings of necessity; for he is the modern incubator of syllogisms for their noisy utterance against what Mr. C. designates, the weak and vicious heads that infer that torments cease in a second death!
Speaking of syllogisms, let us glance at that one Mr. C. has incubated out of his spermology ‘for the sake of a few mere pretenders to sound argumentative discrimination, and great logical acumen!’ How condescending, and how polite! We shall see if Mr. C. is anything else than a ‘mere pretender.’ Hitherto we have seen nothing to the contrary; but rather that his weakness is that of pretending to things which are too high for him. But let this pass. We have got a syllogism here which condenses his argument into ‘regular form;’ and now, says he, look at it, ye Destructionist pretenders to reason; see what ye have got to encounter, and tremble! —Oh! What will become of us!
Behold the redoubtable syllogism:
“No one dispossessed of conscious guilt can be punished.
But persons annihilated are dispossessed of conscious guilt;
Therefore, no one annihilated can be punished.”
The major premiss of this syllogism thrown into an interrogative form, is the question at issue between the eternal-tormentists and their opponents—Can a person dispossessed of conscious guilt be punished? The tormentists take the negative, and say that, no person unconscious of guilt can be punished. This is their syllogistic conclusion, as expressed in the above. Their major premiss and conclusion are ‘No one dispossessed of conscious guilt can be punished; therefore, no omne annihilated can be punished because he is dispossessed of conscious guilt: that is, no thing can be; therefore nothing can be, because it can not be. This is all that can be extracted from the major premiss and conclusion; that is, they are mere assertion which previous argument has failed to prove. The minor premiss affirms a truth admitted by ‘destructionists’ and eternal-tormentists, that ‘persons annihilated are dispossessed of conscious guilt:’ and, if there were no fallacy in the major premiss, they would be bound to admit the conclusion; which would involve them in the guilt of denying all punishment, which Mr. C. desires to convict them of.
But as I have abundantly proved in this article, there is an egregious and ridiculous fallacy in the major premiss. I have shown that, persons dispossessed of conscious guilt can be punished by whatever law. This having been proved, Mr. C’s syllogism is converted into moonshine, or rather into visible darkness; and a better ‘regular form’ takes the place of it; thus:
Any one dispossessed of conscious guilt can be punished;
Persons annihilated are dispossessed of conscious guilt:
Therefore, any one annihilated by law is punished.
The ridiculousness of the fallacy which converts Mr. C’s logic into sophistry, will be seen from the conversion of his syllogism into the following forms:
No one is punished who is dispossessed of conscious guilt;
Uzzah, when breached upon, was dispossessed of conscious guilt;
Therefore, though Uzzah was struck dead for transgressing the Law, he was not punished!
Again,
No one is punished who is dispossessed of conscious guilt;
When a man is hanged he is dispossessed of conscious guilt:
Therefore, hanging is no punishment!
But, whence comes it that so great a logician as my friend C. should be guilty of such an absurdity as to teach, in effect, that hanging is no punishment; or perhaps therefore, a very agreeable thing! —What crotchet has he got into his head that has so perverted his intellect! That makes him contend for eternal consciousness of guilt and pain as the ‘everlasting punishment’ of scripture? The crotchet that perverts him and all eternal tormentists is, the supposition that the ‘natural man’ is a compound of a mortal body and an immortal soul. They teach that this soul is the sinner, who lives after the body dies in heaven or hell; or according to certain, in some intermediate places in ‘the spirit-world,’ where it is happy or miserable short of the full degree it is capable of, according to the deeds it made the body do! They say that the gospel-salvation and damnation is for this soul; hence, assuming that it is immortal, they convert the ‘everlasting life’ of the gospel into eternal blessedness; and its ‘everlasting punishment’ into eternal torment. As they have assumed the existence of this sort of a soul in man; and assumed also that the good things of the scriptures whatever they be, are for that soul—they have soulised the words and sayings of God, and his messengers. Hence, they have converted ‘death’ into life in misery; ‘destruction’ into always destroying; ‘perished’ into coming to nothing but never arriving there; ‘everlasting punishment’ into eternally punishing, &c.; for the obvious reason that if death, destruction, perished, torment, &c., be affirmed of a thing which is essentially deathless, and indestructible, they can mean nothing else. It is this canker-eating assumption that is the crotchet of their bewitchment. While they hold on to this fiction of the flesh they can never understand the Bible, which is silent as the grave on the existence of an hereditary immortal soul in mortal man. The most logical immortal-soulists know they cannot prove its existence from the Bible. Hence, they fall to speculating upon their own consciousness, or fly for proof to animal magnetism! There, on the sensoria of clairvoyants are mesmerically reproduced, the thought-images of their own brains; and this is the highest evidence they can obtain. It is upon this shade of animal magnetism called ‘the soul,’ first observed by the idolaters of old Egypt, that the superstitions and theologies of our age are founded. Expunge this fleshly conceit from the mind, and priestcraft with all its fooleries, against which the advocates of the punishment, the life, and Kingdom of the approaching Age, contend, become the contempt of him, whom the gospel has dispossessed, and endued with a hale and sober mind.
As the ‘everlasting punishment’ is supposed to be for ‘an immortal soul,’ eternal-tormentists can see nothing of it till after death. But this does not accord with the Lord’s teaching. The ‘these’ of whom he was speaking were persons who had risen from the dead, and who were corporeal existences. They had been dead for ages, and from their own showing do not appear to have known their fate till they attempted to justify themselves in his presence. During all that time previous to their resurrection, it is clear, they had not been in a state of punishment; but being sentenced, they are commanded to ‘go away into age-punishment.’ Now, as Jesus comes to Israel’s land, and is there at the resurrection, when he shall say, ‘Depart from me, ye cursed, into the Age-fire,’ ‘go away into Age-punishment,’ they are driven out of the country to a region afar off. This is termed in another place, being cast out of the Kingdom, into outer darkness which is a cause of ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth’—Matthew 8: 12; Luke 13: 28. The ‘punishment’ occupies the interval between the resurrection and the commencement of the thousand years, a period of some forty years; and is the judicial torment of living men for the evil of their doings. It has nothing to do with ghosts, or ‘separate spirits,’ or ‘disembodied souls;’ but with men, flesh and blood, like ourselves. It is the appearing before the judgment seat of Christ, and the receiving bodily the things threatened for evil doing—2 Corinthians 5: 10.
Such is ‘the Terror of the Lord’—resurrection to torment by hunger, thirst, pestilence, fire, and sword, until payment is made of all that is due—Matthew 18: 34. The tormentors (basanistai) who are the Lord’s messengers—Matthew 13: 41, will know how to execute judgment with due severity. The guilty rise from the dead full grown men and women, as Adam and Eve when they first breathed the vital air, with a life of forty years before them; to receive just such a retribution as they would have experienced had their offences when committed been immediately followed by the penalty due. The covetous, for example, though idolaters, are not punished before death. The day of their calamity is when they rise from the dead. Being rich at death, they are ‘sent empty away’ into the country of the Beast and False Prophet; and as beggars there, suffer all the torments of poverty, and disease amid social disruption and distress, with all anguish of mind on account of their cursed folly in sacrificing life and glory, and honour in the Kingdom for the sake of their fleshly lusts; and with no prospect before them but unmitigated evil and death eternal. Men are horror stricken when such calamities seem to threaten them in the present state, and do all in their power to avoid them, or obtain deliverance. But now they have hope. —Then, however, the covetous wretch is hopeless. Though he worshipped his wealth, and looked upon the necessities of his brethren without sympathy, before his death; at his resurrection, he finds society in dismay, and himself unknown, uncared for, a homeless outcast, cursed of God and man, with the words ever echoing in his ears,
‘No covetous man, who is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God’—Ephesians 5: 5; 1 Corinthians 6: 9.
He will seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, but death will flee from him, until he has paid the last mite. Thus, while Lazarus and his friends are comforted in the kingdom, he is tormented—Luke 16: 25—with the worshippers of the Beast.
But enough for the present. Who is there among the eternal tormentists, that assume the custody of the public conscience, dare publish this article in any of their papers for the information of their readers? The exposition is new to this generation; but amply sustained by scripture. Its novelty should command attention, as that is the attractive principle of the age; and its scripturality a minute examination. Will our friend, the supervisor, venture to republish it, and treat it to a reply! It will be pastime, surely, for so magical a logician to parade its fallacies, and prove our logic mere pretence! Come, ye ‘wise and prudent,’ take up the pen and try!
EDITOR.
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