Unspoken Sermons

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'But no one ever doubts that God gives fair play!'

'That may be--but does not go for much, if you say that God does this
or that which is not fair.'

'If he does it, you may be sure it is fair.'

'Doubtless, or he could not be God--except to devils. But you say he
does so and so, and is just; I say, he does not do so and so, and is
just. You say he does, for the Bible says so. I say, if the Bible said
so, the Bible would lie; but the Bible does not say so. The lord of
life complains of men for not judging right. To say on the authority of
the Bible that God does a thing no honourable man would do, is to lie
against God; to say that it is therefore right, is to lie against the
very spirit of God. To uphold a lie for God's sake is to be against
God, not for him. God cannot be lied for. He is the truth. The truth
alone is on his side. While his child could not see the rectitude of a
thing, he would infinitely rather, even if the thing were right, have
him say, God could not do that thing, than have him believe that he did
it. If the man were sure God did it, the thing he ought to say would
be, 'Then there must be something about it I do not know, which if I
did know, I should see the thing quite differently.' But where an evil
thing is invented to explain and account for a good thing, and a lover
of God is called upon to believe the invention or be cast out, he needs
not mind being cast out, for it is into the company of Jesus. Where
there is no ground to believe that God does a thing except that men who
would explain God have believed and taught it, he is not a true man who
accepts men against his own conscience of God. I acknowledge no
authority calling upon me to believe a thing of God, which I could not
be a man and believe right in my fellow-man. I will accept no
explanation of any way of God which explanation involves what I should
scorn as false and unfair in a man. If you say, That may be right of
God to do which it would not be right of man to do, I answer, Yes,
because the relation of the maker to his creatures is very different
from the relation of one of those creatures to another, and he has
therefore duties toward his creatures requiring of him what no man
would have the right to do to his fellow-man; but he can have no duty
that is not both just and merciful. More is required of the maker, by
his own act of creation, than can be required of men. More and higher
justice and righteousness is required of him by himself, the
Truth;--greater nobleness, more penetrating sympathy; and _nothing_
but what, if an honest man understood it, he would say was right. If it
be a thing man cannot understand, then man can say nothing as to
whether it is right or wrong. He cannot even know that God does _it_,
when the _it_ is unintelligible to him. What he calls _it_ may be but
the smallest facet of a composite action. His part is silence. If it be
said by any that God does a thing, and the thing seems to me unjust,
then either I do not know what the thing is, or God does not do it. The
saying cannot mean what it seems to mean, or the saying is not true.
If, for instance, it be said that God visits the sins of the fathers on
the children, a man who takes _visits upon_ to mean _punishes,_ and
_the children_ to mean _the innocent children,_ ought to say, 'Either I
do not understand the statement, or the thing is not true, whoever says
it.' God _may_ do what seems to a man not right, but it must so seem to
him because God works on higher, on divine, on perfect principles, too
right for a selfish, unfair, or unloving man to understand. But least
of all must we accept some low notion of justice in a man, and argue
that God is just in doing after that notion.

The common idea, then, is, that the justice of God consists in
punishing sin: it is in the hope of giving a larger idea of the justice
of God in punishing sin that I ask, '_Why is God bound to punish sin_?'

'How could he be a just God and not punish sin?'

'Mercy is a good and right thing,' I answer, 'and but for sin there
could be no mercy. We are enjoined to forgive, to be merciful, to be as
our father in heaven. Two rights cannot possibly be opposed to each
other. If God punish sin, it must be merciful to punish sin; and if God
forgive sin, it must be just to forgive sin. We are required to
forgive, with the argument that our father forgives. It must, I say, be
right to forgive. Every attribute of God must be infinite as himself.
He cannot be sometimes merciful, and not always merciful. He cannot be
just, and not always just. Mercy belongs to him, and needs no
contrivance of theologic chicanery to justify it.'

'Then you mean that it is wrong to punish sin, therefore God does not
punish sin?'

'By no means; God does punish sin, but there is no opposition between
punishment and forgiveness. The one may be essential to the possibility
of the other. Why, I repeat, does God punish sin? That is my point.'

'Because in itself sin deserves punishment.'

'Then how can he tell us to forgive it?'

'He punishes, and having punished he forgives?'

'That will hardly do. If sin demands punishment, and the righteous
punishment is given, then the man is free. Why should he be forgiven?'

'He needs forgiveness because no amount of punishment will meet his
deserts.'

I avoid for the present, as anyone may perceive, the probable expansion
of this reply.

'Then why not forgive him at once if the punishment is not essential--
if part can be pretermitted? And again, can that be required which,
according to your showing, is not adequate? You will perhaps answer,
'God may please to take what little he can have;' and this brings me to
the fault in the whole idea.

Punishment is _nowise_ an _offset_ to sin. Foolish people sometimes, in
a tone of self-gratulatory pity, will say, 'If I have sinned I have
suffered.' Yes, verily, but what of that? What merit is there in it?
Even had you laid the suffering upon yourself, what did that do to make
up for the wrong? That you may have bettered by your suffering is well
for you, but what atonement is there in the suffering? The notion is a
false one altogether. Punishment, deserved suffering, is no equipoise
to sin. It is no use laying it in the other scale. It will not move it
a hair's breadth. Suffering weighs nothing at all against sin. It is
not of the same kind, not under the same laws, any more than mind and
matter. We say a man deserves punishment; but when we forgive and do
not punish him, we do not _always_ feel that we have done wrong;
neither when we do punish him do we feel that any amends has been made
for his wrongdoing. If it were an offset to wrong, then God would be
bound to punish for the sake of the punishment; but he cannot be, for
he forgives. Then it is not for the sake of the punishment, as a thing
that in itself ought to be done, but for the sake of something else, as
a means to an end, that God punishes. It is not directly for justice,
else how could he show mercy, for that would involve injustice?

Primarily, God is not bound to _punish_ sin; he is bound to _destroy_
sin. If he were not the Maker, he might not be bound to destroy sin--I
do not know; but seeing he has created creatures who have sinned, and
therefore sin has, by the creating act of God, come into the world, God
is, in his own righteousness, bound to destroy sin.

'But that is to have no mercy.'

You mistake. God does destroy sin; he is always destroying sin. In him
I trust that he is destroying sin in me. He is always saving the sinner
from his sins, and that is destroying sin. But vengeance on the sinner,
the law of a tooth for a tooth, is not in the heart of God, neither in
his hand. If the sinner and the sin in him, are the concrete object of
the divine wrath, then indeed there can be no mercy. Then indeed there
will be an end put to sin by the destruction of the sin and the sinner
together. But thus would no atonement be wrought--nothing be done to
make up for the wrong God has allowed to come into being by creating
man. There must be an atonement, a making-up, a bringing together--an
atonement which, I say, cannot be made except by the man who has
sinned.

Punishment, I repeat, is not the thing required of God, but the
absolute destruction of sin. What better is the world, what better is
the sinner, what better is God, what better is the truth, that the
sinner should suffer--continue suffering to all eternity? Would there
be less sin in the universe? Would there be any making-up for sin?
Would it show God justified in doing what he knew would bring sin into
the world, justified in making creatures who he knew would sin? What
setting-right would come of the sinner's suffering? If justice demand
it, if suffering be the equivalent for sin, then the sinner must
suffer, then God is bound to exact his suffering, and not pardon; and
so the making of man was a tyrannical deed, a creative cruelty. But
grant that the sinner has deserved to suffer, no amount of suffering is
any atonement for his sin. To suffer to all eternity could not make up
for one unjust word. Does that mean, then, that for an unjust word I
deserve to suffer to all eternity? The unjust word is an eternally evil
thing; nothing but God in my heart can cleanse me from the evil that
uttered it; but does it follow that I saw the evil of what I did so
perfectly, that eternal punishment for it would be just? Sorrow and
confession and self-abasing love will make up for the evil word;
suffering will not. For evil in the abstract, nothing can be done. It
is eternally evil. But I may be saved from it by learning to loathe it,
to hate it, to shrink from it with an eternal avoidance. The only
vengeance worth having on sin is to make the sinner himself its
executioner. Sin and punishment are in no antagonism to each other in
man, any more than pardon and punishment are in God; they can perfectly
co-exist. The one naturally follows the other, punishment being born of
sin, because evil exists only by the life of good, and has no life of
its own, being in itself death. Sin and suffering are not natural
opposites; the opposite of evil is good, not suffering; the opposite of
sin is not suffering, but righteousness. The path across the gulf that
divides right from wrong is not the fire, but repentance. If my friend
has wronged me, will it console me to see him punished? Will that be a
rendering to me of my due? Will his agony be a balm to my deep wound?
Should I be fit for any friendship if that were possible even in regard
to my enemy? But would not the shadow of repentant grief, the light of
reviving love on his countenance, heal it at once however deep? Take
any of those wicked people in Dante's hell, and ask wherein is justice
served by their punishment. Mind, I am not saying it is not right to
punish them; I am saying that justice is not, never can be, satisfied
by suffering--nay, cannot have any satisfaction in or from suffering.
Human resentment, human revenge, human hate may. Such justice as
Dante's keeps wickedness alive in its most terrible forms. The life of
God goes forth to inform, or at least give a home to victorious evil.
Is he not defeated every time that one of those lost souls defies him?
All hell cannot make Vanni Fucci say 'I was wrong.' God is triumphantly
defeated, I say, throughout the hell of his vengeance. Although against
evil, it is but the vain and wasted cruelty of a tyrant. There is no
destruction of evil thereby, but an enhancing of its horrible power in
the midst of the most agonizing and disgusting tortures a _divine_
imagination can invent. If sin must be kept alive, then hell must be
kept alive; but while I regard the smallest sin as infinitely
loathsome, I do not believe that any being, never good enough to see
the essential ugliness of sin, could sin so as to _deserve_ such
punishment. I am not now, however, dealing with the question of the
duration of punishment, but with the idea of punishment itself; and
would only say in passing, that the notion that a creature born
imperfect, nay, born with impulses to evil not of his own generating,
and which he could not help having, a creature to whom the true face of
God was never presented, and by whom it never could have been seen,
should be thus condemned, is as loathsome a lie against God as could
find place in heart too undeveloped to understand what justice is, and
too low to look up into the face of Jesus. It never in truth found
place in any heart, though in many a pettifogging brain. There is but
one thing lower than deliberately to believe such a lie, and that is to
worship the God of whom it is believed. The one deepest, highest,
truest, fittest, most wholesome suffering must be generated in the
wicked by a vision, a true sight, more or less adequate, of the
hideousness of their lives, of the horror of the wrongs they have done.
Physical suffering may be a factor in rousing this mental pain; but 'I
would I had never been born!' must be the cry of Judas, not because of
the hell-fire around him, but because he loathes the man that betrayed
his friend, the world's friend. When a man loathes himself, he has
begun to be saved. Punishment tends to this result. Not for its own
sake, not as a make-up for sin, not for divine revenge--horrible word,
not for any satisfaction to justice, can punishment exist. Punishment
is for the sake of amendment and atonement. God is bound by his love to
punish sin in order to deliver his creature; he is bound by his justice
to destroy sin in his creation. Love is justice--is the fulfilling of
the law, for God as well as for his children. This is the reason of
punishment; this is why justice requires that the wicked shall not go
unpunished--that they, through the eye-opening power of pain, may come
to see and do justice, may be brought to desire and make all possible
amends, and so become just. Such punishment concerns justice in the
deepest degree. For Justice, that is God, is bound in himself to see
justice done by his children--not in the mere outward act, but in their
very being. He is bound in himself to make up for wrong done by his
children, and he can do nothing to make up for wrong done but by
bringing about the repentance of the wrong-doer. When the man says, 'I
did wrong; I hate myself and my deed; I cannot endure to think that I
did it!' then, I say, is atonement begun. Without that, all that the
Lord did would be lost. He would have made no atonement. Repentance,
restitution, confession, prayer for forgiveness, righteous dealing
thereafter, is the sole possible, the only true make-up for sin. For
nothing less than this did Christ die. When a man acknowledges the
right he denied before; when he says to the wrong, 'I abjure, I loathe
you; I see now what you are; I could not see it before because I would
not; God forgive me; make me clean, or let me die!' then justice, that
is God, has conquered--and not till then.

'What atonement is there?'

Every atonement that God cares for; and the work of Jesus Christ on
earth was the creative atonement, because it works atonement in every
heart. He brings and is bringing God and man, and man and man, into
perfect unity: 'I in them and thou in me, that they may be made perfect
in one.'

'That is a dangerous doctrine!'

More dangerous than you think to many things--to every evil, to every
lie, and among the rest to every false trust in what Christ did,
instead of in Christ himself. Paul glories in the cross of Christ, but
he does not trust in the cross: he trusts in the living Christ and his
living father.

Justice then requires that sin should be put an end to; and not that
only, but that it should be atoned for; and where punishment can do
anything to this end, where it can help the sinner to know what he has
been guilty of, where it can soften his heart to see his pride and
wrong and cruelty, justice requires that punishment shall not be
spared. And the more we believe in God, the surer we shall be that he
will spare nothing that suffering can do to deliver his child from
death. If suffering cannot serve this end, we need look for no more
hell, but for the destruction of sin by the destruction of the sinner.
That, however, would, it appears to me, be for God to suffer defeat,
blameless indeed, but defeat.

If God be defeated, he must destroy--that is, he must withdraw life.
How can he go on sending forth his life into irreclaimable souls, to
keep sin alive in them throughout the ages of eternity? But then, I
say, no atonement would be made for the wrongs they have done; God
remains defeated, for he has created that which sinned, and which would
not repent and make up for its sin. But those who believe that God will
thus be defeated by many souls, must surely be of those who do not
believe he cares enough to do his very best for them. He _is_ their
Father; he had power to make them out of himself, separate from
himself, and capable of being one with him: surely he will somehow save
and keep them! Not the power of sin itself can close _all_ the channels
between creating and created.

The notion of suffering as an offset for sin, the foolish idea that a
man by suffering borne may get out from under the hostile claim to
which his wrong-doing has subjected him, comes first of all, I think,
from the satisfaction we feel when wrong comes to grief. Why do we feel
this satisfaction? Because we hate wrong, but, not being righteous
ourselves, more or less hate the wronger as well as his wrong, hence
are not only righteously pleased to behold the law's disapproval
proclaimed in his punishment, but unrighteously pleased with his
suffering, because of the impact upon us of his wrong. In this way the
inborn justice of our nature passes over to evil. It is no pleasure to
God, as it so often is to us, to see the wicked suffer. To regard any
suffering with satisfaction, save it be sympathetically with its
curative quality, comes of evil, is inhuman because undivine, is a
thing God is incapable of. His nature is always to forgive, and just
because he forgives, he punishes. Because God is so altogether alien to
wrong, because it is to him a heart-pain and trouble that one of his
little ones should do the evil thing, there is, I believe, no extreme
of suffering to which, for the sake of destroying the evil thing in
them, he would not subject them. A man might flatter, or bribe, or coax
a tyrant; but there is no refuge from the love of God; that love will,
for very love, insist upon the uttermost farthing.

'That is not the sort of love I care about!'

No; how should you? I well believe it! You cannot care for it until you
begin to know it. But the eternal love will not be moved to yield you
to the selfishness that is killing you. What lover would yield his lady
to her passion for morphia? You may sneer at such love, but the Son of
God who took the weight of that love, and bore it through the world, is
content with it, and so is everyone who knows it. The love of the
Father is a radiant perfection. Love and not self-love is lord of the
universe. Justice demands your punishment, because justice demands, and
will have, the destruction of sin. Justice demands your punishment
because it demands that your father should do his best for you. God,
being the God of justice, that is of fair-play, and having made us what
we are, apt to fall and capable of being raised again, is in himself
bound to punish in order to deliver us--else is his relation to us poor
beside that of an earthly father. 'To thee, O Lord, belongeth mercy,
for thou renderest to every man according to his work.' A man's work is
his character; and God in his mercy is not indifferent, but treats him
according to his work.

The notion that the salvation of Jesus is a salvation from the
consequences of our sins, is a false, mean, low notion. The salvation
of Christ is salvation from the smallest tendency or leaning to sin. It
is a deliverance into the pure air of God's ways of thinking and
feeling. It is a salvation that makes the heart pure, with the will and
choice of the heart to be pure. To such a heart, sin is disgusting. It
sees a thing as it is,--that is, as God sees it, for God sees
everything as it is. The soul thus saved would rather sink into the
flames of hell than steal into heaven and skulk there under the shadow
of an imputed righteousness. No soul is saved that would not prefer
hell to sin. Jesus did not die to save us from punishment; he was
called Jesus because he should save his people from their sins.

If punishment be no atonement, how does the fact bear on the popular
theology accepted by every one of the opposers of what they call
Christianity, as representing its doctrines? Most of us have been more
or less trained in it, and not a few of us have thereby, thank God,
learned what it is--an evil thing, to be cast out of intellect and
heart. Many imagine it dead and gone, but in reality it lies at the
root (the intellectual root only, thank God) of much the greater part
of the teaching of Christianity in the country; and is believed in--so
far as the false _can_ be believed in--by many who think they have left
it behind, when they have merely omitted the truest, most offensive
modes of expressing its doctrines. It is humiliating to find how many
comparatively honest people think they get rid of a falsehood by
softening the statement of it, by giving it the shape and placing it in
the light in which it will least assert itself, and so have a good
chance of passing both with such as hold it thoroughly, and such as
might revolt against it more plainly uttered.

Once for all I will ease my soul regarding the horrid phantasm. I have
passed through no change of opinion concerning it since first I began
to write or speak; but I have written little and spoken less about it,
because I would preach no mere negation. My work was not to destroy the
false, except as it came in the way of building the true. Therefore I
sought to speak but what I believed, saying little concerning what I
did not believe; trusting, as now I trust, in the true to cast out the
false, and shunning dispute. Neither will I now enter any theological
lists to be the champion for or against mere doctrine. I have no desire
to change the opinion of man or woman. Let everyone for me hold what he
pleases. But I would do my utmost to disable such as think correct
opinion essential to salvation from laying any other burden on the
shoulders of true men and women than the yoke of their Master; and such
burden, if already oppressing any, I would gladly lift. Let the Lord
himself teach them, I say. A man who has not the mind of Christ--and no
man has the mind of Christ except him who makes it his business to obey
him--cannot have correct opinions concerning him; neither, if he could,
would they be of any value to him: he would be nothing the better, he
would be the worse for having them. Our business is not to think
correctly, but to live truly; then first will there be a possibility of
our thinking correctly. One chief cause of the amount of unbelief in
the world is, that those who have seen something of the glory of
Christ, set themselves to theorize concerning him rather than to obey
him. In teaching men, they have not taught them Christ, but taught them
about Christ. More eager after credible theory than after doing the
truth, they have speculated in a condition of heart in which it was
impossible they should understand; they have presumed to explain a
Christ whom years and years of obedience could alone have made them
able to comprehend. Their teaching of him, therefore, has been
repugnant to the common sense of many who had not half their
privileges, but in whom, as in Nathanael, there was no guile. Such,
naturally, press their theories, in general derived from them of old
time, upon others, insisting on their thinking about Christ as they
think, instead of urging them to go to Christ to be taught by him
whatever he chooses to teach them. They do their unintentional worst to
stop all growth, all life. From such and their false teaching I would
gladly help to deliver the true-hearted. Let the dead bury their dead,
but I would do what I may to keep them from burying the living.

If there be no satisfaction to justice in the mere punishment of the
wrong-doer, what shall we say of the notion of satisfying justice by
causing one to suffer who is not the wrong-doer? And what, moreover,
shall we say to the notion that, just because he is not the person who
deserves to be punished, but is absolutely innocent, his suffering
gives perfect satisfaction to the perfect justice? That the injustice
be done with the consent of the person maltreated makes no difference:
it makes it even worse, seeing, as they say, that justice requires the
punishment of the _sinner_, and here is one far more than innocent.
They have shifted their ground; it is no more punishment, but mere
suffering the law requires! The thing gets worse and worse. I declare
my utter and absolute repudiation of the idea in any form whatever.
Rather than believe in a justice--that is, a God--to whose
righteousness, abstract or concrete, it could be any satisfaction for
the wrong-doing of a man that a man who did no wrong should suffer, I
would be driven from among men, and dwell with the wild beasts that
have not reason enough to be unreasonable. What! God, the father of
Jesus Christ, like that! His justice contented with direst injustice!
The anger of him who will nowise clear the guilty, appeased by the
suffering of the innocent! Very God forbid! Observe: the evil fancy
actually substitutes for punishment not mere suffering, but that
suffering which is farthest from punishment; and this when, as I have
shown, punishment, the severest, can be no satisfaction to justice! How
did it come ever to be imagined? It sprang from the trustless dread
that cannot believe in the forgiveness of the Father; cannot believe
that even God will do anything for nothing; cannot trust him without a
legal arrangement to bind him. How many, failing to trust God, fall
back on a _text_, as they call it! It sprang from the pride that will
understand what it cannot, before it will obey what it sees. He that
will understand _first_ will believe a lie--a lie from which obedience
alone will at length deliver him. If anyone say, 'But I believe what
you despise,' I answer, To believe it is your punishment for being able
to believe it; you may call it your reward, if you will. You ought not
to be able to believe it. It is the merest, poorest, most shameless
fiction, invented without the perception that it was an invention--fit
to satisfy the intellect, doubtless, of the inventor, else he could not
have invented it. It has seemed to satisfy also many a humble soul,
content to take what was given, and not think; content that another
should think for him, and tell him what was the mind of his Father in
heaven. Again I say, let the person who can be so satisfied be so
satisfied; I have not to trouble myself with him. That he can be
content with it, argues him unready to receive better. So long as he
can believe false things concerning God, he is such as is capable of
believing them--with how much or how little of blame, God knows.
Opinion, right or wrong, will do nothing to save him. I would that he
thought no more about this or any other opinion, but set himself to do
the work of the Master. With his opinions, true or false, I have
nothing to do. It is because such as he force evil things upon their
fellows--utter or imply them from the seat of authority or
influence--to their agony, their paralysation, their unbelief, their
indignation, their stumbling, that I have any right to speak. I would
save my fellows from having what notion of God is possible to them
blotted out by a lie.

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