Jonathan Edwards! On the one hand the terrible sentence conceived, written down, given to the press, by the child's father; on the other side the trusting child looking up at her, and all the mother pleading in her heart against the frightful dogma of her revered husband. Do you suppose she left that poison to rankle in the tender soul of her darling? Would it have been moral parricide for a son of the great divine to have repudiated the doctrine which degraded his blameless infancy to the condition and below the condition of the reptile? Was it parricide in the second or third degree when his descendant struck out that venomous sentence from the page in which it stood as a monument to what depth Christian heathenism could sink under the teaching of the great master of logic and spiritual inhumanity? It is too late to be angry about the abuse a well--meaning writer received thirty years ago. The whole atmosphere has changed since then. It is mere childishness to expect men to believe as their fathers did; that is, if they have any minds of their own.
The world is a whole generation older and wiser than when the father was of his son's age.
So far as I have observed persons nearing the end of life, the Roman Catholics understand the business of dying better than Protestants.
They have an expert by them, armed with spiritual specifics, in which they both, patient and priestly ministrant, place implicit trust.
Confession, the Eucharist, Extreme Unction,--these all inspire a confidence which without this symbolism is too apt to be wanting in over-sensitive natures. They have been peopled in earlier years with ghastly spectres of avenging fiends, moving in a sleepless world of devouring flames and smothering exhalations; where nothing lives but the sinner, the fiends, and the reptiles who help to make life an unending torture. It is no wonder that these images sometimes return to the enfeebled intelligence. To exorcise them, the old Church of Christendom has her mystic formulae, of which no rationalistic prescription can take the place. If Cowper had been a good Roman Catholic, instead of having his conscience handled by a Protestant like John Newton, he would not have died despairing, looking upon himself as a castaway. I have seen a good many Roman Catholics on their dying beds, and it always appeared to me that they accepted the inevitable with a composure which showed that their belief, whether or not the best to live by, was a better one to die by than most of the harder creeds which have replaced it.
In the more intelligent circles of American society one may question anything and everything, if he will only do it civilly. We may talk about eschatology, the science of last things,--or, if you will, the natural history of the undiscovered country, without offence before anybody except young children and very old women of both sexes. In our New England the great Andover discussion and the heretical missionary question have benumbed all sensibility on this subject as entirely, as completely, as the new local anaesthetic, cocaine, deadens the sensibility of the part to which it is applied, so that the eye may have its mote or beam plucked out without feeling it,--as the novels of Zola and Maupassant have hardened the delicate nerve-centres of the women who have fed their imaginations on the food they have furnished.
The generally professed belief of the Protestant world as embodied in their published creeds is that the great mass of mankind are destined to an eternity of suffering. That this eternity is to be one of bodily pain--of "torment "--is the literal teaching of Scripture, which has been literally interpreted by the theologians, the poets, and the artists of many long ages which followed the acceptance of the recorded legends of the church as infallible. The doctrine has always been recognized, as it is now, as a very terrible one. It has found a support in the story of the fall of man, and the view taken of the relation of man to his Maker since that event. The hatred of God to mankind in virtue of their "first disobedience" and inherited depravity is at the bottom of it. The extent to which that idea was carried is well shown in the expressions I have borrowed from Jonathan Edwards. According to his teaching,--and he was a reasoner who knew what he was talking about, what was involved in the premises of the faith he accepted,--man inherits the curse of God as his principal birthright.
What shall we say to the doctrine of the fall of man as the ground of inflicting endless misery on the human race? A man to be punished for what he could not help! He was expected to be called to account for Adam's sin. It is singular to notice that the reasoning of the wolf with the lamb should be transferred to the dealings of the Creator with his creatures. "You stirred the brook up and made my drinking-place muddy." "But, please your wolfship, I couldn't do that, for I stirred the water far down the stream,--below your drinking-place." "Well, anyhow, your father troubled it a year or two ago, and that is the same thing." So the wolf falls upon the lamb and makes a meal of him. That is wolf logic,--and theological reasoning.
