Conditional Immortality; Plain Sermons on a Topic of Present Interest (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1878 edition. Excerpt: ...be quoted from the Old Testament, and a single sentence from the lips of Paul all that might be quoted from the New. "See," says the patriarch to his people, "I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil." "The wages of sin," says the apostle to his converts, "is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." We pass to another line of argument, that which starts from the language in which our Lord and His apostles describe under the form of symbols the character of future punishment. That this language means something terribly real, whatever that something may be, no one who trusts implicitly the truthfulness of Christ ought to doubt. If He is not to be believed when He speaks to us about the terrors of retribution, why, then let His whole religion go; for if here He is untrustworthy, He must be untrustworthy throughout. To discredit what He says of hell is in the same breath to discredit what He says of heaven, and if into those regions of the future we refuse to follow Him, why should we think Him other than a blind guide when He speaks to us of God and the soul? It is plain, then, that the integrity of the Christian religion is bound up with the truth of what Christ teaches about penalty--not the literalness, of course, but the truth of it. What now does He teach? That is the question at issue. He teaches in plainest words that the wicked are sentenced to unquenchable fire. This, of course, is symbolic language. We must interpret it according to the rules that govern the interpretation of all symbolism. What common fire, such as we know it, does for visible things, such as we know them, that eternal fire must do for souls. But what is the common...