“INTELLECTUALLY INCREDIBLE, AND MORALLY OUTRAGEOUS."

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18939, 9 December 1929, Page 13

“ INTELLECTUALLY INCREDIBLE, AND MORALLY OUTRAGEOUS."

" I Do Not Believe in a Material Hell. Says Rev Gardner Miller. I do not believe in a material hell, and marvel at the mentality of those who do, ’ said the Rev D. Gardner Miller, preaching yesterday* at the Trinity Congregational Church on the subject of “ Hell.” The belief that there is a place, in the future life, where unrepentant sinners are kept alive in flames and pains is, to me, intellectually incredible and morally outrageous.”

“It is a libel on the character of God,” said the preacher, “and makes Him a malignant demon. It imposes on God a cruelty beside which the Inquisition is mere" child’s play. Nothing that even the vilest human being could ever commit would justify cruelty on the part of God. Tt» say that God does not send a man into hell, but that man sends himself into the place of torment reserved for the devil and his angels is to juggle with words. It presumes that hell, whatever it may be, is something outside God’s universe; it presumes that God’s care ceases in Eternity; it presumes that God «. ,n remain unmoved at endless torture (which is, in itself, an utter impossibility), and that a malignant being, called the devil, has final control over human personalities whom God created in His own image. The idea is grotesque. There can be nothing outside Divine Reality. Even hell must be within the Divine mind. We have no regrets that the old traditional and materialistic conception of hell is practically dead to-day and that the belief in fiery torment has f. ded out of human thought. The preacher who tries to whip people into heaven through fear of a material hell doesn't kno vv his business. The use of fear is a poor t motive for the great appeal of the Christian Gospel. “But did not Christ Himself speak of outer darkness, a place of fire, and of a worm that dieth not? He did. Christ insisted that it was possible for a man to become impervious to the Divine appeal. To Him it was a dreadful reality and He pictured that reality in wor<(s that are unforgettable. But He never meant us to take the word pictures for truth. The teaching of Jesus is emphatic regarding the seriousness of sin and the severity that even Divine Love visits upon wrongdoing, but that cannot be held, in any degree, as necessitating a belief in unending torment. “It can be said that a man carries within himself his own hell or heaven. It is a spiritual state, not a material place. The hell we have to fear is nDt a problematical place of torment ka a future life, but the hell we make for ourselves within our own minds. Hell can be hero and now. A man £ Bering the pangs of remorse is in hell. Judas was in hell before he died; he hanged himself in a last desperate attempt to get out of hell. To the retort that if some men are in hell now they don’t seem to know it, my answer would be that one day they will kne / it. When the veil of death is torn into tatters men will see themselves s they are, and the sight will not be good—for some. It is when we shall see ourselves in the light of Holiness that the meanness and wickedness of the soul will be revealed. ‘Hell/’ said Robertson of Brighton, ‘is the infinite terror of the soul.’ “Dante in his vision of the ‘lnferno’ takes us to the nethermost hell a _d shows us Satan and his crew encased in ice. Not fire, but ice! That is, sin in its lowest) depth is utterly callous. Is it possible that any human being could become so utterly callous to Divine Love that hell would be prefer-

able to heaven? The possibility must be allowed, or else Jesus would not have pictured the after-life as He did. Whatever happens, here or hereafter, man must have moral freedom. I know that the unsolved problem of both philosophy and theology is the place of man’s freedom within Divine Sovereignty—but I can never conceive of the Almighty forcing His law upon any human being—even in the hereafter—at the expense of man’s ireedom of choice. Hell is as real as heaven, and both are spiritual states consequent upon human choice, for destiny is a result, not a gift. The old Calvinistic doctrine of election, i.e., —“By the decree of God, for the manifestation of His glory, some men and angels are predestined into everlasting life, and others preordained to everlasting death”—is, praise be! as dead as a doornail. No man with any human sympathy in his heart could, for one moment, believe that any man, even the worst, is predestined to damnation. Man can trust God not to play aim false. “Now, supposing a man has denied goodness and lived evilly, and unrepentant is ushered into the unseen, is there a seco-xd chance for him? Some say yes; others, no. Listen! Can love ever give up loving? Can callousness never break down—will ice never melt? Will there ever be a time when all will be brought within the Divine Love, ‘when the pile is made complete*? Is it possible that some will still say ‘Evil, be my good/ and thus remain, for ever, unrepentant? I don’t know. Nobody can possibly know in our present comparative ignorance of the hereafter. “The love of God, as revealed to us by Christ, is a love whose height em braces heaven and whose depth must compass hell. The Divine love must be all-in-all one day. And yet, and yet, there is the awful possibility of a human personality still crucifying love, even in eternity. Where—or how—you will spend eternity is the most serious question in time. ‘Behold, now is the accepted time, now is the day of salvation/ ”