Why is the idea of eternal damnation so repulsive to many people?

By this denial of the two rival theories, therefore, we come back to the solemn fact, so abundantly stated in a positive way in Scripture, that there is such a thing as future punishment, that it is in the nature of solemn retribution for sin, and that once falling it endures for ever.

That the punishment of sin should be eternal is a dreadful thought. Can it be defended as just, and therefore right?

It is a serious and melancholy fact that the enemy of souls and of the truth of God is leading thousands, both in Europe and America, to call in question the momentous fact of the everlasting punishment of the wicked. This he does on various grounds, and by various arguments, adapted to the habits of thought and moral condition and intellectual standpoint of individuals. Some he seeks to persuade that God is too kind to send anyone to a place of torment. It is contrary to His benevolent mind and His beneficent nature to inflict pain on any of His creatures.

They therefore contend for a universal restoration embracing all creatures, because otherwise the saving love would only be able to undo for a very small number the destructive consequences of the fall. "No," say they, "we reject a judgment that excludes love. Could even an earthly father ever feel happy who had cast out his disobedient child, and given him up to an indescribably dreadful punishment?" "And would the sorrow of God's heart as a Father ever cease, if through eternity the song of praise from the elect and the angels must be always mingled with the howling and gnashing of teeth of the lost? No, it is incompatible with His love. What can the judgment to which the hardened and God-despising souls are doomed be, but a continuous chain of those chastisements which have their origin in God's thoughts of redemption and which are already applied down here to His creatures, till every trace of sin will be obliterated and the gnawings of the worm and the pain of the fire be for ever ended?"

"It was to a world of unbelievers that God was proposed as a God of justice, as well as of pity and of love. To this world, which had no faith, God was proposed for acceptance. God's character and conduct were placed before it, to win its faith and love. So it is even now. … The missionary tells the unbeliever what kind of God the God of the Christian is, in order to convert the unbeliever to the faith. Can we wonder that the answer of the heathen to our messages should be, 'We cannot, and will not, believe in a God of whom you affirm such outrageous wrong' … We ask the human heart for its verdict. We say that judged by human judgment, and that the judgment of believers and unbelievers alike, the punishment which the theory of Augustine supposes that God will inflict is infinitely too great, and we are therefore to reject it as untrue, because wholly unworthy, not merely of a Merciful Father, but a just God."

"But to believe, as Protestants are required to do, that all those fiercer torments will be inflicted when no conceivable purpose is to be answered by their infliction, when the suffering, so far as human imagination can fathom the case, is simply gratuitous, is assuredly a far harder strain upon our faith, — a strain, too, which is hardest on those whose feelings are the most human, and whose notions of the Deity are worthiest; on those, that is, who have most fully imbibed Christ's sentiments and views."

"Prop it up by popular opinion, or disguise and conceal it as we may, it must ever appear to all rational creatures the very essence of folly, injustice, and cruelty. Can we believe that the doctrine is taught in the 'precious Bible, book divine'? And is it so? Must our sense of justice and goodness in Him, in whose hands we are, float on a tempestuous and shoreless ocean forever? No, the effort to lock up reason and common sense much longer in the narrow dark cell of mystery will be vain. Just, impulsive feelings, both of saints and thoughtful sinners must burst the bolts, and emerge into light and relief."*

The eternity of sin is the real basis of the eternity of punishment. If in this life God has with any spent all available resources in vain for their deliverance, so that He should Himself have to say "it is impossible to renew them," what less than "eternal fire "can be the award of those of whom He has had to say, "he that is unjust, let him be unjust still; and he that is filthy, let him be filthy still"? Mr. Greg tells us: "No subtlety of logic, no weight of authority, will induce rightly constituted minds, which allow themselves to reason at all, to admit that the sins or failings of time can merit the retribution of eternity, — that finite natures can, by any guilt of which they are capable, draw upon themselves torments infinite either in essence or duration." But, although we must allow that that is the way the doctrine of eternal punishment has been often sought to be justified, it is not the scriptural ground of it. Nay, it is one which has obscured the subject it was meant to clear; for it represents God in judgment as merely at the best exacting the full extent of penalty, even supposing it proved that that were the extent.

But while all this is true, it is also and equally true that the orthodox doctrine of endless punishment is fully sustained by man's judicial sense of the oughtness of things, and can be maintained on moral grounds, as well as by appeal to Scripture; in other words, it should be no strain on man's natural conscience, nor should it shock his moral sense to believe the doctrine of future and unending retribution as taught in the book commonly called the Bible.

And it is absolutely false what an objector to this truth asserts, when he says: "The missionary tells the unbeliever what kind of God the God of the Christian is, in order to convert the unbeliever to the faith. Can we wonder that the answer of the heathen to our message should be, 'We cannot, and we will not, believe in a God of whom you affirm such outrageous wrong.' … We ask the human heart for its verdict. We say that judged by human judgment, and that the judgment of believers and unbelievers alike, the punishment which the theory of Augustine (the orthodox view) supposes that God will inflict is infinitely too great, and we are therefore to reject it as untrue, because wholly unworthy, not merely of a merciful Father, but a just God." (Constable in Duration and Nature of Future Punishment.) To this Mr. Grant has tersely and convincingly replied: "We happen to know, however, that where the gospel has made its largest and most permanent conquests, the doctrine of endless punishment has been held and put forth. Nay, in Christendom itself it must, according to Mr. Constable, have conquered the whole ground, and that in the teeth of the moral sense, where this had certainly no self-interest to seduce it from the so much milder truth which had first possession of the field. How strange a reflection that what the heathen have moral sense to reject, Christendom should have almost universally accepted; but the gospel can scarcely be shown to have won its way by the aid of annihilation doctrine, or its history will have to be rewritten." It does indeed seem strange that the enlightened nations of Christendom, foremost in rank of intelligence, wealth, power, and benevolence, and who almost universally hold the doctrine of eternal punishment, in theory, at least, should be less capable of judging moral questions than the heathen, who for long ages have been sunk in the deepest degradation of idolatry and most abject superstition, and whose ethical code is notoriously deficient and scarcely above that of Sodom and Gomorrah!

Yes, we assert with fullest confidence that this now much-debated doctrine of endless retribution is quite capable of standing the most rigid test to which the moral faculties of man may put it. We are quite ready to apply to it the principle proposed by the Unitarian, Dr. Bellows, who says: "If we continue to claim the name of Christians, we must continue to believe that the testimony of the records of our faith is not contradictory of the evidence of the moral reason. It it were proved such we should be compelled to abandon Christianity, so far as it claims to be founded on the New Testament. We believe the general testimony of the New Testament to be in full accord with the testimony of man's moral nature, in regard to the issues of divine government." So, too, do we, only with this necessary proviso, that a man's moral judgment may be (and in point of fact, is) warped by sin, and that inasmuch as he is the culprit in the dock, it is hardly to be expected that he would give a wholly unbiased verdict as to what his punishment should be. It is never asked an offender in court what castigation he thinks his offence deserves, though when sentence is pronounced his conscience will doubtless tell him that his punishment is just.

We cannot, it is true, plumb depths that are infinite, and apply God's perfect standard to the judgment of sin, or grasp in our minds the full extent of its enormity as it is seen by Infinite Wisdom, and measured by Infinite Majesty, for we are not Gods, but we can see and own that only thus is sin rightly measured. Its punishment, therefore, must be infinite, for it is according to God's estimate of that which is an offence against Himself; the Infinite One, and so could be no less. It is idle for men to raise objections, as many do, against eternal punishment, on the score that the notion is foreign to their minds, and contrary to their ideas of what is right. These objectors should begin at the beginning, and say if ever they have allowed themselves one true thought of the enormity of that which must be punished. Let them but own that it is beyond their puny minds to comprehend how dreadful is that which their wills have dared to do, and then there would be no difficulty in acknowledging that, while it is not in man to comprehend infinite punishment, yet, when he owns what sin is, he has the sense that nothing else than that can be right.

Another argument against the truth is that reason revolts against the eternity of punishment for a lifetime of sin; but whose reason revolts against it? Quite recently there was a case of a man who received a life sentence for the attempted murder of a policeman; his reason revolted against it, he thought the sentence too heavy, too terrible; he said so, and appealed against it on that ground, but his reason was no match for the sentence of the law, his appeal was dismissed. It is not for the criminal to say what the sentence shall be; the judge decides that, and when God judges He will do it in absolute justice; "We are sure that the judgment of God is according to truth" (Romans 2:3). He has told us what that judgment will be before any come into it, and He has done this in love that warns of it that men may escape.