"Wars of words! wars of words! has not enough blood been already shed for words, and must
the fires of the stake he rekindled for them ? Men dispute about the words 'eternal
punishments,' 'everlasting burnings;' but do you not know that what you now understand by
eternity was not understood in the same way by the ancients ? Let the theologian consult the
sources of his faith, and he, like the rest of you, will see that, in the Hebrew text, the word
which the Greeks, the Latins, and the moderns, have translated as endless and irremissible
punishment, has not the same meaning. Eternity of punishment corresponds to eternity of
evil. Yes; so long as evil continues to exist among you, so long will punishment continue to
exist; it is in this relative sense that the sacred texts should be interpreted. The eternity of
punishments, therefore, is not absolute, but relative. Let a day come when all men shall have
donned, through repentance, the robe of innocence, and, on that day, there will be no more
weeping, wailing, or gnashing of teeth. Your human reason is, in truth, of narrow scope; but,
such as it is, it is a gift of God, and there is no man of right feeling who, with the aid of that
reason, can understand the eternity of punishment in any other sense. If we admit the eternity
of punishment, we must also admit that evil will be eternal; but God alone is eternal, and He
could not have created an eternal evil, without plucking from His attributes the most
magnificent of them all, viz., His sovereign power; for he who creates an element destructive
of his works is not sovereignly powerful. Plunge no more thy mournful glance, 0 human race!
into the entrails of the earth, in search of chastisements ! Weep, but hope; expiate, but take
comfort in the thought of a God who is entirely loving, absolutely powerful, essentially just."
PLATO
"Union with the Divine Being is the aim of human existence. To the attainment of this aim
three things are necessary-knowledge, love justice: three things are contrary to this aim - ignorance,
hatred, injustice. You are false to these fundamental principles when you falsify
the idea of God by exaggerating His severity; thus suggesting to the mind of the creature that
there is in it more clemency, long-suffering, love, and true justice, than you attribute to the Creator. You
destroy the very idea of retribution by rendering it as inadmissible, by your minds, as is, by
your hearts, the policy of the Middle Ages, with its hideous array of torturers, executioners,
and the stake. When the principle of indiscriminating retaliation has been banished for ever
from human legislation, can you hope to make men believe that principle to be the rule of the
Divine Government ? Believe me, brothers in God and in Jesus Christ, you must either resign
yourselves to let all your dogmas perish in your hands rather than modify them, or you must
revivify them by opening them to the beneficent action that good spirits are now bringing to
bear on them. The idea of a hell full of glowing furnaces and boiling cauldrons might be
credible in an age of iron; in the nineteenth century it can be nothing more than an empty
phantom, capable, at the utmost, of frightening little children, and by which the children
themselves will no longer be frightened when they are a little bigger. By your persistence in
upholding mythic terrors, you engender incredulity, source of every sort of social
disorganisation; and I tremble at beholding the very foundations of social order shaken, and
crumbling into dust, for want of an authoritative code of penality. Let all those who are
animated by a living and ardent faith, heralds of the coming day, unite their efforts, not to
keep up antiquated fables now fallen into disrepute, but to resuscitate and revivify the true
idea of penality, under forms in harmony with the usages, sentiments, and enlightenment of
your epoch.
"What, in fact, is 'a sinner' ? One who, by a deviation from the right road, by a false
movement of the soul. has swerved from the true aim of his creation, which consists in the
harmonious worship of the Beautiful, the Good, as embodied in the archetype of humanity,
the Divine Exemplar, Jesus Christ.
"What is 'chastisement' ? The natural, derivative consequence of that false movement; the
amount of pain necessary to disgust the sinner with his departure from rectitude, by his
experience of the suffering caused by that departure. Chastisement is the goad which, by the
smarting it occasions, decides the soul to cut short its wanderings, and to return into the right
road. The sole aim of chastisement is rehabilitation; and therefore, to assume the eternity of
chastisement is to deprive it of all reason for existing.
"Cease, I beseech you, the attempt to establish a parallelism of duration between good,
essence of the Creator, and evil, essence of the creature; for, in so doing, you establish a standard of penality that is utterly without
justification. Affirm, on the contrary, the gradual diminution of imperfections and of
chastisements through successive existences, and you consecrate the doctrine of the union of
the creature with the Creator by the reconciliation of justice with mercy."
PAUL, APOSTLE
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