(TO TRH ED/TOR OP Tux " EIPIECTATOIL'')
Sin,—Steadily reading you, and seldom troubling you with comments, may I ask a small space for a remark on the letter of the Rector of Kinwarton in the Spectator of July 23rd, anent your review of Prebendary Row's recent book on Retribution p Mr. Parton seems to think that Mr. Row is of opinion that the New-Testament Greek words on the future death, destruction, and perishing of sinners "are not at all obviously fitted to express the idea" of the termination of their being. (I decline
to use the term "annihilation," as raising metaphysical questions on substance, which only complicate the inquiry.) Mr. Row has been at great pains to convey his opinion on the quality of Hellenistic Greek, as "Hebrew thought expressed in Greek words." "The meaning of the words, however, is the same as that which they bear in ordinary vernacular Greek, unless the context shows that the author intended to use them in a special sense, which was understood in this special sense by those he was addressing." Mr. Row adds :—" My general conclusion with respect to the terminology of the New Testa- ment in relation to future retribution is that the Greek words which are used by its writers conveyed the same general meaning to a Greek.speaking Christian as the corresponding English words do to a reader in English." "Bat taking them as a whole, they were calculated to convey to the reader the firm persuasion that it wag the intention of the writer to affirm that God will execute a righteous judgment on mankind,—that sin wilfully persisted in will be attended with suffering which will end in the ultimate destruction of the sinner; yet none of the terms employed in their ordinary and natural meaning convey even a hint that that suffering will be of endless duration." In so concluding, Mr. Row confirms the judgment of Cremer, in his lexicon of New-Testa- ment Greek, that the sense imposed by Christian theologians on the words in question, the sense of endless suffering, is "unknown in classical writers," and thereby in effect Professor Greater supports Mr. Row's line of exegesis. This side of the work of Mr. Row was not, I think, sufficiently emphasised in year interesting review of his book. The use of olethros in I. Corinthians, v. 5, which Mr. Parton regards as an example of the figurative use of that term for "destruction," is no exception to the rule of its literal sense. M. Renan says, "There can be no doubt of it; it is a condemnation to death that St. Paul here pronounces." And Professor Godet, a weightier authority, says, "it is the sudden destruction of the earthly existence of the man Paul meant to designate by the words, the destruction of the flesh,' "—a sentence not executed because of the man's repentance in the early stage of the mortal disease.
Where Mr. Row errs, I submit, is in the one-sidedness of his otherwise most masterly examination of the New-Testament language. The question of the signification of death and destruction throughout the New Testament is surely complicated with the corresponding question of the meaning of life and eternal life, as promised in the divine revelation to the saved. If that is only a Ague for spiritual blessedness in God, then of course the death-threatening may be a figure everywhere for spiritual misery out of God,—and both may be eternal. But to my mind it is the most improbable thing in the world that in a prolonged hi-lingual complicated revelation, two long lines of figurative terminology have been employed to denote the principal realities of blessing and cursing incident to its reception or rejection, without one single break-down into literality. I find it easier to believe that the positive idea of life in immor. tality, as a gift of God to regenerate men, lies at the centre of the Gospel, and was in fact the grand object of the Divine Incarnation ; while the penalty of refusing that gift, whether here or hereafter, will be to undergo capital punishment, in the plain sense of the threatening in question,—" the destruction of body and soul in Gehenna." (Matthew, x., 28.) This view of the case transfers the main interest from the side of retribution to that of salvation in Christ, as the Divine Life-giver. After prolonged experience, I have never observed that any considerable spiritual benefit attended the various schemes of mere alleviation of the doctrine of eternal suffering; while a distinct and striking spiritual influence for good attends the habit of directing men's attention to Christ as the Life of the world.
Turning to another subject, permit me, in conclusion, as a Gladstonian voter at the last election, to thank you for the steadily just and noble tone of your comments on the great Liberal leader, and still more heartily for the signal example of geneval fairness in political criticism, which has rendered it easier for many of us to hold our minds in equilibrium with a view to some common action for Ireland in the near future.—I am, Sir, &a,
Previous page
