Hell-Fire
The Legend of Hell. By Percy Dearmer, D.D. (Cassell. 95. 6d.)
Flew, if any, men and women under forty in England can have heard Hell-fire preached. To-day for most people " Hell " is an expletive as utterly meaningless as the word that derives from the oath " By Our Lady." Thus, the main interest of Dr. Dearmer's examination of the idea of everlasting punish- ment—at least, so far as the first part is concerned—is archaeo- logical. He gives a varied selection of quotations describing the tortures of the damned, from Tertullian to Dr. Watts, embracing St. Thomas Aquinas and Calvin on the way. This terrific conception is pungently stated by Jonathan Edwards, the great Protestant American philosopher, in his famous sermon on " Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." " You cannot stand before an infuriated tiger even ; what then will you do when God rushes against you in all His wrath ? " It is exposed in great detail by such Roman Catholic writers as Father Fismis :- " The little child is in this red-hot oven. Hear how it screams to come out. See how it turns and twists itself in the fire. It beats its head against the roof of the oven. It stamps its little feet on the floor of the oven. You can see on the face of this little child what you can see on the faces of all in Hell—despair, desperate and horrible ! "
It seems strange to think that this teaching is hardly more than sixty years old. Its horror is brought home to the reader by a striking collection of pictures. The torture of the damned was, of course, a favourite subject with the mediaeval painters and sculptors. But the most significant picture is that in which Rubens represents St. Francis protecting the World from Christ. Christ is about to destroy the world by a thunder-
bolt. His Mother vainly endeavours to hold Him back. Saint Francis succeeds where she fails. The great place that the Virgin and the Saints have come to occupy in Latin theology can only be understood when it is seen against the background in which Christ is thought of supremely as the Judge of quick and dead. For this reason alone it was probably worth while to set forth, as Dr. Dearmer has done, these strange visions of horror.
But the main question is, whence did they arise ? Has Hell its origin in the teaching of Jesus ? Is there any truth under- lying these extravagances ? This is the problem with which Dr. Dearmer is concerned. Unfortunately, his method of handling it is calculated to arouse a growing scepticism in the reader ; for it is that of the passionate propagandist rather than that of the scientific scholar. Dr. Dearmer lays it down
at the beginning that he will use the word " hell " in its plain meaning as a place of everlasting punishment. He then pro- ceeds to show that many of the phrases attributed to Christ
that seem to teach this are to be explained as late interpola- tions. Thus the sentence, " Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched " is probably an addition by an ardent disciple who " thought that more pepper' was needed." But the root problem remains. The copyist may have added more pepper," but was there no pepper there already ?
The critical work which has been done on the Gospels is a weapon of great value to Dr. Dearmer. He takes Schweitzer severely to task for having made a somewhat reckless use of the results of New Testament criticism. But he himself uses them with astonishing freedom, and is thus able to dispose of almost—but not quite—all the severe sayings attributed to Christ. It is true that he is sometimes reduced to hard straits, as when he has to fall back upon the lost " Gospel according to the Hebrews," to explain the Parables of the Pounds and the Talents. He derives considerable comfort from substituting the word " distress " for " torment " in the story of Dives and Lazarus, though it may be doubted whether Dives would have noticed the difference. Another odd thing appears in con- nexion with this story. Dr. Dearmer welcomes it as evidence that punishment in an after life can have a remedial effect. Yet earlier he rejects the theory of Purgatory in all its forms with as much vehemence as he banishes every kind of Hell. There is a great deal that is obscure in Dr. Dearmer's argument, for he does not adhere to his own definition. But one thing seems to stand out clearly : punishment of sin in any form, mental or physical, temporal or eternal, is excluded from his conception of the Divine action. This may, of course, be a perfectly true view. But is it seriously possible to say that it is one that can be fitted into even the reduced remnant that Pr. Dearmer leaves of the teaching of Christ ? Granted that many passages about the Gehenna of fire, the aeonian punish- ment and the outer darkness are to be abandoned on strictly scientific grounds as late exaggerations, sufficient remains to create serious difficulty. What is to be said of the woe uttered against the man who causes one of the little ones to stumble ? What of the judgment on Judas that it had been good if he had never been born ? (The attempt to identify " that man " with " the Son of Man is really too irrational.) What of the upshot of parable after parable that indicate the world of difference there is between finding and losing the Kingdom of Heaven, between entering into and missing the joy of the Father ?
Dr. Dearmer's book is interesting, because it provokes so many questions. It is an attempt to clear the honour of God But one must needs ask—why conceive God in this naive, anthropomorphic way ? To say that punishment is automatic or judgment continuous does not remove these things from the scope of the Divine activity ; nor does it prove that everyone gets a prize. It may be true that we all go to heaven when we die ; but it is extremely hard to show that the writers of the New Testament thought so. Dr. Dearmer has cut away the mediaeval trimmings of Hell. Might not a parallel book be written on the " Delusion of Heaven " ? And, after all, is it really true that fear has no wholesome part to play in moral growth ? Its use may have been exaggerated, but can it be entirely excluded ?
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