ETERNAL PUNISHMENT.

Taranaki Daily News, 13 November 1915, Page 9 (Supplement)

ETERNAL PUNISHMENT.

NO ARGUMENT AGAINST DIVINE , JUSTICE AND WISDOM.

SERMON PREACHED at ST JOSEPH'S CHURCH 11AWERA. on .Sunday, November 7, bv VERY REV. DEAN POWER.

'■Suller both to grow until the harvest, and in the time of the harvest I will say to the reapers: Gather up first the cockle, and bind it. into bundles to bum, but the wheat gather ye

into my barn."—Matt. 13:30. To make a fundamental distinction between the duration of supernatural reward and that of supernatural punishment -is to withdraw the sanction that supports the moral law and to make a folly of the Law-giver, who is God Himself. If the man who has led an unclean life and has outraged the Holy Ghost by a final and wilful rejection of God will ultimately and throughout eternity enjoy the beatific vision, that exhortation becomes meaningless, and that motive futile which our Lord Himself expressed in the words: "Blessed are tire, clean of heart, for they shall see God.'' That you may have correct notions on so sacred a doctrine of Catholic faith, I wish to put you on your guard against certain tendencies that are characteristic of this soft and effeminate generation. The doctrine of eternal punishment is, no doubt, an appalling one, and every child of God who has the finer instincts which His love implants, will endeavor as much as possible to soften some of its hard speculations; and, therefore, while his human: mind with its power of reasoning will approve the law of his Creator, his human heart will always whisper to him that God is kind and good and beautiful and fair beyond anything mind or heart can conceive, and will sweetly suggest to him that there must be something good and beautiful in the simultaneous existence of reward and punishment throughout eternity, even as there was the assurance of a greater good, though the servants did not see it, in the simultaneous growth of the wheat and the cockle. The most dire result of the Protestant Reformation is found in the confusion of thought that obscures the harmony that exists between the various articles of Catholic belief. These articles were not meaiit to be taken separately, and each justified as if it stood alone, any more than the heart-subduing harmonies of I some great master are meant to be broken up, and each part criticised as a separate melody, and not in sweet combination with the parts that were to minister to it and share its lovely life. The Catholic doctrine of eternal punishment does not stand alone; it must be interpreted in the light and under the influence of the doctrines that essentially affect it: the doctrines of Purgatory, of sin, of grace, of God's sanctity, of free will, and every other doctrine that has been revealed by T!od. But this is just what modern thought, disrupted by the Reformation, is unable to do. It cannot take large views; it is forced to take things piecemeal, and taking and viewing eternal punishment thus, it is shocked at what it considers its inhuman grievousness and is impelled to improve on the designs of the Omnipotent. But the Omnipotent is all-wise as well as all-powerful. Ah! no, my children; do not tamper with God's designs. If you pull up the cockle you will spoil the wheat also. Behold, what would you bring about? Reject the revelation of the true God, and you will create a god according to your own fancy—a god too weakly loving to punish, and too effeminately soft to uphold justice and hate iniquity. But such a god belittles the true God's majesty, minimises His power, undermines His justice; and at one and the same time destroys man's faculty of free will by invalidating the consequences of his free acts. And not only this, but by an inevitable consequence it denies free-will to the Creator, for in this matter creature and Creator stand or fall together. If man be not free, he is but a mere physical thing, and if man be only this, his Creator becomes but a part of the mixture of which he and the world are made. If man is not free to make his choice between eternal love and eternal enmity, and if God is not free to east off for eternity His rebellious and impenitent creature, man is not man and God is not God, and there only remains eonfusion and chaos to beget eternal anarcy.

Casting aside all such debasing and ruinous philosophy, we must maintain that man has the making of his own acts, and has, therefore, responsibility for them. From this we have the logical conclusion that if his final, determinate and deliberate act be a total rejection of his Creator ) a spuming of His mercy and a repudiation of His claims, he must endure the penalty eternal justice has prepared. The act of death coming upon that final act of the will stereotypes it, making it immutable for evermore, since time with its mutations shall be no more, and assigns to it an immutable destiny. Cod could have arranged things differently, but at what a cost! The free will which dignified man would be abolished and the voluntary service which glorifies God and is meritorious to man would be made impossible. Wills that are not free give no free service, but the Divine counsel decrees that men shall freely serve only where they freely love. This counsel stands without reproach in justice even as it is above cavil in wisdom and goodness: "Against Thee only have I sinned and have done evil in Thy sight that Thou may est be justified in Thy words and overcome when Thou art judged." These unfortunates the Church neither remembers nor prays for, believing them to be cast off into the outer darkness where prayers do not avail. She knows not the name of any one of them, but they arc "the slain sleeping in the sepulchres, when Thou remembcrest no more, and they are eifct off from Thy hand" (Ps. 57:5). With regard to tlio.se who resist the Holy Spirit we have the awful words of Christ Himself to disprove the doctrine of their eternal beatitude. If life and light eternal is the supernatural recompense of the good, death and darkness without end must be the punishment of the wicked, whom God does not recognise as His own. "Come to Me," Christ will say to the good on the last day, to those who have kept their baptismal robes unspotted, and to those who, having fallen into many and gross sins, have turned to Him and asked for mercy with contrite and humble hearts. "Depart from Me" will be the sentence spoken to the sinner whom He has so often tried to win. to the sinner for whom He had suffered and died, but who, haughty, obstinate, impenitent to the last, died" in his malignancy, despising Him and His offers of mercy. Of such a sinner Christ said: "Whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him." Of this consummating sin of final impenitence the Beloved Disciple writes: "There is a sin unto death; for that I say not that any man may ask."

Against that sin and its punishment we daily pray as against the great and crowning evil: "From everlasting death, deliver us 0 Lord."

What great love should not Catholics I lavish upon Holy Church, who in the midst of the confusion of tongues takes her children by the baud and leads them like a tender mother along the narrow way that leads to life and light, and guards them from the broad road that ends in everlasting death! She dreads that broad road, and her mission is to make us fear it. She will not tell us that life awaits us at its end, for she knows it is the road to death. She warns us of the reality of the danger, and exhorts us not to expose ourselves to eternal perdition, for the perdition that awaits the wicked there is without appeal. She has no soft words of folly to lull the sinner to sleep; she does not teach that suffering is an outrage on eternal justice; she rather terrilies the sinner, and scares him, and amazes him by declaring that hell is a place "where justice dwellcth," for they dwell there who are being justly punished. But she wishes this fear to be accompanied with a yearning desire to enjoy God in heaven, and so she preaches the twofold pain of hell —the pain of the eternal loss of God, and the pain of the everlasting lire, the former being the greater. She preaches this from her pulpits, in the New Testament and her other sacred books, and in the lives and writings of her saints. Hear St. Chrysost'om in the fourth century:

"You would think that there was only one punishment, the burning fire; look more closely, and you will see that there are two. Whoever is cast into that lire loses also the Kingdom of Heaven: the loss is a severer punishment than the fire. I know that many dread the fire only; but I say that the being cast out from such glory is a much more poignant pain than the fire of hell. No wonder jf it is impossible for me to bring this home to you in words. We do not know the blessedness of the goal things of heaven sufficiently to enable us to form any adequate idea of the misery of losing them. We shall kno'w one day, when we come to have experience. But never be that our lot, thou only-begotten Son of God! Never may we have experience of that final woe of punishment! An unbearable thing is hell, and the chastisement thereof. But though one tell of a thousand hells, he will utter nothing so dreadful as the being banished from that glory and happiness, as the being abhorred of Christ, as the reproach of not having nourished Him in His hunger. Better be struck with ten thousand thunderbolts than see that mild Face turned away from us, and that gentle Eye not enduring to

behold us." But the hardened sinner despises every warning; sin-laden as he is, the mercy of God is hovering over him, like the soul in the Jewish legend that hovers over its own body for four days after death until decomposition sets in. At last grace is granted and a last refusal made, and the unfortunate sinner in his malignancy wends his way down, down to ruin and everlasting misery, where he shall be in turn fed and consumed by the evil he has brought upon himself. "But evil on itself shall back recoil, And mix no more with goodness, when at last, Gathered like scum and settled to itself,

It shall be in eternal restless change Self-fed and • self-consumed." We may not blame God's goodness :or the sinner's ruin, least of all if that sinner be a Catholic. "What more could I do for thee that I have not done? I planted thee a most beautiful vine, and thou hast proved exceeding bitter to Me; for in my thirst thou gavest Me vinegar to drink, and with a spew thou hast pierced the side of thy Saviour." This poor sinner, now in hell, was born of Catholic parents, was brought up in a Catholic atmosphere, was taught how to pray, how to rf&ditate, was encouraged to he devout to her who is the mirror of justice and help of Christians, to be regular at confession and Holy Communion, to love the Mass, the source of every grace, and to keep himself ever in the presence of his Creator. For years and years he heard the word of God and the priest's exhortation at the Sunday Mass and Vespers; he was urged to lay up for himself treasures in heaven. How often was there not opened up to him the prospect of "an eternal weight of glory!" Every word he heard, every day that dawned, every new act or exercise seemed to be a rung in a Jacob's ladder leading him sweetly from this land of labor to the vision of the Eternal Clod. But a day came when God's great enemy attacked the citadel of his soul, and'when he, poor boy, played the traitor to his Lord, lowered every barrier of defence, cast aside the Mass and Sacraments and the pious exercises one by one. cast her out from his soul who would lead him by the hand -to his saviour, and gave himself into the hands of the great hater of the souls of men. You pity him, but you do not blame (Jod or question His fidelity to duty. The sinner has the remedy at his own hand: Let him call to God for strength against Satan, let him have recourse to prayer, to the Sacraments, to God's mercy, and the prison gate of sin will fall before him and admit him once more to the light of grace. There is a story told of a man who languished in prison for years. One day he got up, tried the door of his prison, found it open, and walked out. AYho was to blame for the sufferings of his captivity? So with this poor sinner, he will not move one step towards that repentance that would push open for him the prison door of sin. Every day he keeps adding sin to sin, and God, as holy .lob tells us, is sealing up these sins as in a bag. one day to count them out. And now God has counted them out, and the sinner is found to have filled up the measure of his iniquity; his sentence has gone forth, and life ends and eternal woe begins.

'Oh. what a moment for the poor soul," writes Cardinal Newman, "when it comes to itself, and finds itself suddenly before the judgment scut of Christ! Oil, what a moment when, breathless with the journey, and dizzy with the brightness, and overwhelmed with the strangeness of what is happening to him, and unable to realise where he is, the sinner hears the voice of the accusing spirit, bringing up all the sins of his past life, which he has forgotten, or which he has explained away, which he would not allow to be sins, though he suspected they were; when he hears him detailing all the mercies of God which he has despised, all His warning which he has set at naught, all his judgments which he has outlived! And oh! still more terrible, still more distracting, when the Judge speaks, and consigns it to the gaolers, till it shall pay the end:lc3s debt which lies against it! 'lmI possible, I a lost soul! T separated from home and from pence for ever! It is not I of whom the Judge so spake! There lis a mistake somewhere. Christ, Savi-

our, hold Thy hand—one minute to explain it! My name is Demas; I am jnit Demas, not Judas, or Nicholas, or Alexander, or Philctus, or Diotreuhea. What hopeless pain! For me! Impossible; it shall not be!' And the poor soul struggles and wrestles in the grasp of the mighty demon which has hold of it, and whose very touch is torment. 'Oh, atrocious!' it shrieks in agony, and in anger, too, as if the very keenness of the affliction were a proof of its injustice. 'A second! and a third! I can bear it no more! Stop, horrible fiend, give it over; I am a man, and not such as thou! I am not food for thee, or sport for thee! T never was in hell as thou, 1 have not on me the smell of fire, nor the taint of the charnel house! I know what human feelings are; 1 have taught religion; I have had a eonscience; I have a cultivated mind; 1 am wel versed in silence and art; I have been refined by literature; F have had an eye for the beauties of Nature; I am a philosopher or a poet, or a shrewd observer of men, or a hero, or a statesman, or an orator, or a man of wit and humor! Nay; Tam a Catholic; lam not an uniegenerate Protestant; I have received the grace of the Redeemer; I have attended the Sacraments for years; I have been a Catholic from a child; I am a son of the Martyrs; 1 died in communion with the Church; nothing, nothing which I have ever been, which I have every seen, bears any 'cscmblancc to thee, and to the flame and stench which exhale from thee; so I defy thee, and abjure thee, 0 enemy of man!' Alas! poor soul; and whilst it thus lights that destiny which it has brought upon itself, and with those companions whom it has chosen, the man's name perhaps is solemnly chanted forth, and his memory decently cherished among his friends on earth. . . As the last generation presumed, so does the present. The father would not believe that God could punish, and now the son will not believe; the father was indignant .when eternal pain'-was spoken of, and the son gnashes his teeth and smiles contemptuously. And thus it is that this vast flood of life is carried on from age to age; myriads trifling with God's love, tempting His justice, and like the herd of swine, falling headlong down the steep. 0 mighty God! 0 God of love! It is too much! It broke the heart of Thy sweet Son Jesus to sec the misery of man spread out before His eyes. He died by it as well as for it. And we, too, in our measure, our eyes ache, and our hearts sicken, and our heads reel, when we but feebly contemplate it. Oh, most tender heart of Jesus, why wilt Thou not end, when wilt Thou end this ever-growing load of sin and woe? When wilt Thou chase away the devil into his own hell, and close the pit's mouth, that Thy chosen may rejoice in Thee, quitting the thought of those who perish in their wilfulness?"

The doctrine of eternal punishment is a truly appalling one; but one thing we know for our consolation, the man of humble, persevering prayer shall never be lost. "Oh God, Who makest the minds of the faithful to be of one will, grant unto Thy people to love what Thou commandest, and to desire what Thou hast promised; that amidst the varying changes of the world our hearts may there be fixed where true joys abide."