Article April 10, 1920 Issue

Scholasticism has many things to answer for, but the...

The Christian Science Monitor

Scholasticism has many things to answer for, but the human mind being what it was when scholasticism was born, the result could scarcely have been otherwise. Materiality was, of course, the portion of this mind, that was why in its medieval days it took so kindly to Aristotleism; and that was why, in its Georgian era, it was so enamored of Mr. Locke. Plato naturally was an abomination unto it, Berkeley it could not away with; and all because every form of idealism was to it a fairy tale, since the evidence of its senses argued for and demonstrated the substantiality of matter. When, consequently, it engaged in reading the Bible, how could it doubt the deduction that a man being the image and likeness of God, the original must be of the nature of the model; that the devil being a bad man, the very worst of men, must in the nature of things be black rather than white; and that the Castle of St. Angelo and the Tower of London having their prison cells, braziers, and pincers, hell must be a colossal St. Angelo or a rabbit warren of Towers. Had not Jesus declared that the wicked should be cast into hell, "where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched"?

The worst of the materialist is that he will always take everything literally except the spiritual fact. If he is a materialistic monk, he paints the most appalling pictures of a material hell; but if he is a materialistic philosopher, he smiles indulgently over the feeding of the multitude, and the walking upon the water. Yet Jesus did not speak of hell, but of Gehenna, and he was quoting, quite deliberately from the book of Isaiah. The prophet was, it need hardly be said, not dreaming of sheol or hades, where the material spirits of those who had died were supposed to linger on, but of the valley of Hinnom, outside of the walls of Jerusalem, where the carcasses, as he is careful to explain, of the malefactors were exposed after death: here the worms consumed them, whilst great fires were lighted for their destruction. What the prophet was engaged in saying, in his metaphysical, eastern way, was, that those who fought against Jehovah would come, in due time, to Hinnom. Jesus, picking up, the prophet's words, applied them somewhat differently. Death he had explained, again and again, was merely a sleep, out of which a man would wake. What, then, would it advantage a man, if he should keep his physical body safe and sound, in this world, only to awake on another plane of existence, after death, with a mentality so besmirched that he would embark upon another and a more tormented career of misery and remorse?

This is, indeed, all there is, and it is quite enough, of future punishment, what the Greek of the New Testament describes as age-long and not eternal. Hell, then, is that present or future state which a man's own ill conduct brings down upon him. It can begin in this world as easily as in the next, since in a world of ideas, even if expressed physically, its origin is mental. "Sin," Mrs. Eddy writes on page 196 of Science and Health, "makes its own hell, and goodness its own heaven." Nor is death ever a means of escape from this hell. Death on this plane of existence is followed by death upon the next, unless the probationary stage here is taken advantage of so that, though a man may yield here to the mesmerism of "the last enemy that shall be destroyed," he shall have sufficiently improved his time to render the second death powerless over him. The writer of Revelation makes this perfectly clear when he says, "Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second death hath no power." Referring to which saying, Mrs. Eddy has written, on page 3 of "Unity of Good," "They upon whom the second death of which we read in the Apocalypse (Revelation xx:6), hath no power, are those who have obeyed God's commands, and have washed their robes white through the sufferings of the flesh and the triumphs of Spirit." The writer of Revelation could, however, see a more terrible condition of suffering than this. It was the moment when even the relief of death should be denied to a man. It is, as it were, the very last agony of hell for the man who has failed to reform, and it is recorded in the words, "and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them."

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