Can Evil triumph finally over Good? God is Good all the time?

Can Evil triumph finally over Good?

God is Good all the time?

If the doctrine of hell and the implied weakness and ultimate betrayal, reversal and double mindedness of our loving father in sender a rescuer, Who ultimately failed in His mission: Who is held by many in this dubious position as camp commandant for eternity is allowed to continue to blaspheme the spiritual and intellectual growth of Christian and sinner alike: the evil in this world at least will continue to flourish and the church and God will remain the worlds laughingstock and as intellectually bankrupt as she has been for centuries.

Are we offering a free gift, not only of grace but faith and a message of a hope beyond the grave.

Or are we as modern day Pharisees reinventing self righteousness and works for justification of our lives; not knowing that it is the love of God that leads men to turn to Him!

How is it possible that those who know the depths of sin and ignorance, those who hear the character of God slandered by believers and unbelievers, those who love the ones who pass unrepentant into the Unseen - how is it possible that they should rest satisfied, while retaining in their hearts even a shadow of a doubt that, "as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive ?" 

The old merciless teaching is still taught ; there yet remains in many a nursery, as well, alas, as in many a missionary school abroad, a well-known book called "Peep of Day." In this, little children are allowed to read such doggrel as the following: ---- 

"Now if I fight, or scratch, or bite, 

In passion fall, or bad names call, 

Full well I know where I shall go. 

Satan is glad when I am bad, 

And hopes that I with him shall lie, 

In fire and chains, and dreadful pains. 

All liars dwell with him in hell, 

And many more, who cursed and swore, 

And all who did what God forbid." 

Surely it is time that everyone who believes that the Everlasting Father lovingly, eternally, educates all His children should speak out plainly, and not be ashamed to confess with the Psalmist, "My trust is in the tender mercy of God for ever and ever." -- EDNA LYALL, Eastbourne, 16th December, 1890 

Let me next show what this hell of the popular creed really means, so far as human words can dimly convey its horrors, and for this purpose I subjoin the following extracts- 

"Little child, if you go to hell there will be a devil at your side to strike you. He will go on striking you every minute for ever and ever without stopping. The first stroke will make your body as bad as the body of Job, covered, from head to foot, with sores and ulcers. The second stroke will make your body twice as bad as the body of job. The third stroke will make your body three times as bad as the body of Job. The fourth stroke will make your body four times as bad as the body of Job. How, then, will your body be after the devil has been striking it every moment for a hundred million of years without stopping? Perhaps at this moment, seven o'clock in the evening, a child is just going into hell. Tomorrow evening, at seven o'clock, go and knock at the gates of hell and ask what the child is doing. The devils will go and look. They will come back again and say, the child is burning. Go in a week and ask what the child is doing; you will get the same answer, it is burning. Go in a year and ask, the same answer comes - it is burning. Go in a million of years and ask the same question, the answer is just the same - it is burning. So, if you go for ever and ever, you will always get the same answer - it is burning in the fire." The Sight of Hell. *** Rev. J. FURNISS, C.S.S.R. 

"The fifth dungeon is the red hot oven. The little child is in the red hot oven. Hear how it screams to come out; see how it turns and twists itself about in the fire. It beats its head against the roof of the oven. It stamps its little feet on the floor." - ib. "Gather in one, in your mind, an assembly of all those men or women, from whom, whether in history or in fiction, your memory most shrinks, gather in mind all that is most loathsome, most revolting * * * conceive the fierce, fiery eyes of hate, spite, frenzied rage, ever fixed on thee, looking thee through and through with hate *** hear those yells of blaspheming, concentrated hate, as they echo along the lurid vault of hell; everyone hating everyone *** Yet a fixedness in that state in which the hardened malignant sinner dies, involves, without any further retribution of God, this endless misery." Sermon by the Rev. E.B. Pusey DD. 

"When you die your soul will be tormented alone; that will be a hell for it: but at the day of judgment your body will join your soul, and then you wilt have twin hells, your soul sweating drops of blood, and your body suffused with agony. In fire, exactly like that we have on earth, your body will lie, asbestos like, for ever unconsumed, all your veins roads for the feet of pain to travel on, every nerve a string, on which the devil shall for ever play his diabolical tune of hell's unutterable lament." Sermon on the Resurrection of the Dead. *** Rev. C. H. SPURGEON. 

Awful as are these quotations, I must repeat that they give no adequate idea at all of the horrors of hell; for that which is the very sting of its terrors -their unendingness - is beyond our power really to conceive, even approximately, so totally incommensurable are the ideas of time and of endless duration. 

It will be said, "we no longer believe in a material hell - no longer teach a lake of real fire." I might well ask, on your theory of interpreting Scripture, what right have you so to teach? But let me rather welcome this change of creed, so far as it is a sign of an awakening moral sense. Yet this plea, in mitigation of the horror your doctrines inspire, cannot be admitted; for when you offer for acceptance a spiritual, rather than a material flame, who is there that cannot see that the real difficulty is the same, in either case. If evil in any form is perpetuated then the central difficulty of the traditional creed remains. 

Merely to state the traditional doctrine in any form, is to refute it for very many minds. So deeply does it wound what is best and holiest in us; indeed, as I shall try to show further on, it is, for all practical purposes, found incredible, even by those who honestly profess to believe it. This terrible difficulty, felt and acknowledged in all ages, has been largely met for the Roman Catholic, by the doctrine of Purgatory, which became developed as the belief in endless torment gradually supplanted that earlier and better faith, which alone finds expression in the two really catholic and ancient creeds, faith in Everlasting Life.

Christ Triumphant

or 

Universalism Asserted 

as the Hope of the Gospel on the Authority 

of Reason, the Fathers, and Holy Scripture 

by 

Thomas Allin 

Reprint of the Ninth Edition 

c/o

tent maker.org