San Marcos free press. [volume] (San Marcos, Tex.) 1877-1892, 1878-02-09
Henry Ward Beecher's Views m
the Life to Come.

n
ture; they are eternal. I hold tia,
obedience and disobedience will forever
produce their corresponding pleasure
or pain. l hold, that if, in the life n
come, men persist in the violation of tho
laws of their being, they will unques.
tionably suffer pain and penalty. donot
think that it can be shown to be Scrip.
tural doctrine that probation closes with
death. In another life can conceive
that the experience of this life, which.
by reason of mems physical environ.
ments and social influences, has not
wrought reformation or virtue, may vet
in another sphere and under more fay.
orable circumstances bring men to a
very much higher platform and stand.
point of conduct and of character. We
have reason to suppose that pain and
suffering which, in this world, are of an
educating nature, will have stronger
educating force hereafter, and that thew
will be continued as long as there is
hope or benefit in them. But on all this
subject l would say, first, that probation
does not close with death; second, that
the end and aim of retribution is, in the
first instance, the reformation of the in.
dividual and the safety of society round
about him. ..
The continuance of suffering after it
is hopeless in respect to the individual
and needless in respect to society is
simply cruelty, and can not conceive
of any man of deeply moral and re.
Elective nature who would bring him.
self to believe that God will bring into
life, as He has, myriads which utterly
outrun all computation, under circum-
stances in which they not only have no
help whatsoever to effect moral growth,
but where all their surroundings are ad-
verse and perverse, and allow them to
continue under such known conditions,
to reproduce generations innumerable,
and then to place them in great here
after where the principal feature is suf-
fering and where suffering has ceased to
have any moral benefit, and so continue
them there forever and forever. This is
to create department of the universe
for the purposes, simply, of suffering;
but needless suffering is cruelty, and
any being who inflicts needless suffering
is tyrannical.
Neither is the trouble alleviated by
saying that the penalties are not mate
rial anguish, but they are the torments
of conscience, of anguish, and despair
While we revolt at physical torment,
the refined and cultured nature learns
to estimate mental suffering as even
more exquisite and more horrible than
mere bodily torment; and to teach an
eternity of conscious mental suffering,
after all chance or hope of reformation
is gone, shocks that true moral sense
which has been created and educated
by the example and the spirit of the
Lord Jesus Christ. In short, the very
nature of the atonement, as an evolu-
ton of the interior love nature of God,
condemns and destroys such a vision of
future useless eternal punishment
as nightmare vision of barbarism.
can conceive, therefore, how u man
may believe it simply as an idea. In
part of system it is mere logical alb
straction. But how man can look in
to the face of dying child, the sweet
daughter of his hope, scut off without
any evidence of change; how one can
look into society and see that nineteen
out of twenty are not in those condi-
tons which his system of theology re-
quires precedent to heaven and saliva
ton, and yet live and be happy, eat,
drink, sleep, laugh, jest, drink in the
light of the sun, the glory of the spring
time, walk in a rapture through sum-
mer, and believe this doctrine, can
not conceive. When look at it in the
light of FACILITATING human life, if l
believed in this doctrine every leaf
would watt sigh, the ground would
tremble with the imagined thunders OF
perdition; L would be clothed in sack
cloth, my head would become with the
prophets ga fountain of tears" it
would stop all the processes of human
society; it would say to every man who
entered upon the marriage state, "Thou
art barbarian to bring into life chill
lren under such fearful peril and risk"
do not believe that the reason, nor the
Industries of life, nor the sanctities OF
he household, nor any thing that is