The Universalist. [volume] (Chicago [Ill.]) 1884-1897, 1888-03-10
A WANTED WORD SUPPLIED.
BY REV. ]. w. HANSON, d. D.
(Chicago)

plying a desire for information, and
Rev. DIR. Stafford can appreciate the
qualification feel in fastening to COM
ply with his request for a wanted
word" In recent CHRISTIAN LEAD
Err, under the caption, GA Wanted
Word, " he says:
" The word hell has become cinder
with no carbon left in it to make a
blaze. We want a new word" etc.
Certainly, none of the old words
answer the purpose, for it was long since
discovered that no one of them express
es the meaning the dark ages had in
jected into the brief monosyllable now
rarely mentioned to ears polite"
Sheol has, in the Revision, been re-
manded to its rightful place in the Old
Testament in most of the texts in
which it occurs, and would be in them
all if the accurate scholarship of the
American portion of the committee
could have overcome the conservatism
Of their British brethren. But they did
insist on putting sheol in the margin in
every instance of its occurrence, i'll order
! to inform the reader that sheol and not
hell, in the popular acceptation, is the
true word.
\ similar course has been pursued in
the New Testament. Hell has been
relegated to the tomb of the obsolete
wherever it represents hades. Gehen-
mas has indeed been rendered hell in
the text, but the scholarship and can
dor of the American committee have
inserted gehenna in the margin in order
that all unlearned readers should know
that hell no longer signifies a pit of sui
rors Of endless duration. In other
words the pessimists have consented
to Danish the word hell from one-half
! the places in which it occurs, and the
American portion by recording sheol,
hades, tartarus, gehenna, in the margin
declares to the world that hell should
retire into innocuOus desuetude."
In other words, there is no word in
Hebrew or Greek, and therefore no
word in the Bible, expressive of the
meaning which Partialist theology at
taches to the English word hell.
AS DR.. Stafford shows, hell does not and
cannot contain the meaning that the
word has been supposed to carry. 1t is
very harmless word signifying to
cover or conceal. The thatcher in old
times "helled'' his house when he
rooted it. The bookbinder " helled" a
volume when he bound it. A man
made hell in his backyard when he
dug a posthOle. The Anglo Saxon
helGn into which hell has evoluted
no more means hell than asquirrel hole,
or hell signifies the bottOmless pit. The
time has already arrived when the best
scholarship comedies that no Bible
word carries the meaning that hell sig
nifies to the ignorant, and that even the
learned so long attributed to it.
One of the most amusing of the
many attempts to secure the old idea
from oblivion is found in perhaps the
latest book on the subject, Bishop Mer-
rill's New Testament Idea of He'll"
The good Methodist bishop labors and
founders in aquagmire of logic and ex-
egesis to rescue hell from its doom, but
he utterly nullifes his attempted con-
clusion by two fatal admissions, and
unwittingly gives us the word DR.. SAT-
ford so much desires-provided the
place he is so anxious to preserve shall
be found to exist. On page n he says:
"All classes agree that hades does
not last forever. 1t does not mean the
place Of eternal punishment. 1t is not
the right word for hell"
This abolishes the great gulf" and
let's out the rich man, and the wicked
and all the nations that forget Cod
and when once they shall have been
graduated it will take something more
than the Chicago bishop and his theol-
ogy to get them back again. But he
makes another equally fatal admission
on page 237:
"Gehenna is not yet created
This being true, did it never occur to
Bishop Merrill that he is guilty of
what he has 50 long and so bitterly
charged upon Universalists st eaehing
that there is no hell ? IIades,' he
says, lis not hell, for that is only
place of temporary detention. Gehenna
will be hell-when we get it,-but it is
not now hell, for God has not yet ere
ated gehenna." On his own showing
there is no hell
Now we submit that if God has go
along all these centuries and cons with
a place of temporary detention, it ought
to require something more than the
dictum of a Chicago theOlOgian toproye
that he will so change his mOdus oper-
dndj as to create what he has not yet
created a place of endless torment
That he will do so has only the exigen-
cies of a theology that cannot exist
without it to sustain it, Is this not a
new departure? The Methodist hell is
not now in existence, but God will Gre
ate it some time or other, and when he
| does he will call il pehennap Did ever