IV. HELL.

IN my last Lecture I shewed you what I hope you found to be good and conclusive reasons for expunging the verb "to damn," with its cognates, from our translation of the Bible; and I am now to shew you, if I can, equally good and conclusive reasons for expunging the word "hell."

This word comes, as I have said, from an old English or Teutonic word, hel-an, and means any covered place. In our early literature it is used to denote, not only any obscure place or dungeon, but also the dark hole into which a tailor flung his waste shreds, and even the retired spot to which, in a popular game, a lad led a lass to exact the forfeit of a kiss. But Theology has long since discharged all gay and innocent meanings and associations from the word "hell." It only calls up in our minds either some faint image of a vast prison or furnace, in which the impenitent are tormented in a flame that will never be quenched; or of a vast and awful realm in which their spirits are to be searched through and through with intolerable and never-ending pangs. In short, those who hold the orthodox, or hyper-orthodox, dogma maintain that at death, or at latest after the resurrection, the wicked

will be turned into a place of torment, torment physical or meta-physical, torment uncorrective and therefore without an end.

Now in this theological sense, the sense in which we naturally take the word when we meet it in the Bible, I am bold to say that the word "hell" is never once used in the Original, though it is so frequent in our translation of it, and that we have no longer any sort of excuse for retaining it on the sacred page. There is no word at all answering to it whether in the Hebrew or in the Greek. We, however, are not concerned with the whole Bible; we have agreed to confine our search for light on the future conditions of men to the Gospels and the Epistles. In our Authorized Version of these Scriptures, then, the word “hell” occurs eighteen times, and is used to render the three Greek words, Tartarus, Hades, and Gehenna; at each of which we will look in turn.

1. The word Tartarus occurs but once in the whole New Testament, or, indeed, in the whole Bible. You will find the passage in 2 Peter ii. 4, and a very singular passage it is. The holy Apostle is arguing that the Lord knows how "to reserve unrighteous men, under punishment, unto the day of judgment." He is not speaking, therefore, of the final estate of the unrighteous, but of the state in which they are to await that great and terrible day. To prove his point,

he refers to the punishments which turned Sodom and Gomorrha into ashes, and swept away Noah's ungodly generation with a flood. But the first example to which he appeals is that of the doom which fell on the angels who kept not their first estate. His words are: God spared not angels who sinned, but cast them into Tartarus, delivering them over into dens of darkness, to be held in custody unto"-with a view to" judgment." Now it is very curious that St Peter, a simple and unlettered man, should have used this word "Tartarus," a word never occurring elsewhere in the Bible, not even in the writings of St Paul, the most learned of the Apostles. One can hardly help asking, with an accent of wonder, where he got it from, and how he came to use it; for it is a purely heathen word, and embodies a purely heathen conception. As they pryed into the future the Greeks and Romans saw nothing clearly, although "the initiated," perhaps, had been quickened into an intense yearning for, if not a bright and vivid hope of a life to come. The world beyond the gates of death was, for them, "a world of shades." Their utmost hope even for the good was that some thin shadow of the former man would survive, to enjoy some faint shadow of his former honours and pursuits. The utmost they foreboded for the wicked was that their thin, wavering, unsubstantial ghosts would be doomed to hopeless tasks, or consumed

by pangs such as men suffer here.

Sometimes they

gave the name Tartarus to the whole of this land of shadows; but more commonly they divided the underworld into two provinces-the Elysian fields, in which the spirits of their heroes and their sages, with all who loved goodness, wandered to and fro, illumined by a pale reflection of their former joys; reserving the name Tartarus for that dismal region in which the ghosts of the wicked were tasked, and tantalized, and tormented.1

Here, no doubt, St Peter uses it in its more limited sense, and means to imply that the angels who sinned were cast into that gloomier province of the under

1 Mr Mahaffy, one of the ablest and best-read of our modern classical scholars, has some remarks on this point, which illustrate and confirm both what I have here said on the pagan conception of the Tartarean world, and what I have yet to say on the ancient conception of Hades. "We know from Homer and from Mimnermus, that in the earliest periods, though the Greeks were unable to shake off a belief in life after death, yet they could not conceive that state as anything but a shadowy and wretched echo of the real life upon earth. It was a gloomy and dark existence, burdened with the memory of lost happiness and the longing for lost enjoyment. To the Homeric Greeks their death was a dark unavoidable fate, without hope and without reward. It is, indeed, true that we find in Pindar thoughts and aspirations of a very different kind. We have in the fragments of his poetry which remain to us more than one passage asserting the reward of the just, and the splendours of a future life far happier than that which we now enjoy. But, notwithstanding these splendid visions, such high expectation laid no hold upon the imagination of the Greek world. The poems of Pindar, we are told, soon ceased to be popular, and his utterances are but a streak of light amid general gloom. The kingdom of the dead in Æschylus is evidently, as in Homer, but a weary echo of this life, where honour can only be attained by the pious memory of attached relations;

Probably

world which was the haunt of the wicked. the Apostle did not know, nor affect to know, much of the angels who sinned and fell, and of what became of them after their fall. Probably it was because their fate was dim and shadowy to him that he employed a word, Tartarus, which carried only a dim and shadowy significance. But very certainly his "Tartarus" by no means answered to our Hell." He was speaking, not of the final estate, whether of sinful men or of sinful angels, but of a state in which they are held until the day of judgment arrives. The word Tartarus would call up in the minds of his readers only where duty paid to the dead affects him in his gloomier state, and raises him in the esteem of his less-remembered fellows. Sophocles says nothing to clear away the night; nay, rather his last and maturest contemplation regards death as the worst of ills to the happy man—a sorry refuge to the miserable. Euripides longs that there may be no future state, and Plato only secures the immortality of the soul by severing it from the person, the man, and all his interests."-(Rambles and Studies in Greece, pp. 69, 70.) In the same work (pp. 153-56) he develops the hint I have given above, that perhaps "the initiated" had been taught to "faintly trust the larger hope. Cicero (De Legg, ii. 14, § 36) has a memorable passage on the Mysteries: "Much that is excellent and divine does Athens seem to me to have produced and added to our life, but nothing better than those Mysteries, by which we are formed and moulded from a rude and savage life to humanity; and indeed in the Mysteries we perceive the real principles of life, and learn, not only to live happily, but to die with a fairer hope." Commenting on this passage Mr Mahaffy asks what it was that gave these celebrated Mysteries, the greater Eleusinia, so transcendant a character that all the greatest minds of Greece and Rome speak of them with enthusiasm. And his reply is: "There is only one reasonable cause, and it is that which all our serious authorities agree upon-the doctrine taught in