FROM THE PREFACE.
THE object of this work is to assist the reader to a correct understanding of those controverted passages which are supposed to teach the doctrine of endless punishment. We have given the Bible a thorough examination, and are convinced that this doctrine finds no support in the sacred pages. It is of human origin.
The best heathen writers admit that this doctrine was INVENTED to frighten those who could not be restrained from vice by the punishments of this life! It was regarded by the heathen, as it now is by some professing Christians, as the most efficient motive to deter men from sin.
Cicero, in his seventh oration, p. 207, says that "It was on this account that the ancients INVENTED those infernal punishments of the dead, to keep the wicked under some awe in this life, who without them, would have no dread of death itself."
Polybius, who was a celebrated Greek historian, speaking upon this subject, says: "Since the multitude is ever fickle and capricious, full of lawless passions and irrational and violent resentments, there no way left to keep them in order, but by the terrors of future punishment, and all the pompous circumstances that attend such kind of FICTION! On which account the ancients acted, in my opinion, with great judgment and penetration, when they CONTRIVED to bring those "notions of the gods and a future state," into the popular belief."
Strabo, who was a Greek geographer and eminent philosopher, says: "It is impossible to govern women and the gross body of the people, and to keep them pious, holy and virtuous, by the precepts of philosophy. This can only be done by the fear of the gods, which is raised and supported by ancient fictions and modern prodigies." And again, he says, that "The apparatus of the ancient mythologies was an engine which the legislators employed as bugbears to strike a terror into the childish imagination of the multitude."
Seneca says: "Those things which make the infernal regions terrible, the darkness, the prison, the river of flaming fire, the judgment seat, etc., "are alia" FABLE, with which the poets amuse themselves, and by them agitate us with VAIN TERRORS!
It is here admitted that the doctrine of endless punishment was an "invention" of the heathen, a "fiction" and a "bugbear" contrived to deter those people from sin, who could not be influenced by the rewards and punishments of this life.
The doctrine of endless punishment, then, being of purely heathen origin, has no claims upon our regard, any more than idolatry, and the belief of the ancient Jews in the transmigration of souls! It forms no part of divine revelation, and we reject it, because it is a pure fiction of the imagination.
