"LIFE EVERLASTING" is the last article of the Creed, declaring the goal of our progress. But, as Ecclesiasticus says, all things are double (42.25): to everything there is a reverse side. The reverse of life and light is death and darkness. In Holy Writ there is continual mention both of one and of the others, in the supernatural order. The one is very good, the other must in proportion be passing evil. Better progress, all the worse overthrow: it is the rule everywhere. The reverse of life everlasting is everlasting death, from which in the Litany we pray to be delivered, as from the culmination of all evil. A morte perpetua, libera nos, Domine. Scripture tells us plainly in what the second, final and everlasting death consists: this is the second death, the lake of fire (Apoc. 20.14). It is the mission of the Church to lead men along the way that Christ has opened for them, the path of life everlasting to its consummation in heaven. It is equally the Church's mission to guard men from everlasting death.

The first precaution is to warn men of the reality of the danger, and to explain what everlasting death means. And this exposition must not be academical but practical: it must put the facts in such a way as to form the strongest possible deterrent against people exposing themselves to eternal perdition. That is why the New Testament, and the Church its faithful interpreter, ever insists principally upon the punishment of fire in Hell. Every Christian dreads this fire. One need not be a very spiritually-minded person to dread hell fire. It is of faith that whoever dies in mortal sin, his soul goes down immediately into Hell, there to be tormented forever. It is of faith that this torment is of two sorts, "the pain of loss" (of God), and the pain of sense," which pain of sense is principally that of fire. It is at least proximate to faith, that this fire is a true, proper, real fire, not anything figuratively so called.

This is a fearful matter to think about. But we take a false view of Hell, if we regard it as a mere scene of physical torment. The torment belongs not so much to the physical as to the moral order. Hell is not the dwelling of misery and misfortune, but of wilfulness and crime. Hell too, in a certain sense, is a place where justice dwells (II Peter 3.13), that is, where they dwell who are being justly punished. Hell is for the wicked. Now the tormenting dread of Hell is part of Hell; it is as it were some radiation of that fire reaching the earth: that tormenting dread then is for the wicked also, not for the just. Let them be terrified, scared, and amazed by the prospect of Hell, who are rushing along the broad road that leads thither. Such terror is for them most salutary: it is the beginning of conversions. But for those whose feet are in the narrow way that leads to life (Mt. 7.14), whose supreme desire, at least when their minds are in their normal and habitual state, is to please God and save their souls, the torturing fear of Hell is not their portion on earth, God does not intend it for them. Not that even they can dispense with the fear of Hell altogether: for their charity is not perfect (cf. I John 4.18) and may fail: therefore the fear of Hell should be down somewhere in the depths of their consciousness, to come up to the surface and operate as a deterrent in severe temptation, or as a motive of prompt repentance after a fall. It should also be brought to the surface at times by a good discourse on Hell, lest it be lost beyond power of recovery in the hour of need.

The best fear of Hell, a fear that will not alarm or harass, is the concomitant of a yearning desire to possess God in heaven: it is the apprehension of losing that on which our heart is strongly fixed. In a good man the desire of possessing God grows with his growth from boyhood through youth to manhood; and it alone gathers strength, while all else within him is falling to decay. The man who little knows God fears Hell fire, if he fears anything supernatural. But the man who knows God and loves Him dreads the loss of God more than he dreads Hell fire. It is profitable to such a soul in meditation to dwell more upon the pain of loss than upon the pain of sense. It should be the aim of the Christian preacher to lead his audience on to fear the former pain more than the latter. And to the actual sufferers, the pain of loss is worse than the pain of sense: that is because the sight of God is a much better good than hell fire is evil, and the lost know that it is so. Such is the constant tradition of the Church. We find it proclaimed in these words of St. Chrysostom, spoken in the great church at Antioch, some time between A.D. 386 and 398:

To the same effect St. Teresa:

Though then the lake of fire be the second death, it is rather the loss of God that formally deserves that name. The first death, which men die in this world, is the separation of the soul from the body: the second death, which men inflict upon themselves in this world, but which only becomes hopeless and everlasting in the world to come, is the separation of God from the soul. For God is the life of the soul, as the soul is the life of the body. I do not mean that God and the soul conspire into the unity of one person. But short of that, even in the natural order, there is a certain union between God and the soul, a certain play and influence of the Divine Mind upon the human, without which all intellectual life would be impossible: and supernaturally the connection is much closer, the Holy Ghost dwelling in man as the principle of the supernatural life of grace. As the soul departs from the body when the body is no longer apt to hold it, or is no longer in potentia ad vitam, as the schoolmen speak: so God the Holy Ghost leaves the soul, leaves the whole man, that vilifies and defiles himself body and soul, by mortal sin. Yet God does not so far depart from him as not still to hover over him, seeking a return by the man's repentance. The Jews had an idea that a departed soul hovered about its body till the fourth day, when decomposition set in (cf. John 11. 39). And among the illustrations of the Oxford Bible, I see an Egyptian figure of the soul of Ani the Scribe (about 1400 B.C.), in the form of a human-headed bird, hovering over the mummified body. So I say God hovers over the soul of a sinner, anxious to re-enter there by His grace. But a time comes at the end of life, when the last refusal of grace is made, and God leaves that soul unto death everlasting. Did any such conception flash through the mind of Homer, when he wrote the wonderful line, describing Hector in the last crisis of his fate (Iliad 22. 213)?

The body falls to dust, when the soul is gone from it; so the total, final retirement of God from the soul involves the undoing of the whole man, soul and body, naturally and supernaturally. Fear him that can destroy, wreck and undo, both body and soul in hell (Mt. 10. 28). "God is nearer to us," says Mother Julia of Norwich, "than our own soul: for He is the ground on which our soul stands" (Revelations, Ch. 56). What must happen when that ground is taken away, not by such a withdrawal of God as would mean annihilation, but by a withdrawal of the loving care and kindness of God? The whole being of the creature so abandoned must be in a state of disruption. It must be in the most unnatural state conceivable: for nothing is so natural, so germane to the soul as God. Now we know that all pain is simply some felt perversion of the order of nature within us. There can be no worse pain than the felt loss of God. There are probably millions of souls from whom God withdraws Himself in the supernatural order, but not in the natural. I refer to infants who die without baptism. They are eternally unappreciative of the loss they have suffered of the Beatific Vision: thus there is room for natural happiness in them to have its way. But from Christians who have died in deadly sin, God withdraws Himself in every order and in every way, except in that of conservation of their being and chastisement of their offense. These are the slain sleeping in the sepulchres, whom thou rememberest no more, and they are cast off from thy hand (Ps. 87.5). Cast off into the outer darkness, away from the light of Thy countenance and Thy love, away from election and adoption and sanctification and redemption, abandoned to torture and to devils, exposed without protection to everlasting fire, they have lived in vain. We do not know how far they may be severally conscious of their loss. But from the expression "unequal punishments," used by the Council of Florence, we may argue, what is otherwise a priori to be expected, that the consciousness of having lost God will be stronger in some souls than in others—stronger very likely in those who have come nearer to God in His Church, and in this life have tasted and seen that the Lord is sweet (Ps. 33.9; cf. Mt. 11.22; Heb. 10.29).

We cannot consider this everlasting death without some speculation as to who incurs it. Individual cases we cannot know: besides, science is not of individual cases, but of generalities. Generally then, the bad of all denominations incur everlasting death, bad Jews and bad Gentiles, bad Catholics and bad Protestants, bad Athenians of old and bad Romans of the present day. I call him a bad man, who violates the dictates of his conscience, who shuts his eyes and goes on regardless of the measure of light that God vouchsafes to him. Thus he would be a bad Protestant, to whom God revealed the claims of the Catholic Church on the allegiance of all mankind, and who yet stood aloof from that Church. But I must further qualify this word "bad." I say then that, speaking generally, everlasting death is incurred by the malignantly and contumaciously bad. And I will illustrate what I mean by an example from the science of surgery, as it is now practiced since the discovery by Lord Lister of what is called the "antiseptic treatment." This object is to exclude from the open surface of a wound the germs of putrefaction, which commonly are met with everywhere. Exclude them, and many a wound can be healed, though sufficient of itself to cause death without this care. Thus wounds of their own nature mortal fall into two classes, those from which putrefaction is kept away, and those where putrefaction is allowed to take its course. Of the former the patient is healed: of the latter he dies. So there are mortal sins of frailty and passion, and there are mortal sins of malice. Of the former the sinner would die everlastingly, if he remained in them: but he is cured by the antiseptic treatment of contrition and humility and confession. Thus his sin never comes to be of a malignant type. He has been unfaithful, he has forsaken God, but he has not gone the length of fighting against God (Acts 5.39). There are again mortal sins of malice, sins of the spirit rather than the flesh, when a man hardens his heart against God, wills no more to have Him for his God, or even denies Him or His revelation. A sinner of this type is proud, froward, impenitent. Every priest who has tried to bring erring souls to their duty knows this type of sinner, and how impossible it is to win him, while this malignancy lasts. Of some sin of this sort Our Lord says: Whoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him (Lk. 12.10). It shall not be forgiven him, because he will not stoop to seek forgiveness. This is the sin unto death, of which St. John writes, Not concerning that do I say that any one should make request (I John 5:16). The sin is unto death, exactly so far as the sinner wills to remain haughty, obstinate and impenitent. To repeat St. Chrysostom's words: "But never be that our lot, Thou only-begotten Son of God."