The shutting-down, the extinction, of a man—for this is what it amounts to—who is capable of an indefinite advance in freedom and life, in love and wisdom and knowledge—that is, in God and fellowship—is a catastrophe with which the blotting-out of all the mighty beasts of the past is incomparable. Consider, if he were the only man? Yet is he the less what he is because he is one of millions? For one man, the Christian says, Christ would die, though it is for all men that he died. 'The very hairs of your head are numbered.'
One man in hell—think of it. One man who might have been united with God in an influx of inexhaustible new life lifting him from order to order of glory—that is what the Christian sees and what leads him, or has led him often, to describe such a loss in terms from which we shrink to-day. But if we learn to see what it is the Christian means, can we say that he goes too far? Or shall we not say that if we had at our command words fit to depict his meaning they would go even farther? No doubt we see plainly the absurdity of material fires and the religious and psychological falsity of the picture of human beings vainly desiring God, when we know that, as has been said by a great Christian, 'the sun meets not the springing bud that stretches toward him, with half that certainty, as God, the Source of all good, communicates himself to the soul that longs to partake of him.' But the fact remains that to lose life in 'the second death,' to pass out of all fellowship whether with man or God, to shrink into an ever-shrivelling creature who cares for nothing outside its ever-narrowing and concentrating self-love, is for any live, loving, healthy-minded man or woman as terrible and repulsive a fate as ever a painter or poet or theologian of old times attempted to describe.
Yet it seems reasonable enough. If we will not live we shall not live. If God, the Christian says, is permitted by us to reconcile us with himself, he will reconcile us. If we do not bar out his fountains of life they will live in us as well-springs. We are wholly dependent upon receiving more of his life, but we cannot be compelled to receive it. We may even decline freedom and lose what we had of it, employing it amiss; it is not an inalienable character stamped upon us. We have grown into enough of it to be able to refuse to have more. 'Whosoever hath, to him shall be given; and whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that which he seemeth to have.'