The False God of Fear and the Fear of Death : Part 7

The Conquest of Fear
by Basil King

(Page 14 of 16)

The hostility to this seemingly harmless teaching was of the most intense. There is hostility to it still, but mild as compared with that felt by our great-great-grandfathers. That no one should suffer less than he deserves went without saying; but that no one should suffer more was declared a black heresy. As there are those who declare it a black heresy to-day, it may be worth while, in the interests of the conquest of fear, to say a word as to the relation of God and punishment.

XIX

To my mind it is chiefly verbal.

It is permissible to say that there is no such thing as punishment; there are only wrong results. It depends upon your way of putting it. The wrong method produces wrong results in proportion as it is wrong. Wrong results mean wrong conditions; and wrong conditions mean suffering. You may call this the law of God, but it is the law of anything. It is not positive law, it is negative. As a matter of fact, God does not need to put forth a law on the point since everything works that way.

What we call sin is simply a wrong method. It may be a wrong method meant to produce wrong; or it may be a wrong method in the hope of producing right. In any case it brings its consequence in pain.

That consequence may be corrected in this phase of our being, or it may be carried over into the next. Carried over into the next the individual, according to our ancestral teaching, comes under the sentence in which our fathers delighted as "damnation." Not only did damnation involve the most fiendish torture the Almighty could invent, but the torture was inflicted, without an instant of relief, throughout the eons of eternity.

I recall a sermon to which I listened as a boy of nine. It was on a summer's evening, when the windows of the church were open. A moth fluttered about a light. The church stood at the foot of a mountain. The preacher was trying to explain to us the eternal duration of God's punishment. "Think of that moth," he said, "carrying away one grain of sand from that mountain, and going off for a million years, after which it would return and take away another grain. And think of it keeping this up, one grain every million years, till the whole mountain was removed. Well, that would be only a moment as compared with the time you would be in hell."

On the generations comforted and fortified by this sort of teaching I have no comment to make; but we of another generation should surely not be reproved for moving away from it. We move away from it in the direction of common sense, since common sense must be an attribute of the Universal Father as it is of the wiser among mankind.

XX

I revert, then, to my statement that God's relation to punishment is chiefly verbal. His "wrath against sin" is a way of "putting it." If you can best express the suffering which springs from wrong methods as "God's wrath" you are at liberty so to express yourself; but we should not lose sight of the fact that the wrong methods produce the suffering, and not an outburst of fury on the part of One who is put before us as Love.

The fact that the Hebrew writers often used a vivid form of warning and invective is not a reason why we should keep on doing it. The Hebrew writer was a primitive speaking to primitives. Meaning what we mean, he required a stronger, fiercer vocabulary than we ever need. In saying this I am not dodging the issue; I am stating a fact which rules in all historical interpretation. To make the phraseology of two thousand years before Christ the literal expression of the thought of two thousand years after Him is to be archaic beyond reason. Having grasped a principle, we phrase it in the language of our time.

The language of our time makes, on the whole, for restraint, sobriety, and exactitude of statement. Few of our habits modify themselves more constantly and more rapidly than our forms of speech. Not only does each generation find something special to itself, but each year and each season. To me it seems that much of our misunderstanding of God springs from the effort to fix on Him forevermore the peculiarities we infer from the idiom of five thousand years ago. Only to a degree does that idiom convey to us what is conveyed to those who heard it as a living tongue; and of that degree much is lost when it percolates through translation. To cling to words when all we need is to know principles, clothing them in our own way, seems to me not only absurd in fact but lamentable in result. I venture to think that more people have been alienated from God by a pious but misapplied verbal use than were ever estranged from Him by sin.

XXI

Our ancient Hebrew predecessors understood God in their own way. We understand Him in the same way, but with the clarification wrought by the intervening years of progress. In other words, they bequeath us a treasure which we are free to enrich with our own discoveries.

Among our own discoveries is a clearer comprehension of pain as resulting from wrong methods, and of God's detachment from pain. More and more, punishment becomes a concept we reject. Even in our penal institutions, which have been for so many centuries a barbarous token of our incompetence, we begin to substitute for punishment something more nearly akin to cure. If we find mere vengeance unworthy of ourselves we must find it unworthy of the Universal Father.

About the Author

William Benjamin Basil King (1859-1928) was a Canadian-born clergyman who became a writer after retiring from the clergy due to loss of eyesight and thyroid disease. His novels and non-fiction were spiritually oriented. King retired from the clergy in 1900 due to illness, and began writing. His anonymously published novel The Inner Shrine, about a French Irish girl whose husband is killed in a duel, became very popular when published in 1909. King wrote a number of best-selling works.