honour to God; unbelief withdraws from God that which is due to him. Unbelief is an injury to God, religious high treason. The heathens worship demons; their gods are devils. “I say that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God: and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils.”[1] But the devil is the negation of God; he hates God, wills that there should be no God. Thus faith is blind to what there is of goodness and truth lying at the foundation of heathen worship; it sees in everything which does not do homage to its God, i.e., to itself, a worship of idols, and in the worship of idols only the work of the devil. Faith must therefore, even in feeling, be only negative towards this negation of God: it is by inherent necessity intolerant towards its opposite, and in general towards whatever does not thoroughly accord with itself. Tolerance on its part would be intolerance towards God, who has the right to unconditional, undivided sovereignty. Nothing ought to subsist, nothing to exist, which does not acknowledge God, which does not acknowledge faith:—“That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven and things on earth, and things under the earth; and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of the Father.”[2] Therefore faith postulates a future, a world where faith has no longer an opposite, or where at least this opposite exists only in order to enhance the self-complacency of triumphant faith. Hell sweetens the joys of happy believers. “The elect will come forth to behold the torments of the ungodly, and at this spectacle they will not be smitten with sorrow; on the contrary, while they see the unspeakable sufferings of the ungodly, they, intoxicated with joy, will thank God for their own salvation.”[3]
Faith is the opposite of love. Love recognises virtue even
- ↑ 1 Cor. x. 20.
- ↑ Phil. ii. 10, 11. “When the name of Jesus Christ is heard, all that is unbelieving and ungodly in heaven or on earth shall be terrified.”—Luther (T. xvi. p. 322). “In morte pagani Christianus gloriatur, quia Christus glorificatur.”—Divus Bernardus. Sermo exhort. ad Milites Templi.
- ↑ Petrus L. 1. iv. dist. 50, c. 4. But this passage is by no means a declaration of Peter Lombard himself. He is far too modest, timid and dependent on the authorities of Christianity, to have ventured to advance such a tenet on his own account. No! This position is a universal declaration, a characteristic expression of Christian, of believing love. The doctrine of some Fathers of the church, e.g. of Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, that the punishment of the damned would have an end, sprung not out of Christian or Church doctrine, but out of Platonism. Hence the doctrine that the punishment of hell is finite, was rejected not only by the Catholic but also by the Protestant church. (Augsb. Confess. art. 17.) A precious example of the exclusive, misanthropical narrowness of Christian love, is the passage cited from Buddeus by Strauss (Christl. Glaubensl. B. ii. s. 547), according to which not infants in general, but those of Christians exclusively, would have a share in the divine grace and blessings if they died unbaptized.
