02.19. A Bottomless Abyss
Chapter 19 A BOTTOMLESS ABYSS.
One of the Bible descriptions of hell is that it is a bottomless abyss. This figure was a source of considerable amusement to a prominent infidel in the North. He said on the platform in one of his blasphemous lectures, that he was not afraid of anything that had no bottom to it. To his brilliant mind, the thing described had no foundation, nothing to prop it up, and so could not sit or stand alone; in a word, did not and could not exist. The same figure of the World of the Lost filled the writer with a sense of horror from the terrible meaning he saw in it. It is true that he did not possess the superior intellect of the skeptic; but the Scripture tells us that certain truths, and they are the big ones after all, are spiritually discerned. And so with awakened and developed moral instincts in him, that were dormant or dead in the infidel, he saw with an unspeakable shock what had escaped the mere scholar and man of the world. He grasped at once the thought that in the unique description of hell as a bottomless abyss the fact of locality was not in the words or figure, but the far more ghastly statement of condition. That a man going to hell would find himself sinking into deeper depths for ever. There would never be a time when the moral falling of the lost being would cease. There would never be an age or cycle or remotest period in the illimitable future of eternity when the character drop would be arrested, and the undone man cease to p lunge deeper. Hell is a bottomless abyss as to infinite depths of increasing devildom, and soundless distances into which and down through which lost men and women sink forever. The same truth and argument that builds up a topless heaven and peoples it with a redeemed race that is constantly advancing and rising in grace, knowledge, happiness and holiness, would naturally suggest a bottomless hell whose population having cut themselves off from God, the source of life, goodness, and blessedness, are compelled to fall, and to fall forever. The caption of this chapter, however, is not The Bottomless Abyss, but A Bottomless Abyss. There seems to be two as far as we can understand the Bible, and that crowning work of God, a human soul. The first is in a world called hell, and the other is in, or may be in, the human breast and life. The soul is so amazingly endowed as to faculty and capacity, that it can become a topless heaven or a bottomless hell, according as it receives or rejects and turns away from God. As it is so constituted that it cannot abide intellectually and morally in the same place, but there is bound to be advancement or retreat, bloom or blight, life or death, godliness or ungodliness, with ever increasing heights or depths of the same, we see the perfect reasonableness of the statement that an eternal and infinite heaven or hell can be finally set up in the soul. A man who advocates an everlasting progression of the character life in the skies, to be consistent must admit an unending sinking of the same in a realm and world where God and goodness never come. There is not only a crumbling, caving in, and falling in of one’s own nature, but a conscious, steady descent of one’s own self-hood into profounder depths of darkness and vileness as though going down into a bottomless abyss. Our observation of men in life confirms the statement just made. All of us see human beings steadily getting lower in a moral sense before our grieving and horror stricken gaze. Nothing that we can say or do, or that the Gospel promises or threatens, seems to affect them. They slip away from our grasp and view as we have seen miners descend a deep shaft into the darkness of the earth a thousand feet below. The light lingered a while on their faces as they sank, then there came darker shadows, and finally all sight of them was lost. So have we beheld men go down so deep in depths of iniquity that they were finally lost not only to our gaze and touch, but even to the sound of our voice shouted after them.
There is such a thing as getting where the word of reproof and cry of warning cannot reach the soul. Husbands, wives, sons, daughters and friends all over the land are fast descending to that place. Preachers mark certain of their members reaching such depths that every cry and signal from the pulpit are disregarded, because unseen and unheard.
It must be a frightful spectacle to behold from a distance a man sinking in a quicksand. To see him going steadily down until the yellow death has engulfed him to the loins. To notice from afar his efforts to recover himself, followed by deeper sinkings. To see him throw himself to one side and then another, and yet going down all the time. To mark that when the tawny destruction has reached his arm pits, the victim yields to despair and ceasing all effort goes slowly downward and disappears in the saffron plain of death.
Even more horrible is it to observe human souls slowly descending before our eyes into the yielding sands of sin, or into a yawning pit of wickedness down which they slip and sink steadily as the months and years go by.
They soon get beyond our reach. No matter how we stretch the hand, it does not seem to touch them. They go down before our eyes. A white gleam of forehead turned up toward us in the form of a hasty promise, or a fluttering look of hope is inspired for an instant by a tear they shed, or new leaf they said they would turn over; but it was but for a moment, and after that they seem to sink faster from words to deeds, from deeds to habits, from habits to character, and then with a plunge from character to destiny, black, hopeless and eternal. The bottomless abyss is in the man as a fact of consciousness. Sinners know that they are getting worse all the time. The transgressor who now and then stops a moment to think is compelled to admit his increased capacity for sinning in the line he is pursuing, and for the increased volume of desire attending that form of evil. It is engulfing him. He feels that he is gliding with swifter motion down the slippery sides of the special iniquity. Something is falling in upon himself, and he is being buried alive. Who has not known men falsify so often and so long, that they seemed to lose relish for truth itself and would not and could not state simple facts without twisting, distorting and fairly covering up the transaction with mental colorings, and verbal additions until the occurrence as presented was hardly anything like the original happening. We have met men so practiced in lying that they seemed to enjoy it as one would the possession and exhibition of a rare and beautiful accomplishment. In addition they became so morally hardened in the sin itself, that when detected and exposed they never seemed the least particle ashamed or disconcerted, but gathering their depraved forces together proceeded calmly to lie their way out of the present difficulty. As for the sin of faultfinding and harshness in speech and judgment, it will as inevitably take possession of a man as much as opiates, liquor and other forms of sin, bind and make hopeless captives of its votaries. No human body ever more completely vanished in a quicksand, than the light, beauty and glory of the soul will be swallowed up and disappear in the black, blinding, suffocating, choking, destroying mud of a spirit and life of lovelessness, uncharitableness, bitterness and revengefulness. So is it with the love of money. And with every form of uncleanness, with bad temper, with hasty speech, and with suspicion of people. Indeed with every form and character of sin, the man who lives therein is compelled to see not only that the sin is growing on him, but that he is sinking in the sin. He ought to be horrified to observe his growing proficiency, his acquired alertness, his amazing dexterity in matters where once he had to admit he was halting and clumsy. But instead of horror there comes, it seems, a strange exultation over success in dark lines. The soul seems to be thrilled with a sense of its falling. On the same principle that the murderer Holmes took a pride in having killed over thirty people without being detected, that successful burglary fascinates, so that any kind of sin indulged in grows on the sinner. The one idol started with becomes thirty-three thousand at last to which Greece bowed down without regret or compunction. The occasional glass changes to twenty drinks a day. Careless speech to downright lying. Hasty judgment to indiscriminate and general censure.
Individual dislike to universal rancor and hatred. And so the man continues to sink, and always in the pit of his own making or selection. And he falls with the sin in his soul that as Scripture declares deceived his own heart and turned him aside. The Word adds, that such is his darkness and delusion that "He cannot deliver his soul, nor say, Is there not a lie in my right hand?"
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