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"For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"  —  Mark 8:36,37

  The Loss When A Soul Is Lost   (Continued)  

By Charles Finney

Look at the happiness of the righteous. Always increasing; ever more swelling its deep and gushing tides, with no limit to their growth and no end to their progression. Who does not know that this must be so? Look at the little infant. It seems to have but the least possible capacity, and this is developed at first only in its physical powers. All the earliest germs of sensation and emotion pertain to the body alone. The little one is hungry and cries; then is nursed and is quiet; it opens its little eye and beholds the light and is pleased; by-and-by it comes to know its mother's presence, and to love that beaming look of fondness and those soothing tones of love.

Here opens to that infant mind a new source of happiness, and new powers begin to develop themselves. The little one smiles responsive to the smiles of its now known mother, and enjoys the pleasure of being caressed and loved. Then on and on through opening life: new knowledge opens new sources of happiness; progress -- progress is the established law of our mental and sentient being. By-and-by that child, late an infant, is a pupil in school, and then a youth in college. On and still onward is his progress in knowledge.

Nor let us lose sight of the fact that the same law of progress obtains also in the department of the sensibility. A uniform relation is maintained between man's intellectual and sentient faculties. Knowledge increasing gives scope for increased joys or sorrows. Thus the mind progresses through all the stages of its earthly existence, new knowledge continually opening new sources of enjoyment or suffering. Mark how much that man or woman is capable of enjoying, compared with the capacity of his or her period of infancy. Now he may be bowed down under an overwhelming weight of sorrow, or he may be lifted up in ecstasies of joy unspeakable and full of glory. And this progress, we should remark, is often made despite of very unfavourable circumstances. The law of progress acts with a positive energy that no ordinary circumstances can resist.

But let us now look into the next world -- the next state of our existence. Knowledge sustains still the same relation to the sensibility; what you know there serves no less than it did here to augment your bliss or aggravate your woe. All the powers of your being sustain the same mutual relation as ever. Just think then how vast the joys and sorrows of that coming state! Mark how they tower high above all that is ever experienced in this brief state! This is no poetry. It is more than poetry -- infinitely more! It is too obviously and certainly true to admit of the least question. Its truth results from admissions you make and doctrines you hold as a Christian congregation -- admissions and doctrines common to all who are not atheists -- common to all who observe the laws of our present existence and who admit that these laws will follow our existence into our future state of being.

Following out these admitted truths to their necessary results, we see that the time must come, in the lapse of eternal ages, when each saint can say, I now enjoy more in a given time than all the saints in the universe did when I first entered heaven. For, as with knowledge, so with happiness: it must of course come under the same law of progress. Its measure must sustain its established correlation to the amount of our knowledge; so that, as the one stretches onward and still onward, with no limit to its progress, so also does the other. As therefore the time will come when no created mind can estimate the knowledge attained by the now feeblest intelligence, so will it also come when no capacity can estimate the measure of its happiness. The Bible says, God is able to do exceeding abundantly above all we are able to ask or even to think.

This will have its striking fulfillment in the future heights of bliss and glory to which he will raise his redeemed people. Oh, who can measure these heights of bliss and glory! Yet when you have fixed your eye upon their towering loftiness at any period along the track of endless ages, you have it to say then and there, This man's happiness is only begun. He has only just entered upon his everlasting progress in knowledge and in bliss. And still, so vast are his capacities at this remote period of his existence, that, if we could look into their amazing length and breadth and depth, and measure their magnitude, we should sink like dead men at the sight. See him drawing draughts of joy from God's own eternal fountains. Will he ever cease to quaff those draughts of joy? Never. Can they ever grow less? Nay; they must of necessity be for ever increasing.

Now see also the progress of the wicked. They, too, are moving onward. The law of progress cannot be arrested by any amount of sinning. Onward still their minds are progressing: more and more capacious for knowledge, and of course for sin and suffering. And Oh! What then? What follows from these established laws of the human mind and of human existence? Let your reflections trace out the fearful results which accrue from these laws of eternal progression. When we get into the midst of these things, the mind becomes exhausted and overpowered; it sinks down and cries out with crushing emotion, Oh! what an eternity is this for the sinner, lost for ever!

Oh! look upon that sinner after he has passed along through millions of ages of his unceasing progress in knowledge and in growing capacities for sin and suffering. Hear him. He says, hell knew but little of sin and suffering when I came here compared with what I suffer now! They all then sinned and suffered but little, even taken in the vast aggregate, compared with what I sin and suffer in my own single being now! Alas, I seem to have all hell in my own bosom! I sin and suffer enough with my vastly augmented powers to make an awful hell even if these agonies were equally distributed among myriads of my fellow-beings. How awful! Sin, misery, and ruin enough to make one awful hell, locked up in the agonised bosom of a single sinner!

If this were only poetry I should be glad, but all is true, and so much more is true that no language can express it; no modes of computation and no forms of estimate can reach its appalling magnitude. So much is true that to see the thousandth part of it must set your soul all on fire!

Take any sinner here -- any young man or woman from this congregation. Follow him onward from this hour through a life of sinning, a death of darkness and horror, and then onward still as he rolls in the agonies of the second death, and moves onward, age after age in the unceasing progress of a human mind expanding its intelligence, learning more and more of the God the sinner hates, and only hating Him for ever the more, and only making himself the more immeasurably wretched by sinning with more bitter hate, and suffering with still enlarged capacities as the eternal years roll on! O young man! you will one day be able to say, All that hell knew of suffering before I came here is nothing compared with what I now suffer.

All is nothing to the aggregate of my sins and of my sufferings. And all I now endure is only a beginning. My miseries have only begun. This soul of mine has only begun to know how to suffer the real sufferings of the damned. Its keen sensitiveness to agony has only begun to develop itself. Yet at some period in the flow of those endless years of progression in sorrow, each one will say, If all the universe at the moment of my death had taxed their minds to the utmost to conceive the guilt and miseries that wring my heart, they could not even have begun to reach the appalling estimate!

Continued