Thomas Allin > Quotes

“If it is said, that there maybe some infinite evil in sin, that, even if true (which nobody knows and Scripture nowhere teaches), does not make human guilt infinite. For on any just principle, guilt is determined by the capacities and powers of toe agent, and all these are in man strictly finite. Nay, the Bible, so far from taking this view, tells us that Israel has received of the Lord's hand double for all her sins, which involves a direct contradiction of any such theory of infinite guilt. -Is. xl. 2; Jer. xvi. 18. Besides, does not endless punishment prove, if true, that the judge never obtains satisfaction.”
― Thomas Allin, Christ Triumphant: Or Universalism Attested

“Nothing," says the late General GORDON , "can be more abject and miserable than the usual conception of God *** Imagine to yourself what pleasure it would be to Him to burn us, or to torture us. Can we believe any human being capable of creating us for such a purpose? We credit God with attributes which are utterly hateful to the meanest of men *** I say that Christian Pharisees deny Christ *** A hard, cruel set they are, from high to low. When one thinks of the real agony one has gone through in consequence of false teaching, it makes human nature angry with the teachers who have added to the bitterness of life.”
― Thomas Allin, Christ Triumphant: Or Universalism Attested

“The question is not, whether they might have escaped; the real questions are, do they in fact escape? and does He know that they will not escape? and, knowing this, does He, acting freely, yet create them?”
― Thomas Allin, Christ Triumphant: Or Universalism Attested

“Am I then to believe that the same God Who expends millions of years in slowly fitting this earth for man's habitation, will only allow to man himself a few fleeting years, or months, or hours, as it may be, as his sole preparation time for eternity? To settle questions so unspeakably great in their issue -questions stretching away to a horizon so far distant that no power of thought can follow them-in such hot haste, does seem quite at variance with our heavenly Father's ways. Is God's action outside man so slow, and within man so hurried? Is the husk of far more value than the seed? Are millions of years allotted to fashioning man's earthly home, while for man's spiritual training for eternity, but a few brief years are given, and these so largely broken up by sleep, by work, by disease, by ignorance? What should we say -to take a homely illustration -of an arrangement allotting 10,000 years to fashioning a man's coat, or building his house, while assigning to his whole education but a few hours?”
― Thomas Allin, Christ Triumphant: Or Universalism Attested

“(1.) --No one can deny that the New Testament contains a special revelation of the parental tie uniting us to God. When we pray and say, "our Father," these two words convey the spirit of the whole Gospel. Now, it is not too much to assert that the view generally held is an absolute negation of all that the parental tie implies. It robs the relation of all meaning. We have the very spirit of popular Christianity conveyed in the well-known line which tells us that we are ever in the great Taskmaster's eye." The great Taskmaster ---note the term, for it reduces to mockery the divine Fatherhood, though that is of the very essence of Christianity. What, for instance, shall we say of such a Father's appeal to those who, as He knows, will never hear? To Him there is no future -all is present ; the "lost" are lost, and yet He calls them; they are, on the traditional creed, virtually damned; and He knows it, and yet invites them to come and be saved. But all this difficulty comes from uniting two things absolutely irreconcilable -endless love and power, and yet endless evil. If we want to retain endless sin, let us return to the God of Calvin: nowhere else shall we find solid footing. This God at least is Lord and Master. He issues no invitations, knowing them to be in fact futile. He saves all whom He wants to save. His will must prevail. His Son sheds no drop of blood in vain, All for whom He dies are in fact saved, while the rest go to the devil. All this is hard -nay, cruel; but it is at least logical, intelligible. Contrast with this system the flabby creed of our pseudo-orthodoxy. Long ago it was shrewdly said by an old Calvinist, "universal salvation is credible, if universal Redemption be true." For it shocks the reason to be told of an universal Redemption, when all that is meant is an attempt at the redemption of all the race, which fails; it shocks the reason no less to be told of an unchanging love which wholly ceases the moment the last breath leaves the frail body.”
― Thomas Allin, Christ Triumphant: Or Universalism Attested

“It is a striking fact that the weight of opposition to universalism in primitive times is found in the Latin Church, is found most vigorous where, as in Augustine's case, the Greek language was never really mastered.”
― Thomas Allin

“But in fact the traditional creed knows nothing of what love really is. For love is simply the strongest thing in the universe, the most awful, the most inexorable, while the most tender. Further, when love is thus seen in its true colors, there is less than ever an excuse for the mistake still so common, which virtually places at the center of our moral system sin and not grace. This it is which the traditional dualism has for centuries been doing, and is still doing. Doubtless retribution is a most vital truth. Universalists rejoice to admit it; nay, largely to base on it their system; but there is a greater truth -which controls, and dominates the whole, the truth of Love. We must not, in common phrase, put the theological cart before the horse. Retribution must not come first, while love brings up the rear; nor must we put the idea of probation, before that of God's education of His human family. In a word, to arrive at truth is hopeless, so long as men virtually believe in a quasi-trinity -God and the Devil, and the Will of Man.”
― Thomas Allin, Christ Triumphant: Or Universalism Attested

“If God be unchangeable, then what we see-of Him at any moment, must be true of Him at every moment of time; true of Him also both before and after all the moments of time; always and for ever true of Him. If His purpose be to save mankind, that purpose stands firm for ever, unaffected by man's sin, unshaken by the fact of death, unaltered and unalterable by men, by angels, by naught conceivable." -Salv. Mundi.”
― Thomas Allin, Christ Triumphant: Or Universalism Attested

“My first appeal shall be to that primary revelation of Himself which God has implanted in the heart and conscience of man. I am merely expressing the deepest and most mature, though often unspoken, convictions of millions of earnest Christian men and women, when I assert, that to reconcile the popular creed, or any similar belief in endless evil and pain, with the most elementary ideas of justice, equity, and goodness (not even to mention mercy), is wholly and absolutely impossible. Thus this belief destroys the only ground on which it is possible to erect any religion at all, for it sets aside the primary convictions of the moral sense; and thus paralyses that by which alone we are capable of religion. If human reason be incompetent to decide positively that certain acts assigned to God are evil and cruel, then it is equally incompetent to decide that certain acts of His are just and merciful. Therefore if God be not good, just, and true, in the human acceptation of these terms, then the whole basis of revelation vanishes. For if God be not good in our human sense of the word, I have no guarantee that He is true in our sense of truth. If that which the Bible calls goodness in God should prove to be that which we call badness in man, then how can I be assured that, what is called truth in God, may not really be that which in man is called falsehood? Thus no valid communication -no revelation -from God to man is possible; for no reliance can, on this view, be placed on His veracity.”
― Thomas Allin, Christ Triumphant: Or Universalism Attested

“Before we can hope to understand the Fathers, or rightly to estimate the force of the testimony they bear to Universalism, we must try to place ourselves mentally where they stood. The Church was born into a world of whose moral rottenness few have, or can have, any idea. Even the sober historians of the later Roman empire have their pages tainted with scenes impossible to translate. Lusts the foulest, debauchery to us happily inconceivable, raged on every side. To assert even faintly the final redemption of all this rottenness, whose depths we dare not try to sound, required the firmest faith in the larger hope, as an essential part of the Gospel. But this is not all: in a peculiar sense the Church was militant in the early centuries. It was engaged in, at times, and always liable to, a struggle, for life or death, with a relentless persecution. Thus it must have seemed in that age almost an act of treason to the Cross to teach that, though dying unrepentant, the bitter persecutor, or the votary of abominab le lusts, should yet in the ages to come find salvation. Such considerations help us to see the extreme weight attaching even to the very least expression in the Fathers, which involves sympathy with the larger hope, -a fact to be kept in mind in reading these pages. Especially so when we consider that the idea of mercy was then but little known; (and that truth, as we conceive it, was not then esteemed a duty.)”
― Thomas Allin, Christ Triumphant: Or Universalism Attested

“And this brings us face to face with a blunder of our traditional creed, which is radical. It talks of God's love as though that stood merely on a par with His justice though it were something belonging to Him which He puts on or off. It is hardly possible to open a religious book in which this fatal error is not found; fatal, because it virtually strikes out of the Gospel its fundamental truth, that GOD IS LOVE. The terms are equivalent. They can be interchanged. God is not anger though He can be angry, God is not vengeance though He does avenge. These are attributes, love is essence. Therefore, God is unchangeably love. Therefore, in judgment He is love, in wrath He is love, in vengeance He is love-" love first, and last, and midst, and without end.”
― Thomas Allin, Christ Triumphant: Or Universalism Attested

“The secularist Austin Holyoake, for instance, argued that the doctrine of hell “brutalises all who believe in it”33 and was useless as a tool of moral improvement. Christianity was being accused of being immoral and some were rejecting the church because of its theology of hell.”
― Thomas Allin, Christ Triumphant: Universalism Asserted as the Hope of the Gospel on the Authority of Reason, the Fathers, and Holy Scripture. Annotated Edition

“A further plausible argument against Universalism is the alleged danger of teaching the larger hope. Those who so argue surely forget what their words involve if true. They involve a serious reflection on the Creator (a) who permits His children, made in His Image, to descend to such an abyss of degradation that only an endless hell can restrain them from sin; and Who, (b) knowing this, yet conceals, or permits to be concealed, from the vast majority of men this necessary antidote to sin; and Who, (c) in the Old Testament, gave a special revelation of Himself, and said nothing or almost nothing of it.”
― Thomas Allin, Christ Triumphant: Or Universalism Attested

“Pressed by the irresistible weight of these arguments many take refuge in ambiguous and evasive phrases, e.g., "Be sure God will do the best He can for every man." Ambiguous and evasive words, I repeat, as used by the advocates of endless torment and evil. For if they really mean that the best an Almighty Being can do for countless myriads of His children is to bestow on them, -practically to force on them -whether they will or not, an existence, stained with sin from the womb, knowing that in fact this sin will ripen into endless misery -then such phrases as the .above are but so much dust thrown in our eyes, they are as .argument beneath refutation. And if they do not mean this, such pleas are worthless as a defense of the ordinary creed. If endless misery is the certain result, known and foreseen, of calling me into existence, then to force on mc the gift of life, is to do for me not the best, but the worst possible.”
― Thomas Allin, Christ Triumphant: Or Universalism Attested

“Suppose it were offered to the father of three children to take his choice whether two should be received into heaven and one condemned to hell, or the whole should be annihilated in death. What would a parent say? Where is the father who would dare to secure the bliss of two children at the cost of the endless misery of one? Which of the family would he select as the victim, whose undying pain should secure his brother's immortal joy? Is there any one living who would not suffer himself and his children to sink back again into nothingness, rather than purchase heaven at such a price? Now, if so, if we should so act in the case of our own children, we are bound morally to make the same choice with respect to every one. No moral being would consent to purchase eternal happiness at the price of another's eternal woe. Hence it follows that a future life, on the popular view, is an evil to the human race, not to the wicked, but to all. For if annihilation of the whole race should be tendered as the alternative, no moral being could, as has been shown, refuse to accept it." -BARLOW, Eternal Punishment.”
― Thomas Allin, Christ Triumphant: Or Universalism Attested

“We smile at the ignorant savage who mutilates his body, thinking thereby to please his God. Are not we far worse who think to please our God by mutilating our noblest part, and to hear him better by silencing his voice in us? But our opponents do not forbid the argument from our nature to God: they only forbid the argument from what is best in our nature to His. They are ready to ascribe certain base qualities of humanity to God. Because we delight in vengeance, so does God. Because we are cruel, God must be so. But eighteen hundred years have not taught the mass of Christians to credit their heavenly Father with even so much love for His children, as a frail woman can feel for her offspring.”
― Thomas Allin, Christ Triumphant: Or Universalism Attested

“The popular view is familiar, and most men do not realize its true bearing, or the light in which it really presents the character of God. But consider how this dogma of endless evil must strike an inquirer after God, one outside the pale of Christianity, but sincerely desirous of learning the truth. There are such men -there are many such. You tell this inquirer that God is not Almighty only, but all good; that God is indeed love; that God is his Father. But these terms are words without any justification at all, if they have not their common ordinary sense when applied to God.”
― Thomas Allin, Christ Triumphant: Or Universalism Attested

“-This plea contradicts itself; for to assert that because of man's freedom he can go on for ever choosing evil, is, in fact, to plead not for human freedom, but for servitude, the basest, the most degrading. Take the assertion to pieces and it comes to this. To preserve man's dignity he must be permitted to become the slave of evil if he will, the associate of devils for ever -to secure his prerogative of freedom he must be allowed to sink into hopeless servitude to sin. What would you say were an earthly father to reason thus?-I will permit my child to become a hopeless drunkard for the sake of preserving his sobriety; I will permit my daughter to sink into vice for the sake of preserving her chastity. Under these circumstances, it is mere rhetoric to talk of "forcing" the will. The will yields, because it is free, and because good is finally the strongest force in an universe ruled by God.”
― Thomas Allin, Christ Triumphant: Or Universalism Attested

“Annihilation is the triumph of death over life: it is the very antithesis to the gospel, which asserts the triumph of Christ over every form of death.”
― Thomas Allin, Christ Triumphant: Universalism Asserted as the Hope of the Gospel on the Authority of Reason, the Fathers, and Holy Scripture. Annotated Edition

“While sin is universal, and sorrow and pain universal, shall not our hope be universal too? Shall not life be as universal as death, and salvation as universal as sin?”
― Thomas Allin, Christ Triumphant: Or Universalism Attested

“The dogma of hell, except in the rarest cases, did no moral good. It never affected the right persons. It tortured innocent young women and virtuous boys. It appealed to the lowest motives and the lowest characters. It never, except in the rarest instances, deterred from the commission of sin. It caused unceasing mental and moral difficulties. *** It always influenced the wrong people, and in a wrong way. It caused infidelity to some, temptations to others, and misery without virtue to most." -R. Suffield.”
― Thomas Allin, Christ Triumphant: Or Universalism Attested