The Debate on Eternal Punishment in Late Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century English Literature

IN HIS DICTIONARY Dr. Johnson defines religion as Virtue, as founded upon reverence of God, and expectation of future rewards and punishments. The extent to which this expectation was supposed to govern conduct in this life was very much a bone of contention in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In his valuable book The Decline of Hell, D. P. Walker deals with the debate on eternal torment, from its inception up to and through the seventeenth century, when it begins to be attacked with new vigor.1 Walker considers the debate in European terms, as does E. R. Briggs in two recent articles.2 The emphasis of the present review is more exclusively on the English debate, as sustained in the period between the Cambridge Platonists and the Romantics. In an attempt to discover what men felt about the doctrine of eternal punishment as well as what they merely said about it, the sources cited and the method adopted here will be literary rather than theological or philosophical. It is evident that the doctrine of future rewards and punishments poses fundamental questions about the nature of man and God. Is man such a fallible creature that he can only behave well under threat of damnation? Is God such a vindictive and unjust being that he consigns mortal creatures to an immortality of pain? This was a question which Davenant's Philosopher asked of the dying Christian

Art · Literature · Punishment (psychology · History · Philosophy · Psychology · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought · Social Psychology

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