“We believe that salvation is a gift of God and is received by man through personal faith in Jesus Christ and His sacrifice for sin. We believe that man is justified by grace through faith apart from works” (Acts 13:38-39, Romans 6:23, Ephesians 2:8-10). We believe that all true believers, once saved, are kept secure in Christ forever (Romans 8:1, 38-39; John 10:27-30). ” Sin is an immoral act considered to be a transgression against divine law, while the meaning of salvation combines many philosophical ideas, ideas that cannot be comprehended by a fixed mind.
Both words of diction displayed in Hamlet, were common ideas that Shakespeare audience, the Elizabethans, acknowledged. The Elizabethans believed that this general idea of sin and salvation led them to one of many probabilities of anticipating, heaven, hell, or purgatory, after bereavement. In order to go to heaven after living, one would have to disclose all their immoral actions before dying, but if one had not done so before they expired, than they would have no other choice but to go to hell, dealing with permeant agony and pain.
Claudius, the King of Denmark, can be used as an example of this idea, of sin and salvation. Filled with overwhelming desire for more than what he had already obtained, Claudius killed his brother to succeed the throne. As time advances forward, Claudius pursues clemency for murdering his brother. In a prayer between God and himself, Claudius says, “What if this cursed hand/ Were thicker than itself with brother’s blood? / Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens/ To wash it white as snow? …. Then I will look up/ My fault is past.
But, O, what form of prayer/ Can serve my turn? ‘Forgive me my foul murder’? That cannot be, since I am still possessed/ Of those effects for which I did the murder:/ My crown, mine own ambition and my queen. / May one be pardon’d and retain the offense? ” (III. 3. 47-60) Although Claudius confesses to his wrong doings, he is incompetent of asking for forgiveness. Unless Claudius is able to express some type of sorrow for his atrocious behavior, which means giving up the baggage he has acquired through his sinful actions, his prays of forgiveness will not answered; therefore his sin will stick’s with him, causing him to lose that salvation that he was once looking for.
Hamlet, the son of Claudius’s brother, Seeking revenge for his fathers death, recognizes that in the midst of King Claudius prayer, he is defenseless for a sneak attack. Nevertheless, he withholds on killing Claudius because if he was to die at that given moment in time, than the sins of the uncle would be washed away. Hamlet states, “Now might I do it (pat,) now he is a-praying,/ And now I’ll do’t. And so he goes to heaven/ And so am I (revenged. )/ That would be scanned: A villain kills my father; and for that/ I, his sole son, do this same villain send/ To heaven. (III. 3. 77-83)
Hamlet determines that he wants to kill Claudius when he will cease to exist in the midst of his sins, which will allow Claudius to undergo some type of calamitous amercement after death. The reason Hamlet goes through as this trouble is due the fact that he wants his fathers killer to endure suffering in their afterlife, meaning hell. Another way in which one could go to hell in the after life, was to committing suicide. In Hamlet is it evident that two characters, Ophelia and Hamlet, both had thoughts of ending their life’s.
After the death of her father, Ophelia, who found dead in the water, did not get a traditional Christian burial, assuming that she had committed suicide. Gertrude, the Queen of Denmark, gives a descriptive image of her death by saying, “When down her weedy trophies and herself/ Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,/ And, mermaid-like awhile they bore her up,/ ….. Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, / Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay/ To muddy death. ”(IV. 7. 199-208) In the beginning of the play is is clear that the mind of state of Hamlet, is suicidal.
After the serious of fortune events, he believes his surrounding is fill with dishonesty. Hamlet says to himself, “O, that this too sullied flesh would melt/ Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,/ Or that the Everlasting had not fixed/ His canon ‘gainst (self-slaughter! ) O God, God, / How (weary,) stale, flat, and unprofitable/ Seem to me all the uses of this world! ” (I. 2. 133-138) That’s a lot of internal conflict for one tortured adolescent. But the thought of suicide frightens him, as he knows the punishment for that is hell. Though he also fears the unknown, hereby questioning the common beliefs of what happens after death.
He shows fear of this unknown; makes him endure the oppressions of life. “To be or not to be—that is the question:/Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer/The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,/ Or to take arms against a sea of troubles/ And, by opposing, end them” (3. 1. 64-68). Dr. Samuel f this celebrated soliloquy, which bursting from a man distracted with contrariety of desires, and overwhelmed with the magnitude of his own purposes, is connected rather in the speaker’s mind, than on his tongue, I shall endeavor to discover the train, and to show how one sentiment produces another.
Hamlet, knowing himself injured in the most enormous and atrocious degree, and seeing no means of redress, but such as must expose him to the extremity of hazard, meditates on his situation in this manner: Before I can form any rational scheme of action under this pressure of distress, it is necessary to decide, whether, after our present state, we are to be or not to be. That is the question, which, as it shall be answered, will determine, whether ’tis nobler, and more suitable to the dignity of reason, to suffer the outrages of fortune patiently, or to take arms against them, and by opposing end them, though perhaps with the loss of life.
If to die, were to sleep, no more, and by a sleep to end the miseries of our nature, such a sleep were devoutly to be wished; but if to sleep in death be to dream, to retain our powers of sensibility, we must pause to consider, in that sleep of death what dreams may come. Hamlet is starting to sound like a broken record with the whole suicide thing. But in this later soliloquy, he just might be moving on. Instead of obsessing about whether or not to kill himself, he’s exploring the reasons why people in general don’t commit suicide—which might be one reason he doesn’t use the word “I” or “me” in this whole soliloquy.
Throughout the play Hamlet concerns himself with the idea of death and over the course of the play he considers death from many perspectives. Hamlet ponders both the spiritual aftermath of death, embodied in the ghost, Ophelia’s death and the physical remainders of the dead – the decaying corpses in the cemetery. Death is both the cause and consequence of revenge, and as a cause of this Hamlet reflects upon sin and salvation
