• Introduction - To the American Reader
• Preface to the Fifth Edition
• Author's Preface
• CHAPTER 1. Future Punishment Is Eternal.
• CHAPTER 2. Eternal Death
• CHAPTER 3. Testimony Of The Old Testament.
• CHAPTER 4. Testimony Of The New Testament.
• CHAPTER 5. The Greek Of The New Testament.
• CHAPTER 6. The Primary Sense Of Terms Vindicated.
• CHAPTER 7. The Illustrations Of Scripture.
• CHAPTER 8. The Resurrection Of The Wicked.
• CHAPTER 9. The Divine Justice.
• CHAPTER 10. The Extinction Of Evil.
• CHAPTER 11. Examination Of Particular Texts.
• CHAPTER 12. Distinctions In Future Punishment.
• CHAPTER 13. Theories Of Punishment And Christian Missions.
• CHAPTER 14. Some Objections Answered.
• CHAPTER 15. The Apostolic Fathers. Clement Of Rome.
• CHAPTER 16. Justin Martyr.
• CHAPTER 17. Irenaeus, Martyr And Bishop Of Lyons.
• CHAPTER 18. Rise Of The Theory Of Eternal Life In Hell.
• CHAPTER 19. Tertullian.
• CHAPTER 20. Rise Of The Theory Of Universal Restoration Origen.
• CHAPTER 21. Conclusion.

The Duration And Nature Of Future Punishment

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By HENRY CONSTABLE, A.M.
Prebendary of Cork

Fifth Edition - 1875

CHAPTER IX

Divine Justice

WE now approach a very solemn question—the question of Divine Justice. We approach it with the deep reverence that becomes a creature when he scans and judges the conduct of his Maker; but also with the confidence which becomes one who is invited by his Maker to this inquiry. It is indeed said that we are not able to judge of God's ways; and this, no doubt, is often true. It is true, however, only of those dealings of His with which we are imperfectly acquainted; or which, from their nature, are above our comprehension. The present subject belongs to neither of these categories. Future punishment is a matter fully placed before us. No question occupies a more distinct position than it does in divine revelation. We are clearly told its cause and its nature: we are told to ponder on and study it. We are not treated as children incapable of forming an opinion of what is just or unjust in God. If we were thus incapable, a large portion of Scripture would be useless and meaningless. Called upon in God's Word to love, respect, and confide in Him, and having His entire conduct towards men, whether just or unjust, brought to our view, in order to produce these feelings in us, we are thus viewed by God Himself as capable of judging of His character, of His love, His mercy, His wisdom, His justice, and His judgment. He does not thus merely regard us as capable, but He has directly appealed to us to judge His conduct towards us, admitted His creature's scrutiny as the exercise of a right, and this not merely in the case of His faithful people but even of those who were alienated from Him. Abraham was not rebuked when he judged a certain supposed line of conduct unworthy of the God in whom his trust was placed. Rebellious Israel, misjudging God's dealings from ignorance and prejudice, are invited to look fairly at it and see if indeed God's "ways are not equal." Christ allows to the generation of His day the power of judging rightly, and only on such a supposition could they lie under their deep guilt.¹ "The law of justice in our hearts," it has been well observed, "is only a reflection of God's perfect justice."² In the human breast there is a true sense of what is just, and God not only allows it, but insists upon its exercise towards Himself. He has told us His character. He challenges us to bring any line of conduct attributed to Him to the test. In the question of future punishment we have the highest case on which any tribunal shall have ever sat; and we may be sure that the Judge of all the Earth will do right, not merely in His own eyes, but in those of all His intelligent creation; of the angels who stand round His throne; of theredeemed who rejoice in their acceptance; of the very damned who listen to their sentence.

2. But we are often told that, while no doubt God's conduct towards sinners will one day appear to the redeemed and even to the lost to have been just, yet that we must be content to wait until it shall so appear. This life is to pass away, the hour of resurrection must come, the throne of judgment must be set, the guilt of the lost be displayed, the everlasting sentence be passed, and then, the redeemed and the lost alike will see that God's ways were just. Not so, we reply. God appeals to us now to judge. He places before us His character now, in order that we may judge. It is now that our conduct is to be affected, our fears aroused, our respect gained, our love won, for the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is now that misapprehension of Him will tell with power: it is now that a correct judgment is to save the soul. When the judgment is set and the sentence passed, it is too late.

3. But they who tell us to wait in faith wholly miscalculate the real position of the question before us. They suppose faith in God is to sustain the mind against the appearance of injustice in God's dealings with men. They reverse the mode of God's own proceeding. They suppose faith first to exist, and this faith is to withstand and subdue all that may appear unjust. The exact opposite to this is the way in which God deals with man. He has come to an unbelieving and alienated world and put his character before then to win their fear, their repentance, their love. We judge from our little stand point, taught from infancy to believe in God, to believe that He can do no wrong, to attribute any appearance of wrong on His part to our ignorance, to put down all injurious judgment of Him as unbelief and sin. With all our training at our mother's knee, from our teacher's lips, from that pulpit where man claims to speak in the name of God, we yet know how the Christian heart and judgment mourn, stumble, are perplexed, stand aghast, at the justice which is proposed to them as the justice of God. But it was not thus that the question was first presented, or that the human mind was won to submission. It was to a world of unbelievers that God was proposed as a God of justice, as well as of pity and of love. To this world, which had no faith, God was proposed for acceptance. God's character and conduct were placed before it to win its faith and its love. So it is even now. So it is to a great extent even in so-called Christian lands: it is so wholly in heathen lands. God's character and conduct are to win faith; not to be sustained by faith against appearances. The missionary tells the unbeliever what kind of God the God of the Christian is, to convert the unbeliever to the faith. Can we wonder that the answer of the heathen to our messages should be, "We cannot, and will not, believe in a God of whom you affirm such outrageous wrong."

4. We arrange the matter as God has arranged it. God's conduct, whether past or future, is to win man's respect, faith, and love, and not to be hardly and with difficulty palliated, excused, defended, tolerated, through man's faith. We are to come not merely to the truthful child at our knee, to the modest youth in our school, to the admiring disciple listening to our words; but we are, and may, and ought, to come to the incredulous sceptic, the profligate sinner, the hard stern man, to the poor heathen outside our pale, the outcast Pariah, the cultivated Brahmin, the followers of Confucius, and say to one and all, "Here is our God, the God and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ: give Him your love: give Him your faith, give Him your obedience and your fear: His character demands it at your hands." It is thus we will propose the grand question of the Divine justice in the treatment of sinners. We will not wait for the day of judgment to propose it. We propose it, when it ought to be proposed, in the day of salvation. We ask the human heart for its verdict. We say that judged by human judgment, and that the judgment of believers and unbelievers alike, the punishment which the theory of Augustine supposes that God will inflict is infinitely too great, and we are therefore to reject it as untrue, because wholly unworthy, not merely of a Merciful Father, but a just God.

5. Before we put our question of just or unjust, we must, first refer plainly to the punishment itself: We will not attempt to describe it in our own words. We will merely give a few passages descriptive of it from writers who hold the view.

6. Here is an extract from a little book entitled "The Child's Path to Glory," published at Birmingham, and which has passed through at least seven editions: "There is nothing but misery in hell. You would never more have one moment's ease; for there is nothing but pain and torment there. Put together all you can think of that is miserable, and painful, and terrible, and it is all nothing to what is prepared for those who go there; and that not for an hour, or a day, or a year, but for an eternity. The lost souls who live in that horrible pit wish to die, but they are not able; for God says, 'Their worm dieth not.'The frightful and cruel devil may torment them as much as he pleases—they are made strong to bear it." Here is the description of hell by the Christian Father Hippolytus: "The fire which is unquenchable and without end awaits the unrighteous, and a certain fiery worm which dieth not, and which does not waste the body, but continues bursting forth from the body with unending pain. No sleep will give them rest: no night will soothe them: no death will deliver them from punishment." Here is the celebrated Bishop Jeremy Taylor's account: "We are amazed to think of the brutality of Phalaris, who roasted men alive in his brazen bull. That was a joy in respect of that fire of hell. What comparison will there be between burning for a hundred years' space and to be burning without interruption as long as God is God!" Here is the account given by the famous Jonathan Edwards of America: "The woes of sinners in hell will not be a cause of grief to the saints in heaven but of rejoicing. Though they hear you groan, and sigh, and gnash your teeth, these things will not move them at all to pity you. After your godly parents have seen you lie millions of years, or ages, in torment, day and night, they will not begin to pity you then. They will praise God that His justice appears in the eternity of your misery. The torments in hell will be immeasurably greater than being in a glowing oven, a brick kiln, or fiery furnace." Here is the way in which the Roman Church describes Hell. It is taken from a book written by the Rev. J. Furniss, and published with the approval of the authorities of his Church: "The fifth dungeon is the red-hot oven. The little child is in the red-hot oven. Hear how it screams to come out; see how it turns and twists itself in the fire. It beats its head against the roof of the oven. It stamps its little feet on the floor. God was very good to this little child. Very likely God saw it would get worse and worse, and would never repent, and so it would have to be punished more severely in hell. So God, in his mercy, called it out of the world in early childhood." Here is the description of Hell by the celebrated preacher Mr. Spurgeon: "Only conceive that poor wretch in the flames, who is saying, 'Oh, for one drop of water to cool my parched tongue!' See how his tongue hangs from between his blistered lips! How it excoriates and burns the roof of his mouth, as if it were a firebrand! Behold him crying for a drop of water! I will not picture the scene! Suffice it for me to close up by saying that the hell of hells will be to thee, poor sinner, the thought that it is to be for ever! Thou wilt look up there on the throne of God, and it shall be written 'For Ever!' When the damned jingle the burning irons of their torment they shall say 'For Ever!' When they howl, echo cries 'For Ever!'

"'For Ever' is written on their racks,
'For Ever' on their chains
'For Ever' burneth in the fire,
'For Ever,' ever reigns."

We will close our series of "horrible extracts" with a quotation from Pollok. He thus pictures one of the damned:—

"Like A cinder that had life and feeling seemed
His face, with inward pining to be what
He could not be. As being that had burned

Half an eternity, and was to burn
For evermore, he looked. Oh! sight to be
Forgotten, thought too terrible to think."

The poet's picture of the damned would not be complete if we did not add his picture of God throughout all eternity looking on it as one who

"Hears unmoved the endless groan
Of those wasting within, and sees unmoved
The endless tear of vain repentance fall."

7. These are very horrifying descriptions. We turn with unmitigated loathing from the idea that a scene such as is depicted above by Hippolytus, and Jeremy Taylor, and Father Furniss, is to go on to eternity. But others, who do not agree with us in our view of future punishment, are almost, if not altogether, as much disgusted with them as we are. The ablest and purest minds, that still cling desperately to the Augustinian theory, cannot endure such descriptions, and will not allow that they represent the hell in which they believe. They gravely reprobate the horrors which were so dear and familiar to the middle ages, and which are still urged in all their minute and terrible detail by preachers and writers, Protestant and Romanist. They do not think them true descriptions of hell. They think that they exaggerate its terrors. Dr. Salmon, of Trinity College, Dublin, a man widely known, and respected wherever he is known, rejects with indignation the idea "that all who hold the eternal existence of the wicked, must believe in the demonology of Dante, and in a hell such as is described by Father Pinamonti. He thinks such descriptions too harrowing, and in fact only suitable to an age characterised by "general callousness to human suffering."³ He takes refuge in the idea that the descriptions of Scripture which such men as Bishop Taylor and Father Furniss and Pinamonti have taken as the groundwork of their more minute and circumstantial accounts, are probably not literal, but figurative. He evidently does not believe in a literal fire, or literal worm in hell.

8. While we honour the feeling of such men as Dr. Salmon we do so at the expense of their reasoning ability. We do not ourselves enter into the question whether the descriptions of future punishment in Scripture are literal or figurative, because we do not think the solution of the question to be really of any consequence. Scripture tells us there will be a worm, a fire, darkness, &100.; but it does not seem to take any trouble to explain whether it speaks literally or figuratively. But, whichever view be taken of its language, it must commend itself to reason that the punishment signified is in either case equally terrible though different in character. If there be a literal fire consuming, and a literal worm gnawing, we know the exact pain produced: if the fire and the worm be figurative, they are figurative of a pain and suffering such in intensity as would be produced by the literal agents. Nothing then is really gained by rejecting the literal view of Dante and Pinamonti, or by changing the bodily pains of which they chiefly speak into suffering and anguish of the mind. If the descriptions of Scripture are figures they are at the same time true figures: if they are not to be understood literally they must yet be understood as giving us the truest and best ideas possible of the real anguish and misery of hell. On no hypothesis can we understand hell as other than a scene where pain and anguish, mental or bodily, or both, of the most intense and terrible nature, are endured by all who have any existence there. Hell cannot by any artful handling of words, by any skilful manipulation of phrases, be toned down into a place other than of the most fearful kind. If Dr. Salmon and others object to literal pains of the body for ever, they can only substitute for them pains of the mind that are just as bad. They gain nothing by the exchange. While, by removing from the mind the picture of hell and its pains which Scripture undoubtedly presents, they remove, so far as in them lies, a very leading motive which God has Himself placed before the mind of man. We doubt not that Fathers Furniss and Pinamonti are more scriptural than the men of feeling who are trying to whitewash hell to render it more endurable to the mind. Descriptions such as Christ has given are not to be by us withdrawn as too terrible. He has spoken of "unquenchable fire" and the undying "worm," and we may not, and ought not, to withhold these terrible images from the mind. The real question is, not whether they are literal or figurative, but whether the pains they point to and pourtray are pains to be endured for ever; or are pains which sooner or later produce a destruction of the sentient being, from which there is no recovery. We take the mental conflicts of such minds as those of Dr. Salmon, of Albert Barnes, and others, to be unconscious rejections on their part of the Augustinian hell as a punishment which could not be inflicted by a merciful and just God. We had these attempts at explaining away the awful terrors of biblical description as harbingers of the day when no man will dare to stand up and say that any man or fallen angel however guilty is to endure pain and agony throughout that eternity in which the unfallen and the redeemed enjoy their endless life.

9. Literal or figurative then, the descriptions which we have above quoted from various Augustinian writers are substantially true, if the Augustinian theory is true. Father Furniss did not invent his "red-hot oven," he only took it ready to hand from Malachi: Hippolytus did not originate his gnawing worm, or Jeremy Taylor his fire of hell, they only copied from the words of Christ.⁴ Between them and us there is a wide difference indeed; for we hold that these are consuming and destroying agents, reducing the living to death, and removing even the appearance of that which has become dead and loathsome. But between those who hold the descriptions of Scripture as literal, and those who hold them to be figurative, there is no difference of any material kind. Both believe in anguish of the most terrible nature as continuing throughout eternity: nor can we well see how they can refuse the additional idea that this anguish must go on increasing throughout eternity as the despair of any end grows blacker and blacker.

10. Such then, according to the Augustinian theory, is to be the eternal future of myriads of creatures framed and fashioned by God. Such descriptions, be they literal or be they figurative, are, according to their teaching, true of every being placed in hell. They picture the eternity not only of fallen angels and men who rejected the Gospel, but of the multitudes who never heard the name of the Father and the Son. If the "second death," and "everlasting destruction," and "perishing," of the wicked, be what the theory of Augustine teaches, the ignorant heathen endure it as well as the rejector of the Gospel; for they who "have sinned without law shall perish" as they who sinned in the law; and the men of Tyre and Sidon and Nineveh must appear in the judgment as well as the generation which listened to the words of Christ."⁵ Eternal agonies are the "few stripes" which Augustine's theory has provided for the most ignorant offender. Are eternal agonies a just punishment for any, be they servants who knew or were ignorant of their Master's will? We will take the latter case first.

11. We will take the case of some poor islander of a remote Pacific isle. Steeped in densest ignorance was his mind from the day he was cast a helpless infant upon this dark world, to the time he sunk back still more helpless in death. No lesson of virtue, of moderation, of purity, had ever cast its light on him. What should he know of justice who only saw the strong oppressing those who were weaker than they? What should he know of purity who in the women of his tribe or nation had never seen one who had even a faint idea of woman's highest grace? How was religion in his case to give him some higher, holier, lovelier notions than he could learn from his fellow man? Religion! The gods whom he worshipped—if indeed he worshipped any—were gods to whom rites of cruelty and impurity were a pleasing incense!

12. We do not say of such a man that he has no guilt. We do not believe that any one gifted with reason has ever lived a life free from guilt. Even where no revelation of true religion kept fully before the human mind the sense of right and wrong as in the sight of God—even where no distorted ray of tradition still kept up some rude sense of the essential difference of some from other actions—even in the darkest age and the remotest corner where a degraded humanity sees only a society as degraded as itself, even there the pain and suffering which evil inflicts through one man upon another keeps alive in the lowest type of the human mind the sense of a right and of a wrong.

13. The savage has indeed never heard such divine lessons as the Gospel teaches in its every page—of a God who loves His enemies, and so urges upon His children to be "tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you." The savage has never, in his experience or in the dim tradition of his tribe, conceived of such a man as Jesus of Nazareth, who, in all his aims, had none for self, but all for His Father and His brethren. But, in his smoking homestead, his slaughtered children, his wife carried captive to another's lust—in scenes such as these, and by acts such as these, some sense of right and wrong, produced by the sense of injury and loss, is kept alive, and where there is the sense of right and wrong there is the capacity of offending and the claim for punishment from God.

14. But how is such a man's guilt to be estimated to be weighed in the scales of justice, to be adjudged its fitting recompense? We have the Divine words for saying that this man's guilt is small. The judgment of reason is confirmed by that of God. A favourite proposition of our Augustinian opponents, through by no means so favourably regarded now as it used to be, is that "All sin is of an infinite nature, and requires endless conscious suffering as its only suitable punishment." But what says God, and God's Son, of the sins of heathen men? Do we find Jesus Christ, who came down from heaven to tell us His Father's mind, talking the scholastic jargon which our modern preachers have learned from the ingenious brain-twisting of the middle ages? We do not. What does He say of sins such as we have spoken of? Speaking even of Jews, who had so much fuller light than heathen men possess, He yet declared that if He had not "come and spoken unto them they would not have had sin." While of the dark heathen sinner He said, "He that knew not his Lord's will, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes."⁶ And thus we find from the highest authority that the sins of the heathen are light, and that the punishment which they shall feel shall be also light—a few stripes. They are the words of Christ. And is hell, according to Augustine's theory, a place of few stripes to any placed therein? Is a life of endless agony, of despair growing more despairing as eternity rolls on and still brings no relief, no prospect of a close—is this a just punishment for the offences of heathen? Is this the Christian man's explanation of the "few stripes" of Christ his Master? A few stripes! Why if Methuselah had been multiplying the figures of arithmetic from the time he could calculate till he reached his 969th year he could not have arrived at any appreciable part of the sum of the stripes which the Augustinian theory would inflict on the sinners of the heathen.

15. Away then with this diabolical doctrine which shocks all our sense of justice and casts bitter contempt upon the merciful words of Christ. Is a life of endless agony, ever increasing, what Jesus meant by a "few stripes?" God forbid that we should dare thus to tamper with his words. The heathen offender will know of no such hell as Mr. Spurgeon, and Father Furniss, and President Edwards, and Bishop Jeremy Taylor have depicted. When the Red Indian of the American forest, or the dusky child of the remote Pacific isle wakes up at the solemn resurrection and hears judgment pronounced against him for wilful offence against such dim light as he possessed, it will not be condemnation to a place where he is to suffer agony while the redeemed of Christ enjoy their endless life. The Lord has told us so, and we believe Him.

16. A word, before we pass on, upon the important bearing of this on the real nature of future punishment. An eternal life of misery we reject for heathen offenders not merely from our sense of justice but also from the express words of Christ. But from hence it follows that the terms descriptive of future punishment in Scripture have no such meaning. Heathen offenders are said to "perish" in the coming judgment. ⁷ It does not mean here to endure endless misery. It can only then mean its usual meaning when applied to men treated as criminals, viz., to have existence taken from them. We have thus determined the scriptural use of this word—one of the most important and most frequently used in reference to future punishment. What "perishing" means for one lost sinner it means for all. The process indeed may, nay certainly will, widely differ; so as to bring true the words of Christ, "for some many stripes, for some few," but the end is the same for all; it is the loss of the eternal life which Christ came to give back to man.

17. But we will not stop at the case of the sinners of the heathen. We will take the case that makes most strongly for our opponents' theory. We will ask if pain inflicted through eternity, endured without any hope of an end, no nearer to its close when numberless cycles have passed than when the first groan was uttered, is such a just punishment for any conceivable amount of sin committed by the worst of men? Man did not ask for life; it was given him without his knowledge or consent. Can any abuse of this unasked-for gift justify the recompense of an existence spent in everlasting agony?

18. We must put this question on its proper grounds. The ablest modern defenders of everlasting misery have put it on a false issue. They have done so in two main respects, urged on by their conscious inability to justify their theory in its naked light. The first of these we will give in the words of William Archer Butler, whose view is adopted by Dr. Salmon, Professor Mansel, Dr. Angus, and many others.⁸ "The punishments of hell," says Butler, "are but the perpetual vengeance that accompanies the sins of hell. An eternity of wickedness brings with it an eternity of woe. The sinner is to suffer for everlasting; but it is because the sin itself is as everlasting as the suffering."

19. We must fairly and fully look at this astounding proposition. Our readers will first remark how it is an attempt to change the ground on which the justice of everlasting misery is sought to be defended. The plea used to be that "Sin being committed against an infinite, Being was itself on this account infinite, and therefore deserved to be punished with pain and misery as long as the infinite Being Himself existed." This plea now justly does not satisfy Augustinian theorists. Some of them, indeed, seem to consider it what it truly is, an argument worthy of the malignity of a devil linked with the ingenuity of a Schoolman. On this ground, a single sin against God must be met by the punishment of agony as long as God lived. So the ground must be changed. Our opponents are now busy executing a flank march to take up their new ground. Instead of the old cry, "Sin is infinite, and deserves unending suffering," we now hear, "The sinner will commit an infinite number of sins, and so will deserve suffering as infinite and endless."

20. We will first remark that this is a complete, if not conscious confession, that the sins of the present life, however aggravated and numerous, do not deserve to be punished by everlasting misery. This is exactly what we contend for. This is now conceded by every man who adopts the view just mentioned. Dr. Salmon, Dr. Angus, Professor Mansel, and their sympathisers, confess, that to punish the sins of this life with endless misery would be the grossest injustice.⁹ "Continued punishment" says Dr. Angus, "means continued sin." "If the wicked suffer," says Dr. Salmon, "it is because they are still rebels against God." Both of these gentlemen agree with us that to go on inflicting suffering through eternity for the sins long past of this present life, no matter what their character, would be to be guilty of inconceivable injustice:For endless suffering there must be, in this judgment, a course of sin just as endless.

"Charge not a God with such outrageous wrong."

21. But, good God, what a prospect do these men hold out to our view! "In that mysterious condition of the depraved will," says Professor Mansel, "compelled and yet free—the slave of sinful habit, yet responsible for every act of sin, and gathering deeper condemnation as the power of amendment grows less and less; may we not see some possible foreshadowing of the yet deeper guilt and the yet more hopeless misery of the worm that dieth not, and the fire that is not quenched?" This is one of Dr. Angus' alleviations of hell! This is one of those lights which are to relieve the terrible blackness of the place of doom! Sins throughout eternity increasing in number, in magnitude, and in guilt! Condemnation and punishment throughout eternity gathering force and falling more terribly upon the wretched sufferers! Talk of Fathers Furniss and Pinamonti giving descriptions too horrible to be heard! Talk of Jeremy Taylor's or Mr. Spurgeon's accounts as too harrowing to the mind! They are almost merciful in the face of a theory which describes eternity as entering down an endless course of increasing sin calling for endlessly increasing punishment.

22. And do not these fearful reasoners see that their theory obliterates that marked distinction which Christ has drawn between the sin and the punishment of heathen men and wilful offenders? No distinction of knowledge can continue between one man and another after the judgment day. And then they place the sinners of a once greater or lesser knowledge side by side, and suppose that both will go on through eternity adding to the number of wilfulsins. Any difference that existed in this life from ignorance or knowledge would soon be imperceptible in that ever-increasing catalogue of fresh wilful sins which both alike would and must add to their account. The comparative ignorance on which Christ rests so much, the comparative guilt which He so strongly marks, the wide difference of punishment which He speaks of, would all vanish in that awful vista of an eternity in which all the lost alike were ever adding to the number and magnitude of known and wilful sins. Thank God, we have a Word which sweeps away this vision of terror from our sight.

23. It may very fairly be questioned whether, according to any principles of divine or human law, the lost in hell are capable of sinning. We deny that that they are. "Sin is the transgression of the law," St. John tells us; and Paul lays down this great principle of equity, "Where no law is, there is no transgression."¹⁰ We deny that those who are denied all the benefits of law, and subjected to its greatest and final penalty, are ever considered as under the law, or capable of incurring any fresh guilt from its infraction. We call upon our opponents to produce any authority for their terrible theory: to produce from any code of human law any justification of it. Scripture, from first to last, says not one word of the sins of hell. Let them listen to the just words of a man who agrees with them in their view of future punishment but denounces their idea of the possibility of sinners adding to their sin in hell. "'Sin is the transgression of the law,' says Mr. Girdlestone, "but what law will be laid down for the guidance of those who are bound hand and foot, and cast into outward darkness in Gehenna? 'To him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin' (James 4:17); but what knowledge of good will there be among those who will have had all their talents taken from them? In a word, as the saved will be raised above the possibility of sinning; so the lost will be sunk below it." Elsewhere he says, "Is there any thing in the nature of eternal punishment which makes an eternity of sin certain, probable, or even possible? We think not. What does the Scripture say on this subject? Turning to the various texts which set forth the future and eternal punishment of the wicked, do we find anything to justify us in accepting the conclusion here suggested? Are there any intimations in God's Word that men will go on sinning for ever in the world to come? Does not the whole spirit and tenor of the Scripture go the other way? Can any single verse be pointed out which show that the lost will continue in sin hereafter? No; we see neither the authority of the Scripture, nor the voice of reason, in favour of this idea, which appears to be absolutely without foundation."¹¹

24. But, altogether independent of the question as to whether the outlaws of hell are capable of transgressing law, it is sufficient to say of the view that the punishment of the future is entirely, chiefly, or in the smallest degree, inflicted for the sins of the future, that it contradicts the teaching of Scripture, and is therefore to be rejected as a lie. Not once or twice, but over and over again, it tells us that the punishment of the future is for the sins of the present life.¹²The ablest defenders of the theory of everlasting misery are forced to confess this. "The justice of God," says Archbishop Tillotson, "doth only punish the sins which men have committed in this life." "The evil done by man in this life," says Mr. Paley, commenting on Paul's description of the grounds of future punishment in Romans 2:9, "is what is spoken of, no other evil was in the apostle's thoughts." And Mr. Landis, referring especially to the texts above referred to, says, "In all these, and in multitudes of other passages, there is a clear retrospective reference to sin perpetrated here as the sole ground of the judicial decision and succeeding punishment."¹³ If we think this punishment too great, we are not at liberty to throw in the sins of the future, real or imaginary, to justify the punishment of the future. If we cannot defend man's future treatment as a just award for his present conduct, we cannot justify it at all. Do we not put ourselves into the exact position of the false prophets of Israel to whom God sternly says, "Have ye not seen a vain vision; and have ye not spoken a lying divination: whereas ye say, the Lord saith it; albeit I have not spoken?"¹⁴ It is indeed a piece of impious effrontery for us to present as a reason for God's conduct what God has not Himself presented when explaining to man His judicial action. Just fancy an earthly judge sentencing a criminal to a punishment too severe for the offence committed, and then gravely justifying his sentence by the observation that the criminal would be sure to deserve it all by his conduct in gaol![jail]Yet such is the judicature, unworthy of a Jeffreys, which professors of theology and doctors of divinity take upon them to ascribe, without any authority from Him, to the Judge of the whole earth!

25. Another very favourite refuge for the Augustinian theorist, in defending his fearful view of future punishment from the charge of cruelty and injustice, is that it only follows that natural law which inextricably links together sin and misery. They represent God as though he did not directly interpose in the matter, but left things to take their natural course. As this course would, from the very nature of moral evil, lead certainly and irresistibly to misery, they imagine that such a view of hell shields their theory from its apparent harshness and injustice. They suppose that God just banishes the wicked to a place where they are kept from doing further injury: that in this place they of course go on indulging in all evil passions: and that the indulgence in their evil passions involves misery, and is in fact the terrible hell of the future. They would thus shield God from the awful aspect of directly inflicting pain upon His creatures throughout all eternity. Future punishment is thus, with them, allowing things to take their natural course. The only part God takes in it is that He allows this course, originally ordained by Himself, to go on, and does not interfere with it.

26. We do not say that Bishop Butler originated this view of future punishment; but certainly more modern thinkers have eagerly followed his lead, and have gladly sheltered themselves under the authority of England's greatest theological reasoner. We apprehend that the present controversy on the eternity of evil will reveal the weak points in the armour of the great Bishop of Durham, and that chapters 1:and 2:of part I of the famous "Analogy" will be seen to be those parts which show that even Butler's marvellous reason had its imperfection and its flaw. In chapter 2:he defends future punishment on the ground that it may be the natural effect and consequence of sin.¹⁵

27. Later thinkers, who will scarcely deem it an injustice to be ranked as inferior in intellectual power to the Bishop of Durham, have followed out the idea of Butler. "May we not," says Professor Mansel, "trace something not wholly unlike the irrevocable sentence of the future, in that dark and fearful, yet too certain law of our nature, by which sin and misery ever tend to perpetuate themselves; by which evil habits gather strength with every fresh indulgence, till it is no longer, humanly-speaking, in the power of the sinner to shake off the burden which his own deeds have laid upon him? In that mysterious condition of the depraved will, compelled and yet free—the state of sinful habit, yet responsible for every act of sin, and gathering deeper condemnation as the power of amendment grows less and less; may we not see some possible foreshadowing of the yet deeper guilt, and the yet more hopeless misery of the worm that dieth not, and the fire that is not quenched?" Dr. Salmon shows a very evident inclination to give the same view, through he carefully and very prudently guards himself from being supposed to assert that there is no other punishment to be apprehended than such as follows in the way of natural consequence.¹⁶

28. But the writer of our day who has put forward this view with a minuteness and circumstantiality that equals in its tremendous power the descriptions of Romish and Protestant preachers in their details of the material torments of hell, is Dr. Pussy. "Gather in your mind," he says, "an assembly of all those men and women, from whom, whether in history or in fiction, your memory most shrinks (no fiction can reach the reality of human sin), gather in mind all which is most loathsome, most revolting, the most treacherous, malicious, coarse, brutal, invective, fiendish cruelty, unsoftened by any remains of human feeling, such as thou couldest not endure for a single hour; conceive the fierce fiery eyes of hate, spite, frenzied rage, ever fixed on thee, looking through and through and through with hate; sleepless in their horrible gaze; felt, if not seen; never turning from thee, never to be turned from, except to quail under the like piercing sight of hate. Hear those yells of blasphemy and concentrated hate, as they echo along the lurid vaults of hell; every one hating every one, and venting that hate unceasingly, with every inconceivable expression of malignity; conceive all this, multiplied, intensified, reflected on all around, on every side; and amid it, the especial hatred of any one whose sins thou sharest, whom thou didst thoughtlessly encourage in sin, or teach some sin unknown before,—a deathlessness of hate were in itself everlasting misery. Yet a fixedness in that state, in which the hardened, malignant sinner dies, involves, without any further retribution from God, this endless misery."¹⁷ Such is the idea of future punishment which many of our modern Augustinians would substitute for the material torment's of Messrs. Spurgeon and Furniss; and which, in attributing the misery of the lost to the operation of what they call a natural law, seems to them to shield God from all imputation of cruelty or injustice. Between the amount of misery of Dr. Pusey's hell and that of Mr. Spurgeon, it seems difficult to decide. Mental agony is known to equal, if not sometimes to exceed, the keenest agony of our bodily frame.

29. We object however to this theory on two grounds. In the first place we deny that future punishment is the mere result of a natural law now in operation: in the second place we say that even if it could be incontrovertibly proved to be so it would not in the smallest degree serve the purpose for which it is brought forward.

30. We do not think that any unprejudiced person could read the general scripture, accounts of future punishment and suppose that they meant nothing more than leaving the wicked to the operation of those natural laws which are now actually in full force. The connection of sin and misery is an established connection. It has always been at work. Men see it and know it. The drunkard knows to what his excess will and is leading him: the profligate man knows the same. The natural results of hatred are obvious to us all. What effect this knowledge has in restraining from sin, let every one judge. "Virtue is its own reward and vice its own punishment" is an adage perhaps more familiar to heathen than to Christian ears. We wanted no revelation to be made of such punishment as this. The sinner, with the full knowledge of it, is found from experience to prefer vice with its natural punishment to virtue with its natural reward. To be told that hell is merely the continuation of the state of things which he has here deliberately chosen is scarcely to him a warning. But certainly no specious philosophy about natural laws will ever lead us to suppose the hell which is now only in preparation,¹⁸ to be identical with the punishment which has, from the operation of a great natural law, been in execution from the entrance of sin. Neither do the fallen spirits who have been, for we do not know how many thousands years, under the operation of this natural law, binding together sin and suffering, consider this punishment to be in the smallest measure identical with the punishment to which they know themselves doomed. They have had full time to judge of the connection between sin and misery: their sin, being of the most aggravated kind, must have produced all the natural punishment which it is capable of producing: yet still they cling fondly and desperately to even such a life as they now possess. The fearful cry of the devils, "What have we to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God? Art thou come hither to torment us before the time?" ought surely to dissipate the picture which is drawn by human theorists of the punishment of hell as being simply the result of a natural law.¹⁹

31. But there is one grand fact in connection with the future punishment of wicked men which removes it altogether from the sphere of mere natural law. Whatever might be said of the fallen angels as being removed from the power of doing further injury by their being confined in hell, and of their being left there to the punishment produced by a law which must operate in their case as well as in that of man, the resurrection of the wicked is a full proof that God directly interferes with future punishment, and does not merely leave it to the operation of natural law. To carry out this theory of natural punishment our opponents must be consistent. If God were to leave things to their natural course, there would be no resurrection of the wicked, for surely the resurrection of the wicked is not the operation of a natural law. If our theorists were consistent they must teach that God would leave the wicked for ever in their graves. But this is not at all the case. Without here entering at all into the enquiry as to whether the human soul, separate from the body, is properly capable of pain or pleasure, or of life at all, it is undeniably the case that God does directly and immediately interfere for the purpose of future punishment. It is His voice and direct act, not the operation of a natural law, which calls the wicked to resurrection. They would else have slumbered on for ever. And he thus interferes directly for the purpose of punishment. "We must all appear," St. Paul tells us, "before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad."²⁰ The idea of future punishment then, as being merely the result of natural laws, is overthrown by Scripture. God does not leave things just to follow their natural course. He puts forth what we call miraculous power to bring about the punishment of the wicked. We cannot deny this without denying the resurrection of the unjust.

32. But we also reject this view of future punishment on the ground that it violates every known principle of law and its sanctions. The very notion of a punishment announced for the violation of a law implies some infliction different from that unpleasantness or wretchedness which the infraction of the law itself produces. To tell a child that if he does wrong his conscience will upbraid him and he will be unhappy is quite a different thing from telling him that if he does wrong you will punish him. To make the sanctions of any law, divine or human, to consist in the amount of dissatisfaction and misery which its infraction naturally produces is really to render the sanction nugatory and useless. A creature yet unfallen, as Adam was before transgression, could not possibly know in the remotest degree to what he was about to subject himself. He could see the supposed advantage of transgression: he could not possibly judge its pain. Experience alone could teach him this. The theory of natural punishment fails in the first grand primary object of punishment, viz., the prevention of transgression. Nor, after transgression, could it have much more effect. Universal experience testifies that sin is pleasant at the outset. "Stolen waters" are not bitter the moment they are drunk: the sinner will tell you they are "sweet." "Bread eaten in secret" does not at first grate upon the teeth: the sinner will tell you it is "pleasant." How are all the advice, and warnings, and testimonies of experience accepted by youth and inexperience bent upon the pursuits of unhallowed pleasure? They are treated as the passing wind. The beautiful figure of pleasure smiles and beckons on to follow in her train. The road is strewn with roses: the air filled with perfume. After her eagerly follow the crowd, and think the few who hold aloof are fools to lose the substance of life. Not till they have followed long does the scene change. The road is rough and weary: the perfume is gone: the flowers are withered: the fair soft cheek is yellow and withered. And then! And then it is too late. In the long wild pursuit, the memory of good has been forgotten. The figure of grace, of virtue, is austere, hateful, to the debased follower of harlot vice. He confesses to himself no doubt, that a fair appearance deceived, but the adage "virtue is its own reward" seems to him more supremely ridiculous than when he set out in the train of her rival. Evil has become his only good. To tell him that the punishment of sin is only the result of natural laws producing wretchedness, is only to tell him all he knows already, and has made up his mind to accept and hold by. We must then in the Divine, as well as in all law, have a punishment distinct from the natural effects of transgression, if we would have a punishment effectual either to prevent transgression or to induce to amendment after sin has been entered upon.

33. Dr. Salmon, in one place, seems to think very favourably of that view of future punishment which makes it consist in the lost being miserable because they are wicked.²¹ When however he comes to reason with an opponent who carries out this view to its full and natural conclusion, who does not toy with it as Dr. Salmon does, but holds it, and manfully uses it without apprehension, then Dr. Salmon undertakes its refutation, and refutes it, we must say, in a very pleasant and logical way. "There can be no greater misery than to be a sinner" is what Dr. Salmon gives us as "the substance" of Mr. Maurice's view. We should have supposed this would fall very much into Dr. Salmon's own idea; but it is not so. Dr. Salmon remembers the pleasant Roman satirist who tells us that there is no objection in the world to our stating truth in a pleasant or even a jocular way, and so proceeds to direct against Mr. Maurice some very pleasant and telling banter. "Imagine," he says, "Mr. Maurice's house attacked by burglars, and think of the effect of this remonstrance: 'Consider, my good friends, how your consciences will sting you for this by and by." And if you find a sinner, trembling under the denunciation of judgment to come, you will give him immediate relief if you tell him that the sting of conscience will be the only punishment he need dread. He will say, 'Is that all? I think I can bear that.'"²²

34. But we reject this view of future punishment, on the ground that it gives a view of the highest law, of that which is the model and pattern of all law, viz., the Divine Law, which is inconsistent with and contrary to the nature of all law. We should not fear to oppose to the authority of Bishop Butler the authority of John Locke. On a question of this kind, indeed, we should prefer the authority of the latter. Besides, Bishop Butler, in his chapter on "The Government of God by Punishment," while he with the most perfect correctness insists that in evil actions leading as their natural result to misery we have God actually punishing such actions in the ordinary course of nature, nowhere denies that there may be, either in this life or in the next, other punishment of a direct and immediate kind inflicted by God for sin. The nature of Bishop Butler's argument did not lead him at all to enquiries of this kind. They were wholly foreign to his purpose. When he speaks therefore of the natural results of ill conduct here as pointing to the probability of similar natural results hereafter; and as in both cases being truly and properly a Divine punishment for transgression; he does not in the smallest degree contradict the idea that there may be other punishment, of a kind different from that which is the natural result of ill doing, in store for unpardoned sin. They who would quote Bishop Butler as teaching that the natural evil results of evil doing are its only punishment do not understand the fundamental idea of his "Analogy." We have then the authority of Locke, wholly undiminished by any contrary authority of Butler.

35. What is the testimony of Locke on this question of law and punishment? "Since it would be utterly vain," he tells us, "to suppose a rule set to the free actions of man, without annexing to it some enforcement of good and evil, to determine his will, we must, wherever we suppose a law, suppose also some reward or punishment annexed to that law. It would be in vain for one intelligent being to set a rule to the actions of another, if he had it not in his power to reward the compliance with, and punish the deviation from, his rule, by some good and evil, that is not the natural product and consequence of the action itself: for that being a natural convenience or inconvenience, would operate of itself, without a law. This, if I mistake not, is the true nature of all law, properly so called."²³

36. But even if it could be established, which it cannot, that future punishment was solely and entirely the result of that natural law which binds sin and suffering together, this would not, in the remotest degree, remove this charge of injustice from God, if the punishment thus naturally following were too great for the offence. A natural law must be as just as a special law. In fact, if possible, it should be more so; since it has a wider and more permanent operation. To account for the injustice of an infliction by saying: "Oh, it is the effect of a natural law," is the highest slander against God. Let us call the law which produces any effect by what name we please, natural, or miraculous, or special, it makes no difference. The law must in each case be just in its operation, in order to be justifiable. The laws of nature, as any other law enacted or executed by Him, are the laws of God. For all their consequences, after they have worked their uniform work for ages, He is just as responsible as when He first ordained them, or as when He departs from them by an alteration of law or a miraculous interference. If the laws of nature were to bring on the sinner a punishment greater than his sin deserved, it is God Himself who would be doing so. They who quote Bishop Butler for future punishment being the result of a natural law must also take the remainder of the great reasoner's view on the subject. "We are at present," he says, "actually under God's government, in the strictest and most proper sense —in such a sense as that He rewards and punishes us for our actions. Whether the pleasure or pain which follows upon our behaviour be owing to the Author of natures acting upon us every moment which we feel it, or to His having at once contrived and executed His own part in the plan of the world, makes no alteration as to the matter before us."²⁴

37. But God, by one special act of His, takes in the great day of reckoning on Himself the whole responsibility of future punishment, be it of what character it may. God raises the wicked for the very purpose of this punishment. It matters not then what is its source. If it be a special punishment then specially inflicted, and, different from the mere result of the natural law now in operation, we have God immediately and specially inflicting it. If it be wholly and entirely the result of natural law, producing the fearful hell which Dr. Pusey has pictured with such tremendous power, and which would seem to equal any natural suffering, we have God directly and specially interfering, in the resurrection of the wicked, in order to subject them to this punishment. God assumes the entire responsibility of their punishment, just as much in one case as in the other. We cannot separate the God of nature from the God of revelation. They are one and the same.

38. The simple question then is, "Could man by any conduct here deserve to suffer through eternity pain and torment to which only the worst pain we suffer here can afford a true parallel? Would the agonies to which the martyr was subjected for an hour be only sufficient for the sinner if drawn out through the eternal age? Would it be just in God to inflict this on any single creature of His hand, on any being who would never have had life at all if the Maker had not called him from his clay?" The verdict of the human heart, in its fierce denial, in its secret recoil, answers "No." "Eternal pain," says Augustine, "seems harsh and unjust to human sense." "With the majority of men of the world," says Archer Butler, "this doctrine seems, when they think at all about it, monstrous, disproportioned, impossible." It seems so, in the same writer's mind, to others besides men of the world, to men who do not fear the doom for themselves: "Were it possible," he says, "for human imagination to conceive the horror of such a doom as this, all reasoning about it were at an end; it would scorch and wither all the powers of human thought. Human life were at a stand, could these things be felt as they deserve. Even for him who can humbly trust himself comparatively secure in faith and obedience, were the thin veil of this poor shadowy life suddenly withdrawn, and these immortal agonies, that never-dying death, made known in the way of direct perception: and those, it may be, that such a one, with the keen sympathies so characteristic of the Christian, loves and values, seen to be at last among the victims of that irreparable doom—can we doubt that he would come forth with intellect blanched and idealess from a sight too terrible for any, whose faculties are not on the scale of eternity itself"? It is God's mercy that we can believe what adequately to conceive were death."²⁵ Thus does a writer, who himself believed this doctrine, describe it. He attributes the possibility of believing it to a special act of grace. If God were now to ask man whether his conduct on this hypothesis were just, man with one voice would reply that, according to all His conceivable ideas of justice and judgment, conduct such as this would be most unjust.

39. The history of human religious thought shows man's ineradicable sense of the burning wrong of this fearful theory. If Plato, deriving his inspiration from Egypt, taught a Tartarus with its fiery streams, whence none could come forth, he taught it for an infinitesimally small portion of men. For most, even for the homicide, the parricide, and the matricide, he had his Acherusian lake, whence, after a purgative process, they issued forth again to the upper air. If Augustine adopted his great master's abode of unending pain, he adopted also his purgatory, whence there was a way to heaven. If the Church of Rome has sanctioned the theory of Augustine, she practically holds out its terrors only to those without her pale of safety: for her own millions she has the fires of a finite period. The assertion of Augustine's hell by Tertullian and his contemporaries did but drive the gentler mind of Origen to the notion of a far vaster purgatory than Rome's or Augustine's, where even devils should be prepared to resume their place in heaven. The Churches of the Reformation have generally followed Augustine in his hell, and denied his purgatory; but, at all times, within their bosom has been a struggle against the dominant doctrine, and even from those who maintained it it has only commanded a sullen, uncheerful assent. Such men as Burnet, Whitby, Hammond, Law, Sir Isaac and Bishop Newton, Locke, Bengel, Foster, Birks, have rejected it with abhorrence. Such men as Tillotson, Hermann Witsius, Robert Hall, Dr. Watts, Isaac Taylor, William Butler, Albert Barnes, Bishop Ellicott, while they accepted the theory, loved it not. "I should be very glad," says Dr. Salmon, "to see it proved that I was wrong." "Who would not?" groans out Mr. Grant, labouring under the terrific weight of a theory he yet felt himself bound to maintain. Let these men reason as they would, the black look of injustice lurked about the ugly thing. Let them allow their minds to dwell upon the reality of what eternal evil and eternal misery meant, and their hearts would grieve that man had been made at all; that the feelings of pity were implanted in the human breast, and cherished by the Gospel of Christ. Darkness and anguish settled down and brooded over their spirit; yea, the very light of reason would almost abandon them for madness, when they conceived even in the far-off future the horrible hell of Augustine. We constantly find them, even when they are struggling hard to defend the monstrous thought before a reluctant world, candidly confessing that with all their hearts they could wish that it was a monstrous lie.²⁶ The modern mind, shaken in religious conviction, denies the inspiration of a book which is supposed to teach this creed of cruelty. With those who will not throw away their faith in man's future, the theory of Origen, with all its consequences, bids fair, if only confronted with the fearful nightmare of Augustine, to take the place which the authority of the latter father has so long imposed upon the Church. The ablest modern defenders of the theory are shrinking back from putting forward a vindication of it in its plain and hideous aspect. One after another of the arguments on which it has heretofore been defended they are abandoning as unworthy of their reason or abhorrent to their sense of justice, while those they are striving to substitute are to the full as unreasonable and unjust. ²⁷

40. Listen to the low, sad wail of Foster, as he passes in review the great subject of future punishment. His powerful mind believed in the Platonic view of the immortality of the soul, and therefore he knew not what to believe of the future of the wicked. He would turn to Origen's conception of a universal restoration, until driven from it by passages of Scripture too plain to be mistaken: he would turn to the theory of everlasting destruction, until repelled by his belief in the immortality of the soul which forbid him to imagine that it could be destroyed. But one thing he would not and could not admit into his faith, the notion of the eternity of woe. He set God's character, everywhere revealed in its justice and its love, against what appeared to him the apparent meaning of some of God's words, and the character of God led him to the true and logical conclusion that the theory of eternal misery was a slander against his Maker. "Think of man," he says, "his nature, his situation, the circumstances of his brief sojourn and trial on earth. Far be it from us to make light of the demerit of sin, and to remonstrate with the Supreme Judge against a severe chastisement, of whatever moral nature we may suppose the infliction to be. But still, what is man? He comes into the world with a nature fatally corrupt, and powerfully tending to actual evil. He comes among a crowd of temptations adapted to his innate evil propensities. He grows up (incomparably the greater proportion of the race) in great ignorance, his judgment weak, and under numberless beguilements into error; while his passions and appetites are strong, his conscience unequally matched against their power— in the majority of men but feebly and rudely constituted. The influence of whatever good instruction he may receive is counteracted by a combination of opposite influences almost constantly acting on him. He is essentially and inevitably unapt to be powerfully acted on by what is invisible and future. In addition to all which, there is the intervention and activity of the great tempter and destroyer. . . . Now this creature, thus constituted and circumstanced, passes a few fleeting years on the earth, a short, sinful course, in which he does often what, notwithstanding his ignorance and ill-disciplined judgment and conscience, he knows to be wrong, and neglects what he knows to be his duty; and consequently, for a greater or less measure of guilt, widely different in different offenders, deserves punishment. But endless punishment! Hopeless misery through a duration to which the terms above imagined will be absolutely nothing! I acknowledge my inability (I would say reverently) to admit this belief together with a belief in the divine goodness —the belief that 'God is love,' that his tender mercies are over all his works."²⁸

41. The struggles of two such minds as those of John Foster and William Archer Butler may well weigh strongly on this question. Both were men of powerful mind, sincere piety, deep trust in the truth of Scripture, educated alike from childhood to believe in the eternal misery of the lost. They both accepted as an indisputable axiom the inalienable immortality of man. But they will give their mind to understand as much as they may what this doctrine of endless woe and evil in which they have been educated means. It is too important, too prominent, to be overlooked. They cannot accept it and then lay it by: they cannot be satisfied with an occasional mention of it when professional decency compelled them, and then to hide it as unsuitable to ears polite. If it is true, they truly felt it should be proclaimed in all its terrors, as with the blast of a trumpet. Then look at it, and stand aghast! They see a little part, of its woe, and horror seizes on their minds. Wild questionings of God, strange thoughts of Him which are blasphemy almost to conceive, suspicions which it is anguish even to entertain, bitter wails over the creature called into a life that was to have such an end, rush into their thoughts and cannot be shut out. Foster looks at it and rejects it, though he knew not where else to turn: Butler looks at it with half-closed eyes and accepts it, and his faith all but sets him mad.

42. Our view needs no vindication, does not compel us to keep it discreetly in the background, reduces us to no subterfuge to escape its consequences. It does not force us to advance arguments which we feel to be unworthy of a child, or faintly to defend the justice of a procedure which our heart whispers to us is only worthy of a devil's conception. By it, the next life's dealings with the sinner will but follow the analogy of this. He who scans the course of nature may from it anticipate that future course which revelation opens to our view. According to it God's ways with the sinner are equal. They are severe; but they are just. They are full of awe; but they can be contemplated with calmness. They show the award of a justice in whose consequences we can rejoice. Its issue is eternal death. If it brings the sigh of sadness over a lost soul, it brings also the deep full breathing of infinite relief. "The wicked," says Locke, "had no right to demand their existence, and so no right to demand its continuance." We require neither the "purgatory" of Augustine, nor the "universal restoration" of Origen—man's desperate refuges from the hell he has himself conceived. Looking on the calmed face of death, we will say, "It is well." The woes, the agony, the despair, of life, are passed away from its features with the sin that produced them.