“AND GOD SAID TO JONAH, DOEST THOU WELL TO BE ANGRY FOR THE GOURD? AND HE SAID, I DO WELL TO BE ANGRY, EVEN UNTO DEATH. THEN SAID THE LORD, THOU HAST PITY ON THE GOURD FOR WHICH THOU HAST NOT LABOURED, NEITHER MADEST IT GROW; WHICH CAME UP IN A NIGHT AND PERISHED IN A NIGHT. AND SHOULD NOT I SPARE NINEVEH, THAT GREAT CITY, WHEREIN ARE MORE THAN SIX SCORE THOUSAND PERSONS THAT CANNOT DISCERN BETWEEN THEIR RIGHT HAND AND THEIR LEFT?”—Jonah iv. 9, 10, 11.

Pain affects us, as it comes near to us. The war or famine, or any other calamity that afflicts a nation afar off, is but a vague report or a distant rumour; it may not pass unheard, but comparatively it is unfelt. It requires that grief shall touch and sting us in our selfishness; that we may know fully and truly what it inflicts on others. And it is thus that God at once rebukes and cures our insensibility, by bringing loss and sorrow home to our own souls: the withered gourd wrung tears from the surly and unamiable prophet: but the prospect of Nineveh with her mighty population in ashes had nothing with which to touch the fountains of his sorrows.

Admitting as I thus do that there is much of selfishness in our nature, yet persuaded that there is also much of sympathy and mercy in it, taking either the character of God, or that of man as a criterion, I have long regarded the belief of eternal punishment as one of those moral paradoxes which you cannot deny, and for which you cannot account. Most of human creatures, so far as they accord with their humanity, shrink from inflicting or beholding pain; and when they can inflict it wantonly, or behold it without compassion, we can pronounce on them no sentence of deeper reprobation than to call them inhuman. We tread not knowingly on the crawling worm; we hear not insensibly the inarticulate voice of the sick and dumb animal: and yet many of us who would not look unmoved on the last spasms of an expiring dog, can believe that God regards with ruthless sternness the eternal tortures of numberless eternal spirits. We cannot gaze without compassion on the tear in the infant’s speechless eye, and yet some of us can believe that God has created such beings to look up through all eternity from hopeless torture. We cannot think on the racks by which tyrant-man has tortured his brother-man—on the dungeons in which he has imprisoned him, and shut out from him the sun of heaven and the breath of nature, without a feeling of repugnance and a sentiment of indignation, and yet Christians can believe that God, whom they call “the good, the merciful,” has constructed for his creatures means of undying anguish and dungeons of boundless darkness, where the smile of hope never gleams, where the light of mercy never comes. We lament war, and yet, if orthodox, we believe that God maintains in his dominions regions of everlasting warfare; we lament the madness and abuse of passion, and yet, if orthodox, we must believe that God allows that madness and abuse to be eternalized in all their extreme malignity. We lament physical and mental suffering; except on the visitation of mercy none of us would desire to go through the lazar house, where despair and anguish lie low together, where the head is heavy and the pulse is fevered; or through those asylums which give refuge to humanity in its last calamity, and its worst; and yet, if orthodox, we can believe that God perpetuates throughout everlasting ages the worst evils of the body, the fiercest passions, and the most awful madness of the soul. And yet this great, this glorious universe is his—is his workmanship—it came not up in a night, it is not to perish in a night—the earth is long to be green, and the heavens are to be bright. Throughout the space that has no limit, throughout the time that has no end, the stars are to shine, and systems are to move onward in their unmeasured and their trackless glory. And yet, if orthodox, we must believe there is an endless hell whose smoke of torment must ascend for ever against their brightness. These, the works of God’s hands, are marred—the majesty of his power defeated—Paradise is made a wilderness, and hell is made populous. If we think of the world with any degree of realising truth, we shall feel this result to be most tremendous, and we shall wonder that God with infinite power should have created such a lovely universe to be defaced; that he should have peopled it with such capacities for good, to be exercised for ever only in the production of evil; that he should have given them immense and eternal capacities only to be immense and eternal capacities for misery. This, if true, is the greatest miracle and the greatest mystery unquestionably in the divine government.

This subject committed to my charge I feel to be truly solemn and awful. Next to the idea of a God, that of a future state is the most important. The character we ascribe to God operates on our own, or is created by it; and so our conceptions of the future life reacts on human conduct, and human sentiments. We may see this painfully in the mistakes and abuses with which harsh views of the future life have clouded the Christian church, and poisoned the heart of Christendom. These gloomy sentiments from many robbed religion of solace, and the breast of peace. I have seen beings maddened and convulsed by visions of Calvinism. I have heard them long for annihilation as a consummation most desirable—not in the remorse of sin, but in the tortures of superstition.—I have seen them look forward with pleasure to the church-yard turf under which they were to rest for ever from their troubles, and sleep in peace their “eternal sleep.” This sombre belief has at once desolated and darkened earth. Faith it has turned to a boundless fear; the dread of the future it makes the bitterness of the present, and is equally the parent of stern self-infliction, or of remorseless intolerance. It was this that in older days drove the ascetic to the desert; that made nature and the face of his fellow hateful to him; that filled his ferocious solitude with unearthly terrors; that trained, instead of a saint, a theological savage: it was this which aroused religious wars; which infused into these wars a spirit of fury; that demonised humanity; that made a most merciful nature a stranger to mercy: it was this which brought man in nearest resemblance to that vile and wicked being whom his worst and blackest passions had formed: it was this belief that tore out the heart of flesh and put in its place the heart of stone—a heart which no appeal could soften, and which no appeal could move. It was not until there was a hell without hope, that there was a heart without mercy. I believe it to be quite capable of proof, that no mere worldly wickedness has ever cursed mankind with so many sufferings as the belief of this doctrine; that has ever heaped on them so many cruelties, and made them agents of cruelties in return. Why have wars for religion ever been the worst? The reason is obvious: the soldiers of religion are not soldiers of flesh; the soldiers of religion enter into no earthly service; they enlist under the god of battles and of vengeance. It is against the hated, and the vile, and the accursed, and the lost, they carry destruction; they are but the executioners of the righteous decrees of God, and theirs are the championship of piety, and the chivalry of heaven. When the weak contend with the weak, mutual need begets mutual mercy: but when the natural ferocity of passion assumes the authority of God, and clothes itself with the armour of the skies, the gulf in which all charity is buried, is broad and unfathomable as that which is commonly placed between heaven and hell. This belief was one of the main causes of the most horrible religious persecutions. It was not until the generous and gentle sensibility of the religious nature was debased by coarse picturings of physical tortures and of endless miseries, that the sacerdotal arm became terrible as death, and the sacerdotal spirit was drenched in wrath as dire and unrelenting as that which they fashioned beyond the grave. Before priestly and popular imaginations God became an awful punisher. They created in heaven a throne of inexorable judgment, and from that throne the word of fate went forth which could but once be spoken, and cut off hope for ever. They freed themselves from human compunctions, and emulated the stern despotism which they preached or believed. Fear is the parent of cruelty—and in religion, as in character, the slavish spirit is ever the most unfeeling. The truth is, that whether in idea or in act, familiarity with torture stupifies the heart and indurates the senses. That frequent contemplation of pain destroys sympathy, and that pain, when once it can be carelessly seen, can be easily inflicted, are facts which observation has placed beyond the need of argument, and experience beyond the reach of contradiction.

In this Lecture I propose two objects:—First, to state my views on moral retribution, which in essentials I apprehend are those of Unitarians in general: Secondly, to examine the arguments which are advanced in favour of eternal torture, and to state my reasons for not believing them. I shall try to the utmost of my power to condense what I have to say, but I hope for your indulgence in return, if on a subject of such compass—on which so many volumes have been written—there should be some omissions. The end of this or any other lecture can never be to expound an important topic in all its completeness, so much as to suggest and excite inquiry concerning it.

I. I shall, in the first place, enter on the positive section of my lecture; and on this point, I am sorry to say that the frequent re-assertion of mistakes regarding our doctrines will put me to the painful necessity of much repetition.

1.—I commence with a few remarks on the nature of sin. One essential characteristic on which we have insisted—and we believe what we have asserted—is, that sin is a deep spiritual injury. The source of it is in the soul; it is the dark corruption of an evil heart. This I take to be one of the greatest and profoundest revelations of Christ, one which places him infinitely above all other moral teachers, and which makes Christianity the highest scheme of moral duty. False religions and false philosophies have been all at variance with this inward sense of duty. They have contrived numberless inventions as substitutes for it, or devised most ingenious means to nullify it. Priesthoods, with most imposing authority and mystical influence, have offered all sorts of spiritual panaceas to ease the wounded conscience. Ceremonies, with all graceful gesture and solemn import, have presented their beauty to the senses, and their spell to the fancies of superstition. Sacrifices without number—from the turtle-dove to the hecatomb; from the scape-goat driven to the desert, to the human being slaughtered to God; from the blood of life swelling round a thousand altars of vengeance, to the flowers and the fruits that were heaped upon the altars of mercy—all these have been tried to make religion for the senses, to make religion a flattery and delusion: but all were not sufficient; conscience is stronger than rituals, and to that conscience, to that spirit of God in the soul of man, Christ came; to that he was the Apostle and to that he preached. Christ went at once into the soul; he pierced the veil of sophistries and deceits by which men are ingenious to discover excuses to cover their selfishness and their wrong doings; he went to the seat of the evil, and struck at once to the root of bitterness. Others baptized with water, cleansing merely the outside, but he baptized with fire and the holy spirit, going to the innermost thoughts of the heart and the veins;—others preached on the keeping of feast-days and fast-days, but he taught of that God who is not the Lord of times or seasons, but the God of life in every hour—the God of the whole universe in every motion;—others called men to go to the temple, Christ called them to go into their closets and commune with their hearts;—others told them to wash their hands, Christ exhorted them rather to cleanse their spirits;—others told them to fear men who could kill the body, Christ warned them not to fear man who could only kill the body, but to fear God who could kill the soul as well as the body. He was truly the prophet of eternity—the preacher for eternity. He was truly the preacher of the invisible, and the herald of it—he needed not that any should testify of man, for he knew what was in man—he required no testimony, for he had the knowledge of humanity in his own nature deep and true, but guiltless—and he spake out of the fullness of his own full heart: it was therefore that he spake as never man spake: it was therefore that the common people heard him gladly—for his words had power to those thoughts and affections which are native to bosoms of all men; it was therefore that he spake with authority, and not as the scribes: for they discoursed on the traditions of the fathers, but he appealed to the inspirations of God—they spake of what had been written on tables of stones, but he spoke of what had been written on the fleshy tables of the heart. Others made sin to consist in resistance to the priest or to the king—but Christ showed it to be an alienation of the soul from God, the apostacy of the conscience from its own sense of duty. It is that which is within, he taught, that defiles the man; a man may wash his hands seven times a-day, but not once cleanse his heart; he may often wash his hands, and yet never in innocency. He showed that sepulchres might be beautified outside, and inside be only rottenness and corruption.—His apostles learned of him this most profound, most divine philosophy, and so they preached it to the world. To be carnally minded, says Paul, is death; to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Whatsoever, says the same apostle, a man soweth, that shall he also reap; he that soweth to the flesh, shall of the flesh reap corruption, but he that soweth to the spirit, shall of the spirit reap everlasting life. Lust, (or evil desire,) saith Saint James, when it hath conceived, bringeth forth sin, and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death. This is the gospel doctrine on the inwardness and spirituality of sin; and we preach no other gospel, and we teach no other doctrine. A solemn consequence attaches to our view which is also powerfully enforced in the New Testament scriptures, but which the vicarious scheme tends directly to subvert—I mean the personal nature of transgression. Sin we hold to be no transferable quality, and this was most lucidly proved here by one of my brother lecturers. With the sinner himself lies the guilt; with him who contracts it it must lie; it cannot be acquired by imputation, nor can it be punished by imputation. If one doctrine be more clearly taught in scripture than another, it is this, that the offender shall be answerable only for his own sins; and for these, as surely as there are a conscience, a future world, and a God, he must be answerable.—Every man, our Saviour declares, shall be judged according to his own works. Every one of us, the Apostle Paul asserts, shall give an account of himself to God. But no, saith orthodoxy, you must also be answerable for Adam, and upon your head must be a guilt that darkened the very dawn of creation; and so upon this principle guilt should descend from sire to son; the later we are in existence, the more tremendous should be this growing mountain of imputation, until the last man should sink under the burden of all the crime which had been from the first man to himself.—We are told that Unitarians make light of sin. But, I ask, what does orthodoxy make of justice? And I further ask, what does it make of scripture? If there were a judge on earth who decided as orthodoxy decides, he would be scouted as a monster: if there were a code of laws which contained such a standard, the common moral sense of mankind would reject it; nay, there is not a tribe of savages in the habitable world so blind to the idea of justice as not to repel the dogma of imputed and eternal punishment. And yet we are gravely told that God thus acts, and that the Bible thus teaches; we are constantly rebuked as wanting in faith and humility, because we can find no such principles in either providence or the Bible. The plain declaration of the prophet Ezekiel contains the spirit of both. “The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son; the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.” As certainly as we have a moral sense, as surely as we can discern between right and wrong, we are compelled to acknowledge the one and utterly to repudiate the other. Give but the conscience justice, let common sense have but the slightest voice in the decision, and you might as easily attempt to gain a man’s assent to the broadest of contradictions, even to the admission that a part is equal to the whole, or that two and two are five, as to feel guilty for another man’s crime, to feel remorse for another man’s wrong-doing, to be penitent or humble for that in which we had no participation, or to confess the justice of punishment by a sentence which made him criminal before his existence. On the moral injuries of thus forcing men to contradict the first dictates of their nature, of destroying the personality of virtue on the one side by an imputed righteousness, and the personality of sin on the other by an imputed guilt, I intend not here to enlarge: but one evil I will just allude to; I mean the wrong it does to truth of sentiment. Feelings in their real existence which are most excellent and most beautiful, it distorts and falsifies. There are no virtues on earth that bring men nearer to heaven than humility and repentance. To be humble with a true humility is to be in the likeness of Christ; to be penitent with a true repentance is to be an object of rejoicing even to the angels of heaven: but when we hear it said that we are to be of lowly mind on account of inherited corruption, and penitent for imputed sin; when we try to force ourselves into emotions which are not native to the soul, unconsciously we undermine its simplicity and sincerity, and instead of virtues which must be of spontaneous growth, or not exist at all, we have sickly abortions of sentiment that are false, because unnatural; strained efforts that are at eternal war with experience; and high-sounding phrases that are as empty as echo and as cold as the frozen blast. Perversions like these are almost worse than vices, for vices, though they mar the life, may leave the moral judgment its integrity. Where there is true conviction there may be amendment, but when the inward sense is itself diseased, the case is all but hopeless. Whatever be the evil of sin, whatever be its punishment; whether the evil be infinite or limited, whether the punishment be eternal or temporal, let us at least beware of weakening that sentiment on which all morality is founded, the deep sense of personal responsibility. Unitarian views are often described as being unfavourable to spirituality; but if by spirituality I am to understand the inward life of man, the activity of his mental and moral energies, then I think these views eminently spiritual. The spirit of man is their great subject, and the spirit of God in the human, their great agency of salvation. Within the soul itself they place moral salvation or moral destruction, and within the soul itself they place the elements which constitute one or the other, the sense of guilt which makes its hell, the conscious holiness which makes its heaven. This inward power of conscience is the true distinction of spiritual life; and the righteous submission to it in our own hearts, we maintain, is the faith which justifies: a faith which is an indwelling vitality which consists not in forming propositions about God and Christ, and in enforcing them or submitting to them, but in making God and Christ realities in our secret thoughts; in confidence on the worth of goodness, in allegiance to duty, and in trust in the power and immortality of truth.

2. Next I affirm that sin is evil, and that sin is punishable; and our doctrines make not light of the evil, or disguise the awfulness of the punishment. Sin is evil: we deny not that; how could we? It is an eternal truth written on the heart and life of man, proved with unequivocal and gloomy evidence in the whole history of the world. Sin is evil to the individual; evil in the sufferings it prepares for him, and a still greater evil when it hardens him beyond suffering. Each one of us will judge this question for himself according to his degree of moral sensibility, and according to the circumstances of his moral history; but whatever be that sensibility, or whatever be that history, our moments of most profound anguish have ever been those in which we have felt the shameful consciousness of wrong thoughts or wrong actions. Not, it is true, when the evil passions or evil deeds held their tyrannical sway over us, but when the spell was gone, when the mind’s eye grew clear, and the hour of reflection came with sorrow, and the sad pale light spread over the hand-writing on the wall, from which conscience might shrink but could not fail to read. The worst, the most hardened, the most degraded of human creatures, those whom the world may think have bidden farewell to conscience, have moments in the dark silence of thought when the sword of remorse with all its poisoned tortures sinks into their wounded bosoms. And in such hours, it is not outward loss, or outward suffering, but inward agony that afflicts them most; it is not that they have sunk into the dregs of poverty; it is not that they have been reduced to dependence and exposed to insult; it is not that pride passes them with cold and withering scorn; it is not that pity and hope seem banished from their path; that all appear to frown upon them; that externally for them there is no longer peace on earth or light in heaven—it is, that the brightness and the freshness of their own hearts are gone; that sacred affections are a waste; that conscience, when not silenced into apathy, is enraged into an accuser; that their own respect is lost beyond recovery, and no delusion, however self-deceiving, can again restore it. The heart-consuming grief, the wrath and tribulation treasured up in a life of sin, the righteous judge of the earth alone can know. And these are all the more bitter if that life had ever been blessed with holier associations. There is a courage which can repel the scowl of others; there is a pride, a madness, if you will, which can despise their opinions, or feel independent of their esteem; there is a fortitude which can endure physical suffering to its last infliction; but there is nothing in time, in place, or in circumstance, which can fortify us against our own thoughts, against our own feelings, and especially the feelings of the divinity within us, that struggle to the last for empire over evil; that come ever and ever to tell us of what we had of good or might have had; that haunt us with reproach and sorrow when we have become traitors to our better nature. Not to speak of conscience with its stinging sense of violated conviction; not to speak of wasted time, ruined power, and a wreck of hopes; to say nothing of alienation from God, and the fear of a future world, I can conceive of memory dwelling on spots, which once were spots of light, becoming the tormentor of a fallen soul, the vindicator of duty and of God; I can conceive of one looking back from the bare desolateness of sin to a youth that once had been pure, full of joy and full of virtue, to homes that had been glad with every affection that sweetens life, to sabbaths that had repose for the stainless spirit, and prayer for unpolluted lips; gazing with breaking hearts and weeping eyes over a part marked with vice and misery, that had been a future glorious with promise; all this I can conceive in connection with even the felon in his cell, or with some wretch whose cough, like a knell of despair, awakens the midnight silence of the street, whose latest pang is spent in some hidden retreat of filth and sorrow, of sin and loathsomeness.

I need not say that sin is a great social evil. The fact is urged upon us with too painful a pressure, both from history and observation. Take the history of governments and nations; wars and bloodshed stain the record over its whole extent. And whence are these, but from the struggle and rivalry of selfish and sinful passions? From whence, says the apostle James, come wars and fightings among you; come they not hence, even of your lusts? From these we have had the oppression of strength against right. From these we have had the tyrannies and cruelties with which they surrounded their thrones of iron despotism; with which they made the glory of self the affliction of millions; with which so far as their power extended, they have been the scourges and the curses of mankind. From these we had the hatred one nation against another, men arrayed against each other to hew each other down, doing all iniquities, when interest or ambition called for them, enslaving one another, and selling one another, unmindful of all the claims of fraternity in the din of faction, and losing the sense of their common humanity in the difference of clime or the colour of the skin. Take the history of laws. I shall not allege those of the criminal code which until very recently made even Christian and enlightened countries vast arenas of legalised assassination: which spread a reign of terror over the face of empires, making the scaffold and the gibbet their principal symbols of civilization, and multiplying to enormous extent the very crimes, which, pretending to punish, they only publicly authorized and exemplified. I speak here more particularly of the spirit of partiality, injustice, selfishness, and rapacity in which much of legislation has been conceived and executed: classes of men turning the laws to their own purposes and leaving those unprotected who most required protection; commonly preying most on those who least could bear it. Except where the general sentiment of human right has been too strong for narrow passions, we may see in the long course of ages, principle sacrificed to personal interests, the good of masses betrayed or despised, the poor scorned, the ignorant neglected, the privileged orders hedged about with all sorts of protection, the classification of crime and criminals most unfairly adjusted, the distribution of penalties most unrighteously allotted; this I ascribe to selfish and evil passions. Once more, take the history of religion, and you have all the anger of faction made more stern with the rivalry of Creeds; the ambition of earthly dominion more aspiring by the addition of spiritual rule also; the powers of this world made more fearful by the powers of the world to come; both the visible and in visible existence subjected to priestly empire, and made tributary to priestly aggrandizement; the sword of the civil magistrate which had been sharp enough with one edge to deal the vengeance of man, receiving another edge from ecclesiastical authority, to vindicate the judgments of God. Thus we are compelled to read history, and thus in all its departments we are compelled to witness the dark traces which sin has left upon its pages. When we turn to the world around us, these evils are not the less glaring. Many sufferings, no doubt, are to be ascribed to our natural wants and weakness, but they scarcely deserve to be called evils, when we compare them with those which spring from moral derangements. Poverty is not so great an affliction as an all-devouring love for gain; sickness is not so great a misfortune as an insatiate desire for pleasure; and the ills of poverty and pain together, are not as fatal as the irritable wish for distinction which rules so widely in the world, with its fierce blood of turbulent passions. To these there are to be ascribed the worst social miseries that grieve the best hearts, and to remove or ameliorate which the finest spirits have ever directed their labours. To these we are to ascribe the covetousness which closes the hand of bounty, and shuts up the bowels of compassion; which becomes insensible both to justice and mercy; to these we are to ascribe all forms of sensuality, and all the abuses of passion; to these we are to ascribe all vices, material or malignant: and who, though he had the capacious mind of an archangel, can count the miseries which in all shapes spread contagion through society? Independently of those evils which no human eye can reach, those which present themselves on the very surface of observation are sufficiently extensive and fearful; intemperance, ignorance, grossness, hatred, strifes, with all their gloomy appendages; of unhappy homes; of loud and laughing and blushless infamy; of mad licentiousness, and late despair; of lost health, lost honesty, lost reason, which respectively close their career in the hospital, the prison, or the lunatic asylum.

3. As to evidence, then, for the existence of guilt, as to its extent and its evil, I think I can go as far as any Calvinist. I see the fact, and I have no wish to disguise it; it startles, but it does not subvert my faith. I grant sin to be evil—evil in the inward spirit—evil on the outward life—evil to the individual—evil to the species—evil in this world—evil in the next. In a certain sense, I am not prepared to deny that it leaves injurious consequences, which may be eternal; that the loss of innocence, that subversion of moral tastes, may implant habits which, for aught I know, shall be an everlasting injury to the soul, not utterly to destroy its happiness, or stop its progression, but to deprive it of advantages and advancement which a purer moral state would have given it. The evils of sin I hold to be terrible; the penalty of sin I hold to be inevitable—to be removed by no sacrifice, to be washed out by no expiation—to be escaped only in the criminals rising out of the corruption by experience and wisdom, to a purer moral state. The punishment of sin I believe to be not only inevitable, but also enduring, enduring in proportion to indulgence and malignity. Thoughts, I admit, which have wrought themselves into the very texture of the intellectual nature; feelings which have rooted themselves into the heart; habits that have grown into instinct, are not speedily to be destroyed. Moral punishment, in my idea, is identical with moral discipline, and moral discipline I consider to be such an arrangement of circumstances in the providence of God as shall lead us to self-correction; such a process of spiritual training as leave us the consciousness of our own liberty, but yet accomplish God’s wise ends by God’s boundless power. In building, then, the structure of our character, our Creator works not by miracle, but by experience, and this experience may be slow and painful. I believe most sincerely and profoundly in a future punishment; not vindictive, but corrective—for all wise punishment is, and must be, corrective. That the dispensations of God are not completed in this life, I think all the moral aspects of things here below make most manifest, and all analogies intimate, if Scripture had not expressly declared, that after death there is to be a more distinct exhibition of the divine government. That the results of character formed in the present life are to be carried into the future, and to influence it, I conceive our whole nature argues. Our existence, as spiritual beings, is properly connected and continuous; one state prognosticates another; and no two are absolutely distinct and separate. Our spiritual life consists of thought united to thought, and feeling to feeling, one operating on the other, or producing it, of a mysterious chain of consciousness, bound from link to link by successive memories, preserving unbroken the identity of our existence. Manhood is the growth of our youth, and immortality is the growth of our manhood; and the impressions of character pass from one stage to another, along the line of succession and sequence. There are no extremes, except to our outward observation. Looking at one stage of life, and then, after a long interval, seeing in the same person the apparently opposite characteristics, we take those things to be antagonists which are bound together by the inevitable connexion of cause and effect. The dreamer of youth becomes, perhaps, the misanthropist of age; the prodigal of youth, it may be, grows into the miser of age; the principle of action may in each case be the same—vanity or self-love; the passion is identical in principle, and changed only in form, from a change in circumstances. If we should meet an honest rustic in his peaceful fields, innocent and contented; if we should afterwards by accident behold him on a scaffold, it would be to us a seeming and terrible incongruity. But why? The two events are in our minds in naked contrast: could we, however, pierce the Spirit and trace the life of that unfortunate—watch it from the first intrusive evil thought successively dwelt on; from actions slightly wrong, unceasingly reiterated and darkening with every repetition, until the last deadly volition, and the last awful deed, we should have an analysis of sad consistency and of profound interest. There is something sublime in the reflection, that every human creature who treads the earth and breathes the air, has an inward history, a history unread by every eye but God’s; a history of solemn import, that has definite impression on the concerns of the universe, and is to live for ever in the annals of eternity.

In ordinary phraseology, we speak of our existence as if death made a chasm in it; but temporal and eternal are but distinctions of imagination; our eternal life commences, and our earthly is but the first stage, the infancy of that awful and endless existence. If I see in our nature that which can survive change, I see that also in it which can take materials of joy and sorrow along with it. The faculties that make our life here must be those which shall make that which is to come. Memory then will be there, which is but the resurrection of our by-gone experience; and whether for good or evil, it will call up the spirits of buried deeds, and as the life has been, will be an angel of heaven or a minister of hell;—imagination, which may have been the nurse of piety or the slave of passion,—intellect, which may have had the glow of the seraph or the malice of the demon: accordingly, then, as these powers have been properly directed or abused, every instinct of our moral nature tells us must be the joy of a righteous soul, or the agony of an evil heart. What treasure will the good man find he has laid up for his immortal life, when the past arises to him in the lustre of a new world: the consciousness of good thoughts and good actions, the peace of assimilation with God, and of union with the best of men: the immortal love of those with whom he had companioned in his earthly journey, the gratitude of many from whose eyes he had banished tears, and from whose bosoms he had plucked out despair; who has been true to the claims of his nature, and accomplished the work of a disciple of Christ, and a child of God, and a brother of man. On the other side, what are to be his feelings, who awakens in eternity with emotions of isolation and repulsion, condemned in his own conscience, who now discovers he has all to learn which can fit him for the society of noble spirits, whose expanded faculties flash shame and sorrow on his guilty soul, and show him that his whole course was folly: the sensualist, who stultified his reason and profaned his affections: the hypocrite, that toiled but for the outward, betrayed his convictions, and was a living and incarnate lie; before his fellows, a whited sepulchre; before his God, a corrupted mass of falsehood: the profane man, on whose lips prayer rarely dwelt, but to whom cursing and bitterness were familiar: the persecutor, who finds at last that he has hated or tormented others for a falsehood, or a sound: the man of wild ambition, who, despising the true glory which comes from God, and consists in doing right, spreads terror around him, in pursuing a phantom: the worldling, whose spirit was enslaved to those treasures for which he wasted life, and which he has left behind him in the dust. The sense of right and wrong is powerful and eternal; and when bad men resist it, it may be safely trusted to effect its own work, both of correction and of punishment.

II. I shall here review some of the arguments pleaded for the eternal misery of the wicked, and state briefly the grounds on which I reject it.

When we consider the mild and merciful spirit of the Gospel,—when we reflect on it as a revelation of divine love made manifest in the most perfect form of human love,—we are at first sight astonished that so tremendous an idea as that of an infinite and eternal hell could ever have been connected with it, or so wretched a one as a seclusive, and comparatively all but an unpeopled heaven. And truly this could have never been, had the doctrine of immortal life been apprehended in the full spirit of Christianity. But the fact of man’s immortality made manifest in the Gospel has not generally been so apprehended, it has had from the first to contend against darkening and perverting influences. Converts to the faith of Christ brought with them many of the prejudices and errors of their former training, and what in the early ages of the church was the result of ignorance, in later ones became sanctified into the testimony of faith. Those who came from heathen superstitions to the religion of Christ, brought with them minds filled with material images; their worship or their age left no means for any others; and their belief in a future existence of necessity became shaped by these associations. A sacrificial worship symbolized their gods of wrath, and what they had attributed to many, they were unable to dissociate from one; physical pains and pleasures comprehended their whole notion of retribution and reward, and these their Christianity made eternal. Their hell and their heaven were therefore fashioned from the rude conceptions of their previous superstitions, and from the symbolic language of the Gospel crudely understood. The everlasting hell which thence grew out of the mistakes of the vulgar, and the speculations of the learned, it was too much the interest of priests to maintain, not to receive the sanction of the church with an earnest and zealous promulgation. Connected with other doctrines, what immense power was thus placed in the hands of ecclesiastics! With what deep and gloomy awe it shrouded the character of the priest! Once in the place of his ministry, he stood there not as the simple teacher of his brethren, and his equals, not as the mere expounder of his master’s gospel, but as the commisioned delegate of heaven, authorized by God to denounce his everlasting wrath on the guilty, to wield the thunder of an eternal vengeance. We cannot estimate the power with which such a doctrine would invest the hierarchy, and we are not therefore surprised that it is the last which any orthodox priesthood would be willing to resign,—one of those prime doctrines, to deny which has ever been stamped as heresy, from Origen to Servetus. If even in these times, when protestantism and other causes have done so much to take away the reverence with which the ministry was once surrounded, highly-wrought pictures of endless misery give men not deemed to have any supernatural authority such influence over the minds of their hearers, such despotism over their feelings and their consciences, what must it have been when superstition bent down the votaries before the church in prostrate submission, when the servants of her altar were regarded as the direct messengers of God,—as those ordained to stand between hell and heaven, with the key of both; to announce glad tidings, or empty the vials of indignation; to distribute God’s grace, or to proclaim his malediction. Many causes have been assigned for the growth of ecclesiastical supremacy, but this doctrine I am persuaded was the greatest of all; the priestly throne, which raised its ambition to the stars, was girded around by the lightning and tempests of eternal terrors. The doctrine of eternal torments derives much strength from ecclesiastical interest; and it is further sustained by all the logic of theological subtlety. Many writers on divinity seem to find a strange and morbid pleasure in describing the tortures of the wicked, both in nature and duration, exhausting all analogies to illustrate the incomprehensible; and all modes of thought and expression to explain the infinite. On this doctrine the transition from Romanism to Protestantism has impressed no change. If the Reformation broke some bonds that enslaved the freedom of religion, it removed no cloud which obscured its heaven: the fierce teachings of Augustine were only made more complete and systematic by the still fiercer doctrines of Calvin; and the dark sketch of eternal reprobation drawn in its outlines by the Carthaginian monk, received its last touches from the Genevan master: what in the olden church was broached only in the cautious reasonings of the schools, has in Protestantism been made the staple materiel of theological declamation.

These doctrines have not only done much to obscure men’s minds as to the condition of the wicked in a future state, but also to mislead them in an equal degree on that of the righteous. This we observe in many of the popular notions of heaven. To millions, heaven seems to be for the soul what the grave is for the body—a place of mere repose. If something more than this, an elysium for indolence, a kind of region of complacent idealism, where the faithful and elect are to enjoy ecstacies and prayer, musings and melodies, which the coarse struggles of earth forbade, in which the cares of the world left no time to engage;—the clear skies and still waters of paradise, the golden harps, the incense, and the music of angels, to relieve from weariness, strife, and pain, toil-worn and time-worn spirits. Nor is such view of heaven ungrateful, tried as we are here with sin and tired as we are with labour; but this must not exhaust our thoughts of future bliss. Our highest happiness, even in heaven, must consist in highest action: no other happiness can exist for a moral and intellectual being than that which calls his faculties into energy, and supplies both with materials and objects on which to engage them. Our ideas in general of heaven are too much those of negation or contrast. We are here in sojourn, we think only of home there; we are here in conflict, we think only of peace there; we are here in labour, and there we only picture our rest; we forget that all these are worth nothing but as means to higher purposes, unsuitable as final conditions to creatures who bear within them the life that is henceforth to go on with that of the All-creative God.

I may just observe here, and it is pleasant to be able to do so, that the opinion against which this Lecture is directed, is an illustration of the fact that tenets die out practically before they are renounced theoretically. It is well known to all who hear recent orthodox preaching, or who read recent orthodox works on practical piety, how little compared with former times is the space now occupied in them by Satan and damnation. The imagination is not tortured as it once was, with all horrible and hideous representations of human suffering, which taste and devotion alike reject. Why, even in the Lecture of my reverend and respected opponent, though directly on the subject, all the repulsive features are lost in a most moderate and temporate exposition. Such errors let alone will gradually of themselves expire.

1. In support of the doctrine of eternal torments, it is in the first place pleaded that Scripture expressly declares it. This conclusion is founded principally on the words and phrases correspondent to our “ever,” “everlasting” “for ever and ever,” &c. That in numerous passages they imply duration without end or limit, we readily admit. It is needless to point them out. We are then told that this must be their invariable meaning, except some evident fragility in the object to which they are applied implies the contrary. To assert that they have the highest force when connected with future punishment, is to assume what is to be proved; for the nature of the object is the very question in dispute. If we can show that the words have not unvarying literal application, then the subject is at least open to discussion; but if it be asserted they must mean endless duration, because future punishment is in its nature endless, the point is dogmatically decided, and there is no further possibility of argument. If every phrase of Scripture is to be taken as a rigid definition, then we are to believe that Christ held himself in his own hands when he said, “this is my body.” Now the instances in the Bible, in all parts of it in which phrases disputed between us and our opponents indicated limited duration, and only that, are numerous beyond counting:^[601]—sometimes, not longer than a man’s life, as when after certain conditions of compact, the slave is said to serve his master for ever. In other cases it is more extended, but still temporary; as when the land of Judea is called an everlasting possession; the law an everlasting covenant; the nation a people established for ever; the hierarchy an everlasting priesthood. As to the last, the writer to the Hebrews tells us, that “the priesthood being changed there is made a necessity of change also of the law; for there is verily a disannulling of the commandment going before for the weakness and unprofitableness of it.”

???? (the principal word in the Greek original), Mr. Simpson in his Essay on the duration of future rewards and punishments (p. 17) asserts, occurs about a hundred times in the New Testament, in seventy of which at least it is clearly used for limited duration. In the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament it is even repeated, and several times it is repeated twice, and in two instances signifies no longer a period than the life of one man only. “It is,” says the same critic, “an observation of the utmost importance, that when a???, or a??????, are applied to the future punishment of the wicked, they are never joined to life, immortality, incorruptibility, but are always connected with fire, or with that punishment, pain, or second death, which is effected by means of fire. Now since fire, which consumes or decomposes other perishable bodies, is itself of a dissoluble or perishable nature, this intimates a limitation of the period of time.” The phrase, “everlasting fire,” is plainly a metaphor, a metaphor which the Jews would be at no loss to understand: the associations which they derived from the fire in the valley of Hinnom would render it sufficiently intelligible.

The phraseology was familiar in the Old Testament. Fire unquenchable, fire not to be quenched, is used in many places in which it cannot be literal. Thus Jeremiah (xvii. 27.) threatens the Jews, in the name of God, for their breach of the sabbath, “then will I kindle a fire in the gates (of Jerusalem,) and it shall devour the palaces thereof, and it shall not be quenched.” So Isaiah (xxxiv. 9, &c.), speaking of Idumea, “and the streams thereof shall be turned into pitch, and the dust thereof into brimstone, and the land thereof shall become burning pitch. It shall not be quenched night nor day: the smoke thereof shall go up for ever.”—While on this part of the subject, I shall just allude to a remark made on Mr. Grundy’s view of the text in which it is said of the wicked that their worm dieth not, and their fire is not quenched. After quoting a passage from Mr. Grundy’s Discourse, and making some comment on it, the lecturer went on to assert, “In a note moreover, we are informed that the foregoing criticism is founded on the assumption of the passage really referring to future punishment, which, however, the preacher affirms it does not. For, he adds, we have before shown, the worm has been long since dead, and for ages has the fire been quenched.” The impression which this use of Mr. Grundy’s language had a tendency to leave, is one wholly foreign to his meaning; for it would seem to imply that Mr. Grundy asserted the extension already of retributive penalty in the future life. The plain import is, that our Lord used a metaphor taken from perishable things, which have, in fact, perished—and thence it cannot be proved that he referred to an eternal state of suffering. The allusion, as is well known, is taken from the close of Isaiah, where, of the worshippers going to Jerusalem, it is said, they shall look upon the carcases of the men that have transgressed, for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched. It is plain that here it means not eternity, and though applied by Christ to future punishment, it does not follow from the language that he means to imply unending punishment. Archbishop Newcome’s language is as strong as Mr. Grundy’s; for he also says, “in the valley of Hinnom, the worm died when its food failed—and the pile on which human sacrifices were burnt to Moloch was often extinguished.” To the writer of the lectures which have been referred to, we are all deeply indebted for an example set us in times and under circumstances of which we can but little now estimate the difficulty; we owe him the tribute of our respect for an honest and fearless advocacy of truth, of mental and religious freedom, at the expense of painful and personal sacrifices.

Thus, while none of these passages that I have referred to prove this doctrine, there are many scriptures at utter variance with it. God is again and again called the father that created us. We are taught that he is good, and that his tender mercies are over all his works. God is love. He will not always chide, we are told, neither will he keep his anger for ever; that he will not cast off for ever; that he hath not shut up his tender mercies in anger. Finally, almost in the close of the sacred volume, we are informed that there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, neither crying, neither shall they suffer any more pain; for the former things are passed away. Both these cannot be true. It is a moral contradiction to conceive a gracious and merciful God, creating beings with immortal life, and then rendering them eternally wretched: we have but one alternative, either we must renounce our faith in these declarations, or we renounce it in the benevolence of God. There are but two texts, one in Daniel, and the other in Matthew, in which there is any remarkable force. In these it is said that the wicked go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into life eternal, and on these two phrases the tremendous doctrine is built up. The duration of both are urged to be equal, and we are told, that if we deny eternal damnation, we deny eternal life. No such thing. Reason, feeling, nature, justice, moral sentiment, the belief of a perfect God, and the force of scriptural evidence, coincide with the one and are repugnant to the other. There is not a single proof which can be urged in favour of a future life, which is not an irrefutable argument against future perdition. If you deduce the ideas from the goodness of God, from his truth, from his wisdom, it is essentially subversive of this dark dogma. If you deduce the idea from the nature of man, it comes to the same purpose; if you conclude he is to live for ever, because of his infinite and progressive faculties of reason and of conscience, you must by the same argument infer that he is to live to a better end than to be cast eternally into hell. If he was worth creation, he is worth preserving; if he is worth preserving, he is worth being made good and happy. If a great multitude of immortals are to endure infinite pain, so far as they are concerned, the existence of a soul and the being of a God are infinite evils.

The spirit and the letter of Scripture is in favour of this glorious doctrine. Every Scripture which proves that God is good and not malignant is in favour of it; every Scripture which proves that God is a restorer and not a destroyer is in favour of it; every Scripture which proves that God has more the desire to pardon than to punish proves it. To this effect I might quote passages to greater extent than the whole of this lecture occupies; the selection must therefore be limited, not by the want of matter but by the want of space. “God is love: and he so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life: for God sent not his son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved.”^[602] “Jehovah is full of compassion, slow to anger and of great mercy. Jehovah is good to all: and his tender mercies are over all his works. All thy works do praise thee, O Jehovah: and thy saints shall bless thee.” We are exhorted to “taste and see that the Lord is good.” “The goodness of God,” we are told, “endureth continually.” “The Lord God,” we are assured, “is merciful and gracious, long suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin.” “The Lord your God is gracious and merciful, and will not turn away his face from you if ye turn to him.” “The Lord is merciful and gracious; slow to anger and plenteous in mercy: he hath not dealt with us after our sins, nor rewarded us according to our iniquities: for as the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his mercy towards them that fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us: Like as a father pitieth his children, so hath the Lord compassion on them that fear him: for he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.” And from our earliest prayer to our dying hour, we are taught in the simplest and sublimest of all supplications to open our address to God thus; “Our Father who art in heaven.” We read evermore in Scripture that God’s is not an everlasting anger; as such passages as the following testify: “His anger endureth but for a moment.” “He will not always chide, neither will he keep his anger for ever.” “Hath God forgotten to be gracious; hath he in anger shut up his tender mercies?” “I will not contend for ever, neither will I be always wrath: for the spirit should fail before me, and the souls which I have made.” Correspondent with the doctrine of these expressions, and with the spirit of the whole Gospel, is a passage that I quote from a book which Protestants in general declare not to be canonical. “Thou hast mercy upon all; for thou canst do all things, and winkest at the sins of men, because they should amend. For thou lovest all things that are, and abhorrest nothing which thou hast made: for never wouldst thou have made any thing if thou hadst hated it. And how could any thing have endured, if it had not been thy will; or been preserved, if not called by thee? But thou sparest thine, for they are thine, O Lord, thou lover of souls. For thine incorruptible spirit is in all things; therefore chastenest thou them, by little and little, that offend, and warnest them by putting them in remembrance wherein they have offended, that leaving their wickedness, they may believe on thee, O Lord. For thy power is the beginning of righteousness; and because thou art the Lord of all, it maketh Thee to be gracious unto all. But thou, O God, art gracious and true: long suffering, and in mercy ordering all things: for if we sin, we are thine, knowing thy power; but we will not sin, knowing that we are accounted thine.”^[603]

Once more, whatever theoretical view we may happen to hold on the redemption of man by Christ, the end and glory of that redemption requires as the only consistent consummation, the ultimate happiness and virtue of mankind. To this purport I shall adduce one passage of Scripture and quote a commentary. The passage is Rom. v. 12-21, and the commentary is by Dr. S. Smith. “As by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and thus death hath passed upon all men, inasmuch as all have sinned: (for until the law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed, where there is no law:) nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgressions, who is a figure (a type) of him that was to come: (yet the free gift likewise is not so, as was the offence: for if through the offence of one, many have died, much more the grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many. Neither is the gift so, as it was by one that sinned; for judgment was of one offence to condemnation, but the free gift is of many offences unto justification. For if, by the offence of one, death reigned by one, much more those who receive the abounding of grace and of the gift of righteousness shall reign in life by one, even Jesus Christ:) so then as by the offence of one, judgment came upon all men to condemnation; so likewise by the righteousness of one the free gift hath come upon all men to justification of life. For as by the disobedience of one many were made sinners, so likewise, by the obedience of one, many shall be made righteous. Moreover, the law entered that sin might abound: but where sin abounded, grace did much more abound. That as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ, our Lord.”

“In this passage all men are said to have been made mortal by the offence of Adam, and here the phrase ‘all men’ must necessarily be understood to signify every individual of the human race. Though the style of the apostle in this passage is remarkably intricate and perplexed, yet his meaning is clear, and scarcely to be misunderstood. He affirms that death entered into the world by Adam, and that in consequence of his offence, death passed upon all men, or all men became mortal. Thus many were made sinful or mortal by one. In this sense Adam was a type of Jesus Christ: for as all mankind became subject to great privation or suffering in consequence of the offence of one, namely Adam, so the greatest privileges and blessings are bestowed on all mankind in consequence of the obedience of one, namely, Jesus Christ. But it is only in this single circumstance that all suffer and all are benefited by one, that there is any analogy between them: for in every other respect there is the greatest possible difference between Adam and Christ. The act entailing such important consequences upon the whole human race, was, on the part of Adam, an act of transgression, on the part of Christ an act of obedience. And there is a still further disparity between them; for the calamities resulting from the act of transgression were the legal punishment of the offence; but the blessings accruing from the act of obedience were not such as could be claimed by law, but were the free, unpurchased unmerited gift of God. And the consequences of the act of transgression and the act of obedience may be placed in still more striking contrast: for the act of transgression was but one, and yet death, with all the calamities connected with it, passed upon the whole human race; while the act of obedience provides justification for many offences: nor is this all; for the blessings procured for all mankind by the obedience of Christ are unspeakably greater than the calamities brought upon them by the offence of Adam.”

“This is undoubtedly the argument of the Apostle. Notwithstanding all the obscurity and perplexity of his language, whoever reads the passage with attention, must perceive these were the ideas which were in his mind. And in the whole compass of Christian truth, there is no doctrine more important or more glorious than that which is thus disclosed. It is a direct and positive declaration, that the blessings, provided by the obedience of Christ, shall, in number of persons who partake them, be co-extensive with the calamities produced by the offence of Adam, and in their magnitude and value greatly exceed them. This is sufficient; this is decisive; these ideas were in the mind of the apostle; this is the doctrine which he plainly and indisputably teaches, and nothing more is necessary. For, even though it should be proved that he illustrates his doctrine by a fanciful allusion to what was itself only an allegory; that his reasoning is not in every respect complete, and even, that he did not himself fully comprehend all the glorious consequences of the sublime truth he disclosed, that truth would be neither the less important nor the less certain. The great fact itself, the fact which it was his object and his office to teach, and in which he could not be mistaken, was, that the blessings produced by the obedience of Christ shall be as extensive as the evils occasioned by the offence of Adam; that all who suffer from the one shall partake of the benefits of the other, while these benefits themselves shall infinitely exceed and overbalance the calamities entailed on mankind by the first transgression. The conclusion is inevitable, that the whole human race shall ultimately be restored to virtue and happiness. By one passage of Scripture then, at least, the doctrine which it is the object of this work to establish, is positively and expressly affirmed; and this is decisive.”^[604]

To sustain this doctrine we hear analogy also pleaded. Pain, it is said, has no tendency to correct. This is not true. Pain often does correct—and many are led back to virtue by means of a sad experience. Pain physically and morally is the great instrument of warning. But though it were fully granted that pure pain were not a corrective agency, it may, in connection with other influences, bring healing to the soul. We never see it unmixed in this world, and we have no just ground to conclude it will be so in another. How often is it the means of drawing forth a mercy and a grace from others that softens the stony heart of the transgressor. How often, when the sinner is laid low—yea, and by the very effect of crimes, will a kind look or word, an instance of forbearance or forgiveness, work a regeneration on his nature. How often will the son who plagued his parents’ life, and whitened their hair with sorrow, when driven by misery to seek again the shelter of a home, be sweetened into meekness by a mother’s love, and be raised again to dignity by a father’s generosity. If pain then, by making us feel the goodness of others, will so frequently incite us to deserve it, are we to conceive that an experience, with clearer knowledge of God’s love, shall be entirely ineffectual? It is said, that men grow more hardened in sin the longer they continue in it. I allow it was a generous truth: and yet the thought of a moment—the visit of one pure memory, may suffice to change a life of crime. But our argument is, that men will not continue in sin; and it will not be asserted, that if reformation is at all possible, God will refuse the means, and make crime eternal. It is further stated that the wicked, by force of numbers and society with each other, grow increasingly worse: it is to be proved, which it is not and cannot, that in a future existence there is any such distribution either local or moral. This doctrine is not only unfounded in analogy, but contradicted by it—there must be either destruction or renovation: so it is in the natural world, and so it is in the moral. Nothing can sustain continued existence in a state of extreme disorganization; a certain amount of consistency and harmony is an essential condition of every being—without this, there must be dissolution and destruction. Sin being then confusion in the soul and in society, an eternal state of progressive sin is inconceivable. Pain, being in like manner disorganization in body or mind, an eternity of growing pain is equally inconceivable. Continued and extreme pain therefore must either destroy its subject or destroy itself; and then on this argument alone we perceive that eternal torture is a theological figment; a nonentity and impossibility.

The belief is further pressed upon us on grounds of moral influence. This is but an additional argument against it, for it either has no effect or a bad one. It has no effect, from its vagueness and its incomprehensibleness. It does not fasten on the moral feelings—it sinks dead by its own ponderousness. It has no effect from its inconsistency with human nature; there is no affinity between a finite being and boundless torture; and thence from the want of truth there is also a want of power. It has no effect, because there is an instinctive abhorrence in the heart against it; and there is an instinctive justice which repels it; the imagination reels before it—the mind retreats from it, and finds that it is too odious even to be looked at. That it has no effect may be seen to a vast extent: millions in all countries profess to believe it, and among these have been, and are, many of the most abandoned that ever brought shame upon their nature; and yet a faith in hell gave them no fear of vice. So far as it has influence it is of a bad kind; because it familiarizes the mind with coarse images; because it breathes into obedience a spirit of slavish fear; because it makes terror an instrument of religion; because it throws darkness on the ways of providence; because it undermines filial confidence in God, and puts a limit either to his power or his love. The doctrine of ultimate and universal salvation lowers the sanctions of righteousness. But what is the true motive to goodness, what is the spirit of it—that which unites us most to God? Love, not fear; not fear of hell; and in the sense of terror not even fear of God himself. Fear is mere submission to force, not the willing service of heart-felt appreciation; the crouching of a slave in outward show to the despot whom in his soul he thoroughly detests. Now as we cannot love by constraint, what ideas of God are most likely to move our affections, and consequently produce in us the true spirit of obedience? Evidently his benevolence, his purity, his disinterested goodness, his fatherly nature—to be drawn to him with the cords of our hearts, we see him in the clear light of his moral beauty. It is rather paradoxical that these doctrines on the power of fear, the righteousness of vindictive punishment, and the limits of moral reformation, should be propagated in our times, when all the practical tendencies of society are in contradiction. The influence of conviction and not of force, the influence of mind and not pain, is the growing spirit of the time, and a faith, which puts no bound to hope; for the love of man is a motive deepening ever in the great social heart. This is the blessing of our day,—it has enlightened education, and softened the rigour of instruction; it is mingling the gentleness of mercy with the austerity of punishment; it is working to restore the criminal and not to destroy, tempering discipline with wisdom, believing that corrective amelioration is most useful and most just; in the same believing spirit it is sending a vast spiritual agency into every realm of vice: while thus philosophy and philanthropy labour in the trust they shall leave men better than they found them, exploding the errors which had been the greatest curses to mankind, these are the very errors which theology sanctifies, which it is heresy to deny: whilst a moral and merciful civilization is exerted to exalt man, theology continues to deface the image of God; the one scattering beauty on mortality, and the other spreading darkness on eternity; the one removing pain, and the other preaching it.

The doctrine we oppose is further defended on the ground that sin is an infinite offence, that man is therefore an infinite offender; and that an infinite offender deserves unending punishment. The assertion, that man can be an infinite offender, is wholly inconsistent with the views which the orthodox themselves present of man. To be a transgressor in any degree, implies the possession of a noble nature, much less to be an infinite transgressor; but with the miserable and contemptible creature which Calvinism describes as man, it is impossible to associate any idea that is either noble or infinite, for good or for evil. We may assume another mode of reasoning. The obedience of the law is righteousness, the transgression of the law is sin. These are correspondent definitions. By every rule, therefore, of logical deduction, if a single act of sin is an infinite evil, a single act of obedience is an infinite good; and on the same grounds of justice by which one man is doomed to an everlasting hell, the other merits an eternal heaven.

But to speak of man at all as an infinite offender, is to set common sense at defiance. Whence can be the infinitude of his offence? Not in its origin, not in its effects, not in its duration: not in its origin, for it is produced in limited faculties; not in its effects, for the errors of a created nature, counteracted by an uncreated omnipotence, can never be infinite, can never be irremediable; not in its duration, for the life of one man, the lives of all men to the end of human generations, are but a point in the universe and government of God. Sin is either a state of mind or a state of action; but whether as one or the other, it must of necessity be limited. Were the career of man extended to that of Methusalem, and his powers as capacious as his years were many; were the whole of that existence a succession of crime, uncheered by a solitary virtue; were the energy of the mightiest intellect devoted to contrive guilt, and the efforts of the most ingenious sinfulness given to its execution; were every creation of fancy a vision of impurity, every instinct an impulse to cruelty, every emotion a movement of malignity, yet even thus horrible, we could not with truth call man an infinite offender. Neither in desire nor in action can he be such. Not in desire, for there is no man that wishes, there never has been the man that wished, absolute, unmingled, endless evil; not in action, for there is no man, whatever the malignity of his intention, has unlimited power of execution. If sin is an infinite offence, then all sins are equal, for infinity has no degrees; if sinners are infinite transgressors, then criminals have no distinctions; transgression has no gradations, and the whole moral space is annihilated between him who stands on the very margin of heaven, and him who is already plunged into hell; the same impassable gulf which exists between their conditions, exists also between their characters.

Man is not an infinite offender, nor yet is he an incorrigible one. There is nothing in his nature or history which justifies the conclusion. There is no point of moral baseness so low that we can mark it as a hopeless condition. He is not immutable; and as change is possible, changes for the better may be looked for, as well as changes for the worse. Such changes have been; the painful experience of evil and wrong-doing, however slow and vacillating, always drives towards them; all observation, therefore, is in favour of our expectation. We look not on the deepest, the deadliest, and the worst instance of human depravity, as beyond correction, beyond improvement, beyond the power of Almighty God; we look upon no ignorance that may not be enlightened; upon no vice that may not be removed; upon no human countenance so scarred with the traces of depravity, as to leave nothing visible but the hand-writing of reprobation; God forbid that we should behold any human being with humanity’s capacities, destined, beyond amendment, to hopeless corruption and to incorrigible misery. I deny not the existence and the delusion of vice. I deny not the abuse of the noblest faculties, or the perversion of the best affections, but I do deny that the human soul is ever so wrecked or lost as to become utterly hopeless. The man of pleasure may turn from joy to joy, and collect nothing for his home but weariness and disgust; the man of ambition may sacrifice health and repose, honour and probity; the covetous man may, during a long life, drudge away days of labour, and toss through nights of care, to die in the possession of what he never enjoyed; the indolent and the prodigal may live as if there were no tomorrow; the vicious and profane may reel on, reckless of a future existence and a future judgment. We have all seen every human passion making havoc upon virtue; but we have also seen the passions, carrying with them their own sting and their own punishment, and in that sting and punishment, to a certain extent at least, they have contained their own amelioration and amendment. That human beings have been raised from their lowest debasement, that they have been emancipated from the worst of moral bondage, that they have been purified from the deepest of pollutions, we have many consolatory evidences. In every nation of earth that now enjoys the blessings of religion, of liberty, of arts, of moral and social refinement, we have proofs, that by gradual and progressive improvement, these human beings may be delivered from the very worst estate of ignorance, vice, destitution, and brutality. For what are the nations that we now glory to acknowledge, but instances the most undeniable, that man is not only an imperishable, but also an improvable creature? I have seen beings in their thoughtlessness, the victims of their own vanity, sink miserable and despairing into the terror which they had prepared for themselves: but must I say, that they shall never throughout eternity discover the littleness of the objects they desired, nor abstain from chasing the phantoms that misled them? I have seen men insanely and foolishly toil for all that makes life a trifle, at the loss of all that makes it a glory; I have read in history, and I can recal by memory, the experience of those who spent all they had of energy or misused all they had of goodness to obtain that which at last they felt their torture; I have seen the turbulent nature soften into peace, the thoughtless awakened into wisdom and action, the profane elevated into reverence, the impious bending to pray, the angry subdued into meekness, the proud converted to the wisdom of humility, the hard-hearted melted to the goodness of mercy.

Should it be said that this argument is too narrow, and appeals only to immediate feeling, let us then take a wider sphere, and try the principle by a larger test. Call to your attention the varieties of mankind, of their present and past condition, of their present and past circumstances. Many millions exist on the wide surface of the globe, among whom the elements of moral redemption have never had operation, on whose benighted souls a ray of Christian light has never dawned, hearts which have never felt the bliss of holy liberty, and bosoms that have never burned with heavenly fire. Take up a map of the world; cast your eye over its boundaries and divisions, from pole to pole, and from meridian to meridian; conceive the myriads of rational beings who swarm along that surface; reflect on the wonderful diversities in their conditions and their training; pass over the dreary frosts of one country, and the deadening heat of others; wherever you turn, humanity meets you under different forms, and in various circumstances—with habits more or less corrupted, with morals more or less pure, with religion more or less enlightened or absurd; let me then ask any enlightened thinker, any one who has studied human nature, whether all these are to be arranged under one general classification. Consider the tribes around the arctic, buried in darkness; pierce into the unexplored regions of Africa; go over the deserts of Arabia; walk among the tents of its predatory and pastoral populations; traverse Persia, India, Tartary, the islands that dimly gleam through the Southern Ocean, and wherever you go, mankind are in various moral positions, and consequently under various terms of moral probation. Shall then that all-seeing Creator, to whom every heart is open, place all these motley tribes under one system of judgment? It cannot be. Shall beings born in regions of darkness be condemned for want of light—beings who had never breathed but of impurity, for not being sanctified—beings bred amidst idols, for being idolatrous? Taking thus into view the populations of the earth, we have before us an infinity of moral conditions; and yet the differences are not greater between the extremes of them than those we might select in a single country or a single city; than those, in fact, which we know to exist. Respecting the terms of probation, a New Zealander is not at a greater distance from an Englishman, than some Englishmen are from others. When we think then how many are ignorant and suffering by the very necessity of destiny, and by the same fate vicious and depraved, if the passage of a breath end all hope of amendment, our faith must cease in divine justice, as well as divine wisdom, and our perplexity be turned to despair.

We look on man, not as a member of a sect, but as a child of God; and once more, we ask, if he is not an infinite offender, nor yet incorrigible, is he not worth the correction? If his purity and happiness be within the bounds of possibility, if his eternal misery by any degree of energy can be averted, are we to believe that a God who has infinite benevolence wills him to perish; are we to believe that a God who has infinite power will exert none of it to save the most glorious of his works from utter destruction? Can we suppose that God, omnipotent and most wise, would reverse eternally such capacities for goodness and happiness, and instead of training them to be instruments of boundless utility, would condemn them to be agents of eternal evil? Will not God rather choose to sow the field of everlasting life with seeds of holiness and bliss, than to scathe it to a ruin and a wilderness? I would not strip the future of its awe; no terror can be equal to the truth; it is the most solemn anticipation that can ever come upon the mind, and I maintain that nothing the most fearing imagination conceived in its wildest apprehensions ever equalled the reality: but, for God’s universe and for God’s creatures, there is always hope; in God’s power and wisdom there are limitless means, and at last there will be universal peace and universal emancipation. If creatures are not ultimately and universally happy, it must be either from the want of ability in God, or the want of inclination; and this difficulty pressing itself on the mind of a powerful and pious orthodox writer, he chose, in accounting for the loss of souls, to suppose that theologians had mistaken in their theories the nature of divine omnipotence; that love and power have distinct offices; but if he were to circumscribe either attribute in God, it would be power and not love. On the ground of an eternal perdition, such attribute as a moral omnipotence can truly be ascribed to God. The able writer to whom I have alluded has seen to the bottom of the difficulty, and believing as he does most sincerely in eternal suffering, believing also as he does with equal sincerity in the infinite love of God, he is compelled so far as the human will is concerned to circumscribe the sphere and action of divine omnipotence, or rather to deny it altogether. “The truth is,” he says, “that the only rational conclusion we can arrive at in the matter, is that in the nature of things no such attribute can exist. And until the cloud, which its supposed existence throws on every procedure of divine providence, is dissipated, we must either not think at all, or think amiss on that subject in comparison of which all other subjects are unimportant, namely the character of God: I know that many may, at first sight, be startled at the assertion, that the power of God can in any sense be limited. In this, as in various instances, they will object to the same truth as a distinct proposition, which they will freely assume and take for granted in all their reasonings. These very persons will speak of Providence as devising means and moving by gradual advancement to the accomplishment of an end. If asked, why not decree the end without the means? they answer, because it could not be attained, at least so well, without them. If then, the term could not, be at all admitted, (and how freely is this term applied to God in Scripture!) no such thing as unrestricted omnipotence exists. It is not that there is any limit in God. God forbid that I should dare to say so. It is, that power in its own nature is limited. It can act only on possibilities.... Even power itself is but a vague and unintelligible notion, unless displayed to us as triumphing over difficulties, and rising superior to obstacles. A sweeping omnipotence, which could by one sovereign act of will, decree that in the nature of things neither impediment nor resistance should exist, leaves no field even for power itself to act on. Omnipotence such as this, at least supplies no materials for man to comprehend or adore. No: we are constructed otherwise. Our faculties are so framed as to correspond with the truth and reality of things. The power that fills the soul with wonder and with praise is that which the Scripture of truth exhibits: that power in which God arises that his enemies may be scattered; that omnipotence by which he produces good out of evil, and subdues the most unyielding substances and stubborn elements into himself. But still more, as it respects the wisdom of God, is it necessary to dismiss the notion of an absolute omnipotence before the former attribute can shine forth in its true glory. For surely, according to our conceptions, it would be more wise to arrive at once, if that were possible, at all that means, and contrivances, and processes can accomplish, than to prefer elaborate and circuitous courses, merely for the sake of going round about to do what could be done as well in the twinkling of an eye. And yet in what does the divine wisdom as apprehensible by us consist? What are the views and discoveries which lead us, with the apostle, to exclaim, ‘Oh, the depths of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God?’ Is it not in those very procedures which if unbounded power existed would be folly and not wisdom, that all the treasures of the infinite mind are manifested? in adapting means to ends, in pursuing the path of light amidst surrounding darkness, in harmonizing discordant principles, and bringing order out of confusion?”

After a few other remarks, the author proceeds to maintain his position by the testimony of Scripture.—“To quote Scripture,” he observes, “as fully as I might upon this subject, would be, in a measure, to transcribe the Bible. I shall content myself with producing three passages, which, though not of the directer kind, bear, I think, irresistibly on the point. The first is Ezek. xxxiii. 11. ‘As I live, saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live: turn ye, turn ye, from all your evil ways; for why will ye die, O house of Israel?’ The second is Isa. v. 3, 4. ‘And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem, and men of Judah, judge, I pray you, betwixt me and my vineyard. What could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it? Wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes.’ The last which I shall quote is Matt. xxiii. 37, 38. ‘O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets and stonest them that are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate.’” “Is this, then, I would ask any fair and candid person, who looks as if the All-gracious being who employs it, had any relief or remedy in reserve for those who wilfully reject the mercies he has freely offered them? Are these like the expressions of one who could bestow salvation in any other way, or any other terms? Do they not resemble rather the tender complaints and anxious warnings of a parent who had done all he could do, and proposed all that he had to propose, to rescue his child from ruin, and who must at last, with agonizing reluctance, give up that child, if he would still pursue those courses whose end is inevitable destruction? And if such be the characters in which God has been pleased to reveal himself; if such be the words which he has actually spoken, are we to be wise above what is written? Is it honouring God to say he uses a language to work upon our feelings, which language is in reality a misrepresentation of the truth; a misrepresentation, nevertheless, so ill contrived, that, after all, it does not deceive us? Or is it exalting his great name, to magnify the mere natural attribute of his power, above those moral attributes in which consist at once his essence and his glory? No. If it be indeed reverence to God, to dismiss him altogether from our minds, then all such considerations are set at rest for ever. But if it be our duty, not only to think of him, but to bear him in all our thoughts, then in all around us we see this truth inscribed, that there is a limit in power or a limit in love. In which shall we place it?—In power? Then we place it not in God, but in his lowest attribute.—In love? Then indeed we place the limit in God himself—‘God is love.’”^[605]

The reasoning of this passage is most cogent, the dilemma is inevitable. If there be eternal sin and eternal perdition; if there be not ultimate and universal regeneration, limit there must be in love or in power: but holding as we do the doctrine of progressive discipline, we place limit in neither, and we glorify both. Strange it is, that while thus magnifying God in the highest of his attributes, in the harmony and perfection of his nature, while thus trusting him with the faith of children, notwithstanding many things in his providence mysterious and inexplicable, in despite of the sin and misery that surround us, filling the human mind and human destiny with painful and perplexing problems, we believe him to be all-powerful as he is all-good; yet in thus believing we are set down by Trinitarians as rebels against heaven, and blasphemers of our Creator. If reverence to God demand us to believe that the smoke of eternal torment from the depths of an unfathomable hell is an incense well pleasing in his sight, or an evil which he must endure but has no power to remove, then that is an honour we do not and we cannot give: that is not the God we worship; that is not the God we can love: and if to believe in God be to think him such as Calvin and others have pictured him, then at once take not only the name of Christians from us, but in addition stigmatize us with that of atheists.

III. To limit the power of God in order to justify his love, is the struggle of a humane and benignant nature against a dark and stern theology; but writers in orthodox divinity, whom it would be too tedious to catalogue, have not scrupled to go the whole length along the line of fearful consequences to which their system led them. They have not hesitated to plead for the eternity of hell’s torments the glory of God; strange idea indeed of the glory of God, to contemplate him as the author of everlasting pain and everlasting sin. We think that every attribute of God, in every manifestation, is directly against this doctrine. His omniscience is against it. He must have known from all eternity the destiny of the lost: and with this knowledge, on the orthodox theory, he made creatures with the direct foresight of their everlasting misery and everlasting destruction. His omnipotence is against it. I have shown by the long extract I have before quoted, that the profound and consistent theological reasoner who believes in eternal perdition cannot believe in a moral omnipotence. An all-powerful being must be either infinitely malignant or infinitely benevolent. If God were the one, he could find delight only in the suffering of his creatures; and he wills not to relieve them, because he does not will them to be happy. But this idea is utterly repugnant to the first principles of religion. If God be, as we believe he is, the other, he can have no motive to make his children, the work of his own hands, endlessly wretched; and having the power, he has also the will to redeem them. A progressive universe is, therefore, the only true solution to God’s providence, and God’s prescience. Divine justice, it is said, demands it. What, then, is divine justice? Is this divine justice identical with vengeance? Is it divine justice, to make the everlasting torture of a race—for the saved are but the gleanings—a sacrifice to boundless self-glorification? Is it divine justice to array all the force of infinite attributes against a limited, a weak, and erring creature? Is it divine justice to meet the offence of ephemeral mortality with the agony of deathless torture and of resistless wrath? If this be divine justice, we have reason to rejoice that it is not human justice. Such justice is but naked malignity; and this view of it is the more firmly established when we further consider that, by the orthodox theology, all is the result of a foregone conclusion, the last term of a dark progression, the execution of a cause uttered in the black womb of eternity, for which the wretches are prepared by the inheritance of a corrupt nature in a corrupt world, and lest all natural causes should be insufficient, by an exposure to the unseen snares of a Satan profound in cunning, mighty in malice, and, by himself and his agents, all but omnipotent and omnipresent. This argument from divine justice is urged so frequently and earnestly, that I shall here transcribe a few remarks from a writer who has treated the subject with equal force of logic and fervour of eloquence. “Justice and goodness,” he observes, “are the same. Justice requires no more punishment for sin than goodness: goodness requires the same as justice, but the manner in which benevolence manifests itself under the form of goodness and of justice is different, and, therefore, requires a different appellation. A person who forgives an offence upon repentance and reformation is good: this is one modification of goodness, which, by way of eminence, is often called goodness itself, or more strictly mercy: the person who visits an offence which is neither repented of, nor amended with a proper degree of pain, is also good: this is another modification of goodness to which the term justice is applied. Mercy and justice, therefore, do not differ from each other in their nature, since they equally arise from benevolence, and they differ in aspect only according to the moral condition of the being with regard to whom they are exemplified. This account of divine justice explains, in the most satisfactory manner, the principle on which Deity rewards and punishes mankind. Did men never violate the laws of rectitude, he would make them invariably and completely happy. But there is no person who is free from fault: the moral state of every individual is, in some respect or at some period, such as it ought not to be. Every bad disposition, and every improper habit, must be rectified before happiness can be enjoyed. It is necessary, therefore, that the moral governor of the world should vary his conduct according to the character of the person whom he has to treat; that he should visit the good with favour, and manifest his disapprobation of the wicked; for, if he were to make happiness compatible with sin, it could not be corrected. The effect of pain is to make us dislike and avoid that which causes it. It is for this reason pain is annexed to sin. Sin is an evil which it is necessary to remove; pain is employed as the instrument of its destruction; and that principle by which Deity has established this constitution of things, by which he so regulates events as invariably to secure the ultimate reward of goodness, and the punishment of wickedness, is distinguished by the term justice.... Were it necessary to add any thing more to show that divine justice is not inconsistent with the attribute of goodness, but a part of it, the consideration of the design of its inflictions would afford further evidence of this truth. Every violation of the law of God involves the transgressor, sooner or later, in suffering; and of this constitution of things, by which pain is inseparably connected with deviation from rectitude, the Supreme Being is the author. Why did he appoint it? Why did he so dispose the whole tendency of his moral government as to ensure this consequence? Why does he, who is a being of unerring wisdom and infinite benevolence, never suffer any offence which is unrepented of to escape punishment? Since his very nature is love, and since he created all his intelligent offspring in order to make them happy, it can be no gratification to him to involve them in suffering. Their groans can be no music to his ear. If he afflict them, it must be, not for his own gratification, but for their benefit.... Viewing then the attribute of justice, which has been supposed to require the endless misery of the greater part of the human race, as that very principle which is designed to prevent this terrible consequence, (a man) feels himself capable of relying with implicit confidence on the decisions of the judge, both with regard to himself and all mankind. He is satisfied that he will treat even the most criminal with perfect equity; that he will place them in circumstances the best adapted to their unhappy condition; that his discipline will ultimately accomplish its end, and extirpate sin and misery from the creation.”^[606] If the doctrine of eternal torment be contradictory to God’s justice, much more is it to his wisdom: for surely it is not wise to create only to destroy;—to perpetuate endless moral conflict—not only to destroy and confuse, but to destroy and confuse the best and noblest of his works—to inflict undying anguish on capacities suited for undying happiness, to ruin every faculty and to blast every hope. Nor is the doctrine less opposed to his holiness than to his wisdom. Improved ideas on the philosophy of our spiritual nature, and on the real purport of moral retribution, with the penalties of sin, imply the continuance of sin. A material hell or a material heaven by the thinking portion of all sects is in general exploded. Sin carries with it and creates its own punishments: if sin then be eternal and progressive in its sufferings, it must also be eternal and progressive in its existence and its evils. Hell is not merely a region of unutterable horror, where wretches writhe in eternal torture, but also a region of boundless sin, of malignant wickedness, of hopeless corruption, of vilest affections, of basest passions. What shall we then say of an infinite holiness, enlightened by infinite wisdom, armed with infinite power, allowing this condition to exist? If the doctrine of eternal torment be true, no such attribute as divine mercy can have being: if this doctrine be true, a God of goodness is a fiction of imagination, the creation of a brain-sick enthusiasm, the dream of amiable but unfounded hopes. It is of no purpose to qualify in these things: there is no room in the same universe for a good God and an eternal hell: if this doctrine be true, the past is a wreck, and the future a curse. To such a condition of existence annihilation were a preferable alternative. It were better the brain should at once moulder with the thoughtless sod, than be tortured with the wilderings of everlasting contradictions; it were better the affections should perish with the last earthly sigh than throb through an eternity of agonized or selfish existence. On the orthodox supposition, either man must lose his identity and go to heaven without remembering whom he knew and loved in life, or he must lose his sympathy, become apostate to all his better feelings, and see without pain or pity many given over to despair with whom on earth he walked in dearest friendship. Instead of the big tear which would have burst from his eye in the years of mortality at the thought even of a partial separation; instead of the affectionate and instinctive anguish which would have torn his breast, as he saw the last vision in the sun, and the last flutter in the breeze of the sail which was wafting his friend to another clime; he must approve the sentence, nay, some maintain, he must see its execution with triumph, which may consign his nearest and dearest to endless damnation.—If the belief could be habitually and practically realized, that human souls were every minute over the wide earth dropping into hell, that amongst the sighs of death with which the world is filled, the greater number are the knells of infinite perdition, that the graves on which the mourners weep, which to us all, at one time or other, make earth a vale of tears, are so many monuments of irreparable wreck, the silent witnesses of God’s anger and man’s despair; if any one, I repeat, could constantly, and in very truth, believe that souls were thus quitting the present scene, souls with enlarged capacities, but enlarged for eternal sorrow, and ever smile again, he might wear the form of his species, but he should have the heart of a fiend. Faith in such a doctrine should kill at once the life of joy; every sound should be funereal, brightness or beauty there should be none. Each of us, like Job, should curse the day of his birth, but with a more terrible earnestness; the exclamation of Jeremiah would be in every mouth an appropriate utterance, “Oh that my head were waters, and my eyes were fountains of tears!” Is there the human being that could feel joy in the midst of an hospital, could laugh in a city of the plague, while death went from couch to couch, while mirth was banished from each hearth, and the grass of desolation growing in the streets? But how much more should all delight be banished from the soul, if in the Creator’s universe there be a dark and measureless region, filled with hideous abominations and unexpiring torments! If thus it be, let there, I repeat, be no look of happiness, let there be no voice of sweetness; let garment of praise be changed for the spirit of heaviness; let all heads be bent in grief, and all eyes dim with weeping, in lamentation for the sorrows of the universe. But be it not so—leave us at least a gleam of light from heaven.

Oh no! God has no pleasure in the death of a sinner, no glory in the pain or punishment of his creatures: it is the progress towards universal blessedness, and its final consummation, that truly shows forth the glory of God, and manifests the grandeur of his name and nature—more sweetly than the earth, more majestically than the heavens. It shows forth his justice: he punishes, terribly, it may be, but not cruelly or hopelessly; he punishes, but he amends; he chastises, but he purifies. It shows forth his wisdom: for universal holiness and universal happiness are the mightiest objects which infinite wisdom could select, the highest purposes in which infinite wisdom could be manifested: It shows forth his power, not in a blasting malediction, but in a creative and all-dispensing love; not in the thunder of destruction, but in the hand of a Father full of gifts and full of blessings:—subduing evil, distributing happiness, drawing out of apparent confusion order and harmony, more fair and beautiful than the worlds he has called out of darkness; “moving upon the face of many a stormy wave, and blending into calm what seemed only the chaos of contending elements.”

It is marvellous that we can think seriously on existence or on providence, that we can reflect on human nature or survey human life, without feeling the need as well as the truth of the doctrine of the full mercy of God, and of his universally benignant designs for all his children. True, creation is fair, and much of existence is happy; but still there are evils and miseries which ever perplex us for solution. If the view of God’s government which we receive, does not solve all the difficulties, at the very least it softens them; if there are inscrutable things in the providence of God which it cannot explain, there are atrocities ascribed by other systems to this character which it does not involve. We may mourn over the wrongs, sufferings, and sins, which exist with fatal abundance in our present state; we may wonder and think why they exist at all; but to what an extent of perplexity and pain are we driven, if we are to believe that all these evils are to be for ever, and to have no remedy. When I see those who bear want and sorrow through many and heavy years, I rejoice that there is at last a home and refuge for them in their father’s kingdom where they who were poor shall be made rich; where those who mourned shall be comforted: when I hear the sigh of pain, when I behold the power of death; when I know, as all must, in how many human dwellings grief sits lonely on the hearth, I am saved from a fearful and dangerous distrust by the belief, that in times to come, and in regions which we know not of, there is a balm for every grief and a remedy for every sin. None are unaware of the physical and the moral evils that hang over and around this existence; and both from the felt experience of our own hearts, and the recorded experience of many others, we can judge the infinite complexity of moral struggle, the subtleties of sin, and the miserable consequences of evil doings; and we cannot think that a good, a holy, a just, and merciful God can ordain such a state to be perpetual and eternal. We know, moreover, how many are in the thick darkness of barbarism, each having within a universe of infinite and improvable capacities; we know what millions are in the dens of indigence, of crime, and ignorance, for whom earth is barren and life a burthen: and in what thought are we to take comfort, in what sentiment are we to find hope, if we believe not there is a God who does not forget his orphan children in their worst estate; that as here they have received their evil things, there is a heaven where they have their good? And when we observe in this life so much of antagonist passions; so much war and strife; so much of bitter and hopeless alienation, our tired spirits wish for a retreat of peace; and with the Psalmist we long for the wings of a dove that we might flee away and be at rest; for a calm sky after a heated atmosphere; for a union of heart and charity which no mistakes could again divide. We have no need to fear that our high aspirations for the future shall make us proud or presumptuous; for we have all enough in our present lot to keep us humble. When we look within, we find a melancholy strife between our nobler and our higher existence, which we can never entirely overcome: when we cast our gaze over the face of the world, and the inequalities of life, and there in the strong-holds of sin and selfishness see so many causes of wickedness and pain, which the most believing and the most hoping can never hope entirely to overcome; when we regard our feeble powers and our short existence; our desires ever growing and wants ever deepening, and our passions ever craving; when we think of the knowledge we longed for, and could not have, the visions we dreamed of that never came, the good we resolved on and never did, the felicity we sought and never found, the wishes that were as empty as the echo in the desert, the ideas, the plans, the aspirations, and the purposes that vainly struggled for life, but found in our breasts their prison and their grave; we shall be in no danger of thinking of ourselves more highly than we ought to think.

Blessed and beautiful doctrine is this, of universal redemption and restoration, which pours such a radiance over our groping obscurity, which gives our troubled hearts such peace, which softens grief and glorifies affection, which corrects the perverse and dignifies the lowly, which nourishes whatever in our nature is great or god-like, renders religion transcendent and lovely, and opens before the rejoicing eye of faith the grandeur of a renovated and an emancipated universe.

Footnotes for Lecture XII.