the prophets. In Isaiah you see the elect represented as the grapes left after the vintage, and which had escaped the hand of the gatherer, or like the cars of corn which remain after the harvest, and which the sickle of the reaper has missed. The gospel adds new traits to the fearfulness of these images. I have spoken to you of two ways, one of which is strait and rough, the way of a very small number; the other broad and spacious, strewed with flowers, which is the com mon way, as it were, of all men. In a word, you will observe that throughout the sacred Scriptures, the multitude is always reprobate, and the elect, compared with the rest of mankind, make only a little flock which almost escapes our notice."Cornelius a Lapide adopts the same views, and speaks in much the same manner. Indeed, if I do not mistake the eloquent Massillon had his eye on his pages when he prepared that famous sermon. Lapide finds many "types" of the great disparity in the numbers of the saved and of the damned. "The first of which," says he, "is Lot who with his two daughters, alone escaped from the burning of Sodom and the cities of the plain. The second type is in the deluge, for here Noah alone with seven souls were saved, while the rest were swollowed up.. The third is found in the entering into the land of promise, which is a type of heaven; for two only, Joshua and Caleb out of six hundred thousand Hebrews, entered

...

there. The fourth type is in Isaiah, where the prophet compares those of Damascus, who were saved from the slaughter of the Chaldeans, to a few ears of corn after the harvest, and to a few grapes after the vintage; yea, to two or three olives left after the pressing of the oil. These are types of the paucity of the saved." He finds a fifth proof of this fact from the express words of Christ, "Many are called but few chosen.""Finally," says he, "the multitude of the damned may be determined from the magnitude of hell, which is 1600 stadia, (Rev. xiv. 20,) that is, 200 miles, and this in all directions, to wit, as hell is 200 miles deep so it is the same in height and breadth, which space is capable of holding many thousand millions of the damned, who will be pressed together in hell like pickles or fish in a barrel." What would the honest Lapide have thought if he had heard our modern divines and poets speaking of hell as a "world of wo"—" a universe of death," not merely a cave whose sides are two hundred miles long, but so large that, as the Jewish Rabbins speak, it would take a man three hundred years to travel through it, or as Milton represents it, so broad that even an angel's eye cannot comprehend it?

That his opinion relative to the number of the damned, is true, Lapide argues from the notorious fact that "far the greater part of mankind is infidels, Turks, Saracens, and heretics. But

even of the faithful, St. Chrysostom thinks that scarcely one in a thousand will be saved: for he says, "How many think you in our city (Antioch) will be saved? It pains me to say it; notwithstanding I will speak. In so many thousands (Antioch contained a hundred thousand and more) a hundred cannot be found who will be saved and even of these I have my doubts." .. "St. Augustine compares the Church to a threshing floor, in which there is more chaff than wheat, more bad than good, more to be damned than saved."

But Drexelius relates a case still more definite and satisfactory. "A certain woman," he says, quoting from Hieronymous Plautus, "hearing Bertoldus, a very eminent and powerful preacher in. veigh bitterly against a sin, of which she knew herself guilty, fell down dead; but after a while being brought to life again by the pious prayers of the congregation, she gave them an account of what she had seen in her trance, which was to this effect. I stood she said before God's tribunal together with sixty thousand souls, who were summoned from all parts of the universe to appear before the judge, and they were all sentenced to eternal death, three only excepted!" The honest Drexelius thinks it not important to enquire whether this story is true or not, for the Savior has represented the essential fact in the same light, in that notable passage, Matt. vii. 13, 14,

before referred to. He is ingenuous enough, however, to confess that "it might seem indeed astonishing to us, that a God of infinite mercy and goodness, should pass so severe and dreadful a sentence against so many thousand miserable creatures!"—a thought which many of our orthodox neighbors, it is presumed, have never indulged.

It must be evident to all, from what has now appeared, that according to orthodoxy, as well ancient as modern, a very large part of the human family is destined to be fuel for hell-fire, and that, not only of "the world's people," but also of the church itself! How, with this fact before them, orthodox ministers can call God "the God of salvation," and Jesus Christ "the Savior of the world," I do not well understand. They certainly can attach no meaning to such language. Indeed nothing is cleaner than the fact that while their whole attention has been fixed on e

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line

every every word that can be construed to relate to “hell and damnation," they have never suspected that such passages as speak distinctly of the final conquest of good over evil, and the drawing and ultimate subjection of all things to Jesus Christ, in order that GOD MAY BE ALL IN ALL, have any force, or deserve the slightest consideration.

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CHAPTER IV.

OF BELIEF IN ENDLESS PUNISHMENT.

We have now glanced at Hell, and considered some of its horrors, as they are exhibited by orthodoxy; and also called attention to the immense numbers of the human race who are to suffer them forever. After the numerous and pointed quotations I have made upon these subjects, it must be useless to say that orthodox divines have exerted all their powers, and employed no little time, in inventing and setting forth these torments. They have sought out every mode of torture, whether of body or of mind, under which it seems possible for man to suffer. They have represented these tortures as the most multiplied in kind, the most intense in degree, and absolutely incessant and never-ending in duration. And when they have exhausted their faculties, and carried the description of the miseries of the damned up to the highest point to be attained by human language or imagination, the most learned and sober among them, coolly tell us that these descriptions, horrid as they are, suggest but "painted fires," and are incapable of giving us more than the faintest conceptions of the unspeakably awful miseries of that world of wo; that they are nothing, indeed, for the dread reality infinitely transcends all the powers of thought or imagination.