justice." It was Swedenborg, I believe, who maintains that there must be evil as well as good, a Devil as well as a God. Our author would add another item to these necessities, and have an endless hell, because there is an endless heaven!

SEC. 3. God has set before the sinner life and death,and given him his choice between them; he has also expressly forewarned him of the consequences of his conduct; no one therefore can charge him with injustice.

Several authors greatly congratulate themselves on this precarious ground. "If God inflict eternal torments on men," says Dr. Burthogge, "it is but what he told them of before that he would do if they did not reform, which was but fair. He striketh not, but after he hath threatened."

This, it will be seen, is but little more than another form of the preceding hypothesis in which is assumed the very thing to be proved, and then by a slight of hand, this assumption is made a premise for proving itself. We alledge that endless punishment is unjust, and therefore it can not be threatened; our opposers assume that it is threatened, and thence conclude that it is just, and thence again that it if just it must be threatened. What is this but arguing in a circle?

But let us concede that endless punishment is threatened; and will that prove it just? Some years ago men in England were threatened with capital punishment for petit larceny, and the

threatening was often carried into execution. Was this just? True, they were forewarned; they were told before, as Dr. Burthogge has it, "which was fair." Very fair, no doubt, but I ask again, was it just? So in the case before us.

The sinner, it may be said, has nothing to complain of; God" striketh not but till after he hath threatened." This, perhaps, may be enough to silence, in some degree, the sinner, but as Archbishop Tillotson well says, "after all that, it does not seem so clearly to satisfy the objection, from the disproportion between the fault and the punishment."There still stands that glaring injustice of an infinite punishment for a finite crime; and there is no sophistry, no cloaking over that can lessen the absurdity it involves.

Besides, it might be worth the attention of men, were they not resolved on supporting a theory, to consider whether all men have been duly threatened with endless punishment. What shall we say of the heathen, twenty millions of whom, according to modern orthodoxy, are sinking into hell every year, and more than fifty thousand every twenty four hours? What shall we say infants and children who are incapable of understanding such threatening, but are still exposed to "all miseries, spiritual, temporal and eternal ?"

SEC. 4. The damned will have ended their probation before they are sentenced to Hell; and as they enter the future world sinners, they must be miserable forever, for then there will be neither opportunity nor motives for repentence and reformation.

This is obviously but another form of the old hypothesis of infinite sin. It rests ultimately on that assumption, but introduces at the same time another which is equally absurd. It is a constant doctrine of the so called evangelical churches, that that there is no change after death; as a man dies, as to moral character, so he will remain forever. Dr. Pond tells us that "we learn from the Bible that this life was intended to be a state, not of retribution, but of probation and trial. Men are on probation for eternity. It is for their characters while on probation that they will be rewarded or punished beyond the grave. This being the case, the grand design of probation seems to be to furnish those who are placed upon it such an opportunity for the formation and developement of moral character as will prepare them to stand in judgment, and to meet its everlasting awards."

According to this hypothesis the present world is a state of probation merely, and the future of unmingled retribution; here men act, and there the wicked are punished for the actions here performed. It follows as a necessary consequence of this theory, that there will be no moral action in the world to come. And this is acknowledg

ed, at least so far as the wicked are concerned."The alteration of their condition and their state,'

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says Dr. Whitby, seems to exclude all place for reformation and for the exercise of piety and virtue. For the sentence of condemnation and exclusion from God's blissful presence, being passed upon them, they have no hope of being happy, or escaping the misery to which they are exposed; and so can have no motive to be better, nor can be in a capacity to love that God from whom they expect no good. There also seems to be no place for virtue in a future state."

This is very frank, and on the popular doctrine of probation, very true. But it is unfortunately suicidal. Because nothing can be more certain than that he who is incapable of virtue, is also incapable of sin. Because the power of doing ill in moral creatures, is inseparable from that of doing well. If, then, you deny to the damred the ability to repent, reform and be virtuous, you deny them, at the same time, the very power which renders them amenable to law, and the proper subjects of punishment. The insane and the idiotic may suffer, but they can not be punished; because punishment implies not mere suffering, but snffering in connexion with the consciousness of guilt, and as a recognized consequence of it. The damned in hell either retain their moral natures, i. e. their moral power and freedom, or they do not. If they do, then they can reform; if they do not, then to

punish them is not only impossible, but to torture them throughout eternity, would be the mast piece of all imaginable cruelty. I willingly leave the advocates of endless torments to take which horn of the dilemma they please. The German divines are wiser than to assume the ground generally taken by English and American theologians. "Our ideas of the justice and goodness of God do not permit us," says Dr. Knapp, "to suppose that he will punish any one as an offender, from whom he himself has withdrawn all opportunity for repentance and all freedom of action."

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But without prosecuting this subject farther, it is enough to repeat, that this hypothesis is, at bottom, identical with that of the infinity of sin, and must stand or fall with it. It is the finite sins of a short life that are to be punished with infinite and endless torments. And to show the beauty of this favorite hypothesis, the hardened sinner of three score years and ten, after a life of debauchery and crime, with his hands all red with the heart's blood of his best friend, repents and believes, upon the very scaffold, and goes immediately to heaven; while the innocent and amiable youth with one sinful purpose in his young heart unrepented of, dies without true christian faith, and is consigned to hell torments forever! Two human beings are born the same hour; one of af