fluent, respectable and religious parents, who lead him in the way of virtue, and finally by the influences of education, intellectual and christian, bring him to the full participation of the gospel, and thus fit him for heaven; the other comes into the world in a den of infamy, a sink of corruption, grows up ignorant, amidst the most depraving examples, in poverty, and under constant temptations and sufferings. At the age of twenty one, they both die, as they were born, in the same hour. The child of fortune, having finished his probation, is taken to heaven; the child of vice, whose lot has been so untoward in this world, finishes his also and sinks into hell forever! And this is justice !—the justice of God! SEC. 5. The punishment of the damned will be the natural and necessary consequences of their past conduct, and all such consequences are endless.

This is still another metamorphosis of the old doctrine of infinite sin, and one which is suppos. ed by its friends, to relieve the government of God very greatly, and make the dogma of endless punishment sit quite easily upon the mind.

"These punishments," says Rev. Matthew Horberry," are not merely arbitrary, or so to be understood, as if God interposed every moment to inflict them by acts of mere power or will, but they are the natural and necessary consequences and results of things They will not so properly be executed by the particular interposition of

of course,

any being whatever, as come to pass necessarily, and in the very nature of things."So speaks Dr. Whitby. "The sinner," says he, "becomes miserable forever, not by any positive act of God inflicting everlasting stripes upon him, or loading him perpetually with fresh torments, but wholly from his own sin."

This hypothesis quite dispenses with the ser vice of the Devil, who, on the popular theory, is God's chief minister in tormenting the damned, though Dr. Goodwin maintains that the Deity himself performs the whole work with his own hand. But does it altogether relieve the character of God from the charge of cruelty? If it was impossible for him to create such beings as men without exposing them to endless torments, there certainly was no necessity for creating them at all; and as Archbishop King suggests, "it is hardly agreeable to goodness to have placed any being in that state which was obnoxious to such excessive misery."

But granting that every moral action has certain natural and necessary consequences of either good or evil, what proof, I beg leave to ask, have we that those consequences are endless? Must this, like every other premise employed to sup port the doctrine of endless punishment, be assumed? Besides, if this assumption be true, it will lead us into some difficulties, which I fear those who employ this argument have not duly

considered. If every wrong action be followed to all eternity by consequences of evil to him who performed it, we must conclude that no man will ever be altogether happy, for all men have sinned. And David and Paul, and many others who are regarded as saints, must be miserable forever.There is no good man without some evil, and craving the pardon of my orthodox neighbors, there is no evil man without some good. Of course there will be neither heaven nor hell, neithperfect happiness nor misery in the future world. But what shall become of infants who have done neither good nor evil? According to this hypothesis they will be neither happy nor miserable, and might as well not be at all.

But do not the favorers of this hypothesis perceive that it overlooks entirely the great fact of revelation—the fact that the gospel is a remedial system, introduced on purpose "to destroy the Devil and his works," i. e. to take away the sin of the world? If the gospel is true, "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." Christ will draw all men unto himself.

But perhaps it may be said as Dr. Knapp has done, that "those who have sinned, will always stand proportionably below others in point of happiness." According to this, Peter, and Paul

must always stand below James and John, and the judgment of the Savior, that he to whom much has been forgiven loves much, must be reversed. It can not be shown,then, that the consequences of actions are endless, and especially the consequences of evil actions which goodness can overcome, and which we see even in this world, often made subservient to good purposes, to happiness. But beyond this, the hypothesis is utterly opposed to the whole design of christianity, and stands in no harmony with even the other errors and absurdities of miscalled orthodoxy.

SEC. 6. Those who are damned are incurably wicked and incorrigible; therefore they must be punished world without end.

Another form still of the old hypothesis of infinite sin. For if sin be not infinite or capable of be coming so under certain circumstances, how happens it that any should become incurably wicked, and incorrigible? But here in this new form we are thrown once more upon sheer assumption; the assumption that some men have become, or will become, so bad that they cannot be reformed. Dr. Burthogge is good enough, however, to confine damnation to such exclusively. "That infernal torments are not inflicted, but on the obstinate and irreclaimable, can not but be manifest," says he, "to all that soberly consider, that the divine heart,as well as divine arms, are ever open to the penitent and converting." So all the modern

German divines, who admit the eternity of punishments, predicate it solely of those who have sinned against the Holy Ghost, and lost the very capacity of virtue and happiness. "He who can. love," says Dr. Oldshausen, "may also become the recipient of love; yea, as love is felicity and eternal life, so the privation of love is to be considered as infelicity and incapacity for happiness.'

The question, then, and the only question to decide is, whether there be such persons, or whether it be possible for a human being to become incorrigible, irreclaimable and deprived of the very capacity of loving. All this the hypothesis before us boldly assumes, not only without proof, but against all the proof furnished by experience and observation. Experience and observation demonstrate that there is no point in the point in the progress of the sinner at which we can take our stand and assert that here he becomes incorrigible. History is full of instances of the reformation of men of the most desperate characters. Paul was once a bloody persecutor; Augustine a corrupt and licentious infidel; and how many do we see around us now, upright, religious and valuable citizens, who a few years ago were grossly intemperate and profane. But the New Testament is decisive on this point "Christ came into the world to save sinners"-" to seek and to save that which was lost." Hence he " gave himself