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 be ing 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,'

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 damned 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

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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 ac

tion."

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

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

any being whatever, as come to pass of course, 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 service of the Devil, who, on the popular theory, is God's chief minister in tormenting the damned, though Dr. Good win 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 support 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