who only hast immortality! what is thy will? Shall the soul born of Thyself return to nought, or shall it live forever?"

Our present argument supposes us to be standing alone with nature, and in her revelations of God we have to read our answer. That answer she gives us in her discourses of a God of Reason, Justice and Love. Such a God is revealed to the soul in its own being and constitution. Its own being testifies to it of a Creator, and its intellectual and moral constitution reveal that of its Author. The Father of its reason and conscience, it feels, must be reasonable and just. And He also that has constituted the soul so that its moral sense instinctively and irresistibly loves and approves benevolence and hates and condemns malignity, must be himself benevolent. For we cannot conceive of his creating beings with a nature that must condemn and loathe Himself.

How

The power, then, that is to determine the question of the soul's continuance, is reasonable, just, and benevolent. will these attributes require him to determine it?

First, the aptitudes and capacities of the soul, and its culture and discipline to ends not attained in this life, foretoken, under the rule of a God of reason, a future in which these aptitudes and capacities shall find their object, and those ends shall be fully accomplished; just as the educational course at a University indicates the expectation of life continued beyond that course, or the construction of a watch, a design beyond the time of its construction. So also the moral inequalities of the present world are assurances, under the rule of a God of justice, of a world where these shall be rectified, and where guilt escaping punishment here, shall find retribution. In like manner a capacity and faculty of virtue and happiness, cultivated and disciplined to the very close of life, are prophetic, under the rule of a God delighting in happiness and virtue, of another life where such capacity and faculty can attain their ends. A benevolent God would not quench a being at a time when beyond any former period it was fitted to attain higher moral excellence and bliss. God's reason and wisdom then, and his justice and love, require a life beyond this. And every reason requiring a life beyond this, must plead with strength increasing in proportion to the soul's increasing attainment and capacity of knowledge, bliss and virtue, through all future stages of being.*

We think the argument from nature above indicated, per

This argument is more fully expanded by the same writer in an article in the Biblical Repository, October, 1842, on the Evidence from Nature of the Immortality of the Soul.

fectly conclusive of the immortality of the good, or of all to whom endless existence would be an endless progress in virtue, beneficence and bliss. If there be a good, wise, just and true God on the throne of being, such souls shall never die. No corollary can be more clear and direct. For such, all the Godhead must wrestle with death. But such, alas, are not all of our mortal race. Some of them, the very course of argument we have pursued, vindicating endless life for the good, seems to conduct to the verge of an awful gulf, and leave there, looking into an abyss that yawns-is it with infinite nothing or an infinite hell? The wicked in the death-shade bordering this mortal life! he is a terrible portent in the scenery of being, meeting our argument, as triumphantly and undoubtingly it marches on to its glorious height in the name of the good, challenging for our race the guerdon or gift of immortality. A soul not good nor becoming good, unhealed, uncleansed, at war with God and virtue, incorrigibly, impenitently, and ever progressively evil; owing a fearful debt to justice, with no power to atone or to pay; ever in the farther and faster flight from heaven and holiness; in the adamantine embrace of laws and tendencies consequent on its guilty past, that bear it as in the grasp of a whirlwind toward the outer darkness! Such a soul stays us in the exultant march of our argument with a shudder of doubt and dismay. On this life's utmost verge; on the brink of a mysterious and tremendous change; its course on earth a consummated thing;-with such tendencies and direction of being it seems a portent, terrible alike in its logic and its prophecy, hovering, like a meteor, dim, lurid, and baleful, on the brow of eternal night. But that baleful, lurid luster kindles up and illumines, even as the orbs of happier beam, something of the illimitable BEYOND; kindling and illumining, as it were with the conflagration of its own ruin, the abyss into which its sinks. Now as that baleful, portentous orb dips in the rim of endless night, what do the fires of its ruin disclose? immortal nothing, or immortal woe? What augury does the history of such a soul here, with its aptitudes and tendencies, and its relations to a Divine moral gov ernment at its departure-what augury do these afford of its history and destiny hereafter? what light do they shed on the question of its continued existence? In other words, here we encounter a question of terrible mystery-that of THE IMMORTALITY OF THE WICKED. The immortality of the righteous can hardly be called a question.

It might be urged at first sight with much show of plausi bility, that our course of reasoning to establish the immortality

of the righteous, must have a directly opposite consequence, applied to souls of an opposite character; that the entire argument which builds for those capable of endless bliss and virtue, a highway to an endless life, must to a being so abnormal and monstrous as a morally lost soul, only tear open the gulf of annihilation. "God only hath immortality." But its gravitation toward God has ceased. It must then drift forever toward the outer dark. Forever cut off from Him in whom all being subsists, how shall it not drop into everlasting nothing? An orb forever broken away from the sole original of life and light, sinking evermore with hideous ruin and combustion in the eternal shades, a deformity and terror to the universe! why should not the All-Father utterly quench it?

Would not every attribute of God, that in behalf of the good pleads for immortality, in this case demand the utter extinction of a being that can only work eternal sin and pain? God's wisdom-shall that hold in immortal existence a being, who in that case can only be an immortal failure-an endless ruin, who has departed for ever from the aims of infinite wisdom and love, and defeats utterly the design of his creation? A being which can only be an eternal jar and discord in the universe! which clashes with all celestial order and system, and must go on clanging and clashing with these, through unending ages! which, instead of ministering to the illustration and triumph of virtue, can only be a hideous blazon of immortal sin and shame! and must for ever hate, and war upon, God and holiness and happiness! Shall Divine reason for ever continue an existence in which that reason for ever misses its aim? in which all the indications of aptitudes and faculties bestowed by creative wisdom, are hopelessly perverted or defeated? whose fitness for everlasting excellency can end only in everlasting shame? whose faculty of infinite knowledge, virtue, beneficence and happiness, turns to a destiny of endless madness, sin and sorrow? whose capacity, in fine, of eternal God-likeness only dooms it an eternal devil! If aptitudes, faculties and capacities of immortal reach, when tending to their true, beneficent and beautiful aim, are an assurance of immortality, what must be portended by their hopeless, eternal failure and perversion?

If, then, it be reasoned that God's wisdom must ever deliver from the grave, existences that belong to eternal and universal harmony, order and beauty, what must that same wisdom ordain for those who, through the universe and through eternity, can only be a defeature and discord, a failure and ruin, a curse and a crime?

And Divine goodness, delighting beyond thought in happiness,

can it perpetuate a being only to endless pain? If God's love guarantee endless life to the heirs and diffusers of bliss, what must it do with those who can only be children of eternal sorrow, and the foci of an eternal plague? If souls in health must be his eternal delight, what must those be who are everlastingly diseased, and to whom infinite existence is infinite despair? Can the arm of infinite love lift them up from the abyss of annihilation, only to hold them in eternal suffering? Does not such a thought strike human minds with horror? how much more, then, the Father of infinite mercies?

And Divine justice, too, would it not allow, yea, demand the extinction of such lost souls? Would it admit of an eternity of punishment for the offenses of a life so feeble and so brief, and of a creature so ignorant, so weak and so infantile as man? So far from sustaining the sentiment of justice in the universe, would not its monstrous disproportion appear a tyranny, shocking the sentiment of justice as well as of mercy through the universe? And would not Divine justice-only another name for love, and wise as it is pure-would it not avoid the extremes alike of indulgence and of excessive severity, by annihilation?

Nor, it may be urged, does it avail against the charge of injustice and tyranny in the case, to argue that man is not eternally punished for the sins of this short and feeble life, but only placed by them in a condition and course which make it sure that he will sin on for ever, and so be punished for ever. For it is the action of an omniscient and omnipotent Creator and Governor, that we are considering. To One who is the eternal fountain of all life and being and power, and of all law and motive, what is the difference between certainty and necessity? To such an one it was perfectly sure beforehand, anterior to thus placing man on trial, that it would result in his eternal fall. Would our human justice permit a father thus to treat a child, or indeed any creature? Or should we regard him as wise and good, even if possibly just in doing it? Does not the very nature God has given us declare that justice, if it required of the Divine administration to kindle up a hell, would also require, after a time, its extinction? If constrained to utter the awful commission of a second death, would it not also, somewhere in infinite ages, revoke its commission? Can His throne stand only on the endless torment of offenders of a race and life like ours? Will not Divine justice rather, having compelled them to expiate their crimes, surrender up victims which infinite love and wisdom may not reclaim, for that wisdom and love to annihilate ?

And Divine holiness-can it be otherwise than offended and pained by the aspect of souls for ever unhealed and unrepentant, and to whom eternity can bring no change but that of endless progress in sin as well as woe? Must not such an object be loathsome and grievous in the sight of a pure God? Would He wish to make it immortal? As well conceive of a mind with a most exquisite sympathy, and a sense of the beautiful most quick and delicate, aiming to eternize some spectacle of deformity, torture, foulness, or shame. Would not God's taste, so to speak, compel the removal of such a spectacle as soon as possible? With our obtuse and deadened sensibilities we can but dimly conceive how ineffably repulsive and abominable a sinful soul must be to God. Why, then, should He wish to conserve such a foulness and horror-yea, such an evergrowing foulness and horror-through everlasting ages? And if God's veracity speaking through the constitution of our nature and the expectations and convictions irresistibly springing from it, is thus pledged to grant to the obedient and the righteous the boon of an endless life, is not that veracity disengaged and released in relation to those forfeiting the boon? Do not thus Divine wisdom, love, justice and truth open for the morally lost soul the gates of the eternal grave?

Such are the difficulties that start on nature at the question of Immortality, in view of that most monstrous and dreadful anomaly, a spiritual intelligence implacably and irrevocably at war with God and virtue.

We have endeavored to state these difficulties in their full strength, and as they are wont to be expressed by those most confident, or even those most irreverent in their utterance, that thus we may fully comprehend the position which an argument from nature must occupy, and the objections and difficulties it must encounter.

It is not our wish or aim to cover or disguise difficulties. They are not of a nature to be disguised. They are patent and portentous as the presence of evil in this universe. A lost soul under the reign of a God of love! It is, contemplate it as we may, a terrible phenomenon. It looms upon us in the landscape of being, a hideous, spectral, awful mystery. Nature shudders at it. Even faith would let fall her veil before it. It is not by concealing or denying difficulties and mysteries, that we hope to overcome them. A spiritual ruin must be a spectacle abhorred, to man and to God; whatever its doom-whether eternal nothing or eternal pain--we cannot but regard it with unutterable pain and fear. Yet the analogies of nature will not permit us to reject the doctrine of its reality, because of its