advocates of annihilation admit, vast ages there for atonement to justice, how can we fix a date beyond which Divine love shall no more listen to Divine justice, and shall arrest the sentence which moral government must ever freshly pronounce against ever freshly perpetrated guilt, through everlasting

years.

"But the aspect of an immortal ruin shocks and appals us! Its loathsomeness and misery, they are unutterably repellant and horrible." And does this disprove its reality? Does not this life present innumerable objects under the Divine administration, that fill us with ineffable disgust and terror? Are there not in it scenes of suffering, crime and shame-aspects of disease, squalidness and cruelty, that fill us with inconceivable loathing and horror? The hospital, the madhouse, the conflagration, the horrors of war, of pestilence and faminethe sack of cities, the midnight murder, the martyrdom by starvation, or sword, or imprisonment, or the prolonged malig nant torture of the weak, defenseless and the innocent-could all such scenes and facts of past history, or even of the present, be arrayed before us, what mortal eye could bear the bla zon? What human mind would not go mad at the sights and sounds as of an opened hell? Yet a pure, just, holy, loving God is present to all these, and has been through all history! Yea, not present only, but giving force and vitality, each moment, to all material causes and efficiencies engaged in the horrid work; arming the frost and fire, the poison and steel, and the pestilence, with the power of torture and of death; and giving to nerve, bone and fibre, its necessity to thrill and throb with pain. Will a man deny that these are, because they shock his sensibilities and excite his horror? A man refuses to believe in the future course of Divine justice, because its penalties are terrible and revolting to his thought! But how unsafe is such a rule of belief or disbelief. How many things in our world does a God of infinite love and compassion permit; yea, actually, directly accomplish, which man, cruel, selfish, and with blunted sensibility as he is, could not bear? To burn, stab, torture, rack, starve the good, the pure, the gentle, the innocent, the helpless, he would not permit these to take place before him, he having power to prevent them. Yet on how many such scenes does Almighty and All-wise love look down, age after age! Yea, more, on how many infants, children, innocent and good, does he actually send the horrors of frost, flood, fire and pestilence! The shrieks of the starving, the burning, the drowning, the plague-stricken-do they rise into the ears of a deaf God? You would not for worlds,

by your act, cause, or could you prevent, permit that outcry of pain and fear! Will you, therefore, deny that God causes or permits it? Are you the measure of God? Are there not phenomena under the rule of Almighty love, which you cannot comprehend nor even bear to contemplate? Is it safe to reason from our wounded or offended tastes or sensibilities, to the Government of God? The child thus reasoning from his sensibilities to aspects of suffering, and from his inability to appreciate the necessity of justice, might disbelieve in the reality of human punishments. Scourging, imprisonment, capital punishment, would appal and revolt him. How little adequate is our childhood of being, to measure the fitness or necessity of the punishment inflicted by Divine government! As it regards what DIVINE TASTE may or may not permit, we are ill qualified to judge, save from what we see. The Infinite Mind grasping at once the eternal whole of things, all causes with their consequences, not the evil only by itself, but also its infinite relations to good; considering every thing with its checks, balances, limitations and issues, and with the resultant of all forces ever bearing to the highest holiness and bliss,—is not affected as the finite and limited mind of man, seeing only one object at once. Everything appears in its true combinations and relations. Each individual thing is part only of the universal idea. What seems evil and discord, and is so in itself, becomes as it were part of the universal harmony. Evil is to God ever apparent as limited, girt round and controlled by his own wisdom, goodness and power.

Thus, to the Divine mind, the evil permitted in the universe may ever stand connected with the good to which it is incident or ministrant. If, therefore, infinite wisdom, justice and love, find reason for the endless continuance of a soul in ruin, we may be sure their behests will not be overruled by those of taste or rather those of taste will be sure to conform to them, so that on the universe in its complete, composite idea, the Divine mind may look with eternal delight, as on a picture, the total effect of which gratifies and delights; the gloomy shades, and rough and deformed aspects, in some parts, being made to heighten the ultimate effect of supreme beauty and blessedness, harmonizing the effect of the whole. We can hardly reason from an impression on our finite mind to that on the mind of God, who sees all consequences in their causes, and feels the universal and eternal in each moment and each individual, and in whose thought everything translates itself into its sum of influences and effects through everlasting duration.

Moreover, nature cannot but feel that the Divine taste, or

sensibility to beauty, must be quite as much offended and pained by sin as by suffering; yea, less pained by sin in suffering, than by sin exultant and triumphant. What aspect of things could have been more revolting and utterly loathsome, than that of the ancient world, as given by the graphic pen of Paul, with the truthfulness of inspiration, in the Epistle to the Romans. Could any spectacle have more strongly tempted taste as well as love to blot it out from being? Yet how long God endured it! True, that spectacle was not hell, nor those ages eternity. But the example carries the principle, that the Divine mind, with its ineffable love of moral beauty and bliss, still does keep in existence, and for long periods, examples unspeakably violative of both; keeps in existence, we say, not merely permits for in him all life and being subsist. Nor do we know that there is any obvious limit to this principle, either as regards the degree of guilt and misery permitted, or the time of their sufferance. If simply God's almightiness or holiness, or His aversion to guilt and misery, could have sufficed to prevent such a spectacle, then they could have never been at all. At what point, then, will they suffice for the utter removal of such offense from the universe? When the ends to be secured by its admission shall be achieved? But when shall that be? And are we assured its end shall not be one of everlastingly progressive achievement?

But this is only endured for a limited time, and then compensated by the infinite good flowing from it, and to which it is a necessary incident." But are we sure this relation of evil as an efficient or incident of good, is of limited date? Are we sure we are especially fallen on that cycle in eternity when this relation is subsistent? that a relation which has continued from we know not what awful date in the past eternity till now, is by some means to be with our own period of trial eternally cut off?

Indeed, is not our devised finite system of equivalents and balances, and of compensative stages and cycles, entirely incompetent, applied as a measure to eternal government? Can we thus distribute and set off eternity with metes and bounds, assigning to one part, one plan and principle in Divine economy, and to another part, another? We may thus measure off and arrange some limited act, interest, or cycle in it. But can we limit the scope and date of principles and relations in an administration which has neither beginning nor end? Do we not find ourselves bewildered and confounded, yea, abashed and astonished, when we come formally to postulate our assumptions of the system of the universe thus. "To this point,

from eternity, God shall permit the existence of evil; beyond it not at all." "To this, from beginningless being, God shall create new orders of intelligent and moral existence; beyond it, for ever and ever, none at all." "To this date, from everlasting, shall evil be an efficient or incident of the highest good; but beyond this date that relation shall unto everlasting no more subsist." "To this point, from eternity, is probation; beyond this, unto eternity, is simply retribution." When we say that a period in which such a relation exists, and which never had beginning, is compensated by one in which that relation shall not be at all, and which shall never have an end-do we not feel, when we use such phrases and attempt to sift them, that we employ terms with no intelligible import, or are essaying to handle estimates as much beyond our grasp as the distances and forces of the material universe; that we are attempting to guage and measure by each other, things that are utterly incommensurable? as much as the dialect of different senses? or to adjust and distribute a scheme we can no more ponder and balance, than that infinite order in which our solar system is the minutest sparklet, and the wilderness of galaxies and nebulæ, suffusing immensity, are but the brief-hung curtain of the Eternal One, whose administration we think to distribute and regulate? We are utterly baffled and lost in the effort. But if we cannot do this; if we cannot enter into the council chamber of God and read the programme of eternal government, we cannot limit the duration of the reasons which we may suppose now induce God to permit the existence of evil. Are we then warranted in limiting the duration of evil itself? If this relation of efficiency or incidency to good overcomes the repugnance of the Divine mind to its existence now, may it not, for aught nature can show, do the same infinite ages hence? We ask, may it not-without affirming that it will; for we are not endeavoring by an argument from man's finiteness and ignorance, to build a positive conclusion for the Eternal future. This would be to imitate the very presumption which we are attempting to expose. Our argument claims that nature herself teaches the folly of dogmatism as regards the continuance of the existence of the wicked; especially of assuming their annihilation, because an immortal ruin shocks our natural sensibilities and must offend the Divine taste for beauty and bliss.

But if the endless existence of the wicked does not contradict God's manifestation of himself to the human reason as a God of wisdom, justice and love, on the other hand it might seem that Divine veracity were well-nigh pledged to such a

continuance of being through our moral constitution. Through that constitution with each act and each moment of guilt in ourselves, there is an accompanying prophecy of the future. Indeed this sense of a future is part of the consciousness of guilt. That consciousness is predictive of retribution. Through our moral constitution also, sentence of doom is pronounced on each act of wrong we witness in others; and this sentence of doom also prophecies a future existence as due to retribution, in case of the evil-doer escaping justice here. But if our moral constitution pledges a future existence as a requisite complement to earthly guilt, will not that same constitution, if our conscience acts there as here, and with each guilty act associates a similar prophecy of punishment, requiring time for execution, also subjoin to that future guilty existence perpetual continuation for the same reason? But this voice of our moral constitution, is the voice of God the creator, speaking through it.

That the doctrine of the immortality of the wicked does not so violently shock and offend natural reason, as objectors to it claim, is manifest from the fact that natural religion has so extensively embraced it; indeed, that through the material world, through providence, and the consciousness of the human mind, an impression of this doctrine almost common enough to implicate the veracity of our moral constitution has been inwrought into human thought, is evident in looking at the creeds of ancient and modern nations. To this end testify the eternal labors of the children of night and sin in the ancient mythologies. To the same point witness the popular legends and the poesy of the million under the natural religion of the ancient world; occidental, hyperborean, and oriental. We are aware there was extensively pervading the philosophy of those nations, an esoteric system,-springing from that repugnancy of our feelings to the idea of endless pain and sin, to which we have alluded in the course of this argument, which imagined schemes of future purgation and restoration. But the thought and phrase that floated through the million, said and sung in mythic story and religious festival, exhibits no shrinking from forms of speech that, to popular impression, would convey the doctrine of immortal punishment, and which prove that there was in the popular mind no such revolt from it as true and just, however painful and terrible. And there is no evidence that the multitudes received the language employed, with restrictions on its popular and natural import, such as philosophic systems might attempt then, as now, to impose. Now on such vague and popular thought and lan