confines of the madness of rejecting one of the clearest truths of all Revealed Theology, the eternal punishment of sin. And how could a man accept, retain, believe both, the absolute, inevitable, unescapable, created necessity of sin, and eternal suffering on account of sin, and still believe in the infinite goodness of the Author of such a system, still remain unagonized by doubt, not driven to utter desperation for want of some anchorage to his soul in the attributes of a God of infinite benevolence. The exclusive voluntariness and unnecessariness of sin is one of the axioms of a benevolent creation; so is its exceeding and infinite sinfulness and detestableness. Better believe anything, rather than not believe that God is infinitely good. Better believe that by a defect of Omnipotence God could not have avoided sin, rather than believe that the God of the universe is such a person as prefers sin, and makes it necessary, and yet punishes men for being the creatures of his own preference! O, if there ever was a distortion of Natural and Revealed Theology, coming from the very smoke of the pit, it is this! And perhaps, incredible as it may seem that such a nightmare of malignant conception should weigh upon the soul under the guise of Christianity, no language can tell the anguish, the struggle, the conflict, the fearfulness and horror of great darkness, into which this reprobate caricature of God's Theology has driven many an inquiring, trembling, penitent mind!

We must believe in the voluntariness and sinfulness of sin; that it is neither a necessity created in man's nature, nor imposed upon his nature by his circumstances, nor a pardonable imperfection or mistake; but a wickedness, the choice and persistence of his own free will establishing itself against God; or else we make Revealed Theology an incredible thing, and Natural Theology the demonstration of a supreme malevolent agency. There must be right views of sin, to make either Revealed Theology credible, or Natural Theology trustworthy or endurable. Mistakes here have been unquestionably the source of greater error and evil, both speculative and practical, than can be described. The only right observation-point, from which to view all theology, natural or revealed, is just where we are, in the abyss of human guilt, and not where we might imagine or wish ourselves to be; and there, in those depths, a right sense of sin is the quadrant of the soul, without which, indeed, it can take no accurate observation.

For again, as is the case with some, if your system makes sin a thing which suffering exactly pays for in this world, and is just its equivalent all through life, so that suffering is but the wages of sin paid now in full-this again, besides being a papable contradiction of God's Word, introduces a lie into your Natural Theology, and upsets all its conclusions as to the righteousness of God. For it is as clear as day in the reality of things, that some sins receive no wages at all in this world, while, in the comparison, other sins

are vastly overpaid. Some great crimes pass' unpunished, undiscovered, even up to death, and the executors of great villanies riot in the enjoyment of the fruits of their wickedness, while truly good men are punished for their very goodness. There is, indeed, under this view, no rule whatever, but a perfect confusion, a chaos, a storm of right and wrong, with all winds blowing athwart each other, and contending for the mastery. There is such a state of things, that great and good minds have been thrown from their balance by it, and have well-nigh relinquished their belief in the goodness and righteousness of God's providence; being saved only by the interposition of the assurance that all things shall be righted at last, and that there is a day of doom, when the wicked shall unfailingly and justly be punished, and the righteous unfailingly and justly be rewarded. But if your scheme of Natural Theology, or rather the prepossessions which you bring to it. make sin a thing which is not an evil nor a wickedness, deserving punishment in the future world, than you are compelled to exclude from it all prediction or promise of such retribution; for that which it would be unjust for God to inflict, it would be unjust for God to threaten; and so the very intimations in our Natural Theology of a retribution to come, are arguments against God's goodness, since it is under God's constitution of our moral nature that we have these intimations, and they cannot otherwise be considered than as intimations from Him. He has, therefore, according to this scheme of the nature of sin, as undeserving of future punishment, made our constitution to promise what He himself denies, and to predict concerning Him what is absolute injustice.

It is perfectly undeniable that some good men suffer greatly, while some very bad men suffer very little, if at all. There never was a theory broached, more palpably contradicted by fact, every step of the way, than this, in the Natural Theology of some men, that sin receives its retribution as it goes along. If this were true, then is God, even by the showing of His own Word, an unjust, partial God-" a judge of evil thoughts," accepting the persons of men. For His own children, under the guidance of His own inspiration, are represented reasoning with Him on this point. Job, Jeremiah, David, Asaph, reiterate the question: Wherefore do the wicked prosper? Wherefore are all they happy that deal very treacherously? False theologians and

forgers of lies, like Job's friends, may undertake to answer that the wicked do not prosper; but it is palpable that they do; and sometimes the prediction in their own consciences, that a day of reckoning is coming, is almost the only ingredient of pain or retribution in their cup. And the only possible answer to such false premises and such questions, is that of Job, David, Asaph, and Jeremiah themselves, that the wicked are reserved to the day

of punishment. Mark me, and be astonished. Even when I remember I am afraid, and trembling taketh hold on my flesh. Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, are mighty in power? Have ye not asked them that go by the way? And do ye not know their tokens, that the wicked is reserved to the day of destruction, and shall be brought forth to the day of wrath? The stifling of this truth, the rejection of it from Natural Theology, the not attending to it, or the denial of it by the assertion that the wicked receive their punishment in this life, inevitably makes Natural Theology a falsification of God. It makes it speak wickedly for God.

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And therefore, Natural Theology must recognize sin as sin; as something neither pardonable because trifling, nor a mere weakness, nor an unavoidable necessity, but an enmity against God, and a selfishness chosen and persisted in, and a voluntary depravity, not punished here in this world, though causing, even here, all the misery that mankind ever endure, but to be punished hereafter; a state of guilt and consequent ruin in man, deserving all, and doubtless more than all, that men's consciences and fears ever prejudge in regard to it. For the judgment of the criminal against himself, is ever on the side of leniency; and the judgment of men's natural conscience against sin, and their predictions of a future retribution, are to be taken as beneath the truth.

The recognition, therefore, of man as a sinner, deserving of punishment, which he does not receive in this life, but is to receive in another, is the only way to clear up God's character as a governor and judge. If you do not make this recognition, you falsify even the light of nature, and you manufacture a natural theology which must give the lie to revealed theology. You contradict the undeniable clear affirmations of the system of nature, and you prepare nature, so falsified, to appear in opposition to revelation. You make, indeed, a ruin of all Theology, human and Divine.

Now, to complete our argument, we might run through a list of solemn quotations from heathen and pagan writers themselves, declaring the dictates of Natural Theology without the Scriptures. Professor Lewis has arrayed them in a manner, which, so far as we know, has never been accomplished before, in his Essay on the Divine Attributes, exhibited in the Grecian poetry and philosophy.

"Punishment," the ancients said, "stalks silently, and with a slow pace; it will, however, at last overtake the wicked." Archbishop Leighton makes a striking application of sentences to this purport from Seneca and Plutarch. "The good man God accustoms to hardships, and prepares him for himself. But the luxurious, whom he seems to indulge and to spare, he reserves for evils to come. For you are mistaken, if you think any one THIRD SERIES, VOL. VI., No. 1

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cepted. The man who has been long spared, will at last have his portion of misery; and though he seems to have escaped, it is only delayed for a time." Plutarch in this matter comes very near to Peter. "If he who transgresses in the morning is punished in the evening, you will not say that in this case justice is slow; but to God a whole age, or even several ages, are but as one day." We shall take now but two more of those instances out of many to our purpose.

Thus says Plato in his seventh epistle to Dion, "Thus ought we always to believe those ancient and sacred words, which declare to us that the soul is immortal, that judges are appointed, and that they pass the highest sentences of condemnation, when the spirit is separate from the body." In a still more striking passage from the Republic, Plato gives us the most express declaration of the common belief. "For well know, O Socrates, that when one supposes himself near the point of death, there enter into his soul fears and anxieties respecting things before unheeded. For then the old traditions concerning Hell, how those who in this life have been guilty of wrong must there suffer the penalty of their crimes, torment his soul. He looks back upon his past life, and if he finds in the record many sins, like one starting from a frightful dream, he is terrified and filled with foreboding fears." "Compare also with this," says Professor Lewis, "the terrific account of the world of woe, contained in the tenth book of the Republic, and of the sufferings of that wretched and incurable class, who, in the emphatic language of the writer, never come out, but remain to all eternity. From such descriptions as these, as Plutarch tells us, Plato was charged by Chrysippus with adhering too closely to the popular traditions, and attempting to frighten mankind with the fears of Hades.' Just in the same way in which the preachers of retribution in the eternal world in our day are disposed of in some quarters, by men who wish in their trembling souls that they could get rid of the truth of retribution, by sneering at fire and brimstone. But the mockery of the fool at sin cannot keep off its punishment, nor the foreboding terror of that punishment.

That God is revealed in nature as a God of retribution, the writings of the heathen abundantly show. The attribute of retributive justice they made a separate deity, whose conclusions and awards would be full and perfect only in the future world. They gathered this, first, from the admonitions of conscience within them; second, from those judgments of God, from time to time falling upon mortals, so extreme and awful, that even the most darkened minds were compelled to interpret them as God's testimony, both of His wrath against sin, and His determination to punish it. By far the most remarkable of these judgments are related in the Scriptures; and the sacred writer adds to the enu

meration of them, that they happened as examples, and are to be regarded as proving this great truth, that God is reserving the unjust to the day of judgment, to be punished. God's judgments awaken men's conscience, and set it powerfully at work. They reveal a God who can and will punish sin. If the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah had been related in profane history alone, men could not have avoided connecting it with the enormous wickedness of those cities, and viewing it as an example of overtaking vengeance. But in regard to this and other great judgments, revelation has set the matter at rest, and taught us distinctly what is the lesson God designs to impress, namely, that he is a God who will by no means clear the guilty, but reserves the unjust to the day of their punishment. It is well remarked by Professor Lewis, that the declarations of Plato are the sentiment of the common mind in all ages, exhibiting just the same views of death, and the same apprehensions of future retribution as now prevail, and ever have prevailed among mankind.

There is, indeed, a sense of the future judgment in the heart. Every sinful being is conscious of it. There is no sin ever committed, but it carries with it a monition, a prediction, I shall meet that sin again. The mind travels forward with the speed of thought, to the time when all things shall pass in review. The consideration of that review may not always be distinct in the consciousness; nay, there may be, there almost always is, a shrinking back from the idea of the future judgment, and an attempt to avoid its acknowledgment; but the idea remains, and cannot be struck down or obliterated. It is inwrought and indelible in the Natural as well as Revealed Theology and consciousness of mankind.

There are times when these alarms of retribution sound louder in the soul than at others; times when its deep roar is like the booming thunder of a distant ocean; times when, if you listen at the door of the soul, you may hear it reverberating like the sound of a gong in subterranean caverns. There is within the soul, and ever will be, an instinctive consciousness of future retribution. The power with which this feeling is engraven on the soul, the marked place it occupies in the domain of conscience, the instinctive dread of dying, the shrinking back from the eternal world, the gloom in which that world is shrouded to the wicked soul, are among the undeniable predictions and demonstrations of our Natural Theology. If the world to come were but one world, and that world only heaven, whence should ever enter into the soul, and have such universal power and prominence there, the thought and dread of an eternity of woe? Aye! it is the dictate of natural religion, that the future state of the wicked will be a state of misery. It is one of those insignia of man's Divine origin and moral nature, which nothing can obliterate; no power of sin-no