to, and their eternal torment consisted in their memory being turned to everlasting shame, or infamy and contempt? Rev. xx. 15; xiv. 9-11; Dan. xii. 2. And yet this very thing does the Apocalypse of St. John. Did our Lord design this codicil as a sort of key to the meaning of his former expressions? Did he, when talking to the Jews concerning everlasting fire, and the worm that dieth not, and hell torments, intend to argue with them, merely according to their own notions; and leave another doctrine behind him under cover of the Jewish myth to be evolved at a time when the church should be sufficiently enlightened to receive it? Certainly he was not obliged to undeceive the Jews if they were in error, more than God is obliged to keep his creatures from falling into error in any thing else. But then will not Christ be chargeable, not in a negative, but in a positive manner, by giving such a strong sanction as he does to eternal torments in their literal sense, if he meant something very different? Now I am free to confess, that I cannot see that he can be, if he furnishes a key to his meaning in any other part of his book, and especially if it be an evangelical maxim therein laid down to compare spiritual things with spiritual. Besides the Bible from beginning to end is so strongly metaphorical, and the language very often so opposite to its real meaning, that the bare perusal of only two or three isolated passages is a very fallacious medium by which to judge of the whole of it. Witness the Prophecies concerning our Lord in the Old Testament, in which he is foretold under the figure of a bloody warrior with his garments rolled in blood, Is. ix. 5, when nothing more is meant than that he would be a great spiritual conqueror. Would any one charge our Lord with deceit, because the Jews took their prophecies in their literal acceptation? Or

will any pious man, under similar circumstances, doubtingly exclaim, Where is the promise of his coming? because it is represented as so near at hand in the Gospel? Now I cannot conscientiously subscribe in this age of inquiry to those notions of the doctrine of eternal torments generally current, which arise from a confined and cursory reading of God's blessed Book. In fact, I have a strong suspicion that the doctrine is entirely of heathenish origin, and that it crept into the Jewish church, when God's administration of that economy by temporal rewards and punishments began to be relaxed, and civil governors found nothing so useful as the countenance of it, in order to remedy the deficiency. It is no where taught in the law of Moses. God does not threaten it to Adam for his disobedience; and surely God would not have concealed it from him if his sin had been of such terrible issue. When it is first discovered in the Old Testament, it does not there come with that solemnity of announcement which would mark a direct sanction of so important a doctrine from God, as was the case in the delivery of the law, and the temporal punishments attached to a breach of that, Deut. xxviii. It is first noticed there merely as the popular belief, Is. xxxiii. 14. And it is certain, that the Prophets made use of this popular belief in order to express merely a temporal calamity, as in the case of the destruction of Babylon, and the Assyrian armies, Is. xxxiv. 9, 10; xxx. 31-33. Indeed the writers of the New Testament themselves do not make that use of the doctrine, which might be expected of them, if it were literally true, eternal torments being too often softened down into mere death and destruction, or even present tribulation, 2 Thess. i. 9; Heb. x. 27; 1 Tim. vi. 9; 2 Pet. iii. 7; Rom. ii. 7-12; vi. 23; ix. 22. Our Lord himself also does not scruple to make the punishment of the wicked in hell consist

in the destruction of both body and soul there, Matt. x. 28; and from his sometimes opposing everlasting punishment and destruction to everlasting life, it would seem punishment consisted in a sort of second death. Matt. vii. 13, 14; xxv. 46; John iii. 15, 16, 36; x. 28. His strongest expression of the worm that dieth not in Mark ix. 43-48, is but a quotation of Is. lxvi. 24, where it is far from being evident that it means any thing more than a temporal punishment whose torment consists in the everlasting infamy which is entailed upon it, since the carcases of its victims are mentioned which implies their death; and it is certain that the eternal fire of Jude 7, is but the temporal punishment visited upon the cities of Sodom and Gomorrha, whose state of combustion existed for many ages after their overthrow. The phrase, where the worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched, moreover need not necessarily imply any thing more than that the worm would not die, nor the fire go out, before they had completed the work of everlasting destruction. And this is a common way of speaking, even among us, as when we say of a house burnt down, that we could not quench the fire, never implying, that the fire did not go out, but that it did not go out before it had destroyed the house. And this way of speaking the Bible evidently uses at Jer. xvii. 27; vii. 20; iv. 4; xxi. 12; Ezek. xx. 47, 48; Is. i. 31; Amos. v. 6; there intimating that God could not be satisfied till he had destroyed unpardonable sinners. In short, I am strongly inclined to believe, that our Lord's parable of the rich man in torments, so far from being said in sanction of the doctrine, is meant entirely in discredit of all such representations of future punishment, though like many other sayings of our blessed Master not to be understood till the time of the end. For he who imagines that our Lord when be spoke, always

designed to be immediately understood, will be egregiously mistaken as Matt. xiii. 13-15, 34, 35; Ps. lxxviii. 2; John xvi. 25, 12; xii. 16; 2 Pet. iii. 16; Luke ix. 45; xviii. 34; Rev.x. 4, shew. The Jews with great pretensions to sanctity were guilty of the grossest violations of morality notwithstanding their having added to the law of Moses the doctrine of hell torments. Our Lord represents one after their own account sent to a place of this description for his sins, and begging of Abraham to send Lazarus to give an account to his surviving brethren of the horrid place into which he is represented as come. But Abraham by no means sees the utility of these representations, and says, that if men will not hear Moses and the prophets, (who never taught such doctrines but only temporal punishments,) they would not be persuaded to repent if one rose from the dead to teach them. Luke xvi. 19–31. Our Lord, therefore, so far from giving a sanction to the doctrine of hell torments, sends men back to Moses and the prophets who never taught it,' as Bishop Warburton successfully shews, at the same time inveighing bitterly against the Jews who had turned to so little profit one of their own traditions, or rather inventions, by their covetousness and licentiousness. The Jews accused our Lord of breaking the law; our Lord in turn accuses them of adding to it to no purpose. They probably disbelieved in hell torments themselves, and used it only to maintain their own authority against those who did believe it. The fact is, our Lord meant to tell the Jews, that no man could come to him except the Father drew him, John vi. 44, 37. But it is not at all surprising that the prophets should couch their representations of the future state of the wicked in the language of the popular belief, as eternal life is a gift so immense, that the importance of the loss of it by destruction of the soul's personality, could not be suf

ficiently impressed upon the imagination, except in terms of the infliction of some positive suffering, which the mere deprivation of eternal life is not. However, I do not mean to deny that there will be grades of punishment for the damned during their short revival mentioned, Rev. xx. 3; but my critical division of the Revelations into visions according to pp. xxii. 23, inexorably demands, that as they rise at the termination of the Millennium to conscious life, so they must also die the second death of unconscious nonentity by devouring fire from heaven, at an indefinite period after their revival, and live only in the imagination of the survivors, as an awful memorial of God's justice, and with their characters inflicted with endless infamy. Rev. xx. 9; Is. lxvi. 24. The Apocalypse inexorably demands this interpretation to be put upon the doctrine of the second death, and therefore, though human systems fall, God's must stand. The Jews themselves, from whom the term second death is borrowed, made a distinction between it and hell-torments according to Schottgen Hor. Heb. et Talm. Tom. I. p. 1136, on Apoc. xx. 14.

DESIRE-OF-WOMEN.-Probably Ashtaroth, Astarte, or Venus, a Syrian goddess. Dan. xi. 37. Neither shall he regard the god of his fathers, nor the Desire-of-Women, nor regard any god: for he shall magnify himself above all. The Latino-Greek Emperor neither regarded Jupiter, the god of his fathers the ancient Romans, nor Venus, nor any other divinity. Among the ancients Baal and Ashtaroth, or Jupiter and Venus, seem to have been the principle deities, and for that reason appear to be put together here for all their gods, male and female. early as the time of the Judges, ii. 13, it is said, that the Israelites forsook the Lord and went to serve Baal and Ashtaroth. But the mention of his not regarding the Desire-of-Women may allude to the Emperors' encou

So