followers, should deny the necessity of atonement?

I now come to that part of the reply where the last grand effort is made to show that the greatest sinners receive their whole punishment in this world. Let it be recollected that in my lecture I gave the case of a tyrant, "who, in the pride of his heart, goes forth with mighty armies, trampling upon all law, human and Divine; violating treaties, disregarding justice, burning cities, ravaging kingdoms, spreading destruction and misery every where, wantoning in the miseries of his fellow creatures," &c. I suppose this tyrant to return from his conquest, and to spend the rest of his days in ease and worldly prosperity, and at last to die in obdurate tranquillity. This case is to be disposed of by my opponent, and what, think you, will he do with it? Why, after much "beating of the air," and filling about four squares of a column with words without meaning, he settles the case in few words, by including this tyrant in that class of whom it is said that "God gave them over to a reprobate mind, as a punishment, because they did not like to retain him in their know ledge," that is he gave them over to an "unthinking, unsearching, stupid mind," or in other words, their consciences became " seared with a hot iron, and past feeling,"-" God gave them over." This was certainly a hard case for both my opponents. We may remark here,

1. That this "unsearching, stupid mind,"-. this "seared, unfeeling conscience," is a confirmed state of sin and guilt, in other words. the ne plus ultra of moral depravity.

2. According to my opponent's doctrine, a high degree of criminality is fully punished in this world by a greater degree of criminality. And this is what he contends for. He says that men are "punished in sin and by sin.” And again," sin itself is punishment." Once more: "All the cases of wickedness you can bring forward are met by this," that sin is punished "by sin;" and "the more deeply you plunge the sinner into the abyss of depravity, the more you do against your own cause," that is, against the doctrine that makes a distinction between sin and the punishment of sin.

3. As sinners love sin, and "roll it as a sweet morsel under their tongue," so they are fully punished for their greatest crimes, and for all their sins, by being indulged by God in that which they love, namely, to sin all their days without restraint, without remorse, and without, in the least, endangering their future happiness.

4. As searching after the knowledge of God and retaining that knowledge, is mental labour; and as an unfeeling conscience is a state of freedom from mental pain, so the greatest sinners in the world receive their whole desert of punishment by being abandoned to a state of mind where they are freed

from all labour after the knowledge of God, and from all pain on that account and their sins,-in a word, they are punished without any suffering or pain whatever.

5. But how will my opponent reconcile this view of the subject with what he has said elsewhere? Here he tells us that sin and punishment are the same thing, or in other words, that sin is its own punishment, sinners are punished "by sin." Elsewhere, and generally through this discussion, he has made a distinction between sin and the punishment of sin and no farther back than his last reply, has contended, as you all know who heard him, that the wicked are punished by the trials and afflictions they suffer in this life. And when he was last upon the case of suicide, he told you that "the sin was the intention to do the deed," and "taking life was the punishment of that intention." What a pity it did not occur to him at that time, that "sin is punished by sin." I leave him to settle this controversy with himself in the best way he can.

We may now consider the point of the whole punishment of sin in this world as virtually given up by our opponents, and that of future punishment as established; for, in a case like that before us, when men resort to palpable absurdity and contradiction, it is evident that argument has failed them. It has always been contended by our opponents that sin is punished either in outward afflictions, in

pain and distress of body, in remorse of conscience, or in all these, in the present life. But here is a class of men, the very chief of sinners, who live in worldly prosperity, are as free from pain and distress of body as the best of men, and have no remorse or pain of conscience whatever, being given over by God to a reprobate mind, and to a conscience that is past feeling. This class of sinners do not receive their punishment in any of those ways which the Universalists have assigned for the punishment of sin in this world. My opponent's sophistical illustration of the payment of a debt by three one dollar bills taken together, when neither would pay the debt alone, will not help him here; for his bills are now all blanks. And should he ever again attempt to pay three dollars, or rather ten thousand talents, with three blanks, we shall suspect him of relationship to a class of men (I need not otherwise describe them) who live by defrauding the public. But when these modes of punishment have all failed, something else must be resorted to, or Universalism goes down. And, behold! here you have it—a mode of punishment without pain, and without suffering a mode of punishment which the sinner himself prefers to no punishment at all-a mode of punishment which amounts to a plenary indulgence to follow sin the rest of his days, without restraint, without remorse, and without danger.

In closing my remarks on the reply, I can

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not but observe,-that while it deals principally in evasion and assumption, it brings a number of items as though contained in my lecture which were not in it, and passes over in silence, in the first part, an important argument for future punishment, or rather a threefold argument founded on "the genius of religion, the scope of the Scriptures, and the economy of Providence," and three out of five of my preliminary arguments, as well as much other matter; but it has in some measure compensated for these aberrations by the incautious manner in which it has, in several respects, exposed the nakedness and deformity of Universalism, particularly in respect to him who commits suicide, the law and sin, and the new mode of punishing the greatest crimes without suffering or pain. The cause I plead would have been safe without this defence, from the mere want of sentiment in the reply to which this is an answer; from which circumstance, and an inundation of words without meaning, less was probably carried away by the audience than from any other discussion since we first met. Dec. 14, 1827.