do hope, Sir, we shall find something in the teaching of Holy Writ less tremendously awful. But will you kindly assign your reasons more at length for such a conclusion?

NEMO. You will, I am sure, admit with me, that in the perusal of the Sacred Page, the most unfurnished reader discovers that it will be well with the righteous, that an endless duration of blessedness will be bestowed on such as have loved God, and done His will in this world. He cannot fail to learn that our personal earthly life is one largely accounted of, and is not, as some dream, a fugitive shadow on the surface of existence. It is declared to have an inseparable relation to a ceaseless life beyond the grave. The most unlettered student of God's Word, finds that after an earthly course of devotedness to God, the righteous will rise to a kingdom of immaculate holiness, of supreme honour, of ecstatic bliss. This is life eternal, life in the immediate presence of the Eternal God, life in eternal youth and glory. It is Christianity alone which gives us a revelation of a holy and blissful home after death, a home overflowing with all that can render life exalted and perfect. You, Sir, enjoy the spring and radiancy of youth, and are held by strong bonds to the life that now is. Your earthly career is not visibly hastening to its setting, it has not, I trust, reached its meridian, and as yet you only read of the attacks upon mortal felicity, which you know were attributed by the ancients to the gods. May no painful sense of the poverty and delusiveness of all things here below, ever overwhelm you. But when you have been some sixty years upon the earth, you will have found many of the blanks and sorrows of life, then the prospect of a of a calm and exalting Eden beyond the stars, will come to you with an unspeakable attractiveness and hope.

ALIQUIS. I think I can now say we cannot be too thankful for the Gospel revelations of a permanent and felicitous future for the righteous.

NEMO. Yes, here we stand together, and refresh ourselves with this confident assurance of a blessed immortality. The plainest Bible reader learns that everlasting happiness will follow temporary faithfulness to God. Ask this reader why he believes this happiness will follow, and his ready reply will be, "the Bible says it will be so." He will tell you, that the language employed cannot mean anything else than a future holy and happy life. For one I am quite willing to abide by his decision, since the meaning which immediately strikes the mind of a sincere reader of the Holy Volume, is, in most cases, the true interpretation of the Divine Word. "The Bible is safest in the custody of those who have no temptation to abuse it, by forcing upon it a language foreign from its original intentions."

My point is this, ask this same reader what will be the future of such as leave this world impenitent and unforgiven? His answer would obviously be, the punishment of the wicked is unending, since the words which are employed to express the duration of future punishment, are the same used to describe the eternity of the Divine nature, and the endlessness of the felicity of the righteous. He would say,— and he could have no possible motive for perverting the dictates of Inspiration,-the words could not be otherwise understood. On the text before us he would thus reason, if the hope of the righteous be the hope of an eternal life, the fear of the wicked cannot but be the fear of everlasting or eternal punishment. The juxtapositin of identical words unmistakeably declare a parallel perpetuity of both states of being. A thoughtful and unbiased reader of the Saviour's words, if the obvious meaning of His

expressions be accepted, would strongly affirm, if you deny endlessness of punishment in the one instance, you must deny endlessness of felicity in the other. You will excuse me so frequently adducing this argument, since on the most legitimate and critical principles of interpretation, as well as the conclusion of the plainest reading, it may be maintained. That the immediate hearers of the Saviour believed future punishment to be eternal, I may again state can be proved from abundant testimony. One of the earliest opponents of our faith, Celsus, has recorded that the primitive Christian teachers maintained; "that the good should be happy hereafter, but the wicked doomed to punishment strictly eternal, from which opinion," says he, "neither let them nor any other mortal depart." Here I will add, that although I acknowledge a wide-spread scepticism in these days on this doctrine of future punishment, it could, I think, be shewn that the great body of Christian people in our land hold to it as their fathers did before them. "Heresies have seldom or never taken their rise from the mass of the people."

ALIQUIS. That will not be of much weight, since you will admit that the Biblical interpretation of our day is far more complete than it has ever been before. "Nothing is required but steady perseverance and patient tracking of the argument through all its windings, to bring it to bay, and shew that the popular theory in this subject has not an inch of ground to stand upon."

NEMO. I should have thought that a quotation like that you would not have introduced. Let the principle here adopted be carried into other investigations, and common sense, as well as Scripture truth, will not have "an inch of ground to stand upon." So it comes to pass in this enlightened age, that the teaching of the Romish church is

* Minton's "The Way Everlasting." p. 35.

correct, that the Bible cannot be trusted in the hands of sincere, because unlearned, readers. An open Bible for the mass is after all no great boon. On a doctrine the most personal, the most solemn and practical, the conclusions of the conclusions of an unlettered, though devout reader, are erroneous, and must not be received! There is then no definiteness of religious truth, but for the initiated and erudite, and Our boasted inheritance of a Divine Revelation comes to very little. The poet Cowper in one of his letters writes; "I lay it down for a rule that when much ingenuity is necessary to gain an argument credit, that argument is unsound at the bottom." This observation is pertinent to the matter in hand, for the conclusions of a prayerful, albeit unscholarly, student of Scripture, are sought to be disturbed and destroyed by speculations, by criticisms on the compositions of words, and by the meaning which some of these words may have in other passages of Holy Writ, or in some ancient classic. I fully concede the necessity of the application of the strongest reason and highest learning to the examination of God's Word; but the elaboration of theories, and the discussion of recondite etymologies, in order to set aside the obvious meaning of the Sacred Text, must be condemned. It is an easy thing to raise objections, and surround a subject with difficulties. It is easy to shew that such passages as clearly teach the future endless misery of the wicked, may possibly mean less than is attributed to the words, or may possibly mean something else. You will find many illustrations of my meaning in what I would call the curiosities of scholarship, and an ensnaring minutiæ. These conjectural interpreters might perplex any subject, and darken all counsel with their words. In the language of that popular American divine, Beecher, I would say; "I do not accept the doctrine of future punishment

because I delight in it. I would cast in doubts if I could; but that would do do me no good. I could not destroy the thing itself. Nor does it help me to take the word everlasting, and put it on a rack like an inquisition, and make it shriek out some other meaning."

ALIQUIS. But you are prepared to allow that Biblical scholars are very able in these days, and that we have an amount of knowledge on this and other subjects, greatly in in advance of preceding

times ?

NEMO. We are indeed favoured with an increase and spread of knowledge, in which I rejoice. In all matters of physical science, and in all branches of natural pursuits, we have illuminations before unknown. On spiritual and Divine truths, however, we have not progressed much. The more science has appeared to clear the sky, the more Deity has seemed to hide His face. The tendency of science. is to attribute to intermediate laws and streams of force, what Scripture teaches us to attribute to God's presence and handiwork. With regard to investigations purely Biblical, I could not affirm that the truer vision has been vouchsafed to our modern divines, and this I would say while mindful of the claims of many learned, holy, and illustrious names. But the Augustines, the Pearsons, and the Butlers of other times, are not displaced by any of the theologians of our age. We cannot admit novelties in Christian Divinity. Touching the weighty subject immediately under our consideration, I can find little that is fresh, searching, and instructive, in opposition to it in modern authorship. The books and articles in current literature which I have read on your side of this controversy, have abounded in hypothesis, affected superiority, and a large amount and force of assertion; but little of serious deference to God's Word, and little depth and weight