says they shall be bound hand and foot and cast into outer darkness, or the other that affirms they shall be ground to powder ? Will there really be

as many modes of destruction, as there are representations of it? No book can be fairly interpreted. if its imagery be confounded with the truths it represents. Numbers of words in every language have a primitive or ruling sense, but a secondary sense may be attached to them, which plainly distinguishes them from their original signification. There are in some of the terms you have quoted both a literal and a figurative meaning. "Destruction," for example, which is the opposite of salvation, is in the Epistles more commonly used in a figurative sense than in a literal one. The only safe rule by which we can interpret words is the one already given, that is, to abide by the meaning common. to the author who uses them. The literal sense of an expression cannot always be the ruling one, sometimes, as the context will indicate, the expression must be received figuratively. I readily acknowledge that the word "life" does sometimes, in Scripture, mean natural existence, and that "destruction" sometimes signifies natural death; but, and this applies particularly to the New Testament, they are almost always used figuratively to describe a moral state before God. In your Homer or Virgil you do not make the literal sense always over-rule the figurative one, but the figurative expressions are interpreted in harmony with the general meaning and argument of the writer. Both states of future being, the one of everlasting joy, and that of ever-abiding woe, are revealed to us in terms largely figurative; and we ask for the account of one state the same consideration of metaphor that is accorded to the other. Heaven is shadowed out by the most sublime and beautiful emblems; its inhabitants are to be clothed in

G

"white robes,"

crowns of glory on their heads," palms of victory in their hands." The most unlettered reader accepts these terms as descriptive of happy celestial existence. So I must add, hell, as a place and character, is represented by emblems no less emphatic; there is "the worm that dieth not,' "the fire that is unquenchable," and "the smoke of torment ascending up for ever and ever." We do not minutely and literally explain these words, but accept them as awful metaphorical descriptions of the retribution of the finally impenitent of our race.

ALIQUIS. Is there not weight to be attached to the opinion maintained by many, that the frightful expressions employed to adumbrate the doom of the incorrigible are of a nature too appalling to be true, and that they are intended only to alarm sinners? These punishments are announced, it is supposed, more effectually to deter men from sin, and sustain more firmly the authority of God's law; but in reality wilful and unyielding transgressors will be annihilated at the hour of their death; or, as I am disposed more readily to believe, will survive death, and be condemned at the Day of Judgment, and afterwards restored, restored, through some remedial means, to God's favour and happy life.

NEMO. How wise is the caution of one of the articles of the Church of England, that we must take the threats and promises of God as they are generally set forth in Holy Scripture, leaving them in their simplicity and awfulness to affect the mind. Unless we cling to the words of Scripture, where is the guarantee that two men will think alike, or speak alike, on this awful subject, or indeed on any Christian doctrine? Unanchored at the Bible we shall drift into a thousand theories and speculations, to the great damage of practical belief and godliness. The notion you have just broached is a dangerous conceit, and a specimen of the shifts

and perversions men resort to, who abandon the plain meaning of God's Word. This hypothesis assumes that the Faithful Creator can falsify Himself, and has been obliged to make use of a fallacy in the government of the world. I shudder at the affront here offered to the holy and adorable character of Jehovah. It implies that He intended men should believe it to be a certainty that wilful sinners will be subjects of an eternal reprobation, but that scholarly and discerning men have discovered the cheat, and exposed the pretence. It is, I know, said in extenuation that human threatenings are often revoked without any impeachment of veracity, so it is inferred, God may remit His alarming assevertions. It is true human threatenings are often withdrawn because, it may be, uttered in hastiness and ignorance, or, it may be, from the impossibility of carrying them into execution; but are these reasons applicable to the Divine Being? "Is He a man that He should lie, or the son of man that He should repent?" The fearful declarations of the eternal punishment of the wicked must be taken in their plain and positive sense for two reasons among others. They are designed to shew the necessity and greatness of the redemption by Christ Jesus; and to enforce by the most solemn considerations the acquisition of the blessings of this redemption.

ALIQUIS. We read, however, in the book of Jeremiah, "O Lord, Thou hast deceived me and I was deceived." May not such language as this suggest the idea that for securing a higher moral good, God does sometimes impose upon His crea tures ignorance and deception

NEMO. I see you are quoting Origen. In his comment on this passage he does venture to im

Jeremiah xx., 7.

peach the Divine veracity. But we cannot for one.
moment entertain the thought that the Lord dealeth
hypocritically with us. I cannot on any terms
concede, that sin or deception is an element in
God's government of His creatures. Respecting
sin, or falsehood, or duplicity, His language is, "O
do not this abominable thing which I hate !
"God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth
He any man." The words you have quoted will
not at all favour our dream. The prophet Jeremiah
in the context, is evidently referring to those promises
which God made when He called him to his arduous
office, in the discharge of which he was in daily
derision, every one mocking him. You will find
the passage should be rendered, "Thou didst allure
me or persuade me, and I was allured or persuaded."
This is the literal sense of the Hebrew words,
which you may easily verify. It does not either
directly or indirectly intimate that the faithful Creator
falsifies Himself.

I

ALIQUIS. You hesitate not, Sir, I perceive, to alter our translation, and give another meaning to words, after all you have said to the contrary. thought we agreed to accept the terms of the Bible in their plain and obvious meaning.

NEMO. Just so. My emendation is the unforced reading of the original text, which, in the first place, every passage in our version should faithfully represent. Then the meaning of the context must be taken into account in an attempt at a rightful exposition. Any ordinary reader of the context, would, I should suppose, demur to the conclusions Origen has deduced from the words you have quoted. But here mark how all this kind of representation diverges from the subject we have now in hand. On the eternity of celestial happiness we are agreed. We believe in eternal glory, in the blessedness of an everlasting kingdom, secured to us by the re

demption which is in Christ.

on

On one occasion our Saviour said, "Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, that when ye fail earth they may receive you into everlasting habitations." I turn to this passage and look at the word "everlasting," and discover it is the precise adjective employed in St. Matthew's Gospel to characterise the punishment of the lost. But you tell me, I repeat, that the word "everlasting" in this passage means something short of eternal, nay, that time or duration is designedly excluded. That I call an unreasonable altering of the meaning of words, and the wrenching of them from natural and familiar conceptions. To use Mr. Maurice's own words, "this is to practise the most violent outrages on the language of Scripture, insisting that words cannot mean what, according to the most ordinary rules of construction, they must mean.*"

ALIQUIS. I see no reason why the phrase "everlasting habitations," may not be taken in a literal and absolute sense. Certainly if the Greek term translated "everlasting" possesses there any meaning, it must signify something endless, something for ever and ever, something changeless and eternal.

NEMO. So I think. But why should it not have this meaning when used in reference to the coming punishment of the wicked? The language of our Saviour is, as I have said, in the form of a prediction, affirming of the obdurate and rejected, that they shall go away into "everlasting punishment." Is He one of

your false prophets? Does He use the language of treachery and error? I persist in asking, why do you in this passage alter the meaning of the word? The Scripture you have instanced from Jeremiah will bear the alteration I have mentioned on lexicographical grounds, and is a meaning re