during the period of human life, he represents the sinner as enduring an incalculable period of suffering for each transgression. At this his mind revolts. He cannot feel that this is just. It is disproportioned and excessive; no arguments, no words of Scripture, however" formidably strong," can satisfy him that God will punish any man forever, for the sins committed in this brief space of his existence.

Much of his reasoning on the subject will be answered when we speak to some of the points embraced in the foregoing general representation. The grand idea of the letter is this: Eternity is too long for the duration of future punishment.

This is a subject in which all are equally interested; and therefore, in writing upon it, we cannot but feel impressed with its personal relation to ourselves. Of all the themes of religion, surely no one is more fitted to chasten the feelings of religious controversy, and to excite feelings of deep interest in our fellow men. The doubts and difficulties of serious minds with regard to this subject, only serve to awaken our affectionate regard for them, with a desire that, if this doctrine be true, we may all escape these things, and stand before the Son of man."

In remarking upon Foster's objection to the eternity of future punishment, we will present our thoughts in numerical order for the sake of method and clearness.

I. The existence of a belief in endless punishment in the minds of so many of the best of men is a presumptive argument that it is true.

Superstition cannot account for the continued existence of this belief, even if it had its origin in superstition. No one will think of charging the body of evangelical believers who hold this doctrine, with superstition.

The doctrine is not maintained through interested and selfish considerations. The believers in the doctrine have nothing to gain by proving it to be true. It does not make them richer, nor more honorable, nor add to their worldly ease. The contrary of all this is true. Its tendency rather is to abate the inordinate desire and pursuit of wealth, honor, and pleasure, the Saviour's question, constantly occurring to the mind of the sincere believer, "What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul; or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"

Neither is the doctrine suggested or maintained by severe, inhuman feeling. He who seeks to prove this doctrine true, knows that its truth involves myriads of his fellow creatures in everlasting woe. If he succeeds to establish the doctrine, he shuts the door of hope upon many; though were we to say, instead of many, one immortal spirit, we should suggest a sufficient reason for caution and reluctance in establishing the truth of this doctrine. Nevertheless, the doctrine is believed and maintained by the most amiable and benevolent of the human race.

There are strong personal considerations which constitute very powerful objections to it in the minds of those, who, nevertheless, believe it. They see that it bears with as great force against them as against others. Except they repent, they will all likewise perish. If they draw back from Christ, they may draw back to perdition. Besides this, and perhaps it is the more powerful consideration, almost every believer in this doctrine has at some time a relative or friend whose religious condition at death excites fearful thoughts, and clothes his grave with more than midnight darkness. The very strongest temptations have been presented to believers in this doctrine, to find or create insuperable objections to it; yet the vast majority of Christian believers, who have lost friends concerning whose condition they entertain no hope, remain firmly persuaded that the doctrine is true. Now to such men," the idea of eternity" is as "stupendous as it was to Mr. Foster; the assignment of ages on ages of woe for each transgression, conflicted with their ideas of justice as it did with his; in short, all the objections to the endless duration of future punishment have occurred to multitudes of intelligent, wise, pious men in days and months of tribulation and mourning at the loss of unconverted friends; but they have adhered to their belief, and we are disposed to ask why their assent to it under such peculiar circumstances should not weigh as much as Mr. Foster's dissent from it? He had no penetration which they have not possessed; he also was formed out of the clay; he could present no claim to have his feelings of repugnance regarded as paramount to the feelings of submission and confident belief with which his Christian brethren in the hours of their sorrow have deliberately declared their faith in this doctrine.

If the doctrine of endless punishment be not taught in Scripture, who invented it? and how has it maintained its hold upon

the human mind through successive periods of time? It is true that many evangelical believers, especially in England, at the present day, declare, with Mr. Foster, that they are not satisfied to receive the doctrine; these, however, are dissentients from the commonly received belief of evangelical Christendom. Were the doctrine unscriptural, we should rather expect to find the believ ers in it a minority, remonstrated with by their Christian brethren, and avoided as a class of men of harsh views and feelings, gloomy in their faith and perverters of Scripture. On the contrary, the believers in the doctrine remonstrate, while the unbelievers are in a measure reserved and silent, and the wisest of them do not venture positive assertions on the subject, but state their difficulculties, and declare that they cannot accept the common faith. Enough has been said on the subject to make good and intelligent men re-examine the foundations of their belief on this point; but the result is a deep and firm conviction that the literal representations of the Bible are to be received in all the fulness and strength of their obvious import.

They who reject the doctrine of endless punishment have a formidable task in setting aside, we will not say the language of Scripture, but, the argument drawn from the commonly received belief on the subject. It cannot be accounted for, that evangelical believers should so generally admit and preach a doctrine which is repugnant to our natural feelings, unless it be found in Scripture.

II. Mr. Foster furnishes a sufficient refutation of his own objections to the doctrine of endless punishment, in his published views of the present constitution of things in this world.

In the pamphlet before us, the compiler has inserted a letter from Mr. Foster to Dr. Harris, which we think explains the origin of Mr. F.'s views with regard to future punishment, and makes us feel that a morbid state of mind was the occasion of his doctrinal error. We venture to say that if Mr. Foster, with the state of mind in which he wrote his letter on future punishment, had been an inhabitant of another planet, and had been told of our world, with its enormous woes, its disappointed hopes, its scenes of heart-rending anguish, its oppressions and cruelties, the triumph of vice over virtue, and the inconceivable amount of human degradation in heathen and pagan lands, he would have said, It is a libel on the character of God to suppose that such

a state of things can exist under his government. The following extract from his letter to Dr. Harris we think will confirm our remark:

- the

"To me it appears a most mysteriously awful economy, overspread by a lurid and dreadful shade. I pray for the piety to maintain an humble submission of thought and feeling to the wise and righteous Disposer of all existence. But to see a nature created in purity, qualified for perfect and endless felicity, but ruined at the very origin, by a disaster devolving fatally on all the race,- to see it in an early age of the world estranged from truth, from the love and fear of its Creator, from that, therefore, without which existence is a thing to be deplored, abandoned to all evil, till swept away by a deluge, renovated race revolving into idolatry and iniquity, and spreading downward through ages in darkness, wickedness, and misery, -no Divine dispensation to enlighten and reclaim it, except for one small section, and that section itself a no less flagrant proof of the desperate corruption of the nature, the ultimate, grand remedial visitation, Christianity, laboring in a difficult progress and very limited extension, and soon perverted from its purpose into darkness and superstition, for a period of a thousand years, at the present hour known and even nominally acknowledged by very greatly the minority of the race, the mighty mass remaining prostrate under the infernal dominion, of which countless generations of their ancestors have been the slaves and victims, a deplorable majority of the people in the Christian nations strangers to the vital power of Christianity, and a larger proportion directly hostile to it, and even the institutions pretended to be for its support and promotion being baneful to its virtue, - its progress in the work of conversion, in even the most favored part of the world, distanced by the progressive increase of the population, so that, even there, (but to a fearful extent if we take the world at large,) the disproportion of the faithful to the irreligious is continually increasing, the sum of all these melancholy facts being, that thousands of millions have passed, and thousands every day are passing, out of the world, in no state of fitness for a pure and happy state elsewhere, O, it is a most confounding and appalling contemplation!" Pp. 38, 39.

We say, it is not improbable that the state of mind, or the habit indicated by these lines, of viewing events and things, would have led Mr. Foster to reject the historical assertion of the existence of this moral economy, were he not an eye-witness of it, just as he did, for similar reasons, or rather with similar feelings, reject the doctrine of endless punishment. We feel that the impressions of such a man are not a safe guide. He excites distrust and fear in our minds with regard to the government of the world; we should not feel happy in the thought that God reigns, nor see how the multitude of isles could be glad thereof, should we live

habitually under the influence of such views as those which he expresses in his letter to Dr. Harris. Mr. Foster's views of this world and its awful calamities are not modified, nor his difficulties solved by any representations which a Christian, we should think, would naturally make with regard to the evil of sin. The way in which we are accustomed to hear good men speak of the disorder of the present system is, to illustrate the nature and consequences of sin by referring to the calamities and sufferings of the world. They represent that as redemption is declared in the Bible to have for its object the instruction of the universe; so this planet, cursed with sin, and groaning under its effects, will forever serve to shew the inhabitants of other worlds what sin is, and what it can do; so that however terrible and inconceivably dreadful are the consequences of sin, they will nevertheless be for the happiness of the universe, by keeping other orders of beings in their allegiance to God. It is easy, of course, to step from this position into a boundless deep of speculation and mys tery with regard to the origin of evil. But without venturing into speculation, it is sufficiently obvious that the government of the universe being a moral government, that is, a government administered by means of moral considerations instead of force, such considerations must be prepared to influence moral beings as will be eminently fitted to the great end of preserving and gov erning them in a state of rectitude. If God sees fit to employ the fall and the consequent sufferings of our race in this world for this purpose, who shall say that He is not wise and good in so doing, notwithstanding all that we suffer; especially when we consider that as we are constituted, our very sufferings are the means of a greater knowledge of God, and greater moral excellence and happiness to all who love and obey Him?

If this view of the present system be correct, and is sufficient to vindicate the ways of God to man, we may argue that when we know as much about a future state as we do about this, we shall doubtless see reason to say with the redeemed: "Just and true are thy ways, thou King of Saints."

III. We shall now state several objections to Mr. Foster's reasoning with regard to future punishment.

We nowhere find in his treatment of the subject, a deep, penetrating, Scriptural view of the evil of sin, such, for example, as we find in the writings of President Edwards; and which, after