must be made for rhetoric; and that fire is called eternal or unquenchable, when it so destroys as to leave nothing unburnt.  But on the whole, the very vocabulary of the Greek and Hebrew denoted that the idea of absolute eternity was unformed.  The hills are called everlasting (secular?), by those who supposed them to have come into existence two or three thousand years before.—­Only in two passages of the Revelations I could not get over the belief that the writer’s energy was misplaced, if absolute eternity of torment was not intended:  yet it seemed to me unsafe and wrong to found an important doctrine on a symbolic and confessedly obscure book of prophecy.  Setting this aside, I found no proof of any eternal punishment.

As soon as the load of Scriptural authority was thus taken off from me, I had a vivid discernment of intolerable moral difficulties inseparable from the doctrine.  First, that every sin is infinite in ill-desert and in result, because it is committed against an infinite Being.  Thus the fretfulness of a child is an infinite evil!  I was aghast that I could have believed it.  Now that it was no longer laid upon me as a duty to uphold the infinitude of God’s retaliation on sin, I saw that it was an immorality to teach that sin was measured by anything else than the heart and will of the agent.  That a finite being should deserve infinite punishment, now was manifestly as incredible as that he should deserve infinite reward,—­which I had never dreamed.—­Again, I saw that the current orthodoxy made Satan eternal conqueror over Christ.  In vain does the Son of God come from heaven and take human flesh and die on the cross.  In spite of him, the devil carries off to hell the vast majority of mankind, in whom, not misery only, but Sin is triumphant for ever and ever.  Thus Christ not only does not succeed in destroying the works of the devil, but even aggravates them.—­Again:  what sort of gospel or glad tidings had I been holding?  Without this revelation no future state at all (I presumed) could be known.  How much better no futurity for any, than that a few should be eternally in bliss, and the great majority[2] kept alive for eternal sin as well as eternal misery!  My gospel then was bad tidings, nay, the worst of tidings!  In a farther progress of thought, I asked, would it not have been better that the whole race of man had never come into existence?  Clearly!  And thus God was made out to be unwise in creating them.  No use in the punishment was imaginable, without setting up Fear, instead of Love, as the ruling principle in the blessed.  And what was the moral tendency of the doctrine?  I had never borne to dwell upon it:  but I before long suspected that it promoted malignity and selfishness, and was the real clue to the cruelties perpetrated under the name of religion.  For he who does dwell on it, must comfort himself under the prospect of his brethren’s eternal misery, by the selfish expectation of personal