blessedness.  When I asked whether I had been guilty of this selfishness, I remembered that I had often mourned, how small a part in my practical religion the future had ever borne.  My heaven and my hell had been in the present, where my God was near me to smile or to frown.  It had seemed to me a great weakness in my faith, that I never had any vivid imaginations or strong desires of heavenly glory:  yet now I was glad to observe, that it had at least saved me from getting so much harm from the wrong side of the doctrine of a future life.

Before I had worked out the objections so fully as here stated, I freely disclosed my thoughts to the friend last named, and to his wife, towards whom he encouraged me to exercise the fullest frankness.  I confess, I said nothing about the Unitarian book; for something told me that I had violated Evangelical decorum in opening it, and that I could not calculate how it would affect my friend.  Certainly no Romish hierarchy can so successfully exclude heretical books, as social enactment excludes those of Unitarians from our orthodox circles.  The bookseller dares not to exhibit their books on his counter:  all presume them to be pestilential:  no one knows their contents or dares to inform himself.  But to return.  My friend’s wife entered warmly into my new views; I have now no doubt that this exceedingly distressed him, and at length perverted his moral judgment:  he himself examined the texts of the Old Testament, and attempted no answer to them.  After I had left his neighbourhood, I wrote to him three affectionate letters, and at last got a reply—­of vehement accusation.  It can now concern no one to know, how many and deep wounds he planted in me.  I forgave; but all was too instructive to forget.

For some years I rested in the belief that the epithet “secular punishment” either solely denoted punishment in a future age, or else only of long duration.  This evades the horrible idea of eternal and triumphant Sin, and of infinite retaliation for finite offences.  But still, I found my new creed uneasy, now that I had established a practice (if not a right) of considering the moral propriety of punishment.  I could not so pare away the vehement words of the Scripture, as really to enable me to say that I thought transgressors deserved the fiery infliction.  This had been easy, while I measured their guilt by God’s greatness; but when that idea was renounced, how was I to think that a good-humoured voluptuary deserved to be raised from the dead in order to be tormented in fire for 100 years? and what shorter time could be called secular?  Or if he was to be destroyed instantaneously, and “secular” meant only “in a future age,” was he worth the effort of a divine miracle to bring him to life and again annihilate him?  I was not willing to refuse belief to the Scripture on such grounds; yet I felt disquietude, that my moral sentiment and the Scripture were no longer in full harmony.