But many of those readers, who, up to this point, may heartily sympathise with me in my feeble efforts to quicken a more earnest thoughtfulness on this subject, will be disposed to avoid its further consideration.  I would not blame them for so feeling.  God knoweth I have no wish to “dogmatise” on this subject, but to approach it with real sympathy for the difficulties, the pains, the perplexities, which the noblest, the truest, and the most reverential have experienced when they have attempted really to believe in it What chiefly induces me to submit a few thoughts upon a theme so solemn, is the “dogmatism” and unworthy views of God which are attributed to all of us who cannot discover sunrise beyond the gloom; and the conviction also that a more thorough belief in the clanger of sin, as well as its inherent vileness, and a wholesome “terror of the Lord,” would tend to “persuade men” to entertain with more earnestness the deliverance promised in the gospel.

The idea which many have formed of punishment is that of a mere arbitrary annexation of a certain amount of suffering in the next world to a certain amount of crime committed in this—­so many stripes for so many sins; and, as if obvious injustice were inflicted on men, by threatening them with coming woe for present wickedness, they exclaim, “Surely such sins as these do not deserve such punishment as that!” But if sin itself, by an eternal moral necessity, carries with it its own punishment, even as the shadow accompanies the substance, then the real question in regard to the possible ending of future suffering is merged in the deeper one of the possible ending of future sin.  And if so, what evidence have we from any one source to inspire the hope, that the man who enters the next world loving sin, and therefore suffering punishment as its necessary result, will ever cease to sin, and thereby cease to suffer?  It must, remember, be admitted as an indisputable fact, that life eternal can only co-exist with a right state of the soul.  “This is life eternal, to know thee and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.”  Up to the moment in which the spirit turns with filial confidence and obedience to God, there cannot be a cessation either in the curse that must rest upon enmity and disobedience, or in the pain which must be produced by so terrible a malady.  Some time or other, be it near or remote, in one year or in a million, there must be repentance in the sinner, a turning away from sin and to God, as the only possible means of bridging over the otherwise impassable gulf that separates the bad from the good, or hell from heaven.  There is no salvation for man but from sin; there is no restoration for him but to love.

But if this change in the sinner is not accomplished in this world, what evidence have we that it can be accomplished in any place of even limited punishment?  In what conceivable way, we ask with deepest awe, is a moral and responsible being, who ends this life and begins another at enmity to God, rejecting Christ, disbelieving the gospel, dead in trespasses and in sins, hateful and hating, selfish and vile,—­in what way is he to be made holy after death, and before entering heaven, by a temporary discipline of mere suffering?