form or other, the presence of a dread and mysterious sorrow,—­we ask again, on what grounds is it concluded that this anticipated punishment shall itself possess a healing virtue to produce, some time or other, that love to God which, up till the hour of death, has never been produced in the sinner?  Men attach, perhaps, some omnipotent power to mere suffering, and imagine that if hatred to sin and love to God are all that is needed, then a short experience of the terrific consequences of a godless past must insure a godly future.  Why do they think so?  This is not the effect which mere punishment generally produces on human character.  Its tendency is not to soften, but to harden the heart,—­to fill it not with love, but with enmity.  It cannot fail, indeed, to make the sufferer long for deliverance from the pain; but it does not follow that he thereby longs for deliverance from the sin which causes the pain, and for the possession of the good which alone can remove it.  It is certainly not the case in this world, that bad men are always disposed to repent and turn to God in proportion as they suffer from their own wilfulness, and become poor from idleness, broken in health from dissipation, alienated from human hearts by their selfishness, or pass, with a constantly increasing anguish, through all the stages of outcasts from the family; dwellers among the profligate; companions in crime; occupiers of prisons; members of convict gangs, till the scaffold with its beam and drop ends the dreadful history.  Such punishment as this, constantly dogging the crime which at first created it and ever preserves it, only makes the heart harder, fans the passions into a more volcanic fire, and possesses the soul with a more daring recklessness and wilder desperation.  And arguing from this experience, to which men appeal, as if it was truer than the Word of God, what more special virtue will punishment have in the next world than in this?  What tendency will there be in that long night of misery to inspire a man with the love of God, whose very character, and whose holy and righteous will, have annexed the suffering to the sin?  If the sinner’s character is not thereby reformed, and all the while he retains his responsibility,—­as he must do on the assumption that reformation is possible,—­and if he continues to choose sin with more diabolical hatred to the good, is it imagined that such a process as this, of continued sin accompanied by continued mental suffering, will at any period render him mere meet to enjoy the holiness of heaven than when he first departed from the world to enter upon his new and strange probation?  Oh, the more we think of it, the darker does the history grow,—­the faster does the descent of the evil spirit become, clown that pit which, from its very nature, seems to be bottomless!  If means are discoverable there more suited to gain the end of moral regeneration than any which exist here, let them be pointed out.  We have searched in vain to find them in the Word of God, or in the mind and history of man.