Making every allowance for the real difficulties which beset this question, and for the peculiar feelings, partly allowable, and largely the reverse, with which it is entertained, we have no doubt that many have been driven to the extreme of utter disbelief in the existence of any punishment by the bold and presumptuous manner in which they may have heard men consign all the heathen, and all Christendom, with the exception of a very few, to this awful doom.  Infants even have not escaped the condemnation of some who, professing to have more orthodox faith than their neighbours, have really little or any faith at all in God, but utter mere words to which—­in this case, fortunately for themselves—­they attach no meaning.  For if they did, what would life be to them, believing that it was possible for their babe, because of Adam’s sin, to be cast for all eternity into literal fire?  But while we have perfect confidence in the salvation of infants, and of many more, we dare not condemn any.  The living God, who alone knows each man, may be dealing in ways beyond our comprehension with the most lonely savage, whose inmost spirit He ever sees, and who is of more awful value in His sight than all the stars of the sky. How the living and omniscient Spirit of God has access to the inner spirit of man, I neither know nor could perhaps understand if it were revealed; nor how He can teach that spirit without the gospel or the ordinary means of grace, so as to bring it under law to God.  But when I saw a child (Laura Bridgman) who was born deaf, dumb, and blind, marvellously educated by the genius and wisdom of her remarkable instructor, I could not but feel how grand ends might be accomplished in the human soul by means which before this experience I would have pronounced as impossible;—­and it suggested also to me how a poor heathen even, like that blind girl, might be really taught by another person, and be receiving light within, though for a time utterly ignorant of either the name, the character, or the purposes of the unseen and unheard teacher, who yet in his own way gradually was training his scholar for fellowship with God and man.[A] We ignorant and sinful men must confine our judgments as regards others to what is right or wrong in their actions, and that solely to guide ourselves in our personal duties towards God and one another.  But as to deciding the eternal fate of any man, that, thank God! can be done only by Him to whom all men belong.  When disposed to occupy the throne of the judge, and to scrutinise human character with a jealous regard for the righteousness of God, let us at once do so by summoning ourselves to the bar!

[Footnote A:  As an illustration of this, see a remarkable account of a North American Indian, narrated by Brainerd in his Diary, date September 21, 1745.]