That process of inebriation, warning, and dissolution is going on within stone’s throw of this church, going on in all the neighborhoods of Christendom.  Pain does not correct.  Suffering does not reform.  What is true in one sense is true in all senses, and will forever be so, and yet men are expecting in the next world purgatorial rejuvenation.  Take up the printed reports of the prisons of the United States, and you will find that the vast majority of the incarcerated have been there before, some of them four, five, six times.  With a million illustrations all working the other way in this world, people are expecting that distress in the next state will be salvatory.  You can not imagine any worse torture in any other world than that which some men have suffered here, and without any salutary consequence.

Furthermore, the prospect of a reformation in the next world is more improbable than a reformation here.  In this world the life started with innocence of infancy.  In the case supposed the other life will open with all the accumulated bad habits of many years upon him.  Surely, it is easier to build a strong ship out of new timber than out of an old hulk that has been ground up in the breakers.  If with innocence to start with in this life a man does not become godly, what prospect is there that in the next world, starting with sin, there would be a seraph evoluted?  Surely the sculptor has more prospect of making a fine statue out of a block of pure white Parian marble than out of an old black rock seamed and cracked with the storms of a half century.  Surely upon a clean, white sheet of paper it is easier to write a deed or a will than upon a sheet of paper all scribbled and blotted and torn from top to bottom.  Yet men seem to think that, though the life that began here comparatively perfect turned out badly, the next life will succeed, though it starts with a dead failure.

“But,” says some one, “I think we ought to have a chance in the next life, because this life is so short it allows only small opportunity.  We hardly have time to turn around between cradle and tomb, the wood of the one almost touching the marble of the other.”  But do you know what made the ancient deluge a necessity?  It was the longevity of the antediluvians.  They were worse in the second century of their life-time than in the first hundred years, and still worse in the third century, and still worse all the way on to seven, eight, and nine hundred years, and the earth had to be washed, and scrubbed, and soaked, and anchored, clear out of sight for more than a month before it could be made fit for decent people to live in.  Longevity never cures impenitency.  All the pictures of Time represent him with a scythe to cut, but I never saw any picture of Time with a case of medicines to heal.  Seneca says that Nero for the first five years of his public life was set up for an example of clemency and kindness, but his path all the way descended until at sixty-eight he became a suicide.  If eight hundred years did not make antediluvians any better, but only made them worse, the ages of eternity could have no effect except prolongation of depravity.