“But,” says some one, “in the future state evil surroundings will be withdrawn and elevated influences substituted, and hence expurgation, and sublimation, and glorification.”  But the righteous, all their sins forgiven, have passed on into a beatific state, and consequently the unsaved will be left alone.  It can not be expected that Doctor Duff, who exhausted himself in teaching Hindoos the way to heaven, and Doctor Abeel, who gave his life in the evangelization of China, and Adoniram Judson, who toiled for the redemption of Borneo, should be sent down by some celestial missionary society to educate those who wasted all their earthly existence.  Evangelistic and missionary efforts are ended.  The entire kingdom of the morally bankrupt by themselves, where are the salvatory influences to come from?  Can one speckled and bad apple in a barrel of diseased apples turn the other apples good?  Can those who are themselves down help others up?  Can those who have themselves failed in the business of the soul pay the debts of their spiritual insolvents?  Can a million wrongs make one right?

Poneropolis was a city where King Philip of Thracia put all the bad people of his kingdom.  If any man had opened a primary school at Poneropolis I do not think the parents from other cities would have sent their children there.  Instead of amendment in the other world, all the associations, now that the good are evolved, will be degenerating and down.  You would not want to send a man to a cholera or yellow fever hospital for his health; and the great lazaretto of the next world, containing the diseased and plague-struck, will be a poor place for moral recovery.  If the surroundings in this world were crowded of temptation, the surroundings of the next world, after the righteous have passed up and on, will be a thousand per cent. more crowded of temptation.

The Count of Chateaubriand made his little son sleep at night at the top of a castle turret, where the winds howled and where specters were said to haunt the place; and while the mother and sisters almost died with fright, the son tells us that the process gave him nerves that could not tremble and a courage that never faltered.  But I don’t think that towers of darkness and the spectral world swept by Sirocco and Euroclydon will ever fit one for the land of eternal sunshine.  I wonder what is the curriculum of that college of Inferno, where, after proper preparation by the sins of this life, the candidate enters, passing on from freshman class of depravity to sophomore of abandonment, and from sophomore to junior, and from junior to senior, and day of graduation comes, and with diploma signed by Satan, the president, and other professorial demoniacs, attesting that the candidate has been long enough under their drill, he passes up to enter heaven!  Pandemonium a preparative course for heavenly admission!  Ah, my friends, Satan and his cohorts have fitted uncounted multitudes for ruin, but never fitted one soul for happiness.