Furthermore, it would not be safe for this world if men had another chance in the next.  If it had been announced that, however wickedly a man might act in this world, he could fix it up all right in the next, society would be terribly demoralized, and the human race demolished in a few years.  The fear that, if we are bad and unforgiven here, it will not be well for us in the next existence, is the chief influence that keeps civilization from rushing back to semi-barbarism, and semi-barbarism from rushing into midnight savagery, and midnight savagery from extinction; for it is the astringent impression of all nations, Christian and heathen, that there is no future chance for those who have wasted this.

Multitudes of men who are kept within bounds would say, “Go to, now!  Let me get all out of this life there is in it.  Come, gluttony, and inebriation, and uncleanness, and revenge, and all sensualities, and wait upon me!  My life may be somewhat shortened in this world by dissoluteness, but that will only make heavenly indulgence on a larger scale the sooner possible.  I will overtake the saints at last, and will enter the Heavenly Temple only a little later than those who behaved themselves here.  I will on my way to heaven take a little wider excursion than those who were on earth pious, and I shall go to heaven via Gehenna and via Sheol.”  Another chance in the next world means free license and wild abandonment in this.

Suppose you were a party in an important case at law, and you knew from consultation with judges and attorneys that it would be tried twice, and the first trial would be of little importance, but that the second would decide everything; for which trial would you make the most preparation, for which retain the ablest attorneys, for which be most anxious about the attendance of witnesses?  You would put all the stress upon the second trial, all the anxiety, all the expenditure, saying, “The first is nothing, the last is everything.”  Give the race assurance of a second and more important trial in the subsequent life, and all the preparation for eternity would be post-mortem, post-funeral, post-sepulchral, and the world with one jerk be pitched off into impiety and godlessness.

Furthermore, let me ask why a chance should be given in the next world if we have refused innumerable chances in this?  Suppose you give a banquet, and you invite a vast number of friends, but one man declines to come, or treats your invitation with indifference.  You in the course of twenty years give twenty banquets, and the same man is invited to them all, and treats them all in the same obnoxious way.  After awhile you remove to another house, larger and better, and you again invite your friends, but send no invitation to the man who declined or neglected the other invitations.  Are you to blame?  Has he a right to expect to be invited after all the indignities he has done you?  God in this world has invited us all to the banquet