They say—­“We believe firmly enough in moral retribution.  How can we help believing in it, while we see it working around us, in many a fearful shape, here, now, in this life?  And we believe that it may work on, in still more fearful shapes, in the life to come.  We believe that as long as a sinner is impenitent, he must be miserable; that if he goes on impenitent for ever, he must go on making himself miserable—­ay, it may be more and more miserable for ever.  Only do not tell us that he must go on.  That his impenitence, and therefore his punishment, is irremediable, necessary, endless; and thereby destroy the whole purpose, and we should say, the whole morality, of his punishment.  If that punishment be corrective, our moral sense is not shocked by any severity, by any duration:  but if it is irremediable, it cannot be corrective; and then, what it is, or why it is, we cannot—­or rather dare not—­say.  We, too, believe in an eternal fire.  But because we believe also the Athanasian Creed, which tells us that there is but One Eternal, we believe that that fire must be the fire of God, and therefore, like all that is in God and of God, good and not evil, a blessing and not a curse.  We believe that that fire is for ever burning, though men are for ever trying to quench it all day long; and that it has been and will be in every age burning up all the chaff and stubble of man’s inventions; the folly, the falsehood, the ignorance, the vice of this sinful world; and we praise God for it; and give thanks to Him for His great glory, that He is the everlasting and triumphant foe of evil and misery, of whom it is written, that our God is a consuming fire.”  Such words are being spoken, right or wrong.

Such words will bear their fruit, for good or evil.  I do not pronounce how much of them is true or false.  It is not my place to dogmatize and define, where the Church of England, as by law established, has declined to do so.  Neither is it for you to settle these questions.  It is rather a matter for your children.  A generation more, it may be, of earnest thought will be required, ere the true answer has been found.  But it is your duty, if you be educated and thoughtful persons, to face these questions; to consider seriously what these men would have you consider—­whether you are believing the exact words of the Bible, and the conclusions of your own reason and moral sense; or whether you are merely believing that cosmogony elaborated in the cloister, that theory of moral retribution pardonable in the middle age, which Dante and Milton sang.

But this I do not hesitate to say—­That if we of the clergy can find no other answers to these doubts than those which were reasonable and popular in an age when men racked women, burned heretics, and believed that every Mussulman killed in a crusade went straight to Tartarus—­then very serious times are at hand, both for the Christian clergy and for Christianity itself.