Questions, too, have arisen, of—­’What is moral retribution?  Should punishment have any end but the good of the offender?  Is God so controlled that He must needs send into the world beings whom He knows to be incorrigible, and doomed to endless misery?  And if not so controlled, then is not the other alternative as to His character more fearful still?  Does He not bid us copy Him, His justice, His love?  Then is that His justice, is that His love, which if we copied we should be unjust and unloving utterly?  Are there two moralities, one for God, and quite another for man, made in the image of God?  Can these dark dogmas be true of a Father who bids us be perfect as He is, in that He sends His sun to shine on the evil and the good, and His rain on the just and unjust?  Or of a Son who so loved the world that He died to save the world and surely not in vain?’

These questions—­be they right or wrong—­educated men and women of all classes and denominations—­orthodox, be it remembered, as well as unorthodox—­are asking, and will ask more and more, till they receive an answer.  And if we of the clergy cannot give them an answer which accords with their conscience and their reason; if we tell them that the words of Scripture, and the integral doctrines of Christianity, demand the same notions of moral retribution as were current in the days when men racked criminals, burned heretics alive, and believed that every Mussulman whom they slaughtered in a crusade went straight to endless torments,—­then evil times will come, both for the clergy and the Christian religion, for many a yeas henceforth.

What then are we to believe?  What are we to do, amid this shaking of the earth and heaven?  Are we to degenerate into a lazy and heartless scepticism, which, under pretence of liberality and charity, believes that everything is a little true, everything is a little false—­in one word, believes nothing at all?  Or are we to degenerate into unmanly and faithless wailings, crying out that the flood of infidelity is irresistible, that the last days are come, and that Christ has deserted His Church?

Not if we will believe the text.  The text tells us of something which cannot be moved, though all around it reel and crumble—­of a firm standing-ground, which would endure, though the heavens should pass away as a scroll, and the earth should be removed, and cast into the midst of the sea.

We have a kingdom, the Scripture says, which cannot be moved, even the kingdom of Him whom it calls shortly after ’Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day and for ever.’  An eternal and unchangeable kingdom, ruled by an eternal and unchangeable King.  That is what cannot be moved.

Scripture does not say that we have an unchangeable cosmogony, an unchangeable theory of moral retribution, an unchangeable system of dogmatic propositions.  Whether we have, or have not, it is not of them that Scripture reminds the Jews, when the heavens and the earth were shaken; when their own nation and worship were in their death-agony, and all the beliefs and practices of men were in a whirl of doubt and confusion, of decay and birth side by side, such as the world had never seen before.  Not of them does it remind the Jews, but of the changeless kingdom, and the changeless King.