the influence of infernal power will be banished or restrained. But then what takes place at the termination of that blissful period? A tremendous combination and insurrection of wicked men, in countless multitude, so bold and fierce in depravity, as to conspire for the destruction of the saints. Now the plain question is, How comes this to be possible? WHENCE this multitude of wicked human beings, so wicked, as to aim at the destruction of the righteous, and so numerous, as to be confident of effecting it, perhaps reasonably confident according to ordinary calculation, since to defeat them requires a direct Divine interposition, “fire from heaven ?"

Either there must have remained, during the happy period, a very considerable portion of the earth's inhabitants unsubdued to the kingdom of Christ, in spirit hostile to it and its subjects, or, if all are good throughout, and to the conclusion of the privileged period, there must then take place a frightful apostacy among them or their descendants. And it would seem that a little time will suffice to bring this grand eruption of evil; since it appears to be spoken of as contemporary with Satan's "being loosed for a little

season."

Which part of the alternative is the more probable-or rather the less improbable? for the phenomenon is in any way marvellously strange-yet plainly and literally a fact, if we may at all pretend to know when prophecy means a literal fact.

As to the fact of there being a sad prevalence of irreligion at the conclusion of the world, it seems more than implied by such a passage as 1 Thess. v. 3, "When they shall say Peace and safety, &c." Probably also by Revelation i. 7, "Wail," &c. The same might be said of our Lord's own predictions, if we could be certain how to distinguish between what referred to the end of the world, and what was limited to the destruction of Jerusalem.

But the alternative. I confess I am quite at fault for an opinion, or a presumption, whether it be more likely that, during a long succession of centuries and generations, in defiance of such an illustrious manifestation and prevalence of Christianity as may be denominated the reign of Christ and his saints on earth, (in accomplishment of the promise,

"The heathen for his inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for his possession"), there can remain a very considerable portion of the race, any where on the globe in obstinate resistance; or, on the other hand, that speedily after the completion of a certain number of those centuries, in spite of the mighty power which will have been acquired by truth and righteousness, by virtue of long and universal prevalence (to say nothing of the continuance of Divine interposition), there can be a desperate, furious, and wide. extended apostacy. Either phenomenon confounds one's faculty of thought. One might suggest one consideration, which may be called economical. Would it not be a greater sum of gain (so to denominate it) to the kingdom of Christ, for the whole world-for all men-to have belonged to it through so many ages, though followed by such an apostacy, than, for a considerable or large portion of the race to have stood out all that time, and to break forth at last into active rebellion? We have to consider also the radical depravity of human nature, not essentially abrogated, but only counteracted, repressed, and corrected by Divine influence even during the happy ages. If there should, for a mysterious reason in the Divine Government, be a suspension of that influence, taken together with a renewed permission (according to the prediction) of the infernal influence, we may imagine the possibility of a speedy and dreadful change in at least an immediately succeeding generation.

Taking this into consideration, and at the same time considering the character of universality in the language predicting the happy period in prospect, I should incline to the hope that literally all mankind will then be the genuine subjects of Christ.

I cannot expect that these slight and sceptical surmises should give you any satisfaction. I shall be glad if you gain it by some better mode of inquiry. We shall leave this dark and miserable world very long before the arrival of the commencement of the bright era,-even you will though young; yet I hope you will live to see some highly favourable and exhilarating change. But may Heaven grant us to attain a far happier state of existence elsewhere, than that of mortals can be even in the Millennium! . . . .

VOL. II.

CCXV. TO JOHN PURSER, ESQ.

Stapleton, July 29, 1840. Sometime within the three weeks that I have been on a visit to some old friends and relations in a distant place, which I had not seen for a considerable number of years, and may never see again, Mrs. W. had the kindness to call here, and, as I was told, she had signified, at your request, to make a friendly inquiry. While I was truly gratified by this, I was reproachfully reminded, once again, and for much more than the thousandth time, of my vice of procrastination. That is the modified form of delinquency to which I do honestly refer many of my sins of omission, (and certainly the one now in question,) rather than to a worse moral account. Do not you, under the universal law of self-love, always assign any few faults that you have to the most mitigated species of culpability? If you do not, it would go far to prove that those faults are few, and are very venial, which indeed I am most willing to believe. I have no doubt I should have testimony to this gratifying fact from Mrs. P. and six other primary, and I know not how many secondary, witnesses of most competent knowledge; and surely I may add myself.

I can

Many weeks since, a newspaper under your envelope, indicated to me that I was not forgotten amidst the domestic pleasures and varieties at Rathmines Castle, a scene unknown to me locally, to which I have often transferred my imagination from scenes which I did know in times now so far gone into the past, but very often recalled in pleasing but pensive memory. The times and scenes I can well, even vividly, recall, but not myself as I then was. almost as little carry myself back to realize my then state of feelings, as I can identify you as you now are, with you as you then were. For myself, I say with a sigh of deep regret, "If all the change effected by Time had but been for the better!" But the evil things that cleave to, or rather inhere in, this depraved nature, are the things that least give way to the changing operation of Time. . . . . A strange feeling arises at the confronted looks of persons mutually and distinctly recollecting what those looks were at a distance of time greater than the average duration of

human life, when there has been no meeting in the interval, to graduate, as it were, the appearance and perception of change. What a thing it would be if the souls could be made as plainly visible as the visages, in a comparison between their early and their actual state. For myself, while acknowledging that early state to have been far, very far indeed, from what it ought to have been, I have to acknowledge also that it would require extreme hardihood to make or allow a full plain exhibition of the present state, as in comparison, to the view of a judicial moral and religious observer. "What!" he would say, "this-only this-after an interval of forty years for correction and improvement, with means, advantages, and monitions innumerable, and convictions and even good resolutions endlessly repeated ?" I might well be in haste to close up the miserable spectacle against further inspection, confining it thenceforward to my own conscious reflection. But no; it cannot be so confined; there is another Inspector, and Judge! A solemn and alarming thought; when I consider what might and should have been effected in this long interval, and the miserable account of what has been, adverting in addition to what I believe and know to have been accomplished in the mind and the life of some of my better and wiser fellow mortals and coevals. I should be sunk in the profoundest melancholy, but for the grand sole resource of the Divine mercy as set forth in the propitiatory sacrifice of the Mediator. I often think what a state of feeling mine would be, under a disbelief of this doctrine. And much I wonder how the rejectors of the doctrine, unless they have a lofty opinion of their own merits, can endure to look forward to the future account in appearing before the supreme and righteous Judge. I never recollect our friend Mrs. O. without great regret for what you have told me of her religious faith, in which, however, you said, I think, that she professes to feel confident and complacent, even in the face of that perfect law, which exacts an absolute conformity, without failure or defect, as the condition of acceptance for those who refuse to plead the atonement made by "the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world." Let us be thankful for not having been suffered to be misled into so disastrous an order of religious opinions. . . .

....

For Ireland we have been in extreme alarm during the agitation of Lord Stanley's detestable bill, the threatened success of which would have rekindled all the inflammable passions of your island. You have had Dan, I see, about you at Rathmines, lately. He is the man I should be more curious to see and hear than any other individual in the world whom I have not seen. There is not, in the whole world, any other person who has so much moral power, in virtue solely of the individual's own personal qualities. Our reformers, you may be sure, set a very high value on his agency and co-operation-to a certain extentbut totally disown him in his wild project of "repeal;" I really cannot understand how he can imagine the practicability, or how he can foresee in the actual attempt anything less fearful than a civil war.

...

CCXVI. TO MRS. STOKES.

Stapleton, December 7, 1840.

You can retrace almost numberless circumstances, occurrences, points of time, situations at home and at a distance, all combining to tell the value of a relationship, which it has pleased the heavenly Father to dissolve-to dissolve as to the present world; but leaving a delightful anticipation of what shall be recovered in another.

In the recollection of that long course of associated life, you have the consolation of reflecting that it was a journey in the right direction for a better world; that thus it had not solely its present satisfactions in each passing stage, but had its value with respect to hereafter. You will think with gratitude of the vast difference between this and a case of separation in which the survivor has the melancholy consideration that the now terminated course of united life had nothing in it tending to a happy future;-nothing to excite the joyful hope of a delightful meeting again; that whatever satisfactions and advantages it had, they all belonged exclusively to the time in which they were possessed, were all confined to the interests of the present world, and are therefore now in all senses gone and lost, leaving no