or sought in what may be called incidental expressions of Scripture, or of the passages dubiously cited in favour of final, universal restitution. It is the moral argument, as it may be named, that presses irresistibly on my mind—that which comes in the stupendous idea of eternity.

It appears to me that the teachers and believers of the orthodox doctrine hardly ever make an earnest, strenuous effort to form a conception of eternity; or rather a conception somewhat of the nature of a faint incipient approximation. Because it is confessedly beyond the compass of thought, it is suffered to go without an attempt at thinking of it. They utter the term in the easy currency of language; have a vague and transitory idea of something obscurely vast, and do not labour to place and detain the

are not aware.

the bible on the matter at issue. There can be no misconceiving that; and without repeating its affirmations, I must say, that once you extenuate and dilute them, you inflict a blow on practical religion of which perhaps you The scripture gives us no warrant to believe that our all is not staked, and irrevocably staked, on the faith and obedience of the present life. Be assured you will paralyze all the motives to practical Christianity by giving any countenance to the opposite representation, and you will not only indulge in unlicensed speculation, by attempting to dilute and do away the obvious literalities of scripture on this subject, but you will find it a speculation of most baleful influence on the practice and the general principles of all who are infected by it.

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Let me briefly, and in but one or two sentences, advert to what I hold an important view connected with this matter. When men talk of the disproportion between the sins of an ephemeral life and the penalties of a never-ending eternity, it should be recollected that this is really not the light in which the matter ought to be regarded. There is a law of habit exemplified within the field of every man's observation, and which he does not quarrel with. In virtue of this law, by every act of obedience, a man becomes stronger in the purpose and character of obedience; and by every act of wickedness, the propensities of wickedness lord it all the more strongly and resistlessly over him. Now just imagine the continuity of this process to be kept up between time and eternity, and that if we carry with us unreclaimed impiety and disobedience across the limit which separates the two worlds, we shall carry with us into our future state, the habits and the passions, and all the vitiated principles of rebellion against God; and the punishments which come on the back of these will not he punishments for the sins of the present life, but fresh punishments for the fresh sins to which the inveteracy of our diseased moral nature is ever hurrying us—an inveteracy only to be cured on this side of death, and so affording a most impressive argument for our strenuous, and withal, our immediate repentance."-DR. CHALMERS, Notes on Hill's Lectures on Divinity. Posthu mous Works, vol. ix. p. 416-418.

mind in intense protracted contemplation, seeking all expedients for expanding and aggravating the awful import of such a word. Though every mode of illustration is feeble and impotent, one would surely think there would be an insuppressible impulse to send forth the thoughts to the utmost possible reach into the immensity-when it is an immensity into which our own most essential interests are infinitely extended. Truly it is very strange that even religious minds can keep so quietly aloof from the amazing, the overwhelming contemplation of what they have the destiny and the near prospect of entering upon.

Expedients of illustration of what eternity is not, supply the best attainable means of assisting remotely toward a glimmering apprehension of what it is. All that is within human capacity is to imagine the vastest measures of time, and to look to the termination of these as only touching the mere commencement of eternity.

*

For example:-It has been suggested to imagine the number of particles, atoms, contained in this globe, and suppose them one by one annihilated, each in a thousand years, till all were gone; but just as well say, a million, or a million of millions of years or ages, it is all the same, as against infinite duration.

Extend the thought of such a process to our whole mundane system, and finally to the whole material universe: it is still the same. Or, imagine a series of numerical figures, in close order, extended to a line of such a length that it would encircle the globe, like the equator-or that would run along with the earth's orbit round the sun-or with the outermost planet, Uranus-or that would draw a circle of which the radius should be from the earth or sun to Siriusor that should encompass the entire material universe, which, as being material, cannot be infinite. The most stupendous of these measures of time would have an end; and would, when completed, be still nothing to eternity.

Now think of an infliction of misery protracted through such a period, and at the end of it being only commencing,not one smallest step nearer a conclusion:-the case just the same if that sum of figures were multiplied by itself. And then think of Man-his nature, his situation, the cir* In the Spectator I think. (No. 575, Monday, Aug. 2, 1714.—ED.)

cumstances of his brief sojourn and trial on earth. Far be it from us to make light of the demerit of sin, and to remonstrate with the Supreme Judge against a severe chastisement, of whatever moral nature we may regard the infliction to be. But still, what is man?-He comes into the world with a nature fatally corrupt, and powerfully tending to actual evil. He comes among a crowd of temptations adapted to his innate evil propensities. He grows up (incomparably the greater proportion of the race) in great ignorance; his judgment weak, and under numberless beguilements into error; while his passions and appetites are strong; his conscience unequally matched against their power;-in the majority of men, but feebly and rudely constituted. The influence of whatever good instructions he may receive is counteracted by a combination of opposite influences almost constantly acting on him. He is essentially and inevitably unapt to be powerfully acted on by what is invisible and future. In addition to all which, there is the intervention and activity of the great tempter and destroyer. In short, his condition is such that there is no hope of him, but from a direct special operation on him, of what we denominate Divine Grace.-Is it not so? are we not convinced—is it not the plain doctrine of scripture—is there not irresistible evidence from a view of the actual condition of the human world,—that no man can become good, in the Chriscian sense, can become fit for a holy and happy place hereafter, but by this operation ab extra? But this is arbitrary and discriminative on the part of the Sovereign Agent, and independent of the will of man. how awfully evident is it, that this indispensable operation takes place only on a comparatively small proportion of the collective race!

And

Now this creature, thus constituted and circumstanced, passes a few fleeting years on earth, a short sinful course; in which he does often what, notwithstanding his ignorance and ill-disciplined judgment and conscience, he knows to be wrong, and neglects what he knows to be his duty; and consequently, for a greater or less measure of guilt, widely different in different offenders, deserves punishment. But endless punishment! hopeless misery, through a duration to which the enormous terms above imagined, will be abso

lutely nothing! I acknowledge my inability (I would say it reverently) to admit this belief, together with a belief in the Divine Goodness-the belief that "God is love," that his tender mercies are over all his works. Goodness, benevolence, charity, as ascribed in supreme perfection to Him, cannot mean a quality foreign to all human conceptions of goodness; it must be something analogous in principle to what himself has defined and required as goodness in his moral creatures, that, in adoring the Divine Goodness, we may not be worshipping an "unknown God." But if so, how would all our ideas be confounded, while contemplating him bringing, of his own sovereign will, a race of creatures into existence, in such a condition that they certainly will and must,-must, by their nature and circumstances, go wrong and be miserable, unless prevented by especial grace, which is the privilege of only a small proportion of them, and, at the same time, affixing on their delinquency a doom, of which it is infinitely beyond the highest archangel's faculty to apprehend a thousandth part of the horror.

It must be in deep humility that we venture to apply to the measures of the Divine Government, the rules indispensable to the equity of human administration. Yet we may

advert to the principle in human legislation, that the man tempted to crime should, as far as is possible without actual experience, be apprised of the nature and measure of the penal consequence. It should be something, the main force of which can be placed in intelligible apposition, so to speak, to the temptation. If it be something totally out of the scope of his faculties to apprehend, to realize to his mind, that threatened something is unknown, has not its appropriate fitness to deter him. There is, or may be, in it what would be of mighty force to deter him if he could have a competent notion of it; but his necessary ignorance precludes from him that salutary force. Is he not thus taken at a fearful disadvantage? As a motive to deter him the threatened penalty can only be in the proportion to his (in the present case) narrow faculty of apprehending it; but as an evil to be suffered it surpasses in magnitude every intellect but the Omniscient. Might we not imagine the reflection of one of the condemned delinquents suffering on, and

still interminably on, through a thousand or a million of ages, to be expressed in some such manner as this:-Oh! if it had been possible for me to conceive but the most diminutive part of the weight and horror of this doom, every temptation to sin would have been enough to strike me dead with terror; I should have shrunk from it with the most violent recoil.

A common argument has been that sin is an infinite evil, that is, of infinite demerit, as an offence against an infinite Being; and that since a finite creature cannot suffer infinitely in measure, he must in duration. But surely, in all reason, the limited and in the present instance diminutive nature of the criminal must be an essential part of the case for judgment. Every act must, for one of its proportions, be measured by the nature and condition of the agent. And it would seem that one principle in that rule of proportion should be, that the offending agent should be capable of being aware of the magnitude (the amount, if we might use such a word) of the offence he commits, by being capable of something like an adequate conception of the being against whom it is committed. A perverse child, committing an offence against a great monarch, of whose dignity it had some, but a vastly inadequate, apprehension, would not be punished in the same manner as an offender of high endowments and responsibility, and fully aware of the dignity of the personage offended. The one would justly be sharply chastised; the other might as justly be condemned to death. In the present case, the offender does or may know, that the Being offended against is of awful majesty; and, therefore, the offence is one of great aggravation, and he will justly be punished with great severity; but, by his extremely contracted and feeble faculties, as the lowest in the scale of strictly rational and accountable creatures in the whole creation, he is infinitely incapable of any adequate conception of the greatness of the Being offended against. He is, then, according to the argument, obnoxious to a punishment not in any proportion to his own nature, but alone to that infinity of the Supreme Nature, which is to him infinitely unconceivable and unknown.

If an evil act of a human being may be of infinite demerit,