LECTURE XII.

THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF RETRIBUTION HEREAFTER.

BY REV. HENRY GILES.

"AND GOD SAID TO JONAH, DOEST THOU WELL TO BE ANGRY FOR THE GOURD? AND HE SAID, I DO WELL TO BE ANGRY, EVEN UNTO DEATH. THEN SAID THE LORD, THOU HAST PITY ON THE GOURD FOR WHICH THOU HAST NOT LABOURED, NEITHER MADEST IT GROW; WHICH CAME UP IN A NIGHT AND PERISHED IN A NIGHT. AND SHOULD NOT I SPARE NINEVEH, THAT GREAT CITY, WHEREIN ARE MORE THAN SIX SCORE THOUSAND PERSONS THAT CANNOT DISCERN BETWEEN THEIR RIGHT HAND AND THEIR LEFT?"-Jonah iv. 9, 10, 11.

The war or famine,

PAIN affects us, as it comes near to us. or any other calamity that afflicts a nation afar off, is but a vague report or a distant rumour; it may not pass unheard, but comparatively it is unfelt. It requires that grief shall touch and sting us in our selfishness; that we may know fully and truly what it inflicts on others. And it is thus that God at once rebukes and cures our insensibility, by bringing loss and sorrow home to our own souls: the withered gourd wrung tears from the surly and unamiable prophet: but the prospect of Nineveh with her mighty population in ashes had nothing with which to touch the fountains of his sorrows.

Admitting as I thus do that there is much of selfishness in our nature, yet persuaded that there is also much of sympathy and mercy in it, taking either the character of God, or that of man as a criterion, I have long regarded the belief of eternal punishment as one of those moral paradoxes which you cannot deny, and for which you cannot account. Most

human creatures, so far as they accord with their humanity, shrink from inflicting or beholding pain; and when they can inflict it wantonly, or behold it without compassion, we can pronounce on them no sentence of deeper reprobation than to call them inhuman. We tread not knowingly on the crawling worm; we hear not insensibly the inarticulate voice of the sick and dumb animal: and yet many of us who would not look unmoved on the last spasms of an expiring dog, can believe that God regards with ruthless sternness the eternal tortures of numberless eternal spirits. We cannot gaze without compassion on the tear in the infant's speechless eye, and yet some of us can believe that God has created such beings to look up through all eternity from hopeless torture. We cannot think on the racks by which tyrant-man has tortured his brother-man-on the dungeons in which he has imprisoned him, and shut out from him the sun of heaven and the breath of nature, without a feeling of repugnance and a sentiment of indignation, and yet Christians can believe that God, whom they call "the good, the merciful," has constructed for his creatures means of undying anguish and dungeons of boundless darkness, where the smile of hope never gleams, where the light of mercy never comes. We lament war, and yet, if orthodox, we believe that God maintains in his dominions regions of everlasting warfare; we lament the madness and abuse of passion, and yet, if orthodox, we must believe that God allows that madness and abuse to be eternalized in all their extreme malignity. We lament physical and mental suffering; except on the visitation of mercy none of us would desire to go through the lazar house, where despair and anguish lie low together, where the head is heavy and the pulse is fevered; or through those asylums which give refuge to humanity in its last calamity, and its worst; and yet, if orthodox, we can believe that God perpetuates throughout everlasting ages the worst evils of the body, the fiercest passions, and the most awful madness of the soul. And yet

this great, this glorious universe is his-is his workmanship— it came not up in a night, it is not to perish in a night-the earth is long to be green, and the heavens are to be bright. Throughout the space that has no limit, throughout the time that has no end, the stars are to shine, and systems are to move onward in their unmeasured and their trackless glory. And yet, if orthodox, we must believe there is an endless hell whose smoke of torment must ascend for ever against their brightness. These, the works of God's hands, are marred the majesty of his power defeated-Paradise is made a wilderness, and hell is made populous. If we think of the world with any degree of realising truth, we shall feel this result to be most tremendous, and we shall wonder that God with infinite power should have created such a lovely universe to be defaced; that he should have peopled it with such capacities for good, to be exercised for ever only in the production of evil; that he should have given them immense and eternal capacities only to be immense and eternal capacities for misery. This, if true, is the greatest miracle and the greatest mystery unquestionably in the divine govern

ment.

This subject committed to my charge I feel to be truly solemn and awful. Next to the idea of a God, that of a future state is the most important. The character we ascribe to God operates on our own, or is created by it; and so our conceptions of the future life reacts on human conduct, and human sentiments. We may see this painfully in the mistakes and abuses with which harsh views of the future life have clouded the Christian church, and poisoned the heart of Christendom. These gloomy sentiments from many robbed religion of solace, and the breast of peace. I have seen beings maddened and convulsed by visions of Calvinism. I have heard them long for annihilation as a consummation most desirable-not in the remorse of sin, but in the tortures of superstition.--I have seen them look forward with

pleasure to the church-yard turf under which they were to rest for ever from their troubles, and sleep in peace their "eternal sleep." This sombre belief has at once desolated and darkened earth. Faith it has turned to a boundless fear; the dread of the future it makes the bitterness of the present, and is equally the parent of stern self-infliction, or of remorseless intolerance. It was this that in older days drove the ascetic to the desert; that made nature and the face of his fellow hateful to him; that filled his ferocious solitude with unearthly terrors; that trained, instead of a saint, a theological savage: it was this which aroused religious wars; which infused into these wars a spirit of fury; that demonised humanity; that made a most merciful nature a stranger to mercy it was this which brought man in nearest resemblance to that vile and wicked being whom his worst and blackest passions had formed: it was this belief that tore out the heart of flesh and put in its place the heart of stonea heart which no appeal could soften, and which no appeal could move. It was not until there was a hell without hope, that there was a heart without mercy. I believe it to be quite capable of proof, that no mere worldly wickedness has ever cursed mankind with so many sufferings as the belief of this doctrine; that has ever heaped on them so many cruelties, and made them agents of cruelties in return. Why have wars for religion ever been the worst? The reason is cbvious: the soldiers of religion are not soldiers of flesh; the soldiers of religion enter into no earthly service; they enlist under the god of battles and of vengeance. It is against the hated, and the vile, and the accursed, and the lost, they carry destruction; they are but the executioners of the righteous decrees of God, and theirs are the championship of piety, and the chivalry of heaven. When the weak contend with the weak, mutual need begets mutual mercy: but when the natural ferocity of passion assumes the authority of God, and clothes itself with the armour of the skies, the gulf in which