Men are made wicked, that they may be punished, that they may become good. Now, let the reader observe, that that Evil which terminates in its own ultimate correction, or destruction, adds nothing to the well-being of the universe, but, to the whole extent of it, is SIMPLE EVIL. Nor does it make any difference if we choose to call the former portion of this Evil, cause, and the latter, consequence ;-the former, sin, and the latter, punishment. Dr. Smith asserts, that he who chooses simple Evil for its own sake, and rests in it as an end, is a malevolent being. But Evil that only cures itself, is simple Evil, Here then, again, we perceive, that to support the doctrine of a benevolent causation of evil, it must be believed, that sin will produce, to the subject of it, a positive additional advantage beyond what could result from an uninterrupted course of virtue. A little reflection will convince any one, that if Evil does not produce a higher good, it is pure Evil; and to choose pure Evil, we are told, is the property of a malevolent being. But if it be said that Evil produces a higher good, it must do so, either to the subject of it, (that is, the sinner will be the better for his sin,) or it must procure this higher good to other creatures: but this is a supposition which, we imagine, the favourers of -Final Restitution could by no means allow, for there would then inevitably follow the ideas of partiality,-of the subordination of individual interests, and of the Divine Sovereignty. Indeed it would be impossible, after such an admission, to resist even Calvinism itself.

That all the punishment inflicted upon offenders in the present state is corrective, is universally acknowledged.'

Upon this assertion we remark in the first place, that it does not comprehend the subject. A large proportion of the suffering which we see in the world, is not corrective in its actual influence, nor even in its tendency; nor is it consequent upon the personal violation of duty. Of this sort are the sufferings of animals, and of infants. Though it were true, therefore, that the punishment inflicted upon offenders in the present state, is always corrective, the class of facts to which we refer would unequivocally indicate, that Evil is far more deeply related to the system of things, than is supposed in the shallow theory under discussion. But, in the second place, Dr. Smitu's argument is here analogical. Let him, then, adhere strictly to the limits of the analogy he adduces. Suppose it granted, that all the punishment inflicted upon offenders in the present state, is corrective in its tendency; or, to state the matter with more precision, and on the ground of the definition of punishment above quoted, let it be said, that all the suffering of offenders in the present state, is punitive in its nature. The utmost

extent of the analogical inference would be this, that the suffering of offenders in the future state, will also probably be corrective in its tendency. But we see every day, that even in those cases where suffering is the most unequivocally consequent upon offence, and therefore, the most apparently corrective in its design, not the smallest progress is made towards actual amendment. So much is this the case, that the broad and prominent character of the present state, viewed as a school of virtue, is incorrigibleness. Beside the unquestionable evidence of surrounding facts, proving the insufficiency of correction, it is a truth explicitly established by the inspired threatening, "He "that being often reproved hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly "be destroyed, and that without remedy." Following, therefore, the analogy, we may say, It appears that such is the independent nature of moral evil, such the limits of that influence to which it is subjected in the Divine administration, and such the defectiveness of the proof from which it might be concluded, that suffering and virtue are connected by a natural and infallible consequence, that we may well apprehend, even although future suffering should be corrective in its tendency, it may then, as it does now, wholly fail of its result. An analogical argument is, of course, not a priori, but a posteriori. On the present occasion, we are not reasoning down to the fact, from what we suppose ourselves to know of the Divine character, but from the fact, as it lies before us, we attempt to infer the rule of the Divine Government, and thence derive an expectation of the future. Now an easy supposition will enable us to ascertain the real value of the analogy so much insisted upon. Let it then, for a moment, be imagined, that the present race of men, precisely such as they are, were rendered immortal; every circumstance of human life, so far as the supposition admits, continuing the same; at least, that the inducements to virtue, and the temptations to crime, should be balanced, so as to have exactly the same relative influence, that they are found in fact to possess. Now, let the reader ask himself whether, knowing what he does know of human nature, and of the ordinary operation of external causes upon it, he can feel an expectation, that the lapse of one, of two, or of ten thousand years, would find the larger proportion of these same individuals virtuous; or, that the order of events such as they are, would, of themselves, lessen the power of habit, and strengthen the power of reason; that the indurated conscience would gradually recover its moral sense; that the love of pleasure, under the continued powers of enjoyment, and means of gratification, would expire; that malignancy, ferocity, and the lust of power, instead of becoming more deepened, more dominant, and more inveterate, would yield to that evidence of experience, which proves them to be

inconsistent with true happiness. For ourselves, we cannot for a moment entertain the expectation: no one, we imagine, will sustain the ridicule of so romantic a chimera. The mind can hardly dwell upon an idea more terrific than that of the immortality of men, just as they are, in the world just as it is; nor is the image of such a Hell the less frightful, although the moral misery be supposed still decked out in the beauties of the visible creation.

If, then, we cannot soberlyim agine, that an indefinite continuance under the corrective influences of the present state, would necessitate a change from vice to virtue, the boasted analogy is exhausted; it cannot prove more than it contains. From what we see we cannot be justified in concluding, either, that God will institute a process of infallible correction, or even that there is any other than a connexion of occasional causation between suffering and amendment.

We pass over, for the present, that portion of the volume, in which the Author attempts to ascertain the meaning and value of the terms applied to the subject of Future Punishment in the Scriptures, and follow Dr. Smith again in his general reasonings.

It is when we consider the minute shades by which different sins and even different characters are discriminated, that we perceive in the most forcible manner the impossibility both of the doctrine of endless misery, and of limited punishment terminated by destruction. How slight is the difference between the worst good man and the best wicked man! How impossible is it for the utmost exertion of human sagacity to distinguish between them, yet for this imperceptible difference in character there is according to these doctrines, an infinite difference in destiny! He who is lowest in the scale of goodness, and who differs from the best wicked man only by the slightest shade, is admitted to infinite happiness: he in whom wickedneis preponderates upon the whole, but in so small a measure that no human penetration can discern it, is shut out from the enjoyment of heaven; doomed by one doctrine to inconceivable torments through endless ages, and by the other to dreadful suffering for a very protracted period, and then to endless extinction of being. According to one opinion the positive torment, according to the other the positive loss, is infinite, yet the difference in desert is indistinguishable. This is a disproportion to which there is no parallel in any of the works of the Deity, and which cannot exist, it is reasonable to believe, in any of his dispensations.'

If the Author would allow himself to follow out the principles implied in the above passage, through their inevitable consequences, he could hardly fail, we think, to perceive that, as we have already hinted, his views of the condition of the human system, and of the redemption proclaimed in the Gospel, are obscured by some capital mistake. The very point of the objection upon which he insists, falls without remedy upon Christianity itself.

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Let us then attend strictly to the doctrines expressed or implied in the quotation. It is supposed, that the Good are in part bad, and the Bad, in part good; that between the best and the worst of mankind, there intervenes an absolutely indefinite moral penumbra-a perfectly insensible gradation of desert; and that the worst good man, and the best wicked man, are separated by a difference so small, that although it may be real in the eye of Omniscience, it is too minute ever to be made conspicuous to created intelligences, as affording the ground of a widely different adjudication. Now it is very plain, that the strictness of a simply retributive system, especially if it is to approve itself to the conscience of every one concerned, demands that the gradations of reward and punishment, should, at no point, be more abrupt than are the gradations of desert. If, in the future world, there be any where discoverable a perceptible line of separation between the righteous and the wicked,-if there be room for the one to say to the other: "Between us and you there is a great gulf fixed," upon that line, Equity will be outraged,-in that gulf, Justice will be merged. In place therefore of the vulgar notion of Heaven and Hell, and of the final and perfect division of mankind into two classes-the unequivocal separation of the sheep from the goats,-instead, we say, of the precise ideas of salvation and eternal life, on the one hand, and of condemnation and everlasting destruction on the other, it will, on these principles, be impossible to resist the belief in the future arrangement of men upon an indefinite scale, whose top, indeed, may reach the heavens, while its foundations rest among the fires of intolerable torment, but which shall suspend the great mass of the human system in a middle region, neither exempt from the terrors of the gulf below, nor advanced to the felicities of the glittering vault above. Such a representation follows, without the possibility of evasion, from the indefinite gradation of desert, in connexion with the doctrine of a pure system of retribution; let it, however, rest on what ground it may, it is altogether incompatible with the whole tenour, and with the most express declarations of revealed religion: if such be in fact the case, it must be acknowledged, that in their obvious meaning, the reiterated and varied representations of the Bible on the subject of Heaven and Hell, are utterly deceptive.

It seems, however, that there is an expedient by means of which the glaring incongruity of the theory proposed to us, may be somewhat obscured. In order to give it at least a sem-blance of conformity to the very plain averments of the inspired writers, relative to the final distribution of men into two classes, the happy, and the miserable, the saved and the lost, recourse is had to a sort of mathematical process for determining the precise

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quantum of desert, as a rule of adjudication to heaven or to hell, in those border or approximating instances, if we may so speak, where the right and the strict reason of the case, quite fail in affording any ground for a widely differing destiny. We are told of virtue preponderating upon the whole' in a character, or the reverse, by which exact preponderance the individual is entitled to be classed with the righteous, or with the wicked. We may waive remark upon the palpable grossness of the idea, that goodness and guilt are things susceptible of admeasurement, like bales of merchandize; as well as the ignorance of the true nature of virtue and vice, implied in the supposition, that churacter is determinable by the number of good or of bad actions, or, that the motives, in which are truly contained the goodness or the badness of those actions, may be so counterpoised, as to make their relative value resolvable by calculation. We pass by all this; it is sufficient to remark, that the theory of an exact preponderance of virtue or of viee, as furnishing the pretence upon which men are to be divided into two classes, is chargeabl, on the face of it, with this most egregious absurdity that it fixes a value indefinitely great, upon a quantum of virtue, which the very terms of the proposition suppose to be, in fact, indefinitely small. That indiscernible excess or defect of virtue, which determines this supposed preponderance, can afford a reason only for a proportionable difference of retribution; and if it be made to serve as the rule of a wider disparity, it can only be viewed, on the ground of this clumsy hypothesis, as a courtly fiction, framed to cloak the perversion of Justice.

Compared with views so incongruous, so grovelling, how beautiful, how reasonable is the Gospel of Jesus Christ! He who came to seek and to save that which was lost, offers to men a perfected redemption, a gratuitous rescue from the consequences of mere retribution. Instead of meting out his heaven against the needful tale of good deeds, from which the counterpoise of sins has been duly subtracted, he promises freely to bestow, not only eternal life, but that intrinsic fitness for it, the possession, or the want of which, furnishes at once a true, an unambiguous, and a perfect rule for the final division of mankind. Of this fitness, the first and prominent article is the conviction of individual obnoxiousness to a retribution which would entail immortal ruin, and a simple, thankful acceptance of unbought deliverance. The man, therefore, who despises this offer, is inevitably abandoned to take his portion in the world where every one shall receive that which is his due.

On the subject of Justice, as a Divine attribute, Dr. Smith well remarks, that

There is no attribute concerning which such vague and mistaken motions are entertained, and as these opinions necessarily affect the