died. Turn to the several passages, read them with their respective contexts, and it will be manifest that they announce some extraordinary and signal inflictions of punishment, to whatever state of existence they refer. If to this world, they signify some uncommon and terrible events, some condign, external retributions of a just providence; if to the future, they teach, not properly speaking a state of guilt, but rather an open and formal visitation of judgment in that world, dreadful beyond all that sinners had experienced previously, or, in the present. In this case, christians are precluded, by the authority of revelation, from representing the punishment of eternity either as a continuation of our present accusing conscience, or as a recompense for sins to be committed hereafter. The same alternative that was before presented, still remains either to release all those texts from the cause of endless damnation, or else to restore the doctrine to its native ground of pure vindictive torture and undissembled cruelty.

Is there no eye-salve for the learned criticism of our age, that will give it a reach of vision to take in the contexts and manifest circumstan

ces of these noted passages? With all its array of Greek, Hebrew and cognate languag es, at least characters, must it always continue to peer into the depths of its philological excavations, and never raise its ken to survey: the fields it has mined instead of cultivating? Let but the scholar trace the original, and the

unlearned the translation, with a broad view to the general current of the discourse, rather than to minute and insulated particulars, and they will readily discover that the texts in question have no reference to the subject to which they have been so long applied.

ART. VII.

Punishment and Forgiveness.

1. The Scriptures of the Old Testament teach that God renders to every man according to his work; and they also proclaim the Lord God merciful and gracious, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin. Nor is either of these doctrines of the Old Testament abrogated under the Gospel dispensation. The Scriptures of the New Testament expressly state, that God will render to every man according to his deeds,3 in the day (or dispensation) when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ; and also that he hath exalted Jesus Christ to be a Prince and Saviour, to give repentance and forgiveness of sins. These two important doctrines of the Bible have been so defined by a respectable class of christians, as to appear inconsistent with each other. They hold that the sentence of the law against transgressors, in recompense to them according to their deserts, is their consignment to endless punishment. And as all have sinned,' the just desert of all is the aforesaid endless punishment. Yet the class of christians of whom I

1 Deut. xxx, 15. Ps. lxii, 12. Prov. xi. 31. Ezek, xviii. 2 Ex. xxxiv, 7. Ps. xxv, 11, 18. Jer. xxxi, 34.

3 Rom. ii, 6.

4 Acts v, 31. xi, 18.

speak, notwithstanding they believe that the just desert of all men is eternal misery, and though they urge it as the plain doctrine of God's word that every man shall be dealt with according to his desert, do not mean to be understood as believing that all men shall be made to suffer that deserved recompense of misery. For the doctrine of forgiveness, they say, is likewise a doctrine of the scriptures; and they hope that God, through the exercise of forgiveness, will make millions of sinners to be participants of eternal happiness in heaven. Thus the sinner's hope of final happiness is made to be the hope of an escape from his deserved punishment."

Indeed forgiveness has commonly been understood to be the clearing of a person from some deserved punishment. How then shall the person who is tempted to sin, know what to expect from the threatening of God's law? If divine forgiveness be a deliverance from deserved punishment, then, though God has positively declared that he will render to every man according to his deserts, yet he may render to no man according to his deserts,-nor can he punish any to whom he extends forgiveness. In this way the doctrines of punishment and forgiveness are set in opposition to each other; and many, while they profess to be strenuous advocates, both for the doctrine of divine forgiveness, and of God's rendering to every man according to his works, do, in the very labors in which they undertake to urge these doctrines, alternately deny them both. In urging the doctrine of the punishment of sinners, they preclude the possibility of their ever being forgiven, and in urging the doctrine of the