call it, "conditional immortality:" the opinion that after a retributive punishment the wicked will be 'destroyed.

3. Purgatory, the view that besides Heaven, the final state of the blessed, and Hell, the final doom of the accursed, there is a state wherein those souls are detained and punished which are capable of being purified,—an intermediate purification between death and judgment.

4. The Common view, which, to the utter detriment of all noble thoughts of God, and to all joy and peace in believing, except in the case of many who shut their eyes hard to what it really implies— declares (i.) that at death there is passed upon every impenitent sinner an irreversible doom to endless tortures, either material or mental, of the most awful and unspeakable intensity; and (ii) that this doom. awaits the vast majority of mankind. If this be not the ordinary view, it were well that it should be explicitly disclaimed. It most certainly is the view which has been crudely inculcated from multitudes of pulpits, even in the last few months.

Let me speak very briefly on each of these views in order.

1. The strength of Universalism lies in two arguments; those, namely, which are derived (1) from our belief in the infinite love of God,-in that divine mercy which is from everlasting to everlasting; and (2) from the very numerous passages of Scripture which speak repeatedly, and without any limitation, of the Restoration of all things and the Universality of Christian Redemption.

Every man must long with all his heart that this belief were true; and thousands have repeated with intense yearning the famous lines of the poet of In Memoriam

"Oh yet we trust that somehow good
Shall be the final end of ill,

To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;

"That nothing walks with aimless feet;

That not one life shall be destroy'd,

Or cast as rubbish in the void,

When God hath made the pile complete."

But however deep may be our desire that this should be the will of God; however beautifully it may seem to accord both with His mercy and His justice, that sin, after bringing its own punishment, should be turned to holiness, and so forgiven; however much we may cling to the hope that some such meaning may underlie the broad and boundless promises of a future Restitution,-I dare not lay down any dogma of Universalism; partly because it is not clearly revealed to us, and partly because it is impossible for us to estimate the hardening effect of obstinate persistence in evil, and the power of the human will to resist the law and reject the love of God.

2. Nor can I at all accept the theory of Conditional Immortality. Ably and earnestly as good men have argued in its favour, it seems to me to rest too entirely on the supposed invariable meaning of a few words, and to press that meaning too far; it rejects that instinctive belief in Immortality which has been found in almost every age and every race of man; and while it relieves the soul from the crushing horror involved in the conception of endless

torment, it still-if I understand it right-leaves us with the ghastly conclusion that God will raise the wicked from the dead only that they may be tormented and at last destroyed.1

3. Nor again can I accept the Roman doctrine of Purgatory. If indeed that doctrine consisted in nothing else but these words from the catechism of the Council of Trent, that "there is a purgatorial fire where the souls of the righteous are purified by punishment of some fixed period, that entrance may be given them into their eternal home, where nothing that is defiled can have a place,"—and if the term "fire" interpreted immaterially, as the Eastern Church and Western theologians of all ages have decided that it

may be

1 For Mr. E. White, Mr. Minton, Prebendary Constable, and the other members of this school of thought, I feel a sincere respect; but with them, as with others, it seems to me that "the letter killeth." Rigid literalism is absolutely fatal to any true knowledge of Scripture. The highest service these truly devout, earnest, and able writers have done is to point out the utter untenability of the popular view. Their view is far more scriptural, as well as incomparably less shocking, than the utterances of those who defend the traditional fancies,-whether the latter be hard and illiterate, or learned and

refined.

b

may, then there would be nothing in the doctrine of
Purgatory which seems to me in any way inconsistent

with Scripture, while it certainly is consistent with a
very ancient belief of the Church, and with the all
but universal usage of prayers for the dead.2 Had
this been the whole Roman doctrine of Purgatory, I
do not believe that the Reformers would
ever have
stigmatised it as "res futilis." But they rejected it in
the rough, not only because the conception had been
made too compact, too specific, too much limited to
the poena temporalis, in short, too systematic, to be
capable of exact Scriptural proof; but also because it
was connected in their minds with the deplorable but
parasitic abuses of indulgences, pardons, works of
supererogation, purchasable masses for the dead, and
all the sixteenth century devices of Tetzel and Leo X.

1 "Poenam ignis, sive iste ignis accipiatur proprie sive metaphorice," Bellarmine, Purg. ii. 10. "Why should the 'fire of hell' be more material than the 'water of life'? Why should the furnace' and 'lake' of Gehenna possess more of physical reality than the sea of glass' or the 'pearly gates'?"

2 The Catacombs furnish decisive proof of the antiquity of this practice.