tion; the wheels of His chariot are coming. No obstacle can prevent their forward motion; perverse mind may put on the brakes, but can never produce a dead halt. Virtue can afford to wait and weep, for every groan of our down-trodden humanity, every sacrifice made for truth are on deposit in the great treasury of the future and drawing interest. The tears of the heart, the deeds of kindness and self-sacrifice are not lost. They form the woof and warp in the web of Time, woven together by the mystic shuttle of the Unseen into the richest fabrics with which to clothe the coming generations. Earth's saddest notes, when arranged on the celestial scale, are grander than the music of the spheres. We cannot divine the future, but sin has dug the grave of all the buried past, and the tombs of the dead are the way-stations of progress. THE LORD REIGNS!

The Popular Arguments against Endless Punishment Unsatisfactory as a Sure Ground of Hope.

A SERMON

PREACHED BY R. S. Dabney, D.D., LL.D., Prof. of SysteMATIC AND POLEMIC THEOLOGY IN THE UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY OF VIRGINIA.

Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden.... And the ser pent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die.-Genesis iii: 1 and 4.

With a heart which craves to sin, a plausible doubt counts for much more than it is worth. If men listened to reason, they would no more brave a chance than a certainty of a useless danger or loss. This should be our decision as to a life of sin, unless we can certainly demonstrate that there is neither judgment, nor heaven, nor hell. There is no man who will deliberately say that a life of piety and purity detracts, on the whole, from our earthly well-being or honor. As long, then, as there is a possibility of future retribution for a life of sin, to choose such a life is as gratuitous a folly as though the transgressor saw the future punishment before him. But to this reasonable conclusion the sinful heart refuses to listen. It seizes on the imagined doubt and magnifies it into a shield of impurity. Satan understood this weakness of human nature. Hence, he began his seduction of our first parents by suggesting a doubt (v. 1), and then irrationally leaps to a denial (v. 4). He trusted to the force of temptation on the heart to make his victims follow him blindly across this chasm of evidence.

The very same process is now taking place in a multitude of souls throughout Protestant Christendom, and, it is not unnatural to suppose, at the prompting of the same tempter. The death denounced against the first transgression was not so much bodily as spiritual-the death of the soul rather than of the body; so that the doubt raised by Satan's first question is substantially the same with that which is now enticing the minds of sinful men. Hath God said that final impenitence in transgression shall be followed by everlasting death? May we venture to doubt this? Such is the question by which men are now really deceiving their own hearts. They strive to see at least plausibility in the pleas of those who deny-an easy task for a heart yearning after license in sin! And when this stage is reached, they then proceed to cast away restraint, just as though they had certainly proved that there is no hell,

Let but the head decide that it is questionable whether God hath said so, and the heart rushes to the practical conclusion, "Ye shall not surely die."

One mode by which men sometimes find a pretext for rejecting the solemn truth is to get up a species of resentment against what, they say, is the temper of Christians in testifying to it. They charge that our severity and harsh dogmatism cause us to take a cruel delight in asserting terrible dogmas. They even claim to enlist all the benevolence and amiability on the side of the skeptical position. Now, to this I reply that I have no dogma whatever to assert at this time. It is impossible that I can have any interest in asserting unnecessarily that the second death waits on sin, for I am a sinner myself. The judgments of God are just as formidable to me as to you, my unbelieving brethren. I have no more ability to endure them, or to escape their condemnation, than you. Could I be so insane as to dig out a hell, of set purpose, in the spirit of bigotry, into which I know I am as certain of falling as you, except as I have a hope of deliverance through the sacrifice of Christ? Sure I am that if hell can be disproved in any way that is solid and true and consistent with God's honor and man's good, there is not a trembling sinner in this land that would hail the demonstration with more joy than I would. Can any of you give that demonstration? Let us see it. Let us see whether it will answer as a foundation on which I may venture an immortal soul. I repeat, I have no counter proof, at this time, to advance. My only purpose is to show you how I have endeavored to find some footing in the sentiments on which the doubters seem to build, and how the footing has utterly failed me. I have painfully studied the speculative logic and the wire-drawn criticisms by which what seems to be the plain declaration of Scripture is impugned, and have found nothing there but a pavement of mist. It is not with these I would deal now. I have placed myself in sympathy with the more practical sentiments which I perceive infecting or swaying the minds around me. I have felt them with all the force which the interests of a common guilt and a common dread could give. But I wish to tell you simply the results to which my sinful soul has been unwillingly forced as to these so influential sentiments; and I would show you how baseless they are as foundations of any solid hope that sinners shall not surely die.

I. Men are, after all, much more influenced by feelings than by analytic reasonings. Here is one sentiment, which is doubtless doing its work with all to hide the formidable side of this question from our minds. There is great comfort in numbers. Man is a social being. He is largely governed by the example of those nearest to him; and it is easy and grateful to

our indolence to imitate and to save ourselves mental effort by thinking as the multitude thinks. When we see the vast majority advancing with gayety and confidence in the path our hearts crave to follow, we seem to have all that mass between us and the peril; and we are incredulous that death can consume all this affluence of life in order to get to us. Now, when we set this doctrine in contrast with the actual feelings and conduct of the world, we see that everybody is evidently acting as though the doctrine of a hell could not be true. If the world thought it certainly true-nay, if there were but a probability it might be found true, then the simplest child can see how all the sinful world ought to act. Every sinner should ask: Is it so that I am condemned already, except I repent and find deliverance by faith? That this sentence is the everlasting curse of the Almighty? That it is to fill my soul and body with intolerable torments? That hope is to depart for ever and ever, and eternal despair is to gather up the infinite aggregate of future woe, and in every conscious instant crush my soul with the tremendous prospect? That all this is to go on and on, parallel with the eternity of God; and that between me and this death there may be but the step between health and sickness, or present security and sudden accident? Is this my peril? "Horrible! oh, horrible!" Then what time have I for pleasure? what business with the riches which perish in the using? I ought "to say of laughter, It is mad; and of mirth, What doeth it?" Everything except the one means of escape from this infinite woe ought to be loathsome for its frivolity. I ought to have time for nothing but prayer: every breath ought to be a cry, and tears ought to be my drink until the mercy of Christ pluck me from the awful verge. Thus ought every sinner to agonize. Who can gainsay it? And this wide world ought to be a Bochim.

But what do we see? The world eats and drinks, marries and gives in marriage, pursues riches, earthly pleasure, yea, seeks to "kill time" as though it had too much of it; sings and dances and fills its atmosphere either with jest and laughter or with new insults to this awful Judge-in a word, studies to act precisely as though it were certain there is no hell. Now, has all the world gone insane? Is all the keen sagacity which we meet everywhere in its worldly pursuits and rivalries clean turned into madness? So it would seem, if this doctrine of a hell were true! But it is hard for a denizen of this world to conclude thus of his own kind, as well as of himself; and therefore the practical feeling of doubt comes, like a penetrat ing tide, into the soul that somehow the ghastly dogma cannot hold. Who has not felt the seductive influence, not reasoned out perhaps, possibly only semi-conscious, yet seducing the soul back from the rough, harsh warning of conscience into luxurious relief by the plea, "Ye shall not surely die."

But, my friends, there was one discovery which, so soon as my unwilling reason was constrained to look at it, dashed all the ease and solace which my deceitful heart was drawing from the sentiment. I was compelled to see that if the Bible is true, and man's nature what my own observation evinces, the pleasing inference has only a foundation of clouds. Suppose, as the Bible says, it is the nature of the sin which imperils to produce this very insensibility? Suppose that warning should be sober truth, which tells us to beware of "being hardened by the deceitfulness of sin," so that it is literally true: that "madness is in men's hearts while they live"; and that this dense callousness is itself one of the surest symptoms of the reality of the disease? If I were to find a freezing man in the snow, and he were to answer my rousing appeal by the assurance that he was suffering no evil, and needed nothing except the balmy sleep to which he wished to resign himself, I should understand well that this ease was but the symptom of approaching death. So, if this spiritual torpor of the world may perchance be only the indication of the approaching frosts of spiritual death, then plainly it is madness for us to argue safety from it. The Bible represents also that this benumbing and deluding quality of sin is one of the very features which has caused a God, at once all-wise, just and benevolent, to estimate it as so immense an evil, and has constrained Him to adopt means so stern for curbing it. Can this be true? Can you or I refute it? And when we turn to our own observations, do we see that in fact human experience does contain frequent monitions of a solemnity and dreadful awe precisely appropriate to these revealed facts; that God does indeed, from time to time, lift a corner of the veil which mercifully hides the pit of despair, and makes men hear in anticipation the wails of its torment in the cries of guilty death-beds, the catastrophes of dying nations, the ghastly ravages of plague and war, and that men refuse to hearken and strive to forget the salutary warning? Then we have before our eyes the proof that sin can make a world as mad, as insane, as we saw the argument of the Bible implied. Alas, yes! we see men all around us, under parallel influences of deceitful lusts, shut their eyes to known and experimental dangers. We see the drunkard madly jesting of his "pleasure and jollity," when every worldly wise man except himself sees delirium tremens grinning over his shoulder. We see even woman, intoxicated with flattery, rushing into the snaky coils of the seducer, while every one but she perceives nothing but the envenomed fang that is to poison her soul. Yes, they go "as a bird hasteth to the snare, and knoweth not that it is for his life." With this solution assigned by Scripture for men's insensibility in spiritual danger, and this stubborn confirmation of its reasonable