God makes me, I am not accountable for that which he compels me to be and to do." The objection is a reasonable one; it has often been urged, and will continue to be urged, against the doctrine in question. And the Apostle's answer to this objection is, "Who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel to honor and another to dishonor." True, O Paul! Nevertheless the question is not of power, but of right and accountableness under compulsory influence. The Being who possesses this almighty power has created in me a sense of justice which demands justice of the Maker, has established in me a judgment-seat by which his own acts are inevitably tried. The answer quashes the plea, instead of refuting it. It may silence the objector, but does not satisfy the objection. Unquestionably the potter possesses power over the clay. Unquestionably the Maker possesses the power to make one man wicked and miserable, and another righteous and happy. But Christianity has taught us to know God, not as absolute Power merely, but as Justice and Mercy, as a gracious Father who embraces all his children with equal and impartial care. "Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?" The thing formed in this case is the human heart, and that heart is so constituted by its Author that it craves to know, and must and will ask, concerning the purport and end of its being. And if to such questioning it receives this answer, "Thou wast formed to be wicked and eternally damned," shall not the thing made then say to Him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus? Why thus, O thou Infinite! who hast all power to make and mould, even as the potter has power over the clay, why hast thou made me, thy helpless vessel, to be the subject of such deep dishonor and boundless wrong? It will so ask, and will not be content to receive for answer the absolute will of God as the sole and sufficient reason for such ordination. Could it really believe in such ordination, on such grounds, the heart would feel that it had no God; for, verily, absolute power does not make a God. And the heart would sink into itself with a grinding sense of infinite cruelty and

almighty wrong, or react on oppression like the chained Prometheus of the old Greek fable, - profound symbol of oppressed but unyielding manhood, and scorn omnipotence dissociated from justice. But the fact is, the human mind can never truly believe in such an ordination and in such a God. The Divine has written his nature too deep in the human heart to be extinguished by a dogma. It is possible to human piety to love God without demanding his favor in return, but true piety knows by its own deep sympathy with the Divine, that God is love, and that in that love there is no distinction of persons, that all being is embraced in its boundless affection. No one felt this more profoundly than Paul. No one more ready to confess it whenever his dogmatic prepossessions did not interfere with the sure instinct of his piety. When in this same Epistle to the Romans he declares his belief that "all Israel shall be saved," together with the "fulness of the Gentiles," and when, in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, he affirms that," as in Adam all die, in Christ all shall be made alive," and that Christ must reign until he hath put all enemies, even death, under his feet, he discovers the real conviction of his heart. And so we appeal from Paul the logician to Paul the Apostle, from Paul arguing and speculating to Paul inspired. To the hard and disdainful question, "Who art thou that repliest against God?" we oppose the worthier conception of an elder prophet," Come now, saith the Lord, let us reason together." God, in constituting us rational beings, has sanctioned the use of reason on all matters that invite its exercise, his own nature and government among the rest.

We say then, speaking as critics of the Partialist theory, that that theory militates with the infinite love which reason compels us to ascribe to God, and which seems to require that to every creature of God its existence shall be on the whole a blessing, that no creature shall be called into being for whom in any case it would be better that he had never been born. It matters not how widely we extend the circle of the blest, or how greatly we reduce the tale of the lost. The principle is the same, and no arithmetic can alter it. Suppose all saved

but one, the difficulty still remains. Humanity demands that one; it mourns an imperfect heaven where that one is not, and

hears a wail in the Alleluia whose choral symphony lacks that complemental voice. Indeed, the smaller the number of the damned, the heavier the damnation, and what is gained in one way by such concession is lost in another. What is gained numerically is lost qualitatively. It may even be questioned if the old doctrine which made damnation normal, and salvation exceptional, be not on the whole a more rational view than that which saves the mass and abandons the few. For if the happiness of the world to come is purely a matter of grace, the free gift of God's love, entirely irrespective of the merits of the subject, then the few who are excepted from that grace would seem to be more hardly dealt with, and to have more legitimate ground of complaint, than the multitude of the lost where perdition is the rule and salvation a rare and exceptional favor. But if, on the other hand, the hereafter is determined by moral conditions, the few who shine with pre-eminent holiness are more broadly distinguished from ordinary degrees of moral excellence than the few superlatively wicked are from the general mass of unworthiness.

The insufficiency of those distinctions on which the rewards and punishments of the future state are presumed to be based, is another of the difficulties which embarrass the Partialist theory. If we suppose, what that theory commonly assumes, that the state of the soul is unalterably fixed at death, — the wicked precluded from all chance of reform, the good secured from all danger of lapse, the disproportion between the moral distinctions of this world and the different fortunes of the next, is too monstrous for reason to contemplate. The infinite difference between right and wrong must not be urged in defence of such a doctrine. The infinite difference between right and wrong is one thing; an infinite difference in the characters of those who during the years of this mortal life have done well or ill, is quite another thing. If we subtract from the character and life of the righteous all that may be termed good fortune, natural temperament, the native strength of the higher faculties, the comparative weakness of the baser appetites, education, social influences, opportunity, absence of strong temptation, who can say that what remains of a purely moral nature is sufficient for eternal life, or even a

sufficient guaranty that the individual who has borne so fair a character in this world will preserve the same in another,that he will not change from saint to sinner when placed in new circumstances and solicited by new relations? So, too, it is impossible to say with certainty how much of the crimes of this life may be due to external conditions; how far the circumstances of the sinner may have tended to suppress the good in his nature, and to bring out the bad, and how far the good may be elicited and the bad counteracted by a different position hereafter. We are not warranted in ascribing all sin to circumstance; yet much that we call sin, and that makes the apparent difference between the moral and immoral classes of society, may have this origin, and the good and bad of this world may change places in the next.

It avails not to say, in vindication of the dogma of eternal damnation, that God inflicts no positive pains on the sinner, but simply "withdraws" with his "friends" and his goods, and leaves the wicked to their own devices. This is the view propounded by Dr. Adams, who, in strange contradiction to the title of his Discourse, makes hell to consist in the very absence of those punishments commonly associated with it, and ascribes to God a laissez-faire posture with regard to sinners, which in our view is infinitely more repugnant to Divine perfection than even the vindictive wrath of Jewish and Gentile theology. It is the posture of despair, a confession of failure, a concession of victory to the Adversary, the thought of which, if duly pondered, is shocking to piety. The writer in question is known to be an earnest and devout minister of the Gospel, but the doctrine of the following passage is of the essence of atheism: "What shall now be done with those whom God has failed in his efforts to turn and save? Some reply, He ought to punish them till they do repent.'. . . . . Will it be useful that he should proceed and punish them further?. . . . . Are there other strokes of his lightnings better fitted to rive and consume their spirits than those with which they have already been struck? It is not reasonable. . . . . . We suppose, therefore, and we think it is reasonable, that if we do not repent of our sins, and are not willing to accept Christ, and all the efforts of mercy to save us, God will suffer us to sin

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against him for ever. He will not hinder us from having our own chosen way. . . . . . We chose to sin against him as long as we could; and now it is not unreasonable to give us the desire of our hearts. But God may say, This will I do. I will place all of you who sin in a world by yourselves, from which I and my friends will for ever withdraw."

This withdrawing, we apprehend, is precisely the thing which God cannot do, one of the limitations of his omnipotence. Out of him no creature can exist; in him and by him all being subsists, the hells not less than the heavens. The mystic Yggdrasil is rooted in him as well as crowned by him.

Dr. Adams sees the departing God taking "everything away with him" as he "withdraws." "He would take away, we must suppose, all their domestic relations, friendships, social pleasures, books, every pursuit of knowledge, music, travels, quiet sleep, morning and evening salutations of loved ones, and change the whole face of nature." Unquestionably these things have all a moral foundation, are morally conditioned, and cannot be supposed to co-exist with utter extinction of the moral life. But utter extinction of the moral life is something very different from the theological disqualification which bounds and bars the Orthodox heaven. When we consider the kind of persons whom that heaven most readily admits, to whom the Orthodox pass is most unhesitatingly vouchsafed, men of the Dominic and Loyola stamp in the Catholic Church, and men of the Calvin and Edwards stamp in the Protestant, and compare these with many of the characters whom that heaven most peremptorily excludes, and from whom that pass is most inexorably withheld, it is hard to believe that the Orthodox heaven has all the friendships, social pleasures, books, knowledge, music, &c., &c., and that the Orthodox hell, with such characters in it as some of those whom Orthodoxy would send thither, is quite destitute of all these things, a total eclipse of the soul, unrelieved by a single ray of intellectual or social life. It is hard to believe that Lucian, Marcus Antoninus, Hafiz, Spinoza, Voltaire, Hume, Goethe, Beranger, Heinrich Heine, Humboldt, Waldo Emerson, are to have hereafter no friendships, books, knowledge, nor" quiet sleep."