misery is to be bolstered up? It may do, Mr. Remington, with some of your Methodist brethren who possess an easy credulity; it may pass in the conventiclè as good'doctrine, but thinking people, believe me, even among your own fraternity, must feel the insult that you offer to their understandings, when you thus tender them your own ipse dixit instead of the express word of God. They ask for bread and you give him a stone. They ask for truth, the truth of God, and you repeat to them the falsehood of the serpent; and then to make that falsehood plausible, you talk of the suspended penalty of God's law, of which God himself has said nothing. So dear to your heart is the doctrine of endless misery that you will make any sacrifice, you will resort to any artifice, rather than relipquish it. Am I'too severe? If I am, pardon me. But "let. God. be true." Of the rest of your observations upon your first proposition I have little to say. The doctrines, if I am not mistaken, were chiefly bor rowed from Dr. John Taylor, of Norwich, Eng. and may perhaps be made to harmonize with the doctines of the Methodist Episcopal Church. But of this I have serious doubts. Your friend Mr. Amos Belden is familiar with them, and probably knows how they found. a place in your lectures.

I however admire the ingenuity displayed in this part of your la bors. When God pronounced the curse upon the serpent, that the seed of the woman should bruise his head, you perceive the dawning of the gospel, and thenceforward every part of the divine sentence upon our first parents (Gen. iii. 16-19) was, to your eye,. radiant with its glory. Even temporal death, a part of the original. penalty, became a blessing, and sufferings and sorrows were ap-pointments made under grace. But there is a mystery here. "These allotments, therefore, are not penal," you say, "inasmuch as they were made under grace and therefore not as punishments for our sins." There is then no proper punishment, no infliction of the penalty in this world, and the curse which God pronounced was a blessing. But what do you understand by a penalty or punishment? Is it something that grows out of revenge, the offspring of that ter rible and undivine attribute, "vindictive justice"; something that has no regard to the good of the punished, but finds its end in un-qualified and useless-misery? If such be your conceptions of pen-

alty, how, I ask could spiritual and temporal death ever make a part of it?

But what you have to say on this part of the subject is irrelevant to the question before us, and I shall therefore omit all farther remark. There are some evils in this life which I regard as punishments of sin; if they are not so the Bible is clearly untrue. There are others which I cannot but look upon as evils incident to our physical nature, and to which we are subject in common with all the various tribes of living creatures upon the earth. But that there is any unmixed evil in the universe, any thing which God cannot and will not, in his wonder-working providence, overrule for good, I neither know nor have the slightest reason for believing. The whole economy of God is an economy of adorable grace. "God is love." Love shone forth in the morning of creation; love has displayed itself in every period of the past, and is becoming more and more radiant as the great purposes of the Deity are developed ; and love shall impart the crowning glory to the grand consummation of the divine plan, when death shall have been abolished, and the serpent destroyed, and sin annihilated, and GOD SHALL BE ALL IN ALL; for then "shall he rest in his love"-its objects accomplished, its wishes attained.

May God in his mercy grant you better views of his character and government, and lead you to pray with fervent desire, and faith unfeigned, "Thy kingdom come; thy will be done."

I am as ever yours,

THOMAS J. SAWYER.

LETTER IX.

Dear Sir-I shall now proceed to consider your second proposition. In this it is your business to show that the penalty of the law will be inflicted in a future state of being.

We have before seen what ill success attended your labors to prove that the divine penalty was suspended. That point was made out, if at all, on your bare assertion; for in the twenty pages devoted to that subject, I have sought in vain for a single appeal to the inspired volume. The whole theory is one of human making, and to sustain it the word of God must be frittered away, and the falsehood of the serpent converted into a most wholesome and glorious truth.

The proposition before us is predicated upon the preceding

one.

If you failed in establishing that, this falls to the ground of itself. But I shall glance at your argument, not that it is necessary to refute it in order to defend Universalism, but merely to show you that the case is not so clear as you may perhaps imagine. Future punishment may be true, but I do not believe you have proved it.

"This in

1 am amused at the oddity of your proposition. evitable penalty," you say, "will be executed upon the finally impenitent in a future state of existence." The penalty is inevitable, and yet it can be, and will be, avoided by all but the finally impenitent! And perhaps even they will escape, for you tell us, p. 53, that "God visits incorrigible sinners" who, I imagine, are about as intractable subjects as the finally impenitent-"God visits incorrigible sinners, individually and nationally, with judgments, that they may be led to repentance !"

To prove that the wicked will be punished in a future state, you introduce no less than nine arguments, chiefly borrowed from your brethren, the Rev. Messrs. Merritt, Lee, and Scott. Unfortunately, however, your proofs, like the witnesses against

Jesus, agree not together. The truth is, in making up your book, sufficient care was not taken to avoid contradictions, and it so happens that, if your favorite authors were individually consistent with themselves, they are mutually destructive to each other.

Your first argument in favor of future. punishment is borrowed from Mr. Lee. This gentleman has discovered a me-thod by which he is enabled to reduce any Universalist who will stand his ground, in a moment. The battery which is thus fatally brought to bear upon us, admits however of but one direction, and in case of the worst, we only need to change our position slightly in order to avoid the threatened ruin, and then all his mighty preparation becomes a dead loss. But let us examine this engine of death. The argument before us is simply this "Universalists," according to Mr. Lee, "contend that the object of all divine punishment is to reform the sufferer." This he is careful to inform us the Methodists do not admit; but if it be admitted, then one of three consequences must follow, viz. either every sinner must be reformed in this life, or punishment must fail to accomplish its end, or lastly, it must be continued in a future state. Now to imagine that punishment reforms every sinner in this world is, in the opinion of Mr. Lee, out of the question. To say that it fails to reform, is for the Universalist to relinquish his position and concede that it is not corrective, or else that it must be continued in order to accomplish in a future state what it did not accomplish here.

But what does Mr. Lee mean by corrective punishment, or punishment reforming the sinner? I make this inquiry in no spirit of caviling; for if I am not mistaken, Mr. Lee and Universalists are speaking of two very distinct things under the same name. If by reforming, or corrective, or disciplinary punishment is meant a punishment which always or ever in itself restores a man to true holiness, and thus fits him for heaven, the Universalist denies its very existence. There is no such thing in the government of God. If there were, punishment would hold the place assigned in that government to our Lord Jesus Christ, and thus annihilate the gospel; or ra

ther, perhaps, evolve the gospel from the very bosom of the law, and make itself essentially homogenious with the richest displays of divine grace in the sufferings and death of a MediIn such punishment Universalists have, they can have, no faith whatever. And yet it is of such, that Mr. Lee, if I do not misunderstand him, here speaks.

ator.

What then, it may be asked, do you mean by corrective or reforming punishment? I answer: Punishment obviously holds a place in the government of God, and an important but not the highest place. It was never designed to sanctify the heart or purge the conscience, that is, to give man a complete victory over his appetites and passions. This was reserved for the gospel. For "who is he that overcometh the world," inquires the beloved disciple, "but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?" The office of punishment is a lower one. It was not designed so much to make man holy, as to render him less sinful. It restrains him in the indulgence of his passions, lessens the number and turpitude of his sins, and by seconding the voice of conscience, tends to fit him for the reception of better principles and a holier influence. Punishment alone cannot make a man a christian or form a soul for heaven; but it can keep him back from crimes, which, without it, he would have perpetrated, and from depths of depravity to which he would otherwise have sunk. Its influence, though great, is rather negative than positive, while grace triumphs in the sanctification of the heart.

Considered in this light, it may be doubted, if punishment ever fails of accomplishing good; not the highest good certainly, but a good subservient to the divine benevolence, and tending toward that which is spiritual and divine. And is Mr. Lee quite certain that every sinner not adequately punished and reformed, as far as punishment is designed to reform, in this life? I know he speaks on this subject with great confidence, and assures us that "both. Scripture and matter of fact abundantly declare" the contrary. He adduces instances in which men appear to die sinning and unrepentant. But he judges merely "according to the appearance," with little or no positive knowledge on the subject. He neither knows the in