effort of every believer should therefore be, to know more of Him. By the intercourse of the closet through the Word and prayer; by constant trust in spite of all that seems contrary; by the cultivation of a simple, childlike, obedient faith, shall the believer rise to the sublime heights of realized fellowship with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ. The object of this book is not religious controversy, but to so unfold to Christians the true relations into which the grace of God has brought them, as to make them possessors of the blessing and the usefulness which are properly theirs.

Our opportunity is but brief. Human life itself is but brief. In the days of John, the beloved apostle, the last hour" had already set in. Its darkness has ever since been growing denser. At any moment the glimmer of the Morning Star may herald the sunshine of a new day. Till then, there are lives to be lived, seed to be sown, victories to be won, crowns to be gained-for Eternity.

ETERNAL PUNISHMENT.

THE saintly Archbishop Whately, in his lecture on Rewards and Punishments (Future State, Eighth Lecture), writes as follows. His statement of the subject is so clear and forcible that we quote at length:

"The Scriptures do not, I think, afford us any ground for expecting that those who shall be condemned at the last day as having wilfully rejected or rebelled against their Lord, will be finally delivered; that their doom and that of the evil angels will ever be reversed.

"What that doom will be, whether the terms in which it is commonly spoken of in Scripture-' death,' 'destruction,' 'perishing,' etc. (see Matt. x. 28; Rom. vi. 21, 23, etc.)—are to be understood figuratively, as denoting immortal life in a state of misery, or more literally, as denoting a final extinction of existence,-this is quite a different question. It is certain that the words 'life,' 'eternal life,' 'immortality,' etc. (see John v. 21, 29; xi. 25; 2 Pet. iii. 7; 2 Cor. ii. 15, 16, etc.), are always applied to the condition of those, and of those only, who shall at the last day be approved as 'good and faithful servants,' who are to 'enter into the joy of their Lord.' "Life,' as applied to their condition, is usually un

derstood to mean 'happy life.'

And that theirs will be

a happy life we are indeed plainly taught; but I do not think we are anywhere taught that the word 'life' does of itself necessarily imply happiness. If so indeed, it would be a mere tautology to speak of a 'happy life'; and a contradiction, to speak of a miserable life'; which we know is not the case, according to the usage of any language. In all ages and countries, 'life,' and the words answering to it in other languages, have always been applied, in ordinary discourse, to a wretched life, no less properly than to a happy one. Life, therefore, in the received sense of the word, would apply equally as well to the condition of the blest and the condemned, supposing these last to be destined to continue forever living in a state of misery. And yet, to their condition the words 'life' and 'immortality' never are applied in Scripture. If, therefore, we suppose the hearers of Jesus and His Apostles to have understood, as nearly as possible in the ordinary sense, the words employed, they must naturally have conceived them to mean (if they were taught nothing to the contrary) that the condemned. were really and literally to be 'destroyed,' and cease to exist; not, that they were to exist forever in a state of wretchedness. For they are never spoken of as being kept alive, but as forfeiting life: as, for instance, 'Ye will not come unto me that ye may have life:''He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life.' And again, 'perdition,' 'death,' 'destruction,' are employed in numerous passages to express the doom of the condemned. All which expressions

would, as I have said, be naturally taken in their usual and obvious sense, if nothing were taught to the contrary.

"That these expressions, however, are to be understood not in their ordinary sense, but figuratively, to signify an immortality of suffering, is inferred, by a large proportion of Christians, from some other passages: as, where our Lord speaks of 'everlasting punishment,' 'ever. lasting fire,' and of being 'cast into Hell, where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.'

"This last expression of His is taken from the book of the prophet Isaiah (lxvi. 24), who speaks of the carcasses of the men that have transgressed, whose worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched; and they shall be an abhorring to all flesh': describing evidently the kind of doom inflicted by the Eastern nations on the vilest offenders, who were not only slain, but their bodies deprived of the rites of burial, and either burnt to ashes (which, among them, was regarded as a great indignity) or left to moulder above ground, and be devoured by worms.

"From such passages as these, it has been inferred that the sufferings, and consequently, the life of the condemned, is never to have an end. And the expressions will certainly bear that sense; which would perhaps be their most obvious and natural meaning, if these expressions were the only ones on the subject that are to be found in Scripture. But they will also bear another sense; which, if not more probable in itself, is certainly more reconcilable with the ordinary meaning of the words

'destruction,' etc., which so often occur.

The expres

sions of eternal punishment,' unquenchable fire,' etc., may mean merely that there is to be no deliverance—no revival, no restoration—of the condemned. 'Death,' simply, does not shut out the hope of being brought to life again; 'eternal death' does. Fire' may be quenched before it has entirely consumed what it is burning; ‘unquenchable fire' would seem most naturally to mean that which destroys it utterly.

"It may be said, indeed, that supposing man's soul to be an immaterial being, it cannot be consumed and destroyed by literal material fire or worms. That is true;

but no more can it suffer from these. We all know that no fire, literally so called, can give us any pain unless it reach our bodies. The 'fire,' therefore, and the 'worm' that are spoken of, must at any rate, it would seem, be something figuratively so called,-something that is to the soul what worms and fire are to a body. And as the effect of worms or fire is, not to preserve the body they prey upon, but to consume, destroy, and put an end to it, it would follow, if the correspondence hold good, that the fire, figuratively so called, which is prepared for the condemned, is something that is really to destroy and put an end to them; and is called 'everlasting' or 'unquenchable' fire, to denote that they are not to be saved from it, but that their destruction is to be final. In the parable of the tares, our Lord describes Himself as saying, 'gather ye first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them; but gather the wheat into my garner;' as if to denote that the one is to be (as we know is the practice