factions? We
must assume that the power of sinning remains, otherwise man's
responsibility would cease, and punishment thereby become mere
cruelty. If sin is thus possible, then why may not the sinner indulge
there in the same selfishness, disobedience, and rebellion which
characterised him here? Why may it not be with him as with many a man
who loves sin in the low haunts of profligacy and crime, but loves it
not the less when brought into circumstances of greater comfort and
among society of greater godliness? But should it be otherwise,
and the supposed place of future punishment have none of those
advantages,--and we are forced by the necessity of the case to assume
their absence, at least for a limited period, and to admit, in some
form or other, the presence of a dread and mysterious sorrow,--we
ask again, on what grounds is it concluded that this anticipated
punishment shall itself possess a healing virtue to produce, some time
or other, that love to God which, up till the hour of death, has never
been produced in the sinner? Men attach, perhaps, some omnipotent
power to mere suffering, and imagine that if hatred to sin and love to
God are all that is needed, then a short experience of the terrific
consequences of a godless past must insure a godly future. Why do
they think so? This is not the effect which mere punishment generally
produces on human character. Its tendency is not to soften, but to
harden the heart,--to fill it not with love, but with enmity. It
cannot fail, indeed, to make the sufferer long for deliverance from
the pain; but it does not follow that he thereby longs for deliverance
from the sin which causes the pain, and for the possession of the good
which alone can remove it. It is certainly not the case in this
world, that bad men are always disposed to repent and turn to God in
proportion as they suffer from their own wilfulness, and become poor
from idleness, broken in health from dissipation, alienated from human
hearts by their selfishness, or pass, with a constantly increasing
anguish, through all the stages of outcasts from the family; dwellers
among the profligate; companions in crime; occupiers of prisons;
members of convict gangs, till the scaffold with its beam and drop
ends the dreadful history. Such punishment as this, constantly dogging
the crime which at first created it and ever preserves it, only makes
the heart harder, fans the passions into a more volcanic fire,
and possesses