as
to depart and be with Christ than to pursue his earthly labors. Without
this evidence, Stephen could not have met his fate as if he had been
welcoming the hour of rest from which the beams of a new day should
awaken him. Without this evidence, no one of the Apostles could have
passed through his labors and sufferings with zeal, patience, and
cheerfulness; for we have their own testimony, that if in this life only
they had had hope in Christ, they would have been of all men the most
miserable. Without this evidence, not only would the hopes of millions
who have since lived have vacillated, the peace of millions have been at
the mercy of sickness and death, and their spiritual strength in
perpetual peril from temptation, but the state of morals through the
whole civilized world, imperfect as it yet is, would have been far
inferior to what we see it, and could never attain the purity which we
confidently anticipate in some future age. Without this evidence,
Christianity would be almost nothing; for the doctrine of future
retribution is not only its most important revelation, but it is so
intimately connected with every other, as a sanction, that the Church
might as well be supposed complete without its chief corner-stone, as
Christianity to be efficacious if deprived of this last grand truth.
This evidence we have, however; and possessing it, it is of
comparatively little importance how widely men differ in their
speculations as to the time and mode in which the future life shall
succeed to the present, and as to the nature of the rewards and
punishments which shall follow their probation. The belief in a certain
and righteous retribution is all that is enforced upon us by
Christianity, all that is a necessary consequence of our faith in the
resurrection of Christ. Yet, as a tendency to unauthorized speculation,
and also a misapprehension of some Scriptural expressions, appear to us
to have caused a very extensive forgetfulness that retribution is not
only certain, but will be righteous, we must enter on some explanation
of our views respecting the extent of punishment of which the life to
come is to be the scene.

We say respecting the _extent_ only, because the _nature_ of the
punishment is a subject of far inferior importance, and one on which we
possess so little light that it may fairly be left to the imagination of
each individual to conceive for himself. Some persons, perhaps the great
majority of every denomina