pressed by the stupendous idea of eternal torments. It
absolutely overwhelms the imagination of poor, short-sighted creatures
like ourselves. But God, in his plans for the universe and for eternity,
takes no counsel of human weakness; and that which seems so terrible to
our feeble intellects may, to his all-seeing eye, appear no more than a
dark speck in a boundless realm of light. Surely, if there ever was, or
ever could be, a question which should be reduced to the simple inquiry,
"What saith the Scripture?" it is that respecting the future condition of
the wicked.

It is truly amazing that a mind like Foster's should have put this inquiry
so easily aside, and relied with so much confidence upon what he was
pleased to call "the moral argument." This argument, as we have seen, is
altogether unsound and sophistical. It bases itself upon the prejudices of
a creed, and terminates in dark conjectures merely. He hopes, or rather he
"would wish to indulge the hope, founded upon the divine attribute of
infinite benevolence, that there will be a period somewhere in the endless
futurity, when all God's sinning creatures will be restored by him to
rectitude and happiness." Vain hope! delusive wish! How can they be made
holy without their own consent and cooeperation? And if they could be
restored to rectitude and happiness, how can we hope that God would
restore them, since he has not been pleased to preserve them in their
original state of rectitude and happiness?

But perhaps, says he, there will be, not a restoration of all God's
sinning creatures to rectitude and happiness, but an annihilation of their
existence. Even this conjecture, if true, "would be a prodigious relief;"
for "the grand object of interest is a negation of the perpetuity of
misery." Suppose, then, that the universe had been planned according to
this benevolent wish of Mr. Foster, and that those who could not be
reclaimed should, after a very protracted period of suffering, be forever
annihilated; would this promote the order and well-being of the whole
creation? How did Mr. Foster know but that such a provision in the
government of the universe would oppose so feeble a barrier to the
progress of sin, that scenes of mutability, and change, and ruin, would be
introduced into the empire of God, from which his benevolence would shrink
with infinite abhorrence? How did Mr. Foster know but that the Divine
Benevolence itself would prefer a hell in one part of his