of this theory than by those of the former; and it seems to us
still harder to find for it a place in any intelligent and harmonious
conception of the scheme on which God made the worlds.

Were it possible for us to hold it, it would seem to unfold a terrible
vision of the issue of the great experiment of creation. The free beings
whom God made to be the glory of His universe, drooping down in throngs,
after a life struggle full of anguish and despair, into the darkness of
the everlasting night! One would be tempted to ask passionately in that
case, Why was not the dire experiment of liberty ended in the hour of
the first transgression? why was not the free universe, parent of such
wrongs and miseries, strangled in its birth?

Nor may we dare to hide from ourselves and others, in these days, the
dread considerations involved in the doctrine which the Church has drawn
from explicit statements in the word of God. Eternal punishment; eternal
suffering in the universe; moans rising up ever in the ear of heaven;
the cries of souls in anguish piercing the serenity of the heavenly
rest. Eternal evil too. Evil never more to die out of the worlds on
which the dew of the primal benediction lay, and which flashed back the
smile of Him who looked upon them and saw that "_they were very good_."
The curse rioting, sin reigning unto death, in some region of the
universe sustained and ruled by the Divine hand; never to be expelled
from the creation, never to be drawn under the merciful reign of God. We
are too prone to hide the awful reality which is behind this language,
by vague notions of the judgment as the final banishing of evil from the
sight of God and of the blessed. Nothing that is can be banished from
the sight of God; nothing that exists--we will not say lives, life is a
sacred word--can exist from moment to moment without the interposition
of the Divine hand. Ever present before the great Father must be the
anguish and the moans of the souls in torment; ever to His eye there
must be this dark counterfoil to the joy and glory of the redeemed. And
yet the question forces itself upon us: What else can the plain
statements of the Scriptures mean; nay, what else can in the essential
nature of things befall a free spirit that chooses to exercise its
freedom in sin? We may well feel with a wise one of old, "Such
knowledge is too wonderful for us: it is as high as heaven, what
can we do? it is as deep as hell, what can we know?"