ng of teeth."
Thousands of passages like these, and even worse, might easily be
collected from Christian authors, dating their utterance from the
days of St. Irenaus, Bishop of Lyons, who flamed against the
heretics, to the days of Nehemiah Adams, Congregational preacher
of Boston, who says, "It is to be feared the forty two children
that mocked Elisha are now in hell." 4 There is an unmerciful
animus in them, a vindictiveness of thought and feeling, far oh,
how far! removed from the meek and loving

2 De Spectaculis, cap. xxx., Gibbon's trans.

3 Contemplations of the State of Man, ch. 6 8.

4 Friends of Christ, p. 149.

soul of Jesus, who wept over Jerusalem, and loved the
"unevangelical" young lawyer who was "not far from the kingdom of
heaven," and yearned towards the penitent Peter, and from the
tenderness of his immaculate purity said to the adulteress,
"Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more." There are some
sectarians in whom the arbitrary narrowness, fierceness, and
rigidity of their received creeds have so demoralized and hardened
conscience and sensibility in their native healthy directions, and
artificially inflamed them in diseased channels, that we verily
believe, if the decision of the eternal destiny of the human race
were placed in their hands, they would with scarcely a twinge of
pain perhaps some of them even with a horrid satisfaction and
triumph doom all except their own dogmatic coterie to hell. They
are bound to do so. They profess to know infallibly that God will
do so: if, therefore, the case being in their arbitration, they
would decide differently, they thereby impeach the action of God,
confess his decrees irreconcilable with reason and justice, and
set up their own goodness as superior to his. Burnet has preserved
the plea of Bloody Mary, which was in these words: "As the souls
of heretics are hereafter to be eternally burning in hell, there
can be nothing more proper than for me to imitate the Divine
vengeance by burning them on earth." Thanks be to the infinite
Father that our fate is in his hands, and not in the hands of men
who are bigots,

"Those pseudo Privy Councillors of God,
Who write down judgments with a pen hard nibb'd:
Ushers of Beelzebub's black rod,
Commending sinners, not to ice thick ribb'd,
But endless flames to scorch them up like flax,
Yet sure of heaven themselves, as if they'd cribb'd
The impression of St. Peter's keys in wax!"

It may be thought t