every
generation there are millions on millions of infants, idiots,
maniacs, heathen, within whose hearing or power the means of
salvation by a personal appropriation of the atoning merit of
Christ's blood were never brought; so that life to them is no
scene of Christian probation. But, waiving that, the probation is
not a fair one to anybody. If the indescribable horror of an
eternal damnation be the consequence that follows a certain course
while we are on trial in this life, then a knowledge of that fact
in all its bearings ought to be given us, clear, explicit, beyond
any possibility of mistake or doubt. Otherwise the probation is
not fair. To place men in the world, as millions are constantly
placed, beset by allurements of every sort within and without, led
astray by false teachings and evil examples, exposed in ignorance,
bewildered with uncertainties of conflicting doubts and surmises,
either never hearing of the way of salvation at all, or hearing of
it only in terms that seem absurd in themselves and unaccompanied
by sufficient, if by any, proof, and then, if under these fearful
hazards they waver from strict purity of heart, rectitude of
conduct, or orthodoxy of belief, to condemn them to a world of
everlasting agony, would be the very climax of cruelty, with no
touch of mercy or color of right.

Beneath such a rule the universe should be shrouded in the
blackness of despair, and God be thought of with a convulsive
shudder. Such a "probation" would be only like that on which the
Inquisitors put their victims who were studiously kept ignorant in
their dungeons, waiting for the rack and the flame to be made
ready. Few persons will deny that, as the facts now are, a good,
intelligent, candid man may doubt the reality of an endless
punishment awaiting men in hell. But if the doctrine be true, and
he is on probation under it, is it fair that he should be left
honestly in ignorance or doubt about it? No: if it be true, it
ought to be burned into his brain and crushed into his soul with
such terrific vividness and abiding constancy of impression as
would deter him ever from the wrong path, keep him in the right. A
distinguished writer has represented a condemned delinquent,
suffering on, and still interminably on, in hell, thus complaining
of the unfairness of his probation: "Oh, had it been possible for
me to conceive even the most diminutive part of the weight and
horror of this doom, I should have shrunk from