annihilating shudder would seize and destroy the soul.

We say, therefore, that the doctrine of the eternity of future
punishment is not believed as an intellectually conceived truth,
because that is a metaphysical impossibility. But more: we affirm,
in spite of the general belief in it publicly professed, that it
is actually held by hardly any one as a practical vivid belief
even within the limits wherein, as an intellectual conception, it
is possible. When intellect and imagination do not fail, heart and
conscience do, with sickened faintness and convulsive protest. In
his direful poem on the Last Day, Young makes one of the condemned
vainly beg of God to grant "This one, this slender, almost no,
request: When I have wept a thousand lives away, When torment is
grown weary of its prey, When I have raved of anguish'd years in
fire Ten thousand thousands, let me then expire."

Such a thought, when confronted with any generous holy sentiment
or with any worthy conception of the Divine character, is
practically incredible. The men all around us in whose Church
creed such a doctrine is written down do not truly believe it.
"They delude themselves," as Martineau well says, "with the mere
fancy and image of a belief. The death of a friend who departs
from life in heresy affects them in the same way as the loss of
another whose creed was unimpeachable: while the theoretic
difference is infinite, the practical is virtually nothing." Who
that had a child, parent, wife, brother, or other precious friend,
condemned to be roasted to death by a slow fire, would not be
frantic with agony? But there are in the world literally millions
on millions, some of whose nearest and dearest ones have died
under circumstances which, by their professed creeds, can leave no
doubt that they must roast in the fires of hell in an anguish
unutterably fiercer, and for eternity, and yet they go about as
smilingly, engage in the battle for money, in the race for fame,
in all the vain shows and frivolous pleasures of life, as eagerly
and as gayly as others. How often do we see the literal truth of
this exemplified! It is clear they do not believe in the dogma to
whose technical terms they formally subscribe.

A small proportion of its professors do undeniably believe the
doctrine so far as it can be sanely believed; and accordingly the
world is to them robed in a sable shroud, and life is an awful
mockery, under a flashing surface of sports concealing