rs,
spending every week more money on his miserable body than he gives
in his whole life to save the priceless souls for which he says
Christ died, is a problem admitting but two solutions. Either his
professed faith is an unreality to him, or else he is as selfish
as a demon and as hard hearted as the nether millstone. If he
really believed the doctrine, and had a human heart, he must feel
it to be his duty to deny himself every indulgence and give his
whole fortune and earnings to the missionary fund. And when he had
given all else, he ought to give himself, and go to pagan lands,
proclaiming the means of grace until his last breath. If he does
not that, he is inexcusable.

Should he attempt to clear himself of this obligation by adopting
the theory of predestination, which asserts that all men were
unconditionally elected from eternity, some to heaven, others to
hell, so that no effort can change their fate, logical consistency
reduces him to an alternative more intolerable in the eyes of
conscience and common sense than the other was. For by this theory
the gates of freedom and duty are hoisted, and the dark flood of
antinomian consequences rushes in. All things are fated. Let men
yield to every impulse and wish. The result is fixed. We have
nothing to do. Good or evil, virtue or crime, alter nothing.

Fourthly, if the common doctrine of eternal damnation be true,
then surely no more children should be brought into the world: it
is a duty to let the race die out and cease. He who begets a
child, forcing him to run the fearful risk of human existence,
with every probability of being doomed to hell at the close of
earth, commits a crime before whose endless consequences of horror
the guilt of fifty thousand deliberate murders would be as
nothing. For, be it remembered, an eternity in hell is an infinite
evil; and therefore the crime of thrusting such a fate on a single
child, with the unasked gift of being, is a crime admitting of no
just comparison. Rather than populate an everlasting hell with
human vipers and worms, a hell whose fires, alive and wriggling
with ghastly shapes of iniquity and anguish, shall swell with a
vast accession of fresh recruits from every generation, rather
than this, let the sacred lights on the marriage altar go out, no
more bounding forms of childhood be seen in cottage or hall, the
race grow old, thin out, and utterly perish, all happy villages be
overgrown, all regal cities crumble d