own, and this world roll
among the silent stars henceforth a globe of blasted deserts and
rank wildernesses, resonant only with the shrieks of the wind, the
yells of wild beasts, and the thunder's crash.

Fifthly, there is one more conclusion of moral duty deducible from
the prevalent theory of infinite torment. It is this. God ought
not to have permitted Adam to have any children. Let us not seem
presumptuous and irreverent in speaking thus. We are merely
reasoning on the popular theory of the theologians, not on any
supposition of our own or on any truth; and by showing the
absurdity and blasphemy of the moral consequences and duties
flowing from that theory, the absurdity, blasphemy, and
incredibility of the theory itself appear. We are not responsible
for the irreverence, but they are responsible for it who charge
God with the iniquity which we repel from his name. If the sin of
Adam must entail total depravity and an infinite penalty of
suffering on all his posterity, who were then certainly innocent
because not in existence, then, we ask, why did not God cause the
race to stop with Adam, and so save all the needless and cruel woe
that would otherwise surely be visited on the lengthening line of
generations? Or, to go still further back, why did he not,
foreseeing Adam's fall, refrain from creating even him? There was
no necessity laid on God of creating Adam. No positive evil would
have been done by omitting to create him. An infinite evil,
multiplied by the total number of the lost, was done by creating
him. Why, then, was he not left in peaceful nonentity? On the
Augustinian theory we see no way of escaping this awful dilemma.
Who can answer the question which rises to heaven from the abyss
of the damned? "Father of mercies, why from silent earth Didst
thou awake and curse me into birth, Push into being a reverse of
thee, And animate a clod with misery?"

Satan is a sort of sublime Guy Fawkes, lurking in the infernal
cellar, preparing the train of that stupendous Gunpowder Plot by
which he hopes, on the day of judgment, to blow up the world
parliament of unbelievers with a general petard of damnation. Will
the King connive at this nefarious prowler and permit him to carry
out his design?

The doctrine of eternal damnation, as it has prevailed in the
Christian Church, appears to the natural man so unreasonable,
immoral, and harrowingly frightful, when earnestly contemplated,
that there have always been som