ot personal, but
might be shifted about at will by pecuniary considerations, as the
accounts in the debt and credit columns of a ledger. The theoretic
falsities of such a scheme are as numerous and evident as its
practical abuses have been enormous and notorious. How ridiculous
this ritual fetch to snatch souls from perdition appears as stated
by Julian against Augustine! "God and the devil, then, have
entered into a covenant, that what is born the devil shall have,
and what is baptized God shall have!"12 We hesitate not to stake
the argument on one question. If there be no salvation save by
believing and accepting the sacraments with the authority of the
Romanist or the Episcopalian Church, then less than one in a
hundred thousand of the world's population thus far can be saved.
Death steadily showers into hell, age after age, an overwhelming
proportion of the souls of all mankind, a rain storm of agonized
drops of immortality to feed and freshen the quenchless fires of
damnation. Who can believe it, knowing what it is that he
believes?

We advance next to a system of Christian salvation as remarkable
for its simplicity, boldness, and instinctive benevolence as those
we have previously examined are for complexity, unnaturalness, and
severity. The theory referred to promises the natural and
inevitable salvation of every created soul. It bases itself on two
positions, the denial that men are ever lost, except partially and
temporarily, and the exhibition of the irresistible power, perfect
wisdom, and infinite goodness of God. The advocates of this
doctrine point first to observation and experience, and declare
that no person is totally reprobate, that every one is salvable;
those most corrupt and abandoned to wickedness, unbelief, and
hardness, have yet a spark that may be kindled, a fount that may
be made to gush, unto the illumination and purification of the
whole being. A stray word, an unknown influence, a breath of the
Spirit, is continually effecting such changes, such salvations.
True, there are many fettered by vices, torn by sins, ploughed by
the caustic shares of remorse, lost to peaceful freedom, lost to
spiritual joys, lost to the sweet, calm raptures of religious
belief and love, and, in that sense, plunged in damnation. But
this, they say, is the only hell there is. At the longest, it can
endure but for the night of this life: deliverance and blessedness
come with the morning dawn of a better world. Exac