ate regions in space, whose respective boundaries enclose
hell and heaven, banishment into the one, or admission into the
other, evidently is not what constitutes the essence of perdition
or of salvation, is not the all important consideration; but the
characteristic condition of the soul, which produces its
experience and decides its destination, that is the essential
thing. The mild fanning of a zephyr in a summer evening is
intolerable to a person in the convulsions of the ague, but most
welcome and delightful to others. So to a wicked soul all objects,
operations, and influences of the moral creation become hostile
and retributive, making a hell of the whole universe. Purify the
soul, restore it to a correct condition, and every thing is
transfigured: the universal hell becomes universal heaven.

We may gather up in a few propositions the leading principles of
this theory of salvation. First, Perdition is not an experience to
which souls are helplessly born, not a sentence inflicted on them
by an arbitrary decree, but is a result wrought out by free
agency, in conformity to the unalterable laws of the spiritual
world. Secondly, heaven and hell are not essentially particular
localities into which spirits are thrust, nor states of
consciousness produced by outward circumstances, but are an outward
reflection from, and a reciprocal action upon, internal character.

Thirdly, condemnation, or justification, is not absolute and
complete, equalizing all on each side of a given line, but is a
thing of degrees, not exactly the same in any two individuals,
or in the same person at all times. Fourthly, we have no reason
to suppose that probation closes with the closing of the
present life; but every relevant consideration leads us to
conclude that the same great constitution of laws pervades all
worlds and reigns throughout eternity, so that the fate of souls
is not unchangeably fixed at death. No analogy indicates that
after death all will be thoroughly different from what it is
before death. Rather do all analogies argue that the hell and
heaven of the future will be the aggravation, or mitigation, or
continuation, of the perdition and salvation of the present. It is
altogether a sentence of exact right according to character, a
matter of personal achievement depending upon freedom, an
experience of inward elements and states, a thing of degrees, and
a subject of continued probation.

The condition of the heathen natio