In replying to the Sabbath Recorder, on future punishment, in REVIEW No. 9, we quoted 2 Pet. 3:7, 10-12, and remarked, “This is the perdition of ungodly men, and the hell in which we believe.” To this the Recorder of Feb. 27, replies:— “The quotations in the Review and Herald from 2 Pet. 3:7, 10-12, declare the miserable earthly end of the wicked, living at the time of the destruction of the world by fire, but prove nothing concerning the nature of their future punishment. The form of reasoning followed by the Review and Herald entirely cuts off the idea of future punishment, as it also does a judgment after death. It also denies the resurrection of the wicked; for it would be most unreasonable to suppose that they would be raised and judged again after they had received their full doom. According, then, to this reasoning, the world of human beings destroyed by the flood, the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah, and all who have suffered death by a direct judgment of God, are blotted out forever! Why not, then, all who die of drunkenness and debauchery, or even of cancer, small-pox, or consumption! Let there, then, be no double dealing here, but at once throw off the mask, and plainly say, that to the wicked, to all who die on account of their sins, there is no hereafter.” Never having been guilty of double dealing, as we complacently believe, we do not apprehend that we shall incur any guilt in that respect on the question before us; and not being in possession of a mask, we are unable to comply with the Recorder’s request to throw it off. We do think, however, that we can offer a few words of explanation, which will enable that paper to understand our position which it now very evidently misapprehends. If we believed that 2 Pet. 3:7, 10-12, described simply the “miserable earthly end of the wicked,” as the Recorder holds, and if we believed that any infliction of temporal death ever did or could constitute the full doom of the wicked, then we should stand demolished by its ponderous blows; but as it is, it strikes at a phantom of its own creation, and has hit us only in imagination. So far from denying the resurrection, our view makes it necessary. There shall be a resurrection both of the just and the unjust, the Scriptures declare: an event very unnecessary in the cases of either the righteous or the wicked, if death leaves us more alive than it finds us. But the resurrection of these two classes is not at the same time. Rev. 20:1-5 places a thousand years between them. The righteous are raised at the second coming of Christ. 1 Thess. 4:16. The living wicked are then destroyed. 2 Thess. 1:7, 8; 2:8; Rev. 19:21, &c. But this is not their final destruction or perdition, of which Peter speaks. And why not? If death is the penalty for sin, were not the antediluvians, the Sodomites, &c., destroyed for their sins? and will not the wicked be destroyed for their wickedness at the second coming of Christ? and why is not this the last of them? Answer. Because since death has passed upon all the race as the result of Adam’s sin, this death is not, and cannot be, under any circumstances, inflicted upon us as the penalty for our own personal transgressions. But every one, as is consistent and just, is to give account for his own deeds, and by them is to be judged. According to his own works is to be his eternal destiny. If his sins are unrepented of, and unforgiven, he will find that, as in the beginning, death is still the wages of sin; and beyond that scene, there is to the transgressor no hereafter. There is no way that the wicked can give account of themselves to God, unless they are raised from the dead; hence their resurrection is a necessity for this very purpose. Some seem to find great injustice in the idea that the wicked should ever be raised, if literal death is the penalty for sin. This is to us simply astonishing. Far sooner should we expect them to become perplexed and bewildered over the simple proposition that two and two make four. The two deaths that the sinner dies are very clearly brought to view by the prophet Ezekiel: “When a righteous man turneth away from his righteousness, and committeth iniquity, and dieth in them; for his iniquity that he hath done shall he die.” Eze. 18:26. Here a person turns from righteousness to sin, and in that iniquity dies. Then something else follows: For that iniquity he is to die. Having died in it, he is afterward to die for it. How can this be? By being raised to give account of his deeds to God, and then, as he had died once on account of Adam’s sin, dying at last for his own. And John, speaking of these deaths in their numerical order, calls this, as it literally is, the second death. Rev. 20:14, 15. Were not, then, the special judgments which God has brought upon the wicked from time to time, punishments for their sins? They were manifestations of God’s anger against sin in this respect, and to just this degree; that God thereby declared that he could no longer suffer them to go on in their guilty career. It was simply a cutting short of their life; but their death, in itself considered, was not a punishment for their sins, inasmuch as they would have suffered death, sooner or later, in the natural course of events, had no such judgment intervened. A thousand years after the resurrection of the righteous, the wicked are raised, and judged according to the things written in the books. Fire then comes down from God out of Heaven to execute upon them the sentence written. Then the earth and the elements, which do not melt with fervent heat at the second coming of Christ, melt, become gasified, or “flee away” before the burning presence of Him who sits upon the great white throne. Rev. 20:9, 11. This is the burning day to which Peter refers (2 Pet. 3:7, 10-12), and Malachi (Mal. 4:1); and here we repeat what we trust will now be better understood than it seems thus far to have been, that this is the perdition of ungodly men and the hell in which we believe; not simply the earthly end of the wicked, but their final punishment at the end of the thousand years; for here all the wicked are raised, and here, and here only, they answer for the deeds done by themselves in this mortal life, and receive the punishment which their crimes deserve. Will the candid reader now say that our mode of reasoning “entirely cuts off the idea of future punishment”? or “a judgment after death”? or “the resurrection of the wicked”? No. We have a place for all these things. And with the view here set forth, there is, in our eyes at least, consistency and harmony throughout; we can give every event the order and time which the Scriptures assign it, and describe it in the very phraseology which they have seen fit to employ in revealing to us these fearful scenes.