DESTRUCTION OF THE WICKED.
By William Penniman
It "Leads to Infidelity."
CERTAINLY those who use this objection must be hard pressed. We shall prove that the infidelity is on the other side of the question. A noted revivalist, in depicting the horrors of the damned, said that after the sinner had wailed for millions and millions of years in hell, he would lift up his eyes and behold the pendulum of the great clock of eternity beating backward and forward eternity after eternity. God will exert all the power of His omnipotent wrath to make the sinner as wretched in hell as he is capable of being.3 Pres. Charles G. Finney, of Oberlin, said:— The laws of progress can not be arrested by any amount of sinning. . . . What follows from these established laws of the human mind and of human existence? Let your reflections trace out the fearful results which will occur from the laws of eternal progression. . . . O, look upon that sinner after he has passed along through millions of ages of his everlasting progression in knowledge and growing capacities for sin and suffering. Hear him; he says hell knew but little of sin and suffering when I came here compared with what I suffer now. Alas, I seem to have all hell in my own bosom. I sin and suffer enough with my vastly augmented powers to make an awful hell even if these agonies were equally distributed among myriads of my fellow beings. How awful! Sin, misery, and ruin enough to make one awful hell locked up in the bosom of a single sinner. . . . No form of estimate can reach its appalling magnitude. The sinner is represented, after he has passed on beyond these millions of ages, as saying:— My miseries have only begun. This soul of mine has only begun to know how to suffer the real sufferings of the damned. Its keen sensitiveness to agony has only begun to develop itself. Yet in the flow of endless years of progression in sorrow, each one will say:— If all the universe at the moment of my death had taxed their minds to the utmost to conceive the gulf and miseries that wrung my heart, they could not have even begun to reach the appalling estimate. According to this horrible and blasphemous doctrine sin and suffering will eternally increase. Another theologian teaches that the happiness of the righteous, as they look over the battlements of heaven into the gulf of despair and behold the suffering of the wicked, will be increased. It is no wonder that Rev. Sylvanus Cobb (Universalist) said he was "willing to forego that amount of pleasure." To prove how the infidelity comes in, listen to a plain writer on this subject:— Robert Owen, his son Robert Dale, Paine, Carlisle, Taylor, Francis Wright, and nearly all their coadjutors in Europe and America, were nurtured in the faith of the endless misery of the lost, and what but that horrible doctrine, and the erroneous supposition that the Bible teaches it, led them to reject the whole of Christianity. Robert Dale Owen says that he was brought up a Presbyterian of the strictest sect, and that the doctrine of the endless punishment [as it is taught in the catechism] was the first thing that staggered his young credulity. It is related of Lord Shaftsbury that on asking Bishop Burnett if the doctrine of endless torment was actually taught in the Bible, and being answered in the affirmative, he immediately replied:— I can not embrace a system which inculcates a doctrine so utterly opposed to all particulars of the character of the merciful Ruler of the universe. Many good and benevolent minds have come to the same determination. Taking it for granted from the testimony of religious teachers that the Bible teaches the detestable and terrible doctrine of endless sin and woe, they at once reject the whole as entirely unworthy of a God of benevolence and wisdom. Let Christianity be stripped of all heathen dogmas, and all doctrines of human invention, and especially of the God-dishonoring and soul-withering system of endless sin and suffering which is no part of revelation, but stands directly opposed to the Bible, and let the Gospel be presented to man in its purity and divinity as a system worthy of a God of infinite wisdom, power, and goodness, and it will and must prevail. A doctrine which so plainly conflicts with the justice, mercy, and goodness of God can not but work evil. It has been, and may be said by some that they would rather exist forever in torment than to cease to live. Such do not realize what they are talking about; for how often do some pray for death to end their suffering in this life. Then what will it be where the suffering is so much greater that it can not be compared to the sufferings of this life and also "eternally increase"? The Lord in great mercy, after one has suffered according to his deeds, ends the life. Let us then thank the Lord that "justice and judgment are the habitation of Thy throne; mercy and truth shall go before Thy face." Ps. 89:14.