19. But you say it is dishonorable to God also. It supposes that he could not or would not prevent it. If there be any sense in this, of which I am very doubtful, your admissions dishonor God infinitely more. You admit that sin exists, and sin is the cause of punishment. Now God could not or would not, as respects past, present, and future punishment, prevent sin.

20. You assert also that future punishment is opposed to the benevolence, mercy, wisdom, power, and justice of God These are your 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and eighth weighty arguments. It is as easy to transfix these five weighty arguments with one shaft, at one time, as to take them in single file: for they all rest upon a common fallacy. Sin and present sufferings are as much opposed to these perfections of God, on your own reasoning, as endless punishment. The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain in consequence of the permission of moral evil. Whenever you reconcile this to infinite benevolence, mercy, wisdom, power, and justice, I will by your own arguments reconcile eternal punishment to all the same perfections of the Deity. For if you assume that the end in view justifies the permission of the endurance of moral evil, with all its pains and agonies, for seven or ten thousand years; I have only to assume that similar or greater ends in view may justify perpetual suffering and punishment. The principle is the same. The difference is only in degrees. If the Creator could have created and blessed moral agents without sin or punishment, would he not have done it? And if this has hitherto been impossible, on what principle or fact in philosophy can any one infer that it may at some future period be possible!

21. To my mind, sir, there is no argument, no sense, no philosophy in your ten arguments. God cannot do every thing that he has power to do, or that he has mercy to do. He can only do what all his perfections, guided by infinite and eternal wisdom, say is consistent with his whole nature. He can show mercy, and he can punish sin; but he cannot do the one or the other in any way that is not in unison with all his perfections. Well, now, God is immutable in all his excellencies. Yet he permits sin, punishment, and death; and who can say that what is now may not hereafter be; and that what is just and right and benevolent in time, may not be just and right and benevolent to eternity!

22. Your theory, sir, is the most baseless conceit in the universe. It has not a single fact nor argument to support it. It is the superlative of the weak and beggarly elements of assumption. Your hypothesis is without fact, without philosophy, without analogy, as well as without Bible authority.- -Let us take a parable from the brutal creation. Look at yonder boundless plain: see how many beasts of burden, sheep, cattle, and domestic animals of every species are oppressed and tortured by human hands, or by a thousand accidents. Add to these all the wild beasts of every species that have been lacerated, torn, and bruised by one another. See the millions of birds, beasts, and reptiles not to invade the inhabitants of rivers, lakes, seas, oceans, the animalcula that people every thing that grows. Hear, sir, the myriads of groans, shrieks, and agonies that rend the heavens and melt the stony heart of man. Who could endure for a single day to look on all the writhings, wrestings, distortions, convolutions of this congregated mass of sinless sufferers! Who, sir, could endure to hear and see so much

misery for an hour without melting into sympathy! And do you not believe that God, who is infinite in mercy and benevolence, whose goodness is boundless and unsearchable, has had all this groaning and travailing creation before his mind, not only for six thousand years, but from the dateless records of a past eternity, and that in full sight of it he called all those beings into existence, and permitted these sufferings for reasons to man or angel, perhaps, for ever inscrutable; but to his mind perfectly wise, just, benevolent, and merciful in reference to a boundless whole, an infinite system, which his eye alone surveys and understands. I ask you then, sir, to show how you can reconcile this with your idealism, your a-priori reasonings, your hypothetical divinity? If God, in all his power, wisdom, justice, mercy, and benevolence, did give birth to such a system and allot such sufferings to sinless and unsinning brutes; may he not, I ask, for ever punish wicked men and spirits, by whose rebellion all these miseries, groans, and agonies have diffused themselves over the face of animated nature, and cast at least a temporary gloom over universal being.

23. If farther evidence be yet wanting in demonstration of the quicksands on which your temple of reason stands, I would inquire whether from your own reasonings on the power, wisdom, goodness, justice, benevolence, and compassion of the Creator, could you fling yourself back before sin and sorrow were conceived or born, you could have expected or inferred from all the perfections of the Deity that he could possibly have originated such a mixed system of good and evil as now obtains, as far as known to us through the whole rational creation? From what attribute or excellency of the Almighty Father could you, before the event of sin and punishment occurred, have inferred the probability of the catastrophes of angels and men? I am bold to say, sir, you never could, from any premises or a-priori reasonings in reach of human faculties, have anticipated such events. How then, sir, let me compassionately and benevolently ask you, dare you, from the empty storehouses of your ephemeral experience, memory, and reasonfrom your little horizon-from the deep valley covered with the mists of multifarious ignorance in which you stand, presume to say that a state of endless misery for wicked agents is useless, pernicious, dishonorable to God, malevolent, unmerciful, unwise. unjust, and impotent on the part of God; when, upon your own philosophy, present sin and suffering-nay, the origination of a mixed system of good and evil, is equally to be reprobated as useless, pernicious, dishonorable, &c.? 24. But to cap your climax of unfounded reasoning, you add that the eternal punishment of wicked men is contrary to the veracity of God. This is your ninth weighty argument. Your proof?-You say, For he has declared that he will not contend forever, nor be always wroth, [with a certain people I trow,] and that he will not cast off for ever." "I thank you for this proof; for it proves that when you please for ever and always, your aei and aion, do signify endless. Your only proof for this weighty argument is a positive disproof of all your reasonings upon aei and aioon; for here you rely upon it three times as certainly intimating without end. God, you say, will not contendwithout end, or for ever!!! Never was there on earth a system more suicidal than your Universalism. It is always knocking out its own brains upon its own reasonings and upon its own verbal criticisms. It will not wait for the sentence of the law.

25. Your tenth argument is the whole Bible-the voice of all revelation! Eternal punishment of the devil and his angels, and wicked men, is contrary to the voice of revelation. If this be so, your nine arguments were foolishness, yourself being judge. They are no part of revelation. You have given us nine arguments, and then the voice of all revelation! What a logician! Your tenth supersedes the nine, and dooms them not to be a part of the voice of revelation. Lest I should seem to sport with your frailties, or rather those of your system, I shall hear you once more, as you promise, on the fourth proposition. Controversially yours,

A. CAMPBELL.

LETTERS TO ENGLAND-No. VIII.

MR. J. WALLIS:

BETHANY, March 15, 1838.

My dear Sir-IN my second letter I think it was observed that reformation, as plead by us, consists of three chapters-the reformation of sinners, of Christians, and of religious institutions. I shall close my rather desultory remarks on the first chapter in the present letter. A few hints have been suggested on the manner in which the Scriptures ought to be quoted in proving and illustrating any point of faith or duty. We shall now at tend to the manner in which the gospel proclamation should be tendered to an audience. Of the manner of truth in general, as contradistinguished from the manner of error, we have said something; but in reference to the particular point now before us we have not yet written.

The present question is, How should the preacher apply his discourse to his audience at the close of it? The Christian preacher seldom finishes his addresses to sinners by proving the gospel to be true. This is the first part of his course. To prove that the gospel is a faithful saying, or a true report, is certainly the first point; to prove that it is worthy of all reception is the second point; and to press the immediate acceptance of it upon an audience, is the third and last point of a preacher's duty. This is the most important, and it is the most difficult and delicate point of the three. To address Jews or Pagans, such as those spoken to by the Apostles, would be comparatively an easy and a straight forward course; but appropriately to address those mongrel races of modern times, part Jews, part Pagans, and part Christians:-to convert such people from error to truthfrom theory to practice-from disobedience to obedience-from Satan to Christ-this is the work that requires the wisdom of a Paul and the eloquence of an Apollos.

To disabuse them of all their mistakes and prejudices-to

prepare their minds for a candid and faithful hearing, is an essential, though but a prefatory work: for so long as persons mistake both their own state and character, they cannot be set right in any great point of Christian holiness and righteousness. It is therefore essential that our hearers should be undeceived in that peculiar species of error under which they may have been educated. These are too numerous and various for our immediate specification, but they may be generalized under a few heads. Two or three of these most common and fatal errors merit our special attention:-First, the erroneous impression that our hereditary or accidental proximity to the Christian institutionsuch as our being born in a Christian country, within the pale of a reputable and orthodox profession, and of a religious and moral parentage, distinguish either our state or character, as respects justification before God, from that of a Jew, an Infidel, or a Pagan. Second, that an assent to the truth of the history of Christ, without a cordial reception of him as our Prophet, Priest, and King, and a believing and unreserved submission to him in the stipulated ordinances of the gospel, is accounted to us for justification. Third, that after such a full persuasion of the gospel facts, the promises and the precepts of Christ, and our need of his institution as it is opened to us by the Apostles, we must still wait for some other preparation of heart-some other mysterious drawings of the Holy Spirit, to predispose or enable us to obey him or cast ourselves upon his faithfulness and love, before we put him on by an immersion into his death and resurrection into his life.

These very common mistakes in their various branchings and bearings must be exposed and corrected, and prompt and immediate submission to Christ's authority and commandments en. forced upon all persons who acknowledge the divine person and mission of Jesus of Nazareth as the author of an eternal salvation to all who obey him.

Now the cardinal error of the popular proclamation of the gospel, is, that it usually ends in a boisterous and unmeaning appeal to the passions; or in a few very pleasing generalities, that leave a thousand doors open for the retreat of the hearers from the positive and express commandments of Jesus; or in such an ideal, mental, mystic closing in with the offers of Christ, as leaves our personal obedience to the gospel, or our immediate submission to its renovating institutions as unnecessary, inexpedient, and ceremonious.

Under this system persons come and go a thousand times to hear the gospel, without an opportunity of knowing whether they truly believe it, by promptly obeying it in the form of a command. In ancient times no one left the Apostles' preaching ignorant

whether he believed or disbelieved it. Indeed, the persons in attendance generally knew who did and who did not believe it; hence Luke says on one occasion, "Some believed the things that were spoken, and some believed them not;" and on another, "As many as were ordained to [or determined for] eternal life believed." If asked how this was known to themselves and others, we answer, Because a public confession of their faith and an immediate baptism declared the secret of what had passed in their hearts during the speech of the primitive preacher.

An opportunity, then, on all occasions when the gospel is preached, ought to be afforded to all convinced of its truth, for their immediate acknowledgment of Christ; nay, in the present day, that class of persons who occasionally attend the proclama. tion of the word, and submit not to its guidance, ought to be so pressed with its evidences and authority, and their own danger, as to leav› them no other excuse except that it is not true; in other words, to resolve their disobedience into a naked and unambiguous rejection or disbelief of the testimony of God.

I do not think that this ought to be done in every discourse, nor until the premises are fully stated, illustrated, and opened to the understanding of the auditors; but when this has been accomplished, it becomes our duty to press the subject, until all who hear it shall have an opportunity to say, by their conduct, they will or they will not obey him.

Meetings of some days' continuance in one place, or a series of discourses, opening and alleging the original gospel and its institutions, are in exact conformity to the apostolic plans; for they visited certain cities, and "fully preached" the gospel to them, "separating the disciples" from the multitude, or those who confessed the Lord into companies, called "churches." They then taught them how to obey in every thing.

There is no possibility of improving upon their plans. And in all matters the most minute, where the circumstances are at all analogous, we ought to adopt their expedients in preference to all others. The "ministration of the Spirit," or Gospel, was committed to them, and they were able ministers of the New Institution," and of course our teachers in all things connected with Christianity.

The human heart is the same; the gospel is the same; the kingdom of Christ the same; the world is still enmity against God; the preaching of the cross is yet foolishness with the sons of the old philosophers. The preaching of the gospel to those ignorant of it ought, therefore, to be now as it was at the beginning. The ordination of Christ is still that the gospel, the same gospel, should be preached; and that they who, as evangelists, devote their whole life to it, ought to live in it and of it, and earnestly