ints! And with how much greater enlargement
of heart will they praise Jesus Christ their Redeemer, that ever He was
pleased to set His love upon them, His dying love!'

Was the man who could utter such blasphemous sentiments--for so they
undoubtedly appear to us--a being of ordinary flesh and blood? One would
rather have supposed his solids to be of bronze, and his fluids of
vitriol, than have attributed to them the character which he describes.
That he should have been a gentle, meditative creature, around whose
knees had clung eleven 'young vipers' of his own begetting, is certainly
an astonishing reflection. And yet, to do Edwards justice, we must
remember two things. In the first place, the responsibility for such
ghastly beliefs cannot be repudiated by anyone who believes in the
torments of hell. Catholics and Protestants must share the opprobrium
due to the assertion of this tremendous doctrine. Nor does Arminianism
really provide more than a merely verbal escape from the difficulty.
Jeremy Taylor, for example, draws a picture of hell quite as fearful and
as material as Edwards', and, if animated by a less fanatical spirit,
adorned by an incomparably more vivid fancy. He specially improves upon
Edwards' description by introducing the sense of smell. The tyrant who
fastened the dead to the living invented an exquisite torment; 'but what
is this in respect of hell, when each body of the damned is more
loathsome and unsavoury than a million of dead dogs, and all those
pressed and crowded together in so strait a compass? Bonaventure goes so
far as to say that if one only of the damned were brought into this
world, it were sufficient to infect the whole earth. Neither shall the
devils send forth a better smell; for, although they are spirits, yet
those fiery bodies unto which they are fastened and confined shall be of
a more pestilential flavour.' It is vain to attempt an extenuation of
the horror, by relieving the Almighty from the responsibility of this
fearful prison-house. The dogma of free-will is a transparent mockery.
It simply enables the believer to retain the hideous side of his creed
by abandoning the rational side. To pass over the objection that by
admitting the existence of chance it really destroys all intelligible
measures of merit and of justice, the really awful dogma remains. You
still believe that God has made man too weak to stand alone, that He has
placed him amidst temptations where his fall, if n