devil) and take away his armour and divide
his spoils" (Luke xi. 21, 22). "He was manifested to _put away_ sin by
the sacrifice of Himself" (Heb. ix. 26). "God hath not cast away His
people whom He foreknew ... and so _all Israel shall be saved_" (Rom.
xii. 25-33). "The times of the _Restoration of all things_ which God
hath promised by the mouth of all His holy prophets since the world
began" (Acts iii. 21). "As in Adam _all_ die, even so in Christ shall
_all_ be made alive. But every man in his own order: Christ the
first-fruits; afterwards they that are Christ's at His coming. Then
cometh the end ... when all things have been _subjected unto Him_[4]
... then shall the Son also be subjected unto Him that put all things
under Him that God may be all in all" (1 Cor. xv. 22-29).

One can see how the constant study of such passages should lead men to
an enthusiastic hope and lead them to study less carefully the stream
of darker teaching that seemed to conflict with these. Whatever may be
said against the advocates of Universalism we at least owe to them a
clearer emphasizing of the mysterious hopefulness of Scripture as to
the final triumph of good.

But with deep reluctance one is bound to assert that the advocates of
Universal Salvation to a great degree ignore or explain away
unsatisfactorily much of the sterner side of the Bible. For amid all
its hopefulness there is a steadily persistent note in Scripture,
stern, awful, sorrowful, which seems impossible to reconcile with
Universalism. There are clear and repeated assertions that some men at
any rate will not be saved. It is St. Paul, the author of so many of
those hopeful Scriptures quoted, who tells us "even weeping" of men
"whose end is destruction" (Phil. iii. 19), and of those whose fate
shall be "eternal destruction from the presence of God" (2 Thess. i.
9). It is the loving Christ Himself who said of one of His apostles,
"It were good for that man if he had not been born" (St. Matt. xxvi.
24).

We are warned back too by the tendency of character to grow permanent.
And when we are told that God "willeth all men to be saved," and that
God can do everything, we are forced to ask, Can God do contradictory
things? Can God make a door to be open and shut at the same time? Can
God make a thing to be and not to be at the same time? Can God make a
man's will free to choose good or evil and yet secure that he shall
certainly choose good at the last? O