probation is realized--that
voluntary acts form habits, and habits stereotype into a fixed
character. It is foolish to look to the process or moment of death for
redemption from sin; for death, as far as we know, only transplants us
with the character we have made for ourselves, and with continuous
consciousness, into the unknown world; so that if in this life we have
unfitted ourselves for God, we must find it out beyond death, and know
there the full meaning of our awful miscalculation here. And the
awakening of the 'lost' to what they have cast away--to the meaning of
irreversible self-exclusion from the presence of God--is imaged as
unspeakably awful; and their state is pictured in metaphors and phrases
descriptive both of torment and finality--'outer darkness,' 'gnawing
worm,' 'unquenchable fire,' 'eternal punishment,' 'eternal sin,' 'sin
which shall not be forgiven, neither in this world, nor in that which
is to come,' eternal 'death,' or exclusion from eternal life, 'eternal
ruin,' 'wrath and indignation, tribulation and anguish.'

In face of all these sayings, it seems to me indisputable that
'universalism'--the teaching that there are to be none finally lost--is
an instance of wilfulness. To speak of that which lies beyond death,
even in the case of the worst and most impenitent criminal, as a place

'Where God unmakes but to remake the soul
He else made first in vain--which must not be,'

is, I cannot but feel, in flat contradiction to the whole tone of the
New Testament.

{214}

It is no doubt true that there is in the New Testament an expectation
of a final unity of the whole universe in God, and that we find it hard
to conceive the relation of lost souls in hell to this final unity.
Certainly all legitimate avenues of dim conjecture that a very limited
revelation allows to be kept open, ought to be kept open. Certainly we
know in part--the partialness of our knowledge can hardly be
exaggerated. But we must be true to both elements in what is disclosed
to us; and Dr. Martineau has reminded us[3] how deeply 'the belief in a
separate heaven and hell, and a corresponding distribution of men into
only two classes of good and bad, friends and enemies of God,' though
'at first sight nothing can appear more unnatural and defiant of all
fact,' is yet bound up with 'the inward look' of moral evil and the
fundamental reality of moral choice. In fact it seems to be true to
say that a really Christian Th