r outshines the constellations,
and whose bliss shall outlast eternity.

IV.

LAW AND LIFE.

"In the place where the tree falleth, there it shall
be."--ECCLES. xi. 3.

There are few passages in the word of God which are more constantly
misapplied than this. It is systematically wrested to the establishment
of doctrines with which it has nothing whatever to do. The popular
interpretation of the text treats it as equivalent to the assertion,
that the condition of the human soul through its long eternity is
settled absolutely and irrevocably by death. We believe that nine out of
ten, of those who hold this doctrine would quote this passage if they
were suddenly asked to sustain their belief out of the word of God. With
the truth of the doctrine in question we are not dealing in the present
discourse; there are passages in the word of God which bear on it with
most unquestionable cogency. But this is not one of them. Our present
purpose is to show what it _does_ mean, and that its reference is to a
subject which is well-nigh as far removed from that on which it is
supposed to bear as the poles.

We approach a dread, an awful subject, when we contemplate the condition
of those who pass into the unseen world impenitent and faithless; who
despise finally, as far as we can trace, the riches of the mercy and the
love of God. It is a subject which is occupying the most earnest and
solemn thoughts of some of the wisest of our Christian thinkers, and on
which a large freedom of judgment will have to be conceded within the
visible pale of the Christian Church. It is easy to state the doctrine
of universalism, and to offer it as a solution of the dark difficulties
with which the subject is surrounded. But it is not easy to get the
doctrine of universalism out of the Bible; nay, it is not possible,
without grievous violence to some of its plainest and most awful
statements: nor, on the other hand, is it easy to harmonize it with any
intelligent conceptions of the moral freedom and responsibility of every
child of the human race. Others seek refuge, for it is as a refuge that
they appear to cling to it, in the theory of annihilation--that is, the
annihilation on a vast scale of that which God made to be His
masterpiece, which He constituted in His own image, and into which He
infused by inspiration the breath of His own life. More grievous
violence must be done to the plain language of Scripture by the
advocates