world the ravages of their actual crimes by hurling them into hell
beneath the endless penalty of their latent infinite guilt. In
reply to those who argue thus, it is obvious to ask, whence did
they learn all this? There is no such scheme drawn up or hinted in
Scripture; and surely it is not within the possible discoveries of
reason. Plainly, it is not a known premise legitimating a result,
not a sound argument proving a conclusion: it is merely a conceit,
devised to explain and fortify a theory already embraced from
other considerations. It is an imaginative hypothesis without
confirmation.

16 Bretschneider, in his Systematische Entwickelung aller in der
Dogmatik vorkommenden Begriffe, gives the literature of this
subject in a list of thirty six distinct works. Sect. 139, Ewig
keit der Hollenstrafen.

17 Thomas Aquinas, Summa, pars iii. suppl. qu. 99, art. 1.

Thirdly, it has been said that future punishment will be endless
because sin will be so. The evil soul, growing ever more evil,
getting its habits of vice and passions of iniquity more deeply
infixed, and surrounded in the infernal realm with all the
incentives to wickedness, will become confirmed in depravity
beyond all power of cure, and, sinning forever, be necessarily
damned and tortured forever. The same objection holds to this
argument as to the former. Its premises are daring assumptions
beyond the province of our knowledge. They are assumptions, too,
contrary to analogy, probability, the highest laws of humanity,
and the goodness of God. Without freedom of will there cannot be
sin; and those who retain moral freedom may reform, cease to do
evil and learn to do good. There are invitations and opportunities
to change from evil to good here: why not hereafter? The will is
free now: what shall suddenly paralyze or annihilate that freedom
when the soul leaves the body? Why may not such amazing
revelations be made, such regenerating motives be brought to bear,
in the spiritual world, as will soften the hardest, convince the
stubbornest, and, sooner or later, transform and redeem the worst?
It is true the law of sinful habit is dark and fearful; but it is
frequently neutralized. The argument as the support of a positive
dogma is void because itself only hypothetical.

Some have tried to prove eternal condemnation by an assumed
necessity of moral gravitation. There is a great deal of loose and
hasty talk afloat about the law of affinities distributing so