uls
hereafter in fitted companies. Similar characters will
spontaneously come together. The same qualities and grades of
sympathy will coalesce, the unlike will fly apart. And so all
future existence will be arranged in circles of dead equality on
stagnant levels of everlasting hopelessness of change. The law of
spiritual attraction is no such force as that, produces no such
results. It is broken up by contrasts, changes, multiplicity of
other interacting forces. We are not only drawn by affinity to
those like ourselves, but often still more powerfully, with
rebuking and redeeming effect, to those above us that we may
become like them, to those beneath us that we may pity and help
them. The law of affinity is not in moral beings a simple force
necessitating an endless uniformity of state, but a complex of
forces, sometimes mingling the unlike by stimulants of wedded
similarity and contrast to bless and advance all, now punishing,
now rewarding, but ever finally intended to redeem. Reasoning by
sound analogy, the heavens and hells of the future state are not
monotonous circles each filled with mutually reflecting
personalities, but one fenceless spiritual world of distinctive,
ever varying degrees, sympathetic and contrasted life, circulating
freshness, variety of attractions and repulsions, divine
advancement.

Finally, it is maintained by many that endless misery is the fate
of the reprobate because such is the sovereign pleasure of God.
This is no argument, but a desperate assertion. It virtually
confesses that the doctrine cannot be defended by reason, but is
to be thrown into the province of wilful faith. A host of gloomy
theologians have taken this ground as the forlorn hope of their
belief. The damned are eternally lost because that is the
arbitrary decree of God. Those who thus abandon reason for
dogmatic authority and trample on logic with mere reiterated
assertion can only be met with the flat denial, such is not the
arbitrary pleasure of God. Then, as far as argument is concerned,
the controversy ends where it began.

These four hypotheses include all the attempted justifications of
the doctrine of eternal misery that we have ever seen offered from
the stand point of independent thought. We submit that, considered
as proofs, they are utterly sophistical.

There are three great arguments in refutation of the endlessness
of future punishment, as that doctrine is commonly held. The first
argument is ethica