two children snatched away by disease when twenty
four hours old, one has been baptized, the other not: the angels
of heaven welcome that, the demons of hell clutch this. The
doctrine of infant damnation, intolerably painful as it is, has
been proclaimed thousands of times by authoritative teachers and
by large parties in the Church, and is a logical sequence from the
popular theology. It is not a great many years since people heard,
it is said, the celebrated statement that "hell is paved with the
skulls of infants not a span long!" Think of the everlasting bliss
or misery of a helpless infant depending on the petty accident of
whether it was baptized or not! There are hypothetical cases like
the following: If one man had died a year earlier, when he was a
saint, he would not have fallen from grace, and renounced his
faith, and rolled in crimes, and sunk to hell. If another had
lived a year later, he would have been smitten with conviction,
and would have repented, and made his peace, and gone to heaven.
To the everlasting loss of each, an eternity of bliss against an
eternity of woe hung fatally poised on the time appointed for him
to die. Oh how the bigoted pride, the exclusive dogmatism of self
styled saints, self flatterers equally satisfied of their own
election and of the rejection of almost everybody else, ought to
sink and fade when they reflect on the slight chances, mere
chances of time and place, by which the infinite contingency has
been, or is to be, decided! They should heed the impregnable good
sense and logic conveyed in the humane hearted poet's satirical
humor when he advises such persons to

"Consider well, before, like Hurlothrumbo,
They aim their clubs at any creed on earth,
That by the simple accident of birth
They might have been high priests to Mumbo Jumbo."

It is evidently but the rankest mockery of justice to suspend an
infinite woe upon an accident out of the power of the party
concerned.

Still further: there is a tremendous injustice even in that form
of the doctrine of endless punishment, the most favorable of all,
which says that no one is absolutely foreordained to hell, but
that all are free, and that life is a fixed season of probation
wherein the means of salvation are offered to all, and if they
neglect or spurn them the fault is their own, and eternal pain
their merited portion. The perfectly apparent inconsistency of
this theory with known facts is fatal to it, since out of