certainly transfixed to the core if they ever had any. He has fully shown, by all his blunders, first and last, that aci, whether by itself or in composition with any other word, does signify absolute eternity; and that there is no other word in any language more indicative, indeed none except its own representatives, so indicative of endless duration. He has shown us aei by itself, in aioon, in aidios, in æternus, and in every form, as the word which himself argues would have imported the endless woe of the wicked had it been so used. This he has positively and repeatedly, though ignorantly done.

15.-8th. His assertions about authorities have been fully shown to be of no credit. When his reputation has been suspended upon his redeeming his pledges, I need not repeat how it has been left to totter, to its entire prostration. This may have been the consequence of ignorance rather than of perversity; but this is a matter of which every one will think for himself despite of all that he or I may write about it. Should he now introduce the subject of verbal controversy after the ecclaircissement now before the community, I should feel myself acting out of character to spend another paragraph in reply to him. His assertions about the meaning of foreign words must now pass with us as matters of course, which will excite no more attention than the constant and monotonous lashing of the waves against the shore.

16.-9th. It is indeed a subject of awful moment, if, apart from the canting style and insulting diction of the letter before me, we could be permitted to examine and discuss it. I shall endeavor that the sequel be more intelligible and interesting to all my readers: for I think there is much useful matter of reflection which may come in our way in the common sense and scriptural view of the whole subject, which remains to be taken. We shall again, after this apology and explanation, return to Mr. Skinner.

17. In your courteous style, Mr. Skinner, you ask me, par. 9, for my authority for certain conclusions; and politely add, "that I well knew that you had never said any thing resembling such ideas." I well know that in Letter xxi. par 20, you say that notwithstanding all their pains, the brutal creation "still love life and cling to it, and doubtless on the whole enjoy much more than they suffer." "We, too," you add, "esteem life a blessing, and cling to it maugre all its troubles." And what is this but to say with the poet, "It is better to bear the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of"?-virtually making the love of life the choice of evils. "To be, or not to be," that is still the question which reason without the Bible cannot decide. We also argued on your allegata, that God is either just or unjust in inflicting present pain for transgression. If he cannot justly inflict eternal pain for eternal reasons, we argue that he cannot inflict temporal pain for temporal reasons: but he does the latter; therefore he is either unjust in the little or unjust in the much. Your system makes him unjust in little that he may be just in much-mine represents him just in little and in much

18. But you justify this injustice by assuming that temporal sufferings are means to a certain end. Well, be it so, if you please, and I assume, with more reason, that eternal punishment is a means to eternal ends, and that these ends are perfectly compatible with perfect justice and benevolence. If you, sir, will explain the justice of the pains and

sufferings of our stage and waggon-horses in any way that will not justify the eternal pains of him that wickedly and wantonly causes them to suffer, I will answer the hardest question in your Catechism. But you can escape from all difficulties on your present plan of disposing of the three-fourths of my last letter, by reproaching it and begging to be excused for not replying. Our readers, however, know how to interpret this. "They are sour grapes," said the fox, when he saw he could not reach them.

19. Your parade about a priori reasonings is wholly gratuitous and unworthy of any respect. Still, lest you or any one should imagine that it has any sense in it, I observe-that to prove a fact from an established first cause or law of nature, is a priori reasoning good and valid. But to suppose a law of nature or of the divine perfections-and then farther to suppose that law to be an adequate cause for an effect, is a priori reasoning false and deceitful in the superlative degree. And this is precisely your case, as I will abundantly prove. You imagine the laws and the causes of your effects by a priori reasonings, and, without detecting the sophistry, substitute your hypotheses for facts. Now-a-days we find out the laws of nature and of the divine government, so far as reason is employed, by reasoning a posteriori from the facts, effects, and events, up to their causes. You place your interpretation of the divine perfections for the perfections themselves. This is your first hypothesis. Then you imagine what will be consistent with these divine perfections. This is your second hypothesis. And finally you disprove eternal punishment because it is incompatible with both your first and second hypothesis. With half this expense of hypothesis you might fully prove the utter impossibility of the origination or existence of any moral or physical evil in God's creation. Had I supposed you could not have understood this, I should doubtless have fully explained it.

20. That you reason from hypothesis to facts is a truth which must not only be obvious to the uncommitted reader; but this alone fully explains your disquisitions upon the divine perfections. When I read over your preceding speculations upon the divine perfections, believe me I was forcibly reminded of the reasonings of one who first whispered to mankind, No danger! Eat:' "you shall be as gods, knowing both good and evil." "God is too good to punish you:' "You shall not surely die." "God is love, infinite and immutable love: he cannot punish sin!' How much truth in those hypothetical reasonings? Just as much as there is in yours. You have said many things about the divine perfections which I cordially approve. In the one hand you present a glass of pure water, but before it reaches our lips you infuse into it a few drops of adulterated wine, which discolor and vitiate the whole of it.

21. To illustrate: You say some correct things on four propositions: -God is omniscient; God is infinitely good; God is omnipotent; God is omnipresent. Three of these propositions are scripturally expressed; one of them is not. You introduce mathematical or metaphysical infinity in one proposition, and from your application of that term you poison all the good things you have said. "His understanding is infinite," says the Bible; but no where does it say he is infinitely good. This is as apocryphal as your quotation from the book of Wisdom to prove it.

It was homogeneous enough for you to quote the Apocrypha, as you have done, to prove this apocryphal interpolation. If two lines incline to each other at either end they are not parallel, and will when projected form an angle. So your interpolated proposition when extended contradicts the Bible: for God has not been infinitely good to the devil, nor infinitely good to Adam, nor to you, nor ever can be on your own mathematical reasonings: for, sir, if your head only ache once in a million of years, God never can be infinitely good to you!!-your theory being that omnipotence can prevent whatever infinite goodness dictates. He that practically admits your reasonings to be correct, takes a viper into his bosom, poisons his own bliss, and drinks to himself eternal death.

32. Your reasonings on God's perfections are false and most pernicious. Your trilemma is a mere trick in logic. I can make a child see through its folly. 1. "God," you say, "could save all mankind, but would not; or, 2. he would save all, but could not; or, 3d. he can save all mankind, and will save all." This is your trilemma. Here is another constructed after its model: "God could save all men from all temporal evils, but would not; or, 2. he would save all men from all temporal evils, but could not; or, 3. he can save all men and will save all men from temporal evils." Now, Mr. Skinner, choose the first, and you impugn God's benevolence and "infinite goodness;" choose the second, and you impugn his omnipotence; choose the third, and you declare a falsehood. Repair, then, your trilemma, if you can. In the same easy mode we can explode all your reasonings upon mathematical omnipotence, goodness, omnipresence, &c.

23. You reason most sophistically upon the word possible. You think of one perfection only when you use this word; namely, the power of God. I think of all his perfections. The word "possible" in my mouth has respect to all the perfections of God viewed together-in yours it has respect to simple power. Many things are impossible to the whole person called Mr. Skinner, which are quite possible to a part of him. It is impossible for the whole Mr. Skinner to be a matricide, a patricide, a fratricide. a filiicide, a suicide; and yet if Mr. Skinner have such relatives it is possible for a part of him to commit any one of these deeds. Singular logic in your ears, sir; but it is true logic. The whole Mr. Skinner cannot do what a part of him can do! Neither can the whole Creator do what a part of him could most easily perform. God can only do what is consistent with all his perfections.

21. He is supremely good to the whole universe; but he cannot be infinitely good to any member of it that ever suffered a single pain! Thus we dispose of your little universe of 1000 persons, each one capable of 1000 degrees of bliss, a million of bliss in all; but should only one of them fail of this state, whether annihilated or cursed with eternal woe, then your universe is minus 1000 degrees of possible bliss. Hence you add, "He would not produce the greatest possible amount of good to the whole." We shall now see how much logic is in your mathematically happy universe. Suppose that each one of your 1000 genii has suffered during the first part of his being a thousand earthly agonies, designed you say for his ultimate bliss; but which your Deity of omnipotent power and infinite goodness might have prevented by making and keeping him from the necessity of suffering these 1000 agonies→→

then your universe fails by a million of agonies of all possible bliss, through the infinite goodness and almighty power of its author! On your premises and conclusion God cannot be infinitely good to any man who has suffered on earth only a single agony; for he has been that agony minus infinite bliss. So ends your mathematical universe of mathematical bliss. Our theory is, that God's government will secure to his own universe the greatest possible good at the least possible expense of evil. But evil, moral and physical, is an unavoidable attendant on rational agency; and if God had not permitted, controlled, or punished it in some instances, and pardoned it in others, according to its meaning and desert, his justice, holiness, wrath, condescension, mercy, never could have been known at all, and none of his other perfections could have been so fully developed and glorified; consequently God could never have been enjoyed by any creature.

25. You eulogize the proposition God is love. A glorious proposition it is. I rejoice with joy unspeakable in the belief of it. But you pervert it the moment you change the subject into the predicate, and say, "Love is God." In this you err, as much as should you change the proposition "God is light" into Light is God, or God is spirit and Spirit is God. You say love is almighty, omniscient, omnipresent, &c. and why not say that love is jealous, just, true, indignant, not acquitting the guilty, but visiting the iniquities of fathers upon their children to the third and fourth generation of them that hate God? But this would not suit your purpose.

26. Your theological limb is not yet fully anatomized. As you have in a good measure ceased to reply to my objections, I shall have more time to descant upon the common sense and scriptural view of the question!

27. You believe in after death repentance, conversion, and sanctification in Purgatory. Of what use is the proposition God is love, when you teach that the proposition "God is continually angry with the wicked," will in the demonstrations of his wrath in the fires of Purgatory sanctify and save all that die in their sins, which has yet been a majority of mankind? A few texts of scripture and a little light upon your purgatorial punishment and its localities, with the length of its continuance, will be thankfully received at this office.

Benevolently and controversially yours,

A. CAMPBELL.

CO-OPERATION.

How harmless the dew-drops that sparkle like so many gems on the tender blades of grass, or the gentle drops that distill from the bosom of a vernal cloud, compared with the torrent that rushes from the mountain, or the overflowing floods that sweep the vallies along the water-courses! How impotent the hoary frosts of autumn, or the single flakes of snow that fall upon the Alpine hills, compared with the descending avalanche that rolls from its rocky summit, and in its mighty descent overwhelms families and flocks under the ponderous mass of its immense ac.

cumulations! So feeble are the individual efforts of a scattered few, compared with the concentrated power of co-operative hosts in any enterprize of good or ill to human kind!

Does any one doubt the necessity, the power, or the utility of co-operation in all the holy charities of Christian life-in all the benevolent efforts of Christian enterprize-let him devoutly listen to the triune voice of Nature, Providence, and Redemption, on this vital point.

These three infallible witnesses, clear, full, and eloquent in their testimony, harmoniously assert the necessity and the supremacy of co-operation in every great undertaking. Nature's laws and powers, singly and alone, never operate. She completes nothing by single efforts. Atoms come together and mountains rise. Vapors ascend and fill the atmosphere, and all the hosts of heaven are hid from our sight. Drops mingle into floods, and oceans spread over immense channels. Planets circle around their suns, and systems of worlds are formed. Solar systems revolve round a common centre, and a universe is complete. Thus Nature is one grand co-operative system of cooperations, by which, under the providential supervision of its great Author, innumerable series of new creations from her secret chambers and her immense laboratories, are constantly issuing into life and activity.

And under the providential management of the God of Nature what do we contemplate? Individuals form families; families grow into tribes; tribes into nations; nations into empires-and continents are filled with inhabitants. Of these empires each member contributes his mite, and its treasuries are filled with wealth. One class of co-operatives go to work, and the wilderness becomes a fruitful field, the morasses are drained, the pas tures are clothed with flocks-the vallies are filled with corn. Other classes combine their energies, and highways, cauals, aqueducts spread in every direction-villages, cities, temples, towers rise in all the rich variety of human taste, and fill the earth with all the conveniences, refinements, and elegancies of social life; navies are built and manned; harbors are constructed; arsenals are founded, and immense bulwarks are completed and armed with military hosts.

But does a nation forget God, break his covenants, forsake his worship, corrupt his institutions, and become unworthy of his protection? He them summonses his great armies. The caterpillar, the locusts, the canker and the palmer worms, his feeble soldiers, but his victorious armies, obey his mandate. They go forth. How puny the artillery of their teeth! how imperceptible their individual depredations! But their co operation how appalling! Before them the whole country is as the garden of