8-Because, in the second place, you allege that the punishment of hell expiates sin, which no punishment in this life accomplishes. This peculiarity of your purgatorial punishment calls for special proof. In proving that your purgatorial punishment expiates sin, you must reconcile that idea with Hebrews i. 3; vii. 27; ix. 12, 13, and very many such passages, as intimate that the death, or blood, or sacrifice of Christ expiates sin. If Christ's sacrifice expiates sin, how can the punishment of the wicked expiate it? One of the two is redundant. If Christ's death expiates sin, the pains of the wicked cannot do it; if the pains of the wicked do it, Christ's death cannot have done it. I say, then, Mr. Skinner. you must prove that your purgatorial pains do expiate sin, or give up your purgatory. 9-Because, in the third place, you allege that the punishment of your prison, or purgatory, (give me a more appropriate name for it, and I will cheerfully use it,) necessarily terminates in holiness or the perfect love of God. Now, sir, if the wrath of God works love in the human heart, why has not God tried it in this world? Here he uses 'goodness to lead men to repentance'-here he displays love unspeakable to produce love in the human heart. Now, sir, explain to us this new philosophy: two opposite causes produce the same effect. The love of God produces perfect love, and the wrath of God produces perfect love! And stranger still, those hardened by the love of God here, are to be softened by the wrath of God hereafter! You must not explain away this word wrath. Recollect Paul says, "Being now justified by Christ's blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him:” Christ "has delivered us [Christians] from the wrath to come." " And Jesus says, "He that believeth not, the wrath of God abides on him,” &c. &c. 10-Because, in the fourth place, punishment in this life does not even under its pressure prevent sinning. Men are punished, often punished, as were Pharaoh and the Jews, and yet sinning all the while. Now as you inform us that in your purgatory men will stop sinning when God begins punishing, please name the passages of scripture which sustain these novel assumptions. 11-You assume, first, that the wicked who are cast into your prison, or hell, or purgatory, will come out. 2d. To prove this assumption you assume that this punishment expiates the guilt of sin. 3d. You assume that this punishment works holiness, or sanctifies all who are the subjects of it. And, 4th, you assume that men will have to expiate the sins of this life only in hell; for that while there they wil! cease sinning and all become good from the first moment-indeed you make them good and holy the first instant they enter hell: for there they never sin, and only continue as long as to expiate the sins of this life. These are all very extraordinary propositions, and require, if you please, Mr. Skinner, a word of proof-chapter and verse, sir, if you please. I believe you have twice quoted the Apocrypha in this controversy. I now want a text from the canonical Scriptures! 12-But, sir, your whole doctrine of post mortem holiness as the result of punishment, is stultified and nullified by your fourth assumption. I therefore print it in capitals-MEN CEASE SINNING AND BECOME HOLY THE MOMENT THEY ENTER YOUR PURGATORY. HOW, THEN, DOES PUNISHMENT MAKE THEM HOLY!! You have yet remaining as much sense as to see that if you do not make them quit sinning when they enter your prison, they never can get out; but you had not sense enough to see that this admission explodes your whole doctrine of the sanctifying tendency of punishment: for they are holy before the punishment begins; and therefore you have made God punish holy beings! To return some of your fine sayings, What a soul-withering doctrine! what a horrid system of nonsense and iniquity is your Restorationism! You had better decline the proof! 13-Another beautiful trait in your system is, that it precludes pardon altogether. There is no forgiveness with your Divinity. You say, par. 13, that "God does and will punish every sinner according to the full demerit of his crimes, and there is no escape." These are your own words, and they are the true result of your system; therefore I have italicised them. Then where is the mercy of God-yes, the mercy of God! He punishes without exception, without escape, all sinners; and that, too, according to the full demerits of their crimes. Why talk of mercy, then!! For what did Christ die, if every sinner must still suffer the full demerit of all his sins—if God forgives not one sin? Why did David sing, and Paul preach, "Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered!" "Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin." With you, sir, there is no such man-all men suffer in this life all the punishment due for all their sins; or if they do not, they go into your penitentiary, and there they pay the last farthing, and come out without any gratitude or thanks to God or Christ. He is in justice, without mercy, bound to open the prison doors; for they have been punished according to the full demerits of their crimes. Why, sir, Deism is pure and undefiled religiongood sense, good logic and gospel, rather than your Restorationism. 11-It is, sir, not true-it is, sir, a calumny of your own invention, when, to revile the doctrine of forgiveness, you say, that "if they will repent and be baptized at your hands, they shall surely escape the threatened death." No, sir, I never taught so. Jesus says, "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved"—from his past sins; and if "by patient continuance in well-doing he seeks for glory, honor, and inmortality," Paul says, "he shall receive eternal life." So I preach. 15-My version of your trilemma has, I perceive, thoroughly refuted it. You have confirmed it by making a new one-without point or bearing 16-You do not state my views, sir, when you say that "the greatest possible good of the universe consists in the salvation of a minority of the universe," and that "the least possible expense of evil consists in the eternal damnation of a majority." Such a view is not in the premises, and therefore it cannot be in the conclusion. What proportions of human kind shall be saved I know not. An immense multitude there will be, when all the days and generations of millennial light, and bliss, and righteousness shall have been completed. This is a poor defence of your system against the drawbacks of all possible bliss stated in my review of your mathematical happy universe, Letter 24, par. 24. For any thing that appears to the contrary in my premises, ten to one of human kind may be saved. 17-In conclusion of your letter now under examination, do you not admit a Purgatory, but not a Catholic Purgatory? Is it a Restoration Purgatory? Touching its localities and attributes I renew all my former requests. You say spiritual light is God! and that spiritual love is God! Need I reply? And you say, "In my next letter I shall dispose of the remainder" of (as if you had not yet begun to notice) my letters Nos. 26 and 28. Well, if you do all this in your next, after a reasonable share of abuse, and after telling us the one hundred and first time how completely you have vanquished, confuted, refuted, exploded and disproved every word, letter, and point that I have written, you will have expiated at least one of your former sins of omission. We shall look for it, however, without fear or hope. 18-Having nothing more to reply to, I shall commence an examination of the tendencies of your system. Your theory of a future stateof a penal dispensation issuing in the salvation of all subjected to it, stultifies and nullifies the gospel dispensation to all intents and purposes. The incarnation of THE WORD, the sufferings and death of the Messiah, the ministry of angels, apostles, and prophets-the ordinary preaching and teaching of the word, and indeed the gospel system of justification and sanctification, of which the New Testament speaks, and of which it is so prominent and efficient a part, are all demonstrably useless and worse than useless on your imaginative hypothesis. If it be true, the gospel is vain and worse than vain. 19-Let us, then, distinctly state your penal system, and hastily survey its most striking features. Taking into view the whole world of mankind-the Pagan nations, the Turks, the Jews, and all the Infidels an immense majority, you say, live and die in their sins. Well, now, this overwhelming majority of human kind are all the proper subjects of your penal system, and are all saved in due time by its influence upon them. Hence, of all the inhabitants of this planet for six thousand years, an innumerable majority are hereafter to come forth out of your penal system, pure as the silver from the furnace, holy as God, and fitted for the happy abodes of the eternally blessed. In one word, your penal fires of hell, or your penal system, saves all its subjects -not one of them is forever lost. It triumphantly saves all-Cain, Ahab, Judas, Nero, Caligula, Heliogabulus, the Devil, and all his angels are its splendid trophies. It is, then, decidedly more powerful, successful, and triumphant than the gospel: for it is conceded on all hands that as yet but comparatively few of those who hear the gospel are saved by it. In this first and grand character of the two systems, the gospel system and the penal system, the latter is incomparably superior to the former-the penal to the gospel plan. 20-But in reply to this you will doubtless allege that the gospel is nevertheless not useless, because it saves some from sin and from the penal fires of your Purgatory; and besides, it has contributed much to the civilization and temporal prosperity and happiness of the world. Admit all this, and still it is useless and worse than useless; because, in the first place, had there been no gospel at all, the penal system, seeing it infallibly saves all its subjects, could as easily have saved all that the gospel saves as it does all that the gospel fails to save. Indeed those that the gospel saves would be more easily saved by the penal system than those it fails to save. Now it is useless to employ both a perfect and an imperfect system. The former is sufficient without the latter. 21-But I have said it is worse than useless-because the good that it does here is incomparably more than counterbalanced by the evil it produces under your penal dispensation. We admit all you say of the good the gospel does here, and still affirm that it is worse than useless; because it is admitted on all hands that the doom of those who hear the gospel and turn away from it, will be inexpressibly more fearful, woful, and wretched than the doom of the Indian and the Pagan who heard it not. Now as there are more who reject than obey the gospel, there is a positive accumulation of guilt which will, under your penal system, require a corresponding increase or duration of misery; and thus the alleviation of pain produced by the gospel here is more than counterbalanced by the aggravation and accumulation of pain and anguish there. So that if the gospel only enhances the condemnation and misery of two for one it saves, which all must allow, then the increased or protracted punishment of only two millions for example, under your penal dispensation, outweighs the whole gain of the one million saved by the gospel, who, had there been no gospel, would, like the devil and his angels and all wicked men, (only still more easily,) have ultimately come out of your furnace-your gehenna, pure as the light of heaven. It is worse than useless in a general system, on the admission of the objection alleged. 22-Let me add, sir, that if the common views of the present state of the Pagan, Mahometan, and Jewish worlds be correct-that is, if those who are borne and brought up in gross darkness as to the gospel, are liable to the least imaginable quantum of punishment; and if your system of the salutary, converting, and sanctifying power of the penal fires of hell upon the soul, be correct, it would have been infinitely better to have suffered all the world to to be as ignorant as the Amazonian or the Arabian, and to have sojourned for a time under the mildest chastisements of your imaginative Orcus, and by a shorter passage have escaped to heaven, than to have enlightened them by the gospel and subjected them to the unmingled vials of divine indignation and the long protracted sufferings under the penal system for the deeper guilt of disobeying the gospel of the grace of God and slighting the mediation of his beloved Son. This, sir, on the general scheme of divine government, makes the gospel rather a curse than a blessing to mankind in the aggregate, and, as I before said, stultifies and nullifies the whole remedial system. But, sir, here I must close before I have finished my picture of the inutility and folly of your system. Now, sir, in your next, after your regular portion of abuse, and of enumerating your triumphs, please notice this point somewhat specially. Faithfully, A. CAMPBELL. MR. LYND'S THIRD ATTEMPT. From the Cross & Baptist Journal. REPLY TO MR. CAMPBELL. Mr. C's philosophy of divine power is not the philosophy of facts. That men possess but two kinds of power, physical and moral, is founded upon fact. That their physical and moral power is confined within certain limits, even in regard to possible things, is also 38 VOL. II.-N. 8. founded upon fact. But to say that God possesses no other kind of power than physical and moral, as Mr. C has defined them, or to say that God cannot act upon mind or spirit in any other way than we operate upon spirit, is altogether an assumption. It is unsustained by a single fact. It is an incomprehensible theory. Will Mr. C. make an effort to sustain this position? Will he in his next reply give us the facts upon which this philosophy is based? He cannot do it. He cannot find a single fact in nature or revelation.This whole philosophy ought therefore to be discarded as the baseless fabric of a vision.He may say that he cannot conceive of any other kind of power, and that he is not therefore required to admit any other. But he cannot conceive how Father, Son, and Holy Spirit can be one God, and upon the same principle he is not required to believe in any such existence of Deity. The only possible way in which he can escape this result is by calling the latter a fact, and the former a theory. There is one point to which I would especially direct the reader's attention, because it will clearly prove that Mr. C. is exceedingly embarrassed by my arguments. His work called "Christianity Restored," from which I quoted, was doubtless prepared with great care; and it is obvious that Mr. C employed, as he thought, the greatest exactness in his views of divine influence, particularly in relation to its foundation principles. Now if he had not been embarrassed by the arguments which I offered, he would have made an effort to sustain these principles; whereas one great effort has been to avoid them as much as possible by shifting the meaning of his own words. Let it be observed then, that one foundation principle with him was, that physical power could operate upon matter only, and moral power upon mind only. He uses the strongest language which he can find to express this principle. He says, 'When we think of the power of the Spirit of God exerted upon minds or human spirits, it is impossible for us to imagine that that power can consist in any thing else but words or arguments.' In my reply this position was fairly met by a reference to his own words in another part of the dialogue between Austin and Timothy. These are the words: 'In primitive times a whole congregation expressed all the same words at the same instant, the Holy Spirit suggesting to each individual the same ideas and expressions, at one and the same impulse.' To this I remarked, 'If we are asked to define this kind of influence we cannot. We know it was not physical, (i. e. according to Mr. C's definition,) for it had relation to mental operations. We know it was not moral, (i. e. according to Mr. C's definition,) for neither words nor actions, addressed to the ear and the eye, were employed. We cannot produce such results in men, either by physical or moral power, and yet these are the only kinds of power we can define and employ. If then the Holy Spirit could suggest to the minds of a whole congregation at the same instant, the same ideas and expressions, we cannot doubt his power to give to divine truth an impression upon the mind which it could not have independently of such power.' Did not this argument at once demolish his position? Here is a case exactly in point, in which we can think of the power of the Spirit of God upon human minds, without words or arguments. And in the February number Mr C. expressly deelares that these suggestions or inspirations are not moral influences. Physical then they cannot be upon his own showing, for he says, that physical power cannot act upon mind. But now for the difficulty. How does he manage it? By complaining that I enlarge the capacity of the word moral, and make it equal to the word mental. Well, is Mr. C. then prepared to abandon his position, that physical power cannot operate upon mind? Or will he say that moral pertains to the mind, and mental does not? No, there is still another method of getting over the difficulty, and that is that physical power cannot operate upon mind to change its moral hue. Now let the reader observe that this was not Mr. C's position. His assertion was this, "When we think of the power of God exerted upon minds or human spirits, it is impossi ble for us to imagine that that power can consist in any thing else but words or arguments. I showed from his own words that we can conceive of that power consisting in something else than words or arguments. And now his explanation about operating upon mind to change its moral hue, is a full admission that God can operate upon minds without words or arguments. He did operate upon the minds of the Apostles to bring all things that Jesus |