Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/342

330 the future differ from those of the present? Is God variable or partial? Is not a probationary existence here wise? Could there be virtue or vice, happiness or wretchedness, without it? Could there be virtue or vice under constraint? Would obedience or disobedience that was perfunctory, or a sequence, or of habit, were it possible, be of any moral quality so as to be either pleasing or displeasing to God, or profitable or damaging to the soul? Or is there any greater probability of falling from virtue hereafter than here? But virtue is impossible anywhere without the alternative of vice; and, since the tendency to repeat is confirmed by repetition, and since virtue only accords with or is agreeable to the soul, is it not probable that the acquired taste for virtue shall continually increase until all other inclination of the soul shall cease, and virtue shall be loved for itself, and be practiced because it is so loved? And so vice can only be vice when it can be rejected. It, too, may be pursued to a habit, but it is always hostile to nature, and can never be relished; so that, since it is unnatural and disagreeable and unnecessary, it is not improbable that it will be resisted and ultimately be superseded by virtue; for will not the "evil" always "bow before the good"? This, at least, would be in accord with the order of nature, and could neither minify penalty nor reproach law, and would vindicate the divine righteousness in the creation and redemption of man, and be the fullest and the grandest exhibition of the divine wisdom and love to the intelligent universe.

To compass this end, Christian theology has resorted to purgatory, universalism, restoration, annihilation of the wicked, second probation, and other subterfuges, and has sought in scriptural teaching and in natural processes for a theodicy that would relieve the Creator from the reproach of the eternal punishment of sinners. To a greater or less extent all these schemes to rescue man from the unquenchable fire and the gnawings of the undying worm, or to justify their infliction, are evoked by shame or horror at the extreme severity of the penalty, and express the modifications which human wisdom and tenderness would interpose or substitute. They not only reproach God for inhumanity, but overlook the fact that his law could not be sanctioned nor be worthy of respect were its penalties either variable or transient.

Death—eternal disability—must follow the first and least as well as the last and greatest transgression, and the eternity of its infliction is based on sin and not on continuous sinning. But death does not end life. It is a stage in a process which marks the decay or loss experienced by a wasted moment or a neglected opportunity which never can be recovered, and the beginning of a new opportunity in life, and can be no more reproachful in its recurrence than in its incipience. The eternity of the reward and punishment is not only an expression of the sanctity of the law, but of the divine respect for it,