MORTALITY. O! why should the spirit of mortal be proud? The leaves of the oak and the willow shall fade, Be scattered around and together be laid, And the young and the old, and the low and the high, The child whom a mother attended and lov'd, The maid on whose brow, on whose cheek, in whose eye And alike from the minds of the living eras'd Are the mem'ries of mortals who lov'd her and prais'd. The band of the king that the sceptre hath borne, The saint who enjoy'd the communion of Heaven, The peasant whose lot was to sow and to reap, So the multitude goes, like the flower or the weed So the multitude comes, even those we behold, For we are the same that our fathers have been, The thoughts we are thinking our fathers would think, They loved, but the story we cannot unfold; They died!-ah! they died!-We things that are now, Yea, hope and despondency, pleasure and pain, And the smile and the tear, and the song and the dirge, "Tis the wink of an eye, 'tis the draught of a breath From the blossom of health to the paleness of death, • From the gilded saloon to the bier and the shroudQ! why should the spirit of mortal be proud? UTICA, August 9, 1838. Dear Sir-I SHALL now (having fully and scripturally proved my fourth proposition) return to the review of your 24th and 26th letters. (The reader will please re-examine them.) These letters are an anomaly in an anomalous series of indignant and contemptuous letters. You have here given an extra touch to your former gasconade, pedantry, abuse, and effrontery. In defiance of all the rules of courtesy and decorum, you have departed from your address directly to myself, and appealing to the worst prejudices of your readers, have deliberately set yourself to reproaching and insulting me personally, the views I entertain, and the Christian denomination to which I belong. You have unblushingly compared yourself to Michael, the archangel, and me to Satan. You have no less than five or six times travelled directly out of your way, for the sake of ranking me and those of my faith with deists, atheists, infidels, mammonites, &c. and our views with theirs. 2. You pretend that "it is "most repugnant to your feelings," and with great reluctance" that you have pursued such a course in this controversy, and yet almos: your entire letters breathe a spirit of deep bitterness and indignant contempt, of disappointed ambition and mortified pride. An opinion which I hold, but which has nothing to do with this discussion, and which you neither can, nor attempt to refute by argument, you have nine times introduced in these two letters, in every distorted form, and attempted to ridicule and reproach as the doctrine of purgatory, a name which neither myself nor any other enlightened person, ever gives it. Your leaving my address, and attempting to apologize to your readers for such a course, evinces that you have been severely lectured by your best friends, for the manner of your conducting this discussion, and that they are greatly dissatisfied therewith. How far your additional abuse and insults to me and my opinions will tend to satisfy and pacify them towards you, I know not; but I altogether mistake their intelligence if it does not still further disgust and mortify them. VOL II-N S. 37 3. You have wounded yourself far more than me, and mortified and grieved your own friends far more than mine. The truth is, this is not a Papal country: for though your bulls might silence a few of your friends, (for instance, those like Spencer, who began this discussion.) they cannot, with equal facility, silence all of them. They will think, and by and by they will speak. It is for your sake, therefore, and the reputation of this discussion, generally, that I regret the ungentlemanly and unchristian course you pursue. In your 24th letter, you attempt to play off your old game of sophistry, misrepresentation, and ridicule. You persist in maintaining that sempiternus is not a compound, but a simple word, and say that I attempt to find in æternus a root and reason for fernus in sempiternus." This is false. I never attempted nor pretended any such thing. I said sempiternus was a compound from semper, always, and æternus, [not ternus merely,] and though Lexicons generally do not mention it as a compound, it being so plain that a tyro, a child, would know it, yet I have the highest authority for the assertion. Dumesnil, in his "Latin Synonyms," than whom no scholar of the present day will ask higher authority, gives the following as the roots and definition of the word: "SEMPITERNUS (semper æternus) enlarges upon the idea of æternus." And yet you attempt to lampoon me for agreeing with this eminent critic. Will you "call the devil a saint," now you are proved to be so great "a scholar and a critic?" 4. What you say of Kneeland, may go for what it is worth. But you have not impeached, and cannot impeach the reputation of Scarlett and Creighton, whose work was highly recommended by the most eminent literati of their day. It is useless to say more on aperantos: for in either derivation, the reader must perceive it is quite as applicable to time as to space. You say I give myself for authority that aidios is compounded of aei and dios. I have your own authority for saying aei forms a part of the word; and I have four Greek letters maintaining their unaltered position in proof that dios forms the other part. Suppose, sir, a man affirms that the English compound ever-during, is composed of ever and during. You demand his authority from some Lexicon: he tells you that is unnecessary, for the statement is so obviously true as to need no proof, as a self-evident truth admits of none. You then go to ridiculing him for giving himself as authority! The same may be said of the words archbishop, archdeacon, and hundreds of other words in our and all languages. Instead of answering the questions in my 23d letter, relative to the use and meaning of the letters di in the middle syllable of aidios, in your June number of the Harbinger you reprint them, and change (apparently on purpose) the d i into a i (the two first letters,) and then leave them to the contempt of your readers! 5. But, sir, the composition of aidios is a matter of small moment with me, though you talk as if the whole controversy depended on it. It is only one of the ten words adduced by me in proof of the third proposition. I can very well spare it. I do not need it. The proposition is abundantly sustained without it, even by your own concession relative to the meaning of five of the other words, and Hedericus' definition of a sixth, (athanatos, defined immortalis, sempiternus, æternus, perpetuus,) and hence I will, for the sake of the argument, concede every thing you say of aidios-that it has but one root, one significant part, viz., aei. And what have you gained? Nothing: for though we both agree that the word means endless, yet as yet it is not applied to punishment, it cannot prove the latter to be endless. And furthermore, its sense of endless, if you are right in its construction, must be derived from its general usage, and not merely from the force of aei. Thus neither aci, aion, nor aionios from the same root, can prove the endless duration of punishment. 6. This will further appear from the following facts: 1st. We have examined all the passages in the New Testament in which aei occurs uncompounded, and in not one of its eight occurrences there, does it signify endless duration. 2d. The numerous passages of scripture adduced where aionios occurs in a limited, and necessarily limited sense, clearly show that this of itself cannot unequivocally prove endless duration. And, 3d, (perhaps the reader will smile at the authority, and you again complain of misrepresentation!) the Rev. Alexander Campbell himself, thus defines aion, in Table XIV. of the Appendix to the third edition of his version of the New Testament, 8vo. edition, 1835: "AGE, aion, (derived from aei, always, and on, being.) Its radical idea is indefinite duration. It is in all versions differently translated. We have the phrase eis aiona, or eis ton aivna, in the singular form thirty-two times, and in the plural form twenty-six times, transla ted in the common version 'always' and 'forever.' The phrases since and 'before the aion (world) began,' occur in Luke i. 70; John ix. 32; Acts iii. 21, and xv. 18; Eph. iii. 9. The phrases sun telei ton aionos, occurs in Matthew five times, rendered 'end of the world;' by Doctor Campbell, 'the conclusion of the state;' and in Heb. ix. 26, in the plural form, rendered once in the end of the world,' &c. &c. (See the whole article published in the number of the Magazine and Advocate containing this letter. And, sir, will you oblige me by republishing the whole of it in your Harbinger?) 7. Thus, sir, you have cut your throat with your own weapon. You say, in the unexcited hour of calm investigation, in your study by yourself, when no controversy is pending, the RADICAL meaning of aion is INDEFINITE DURATION, and we read of the END of aion five times in Matthew,&c. Ecce homo! Behold now your unenviable position! On the first proposition you conceded that neither sheol, hades, nor gehenna, did or could of themselves express endless misery, and that aionios, your favorite term for endless, was never applied to either of them. You subsequently affirmed positively, that gehenna was never used literally in the New Testament, and never meant a literal punishment in the valley of Hinnom. I quoted from one of your own notes (on Matthew v. 22 ) and fully refuted that statement. You accused me of garbling_and misrepresenting your note, and asked me to publish the whole. It is done, sir, in the paper containing this letter. Will you publish it entire in the Harbinger? 8. You took the position that aion and aionion were more unequivocally expressive of endless duration, than any other word—that if they mean not duration without end, there is no word in human speech that does, and thus suspended the doctrine of endless misery upon this single hair. Your own definition of aion, above quoted, completely severs that hair, and the doctrine falls. Where is it? "And Echo answers, Where?" You have conceded the affirmative of the third proposition; and I have amply proved the fourth. If, sir, there is a single argument of yours up to this point, that is not completely transfixed to the core, and mostly by your own weapons, my judgment is strangely at fault. You remind me of king Saul in his last moment of desperation he rushes on his own sword, and lets out his own bowels. You also remind me of poor Sampson grinding at the mill of Gaza with both eyes put out. Like him, you appear not to know where you go. Like him, you seize the pillars of the house wherein you stand. Like him, you bow yourself with all your strength. But, unlike him, in its fall, you crush only yourself in the ruins! I pity you, my friend: but really your fate seems to be richly merited. 9. I care not what you say about ex post facto words. Having fully proved my fourth proposition, I am at perfect leisure and liberty to go back to the third, or second, or even first, as often as you do. And, sir, I assure you I intend to follow you up in all your wily meanderings, and do up this work thoroughly. You say these additional words are not in the New Testament. I did not say they were. They are equally applicable to the third proposition. And I say they are Greek words, and would be likely to be in the New Testament, and applied to punishment, had the inspired writers intended to represent punishment as endless. The misspelling of the Greek words quoted, of which you speak, happens to be, in this as well as in several other previous instances, on your own part. I follow the Greek orthography: you do not. But as your criticism here is hornless, although it has hoofs, it is as harmless as its prototype! 10. What you say about my having "long flourished by dint of my Hebrew, Greek, and Latin lore," and being "reckless, bold, and dogmatical to a proverb," I am perfectly willing to leave to the decision of my regular readers for the last eleven years, and that they should compare my course with that of my learned opponent in this discussion. They all know right well that I have never made any great pretensions to a knowledge of either of those languages: and I think by this time they are satisfied that a very moderate share of that kind of knowledge is quite sufficient to refute the first two, and establish the last two propositions under discussion. 11. Your 17th paragraph is really amusing. You undertake to prove your assertion that I had maintained that life was an evil. You make two quotations from me to prove it, and both of them go directly against you, and refute your charge. You then make a distorted quotation from Shakspear's Hamlet, and assert that you have proved me guilty of the charge! A affirms he has never seen a white blackbird-he repeats the affirmation. B says he has seen one. C then stoutly maintains that, taking the assertions of both together, they positively prove that A says he has seen a white blackbird! And this alphabetical C is my friend of the Harbinger! The conclusion of your 17th paragraph contains a palpable sophism. Show me eternal reasons for eternal pain, and I will concede the truth of the latter. Temporal punishments are inflicted for temporal sinning. Prove eternal sinning, and I grant eternal suffering. But you have not proved, nor attempted to prove either eternal sinning or any other eternal reason for eternal pain. 12. When you will show any beneficient and eternal ends compatible with the divine character and the good of the whole universe, or any |