think I should have started for heaven. You say, "I will not be scared in that way. I will not be affrighted by any future punishment." You are quite mistaken. I can frighten you half to death in five minutes. As you are walking along the streets, let me pull down the house-scaffolding, weighing two or three tons, about your head, and you will look as white as a sheet, while your heart will thump like a trip-hammer. Now, if it is not ignoble to be affrighted about a falling scaffold, is it ignoble to be affrighted by a threat from the Omnipotent God, who with one stroke of his right hand could crush the universe? You ask how God, being a father, could let us suffer in the future world? I answer your question by asking how God, being a father, can let suffering be in this world? Tell me why he allowed that woman to whom I administered the holy sacrament this afternoon to have a cancer; tell me why children suffer such pains in teething, the lancet striking such torture in the swollen gums. You fail to explain to me suffering in the present time; be not surprised if I fail to explain to you suffering in the future.

3. Has not the time come for me to say that, though there is a hell, there is no need that any one should go there? I am going to announce to you that five or ten may escape-yea, a hundred-yea, a thousand-yea, ALL. You say, "Tell me, just now." Oh, my skeptical reader, I do not want to break on you the glad tidings too suddenly. I want to tell you that there is no more need that you go to that world than that you should leap into the geysers of California, or the crater of Cotopaxi. If any one goes there he is a suicide of his immortal soul.

I turn to the same old book, and I find out that the Son of Mary, who was the Son of God, the darling of heaven, the champion of the ages, by some called Lord, by some called Jesus, by others called Christ, but by me here called by the three blessed titles, Lord Jesus Christ, by one magnificent stroke made it possible for us all to be saved. He not only told us that there was a hell, but he went into it. He walked down the fiery steeps. He stepped off

the bottom rung of the long ladder of despair. He descended into hell. He put his foot on the coal of the furnace. He explored the darkest den of eternal midnight, and then he came forth, lacerated, and scarified, and bleeding, and mauled by the hands of infernal excruciation, to cry out to all the ages, "I have paid the price for all those who would make me their substitute. By my piled-up groans, by my omnipotent agony, I demand the rescue of all those who will give up sin, and trust in me." Mercy! mercy! mercy! But how am I to get it? Cheap. It will not cost you as much as a loaf of bread. Only a penny? No, no. Escape from hell, and all the harps and mansions and thrones and sunlit fields of heaven

besides in the bargain, " without money and without price."

Now, I ask every common-sense man and common-sense woman, if one has a choice between heaven and hell, and he may escape the one, and he may win the other, and he refuses to do so-I ask you, if he does not deserve to be lost? He does. You know he does. Do not, my friend, make it a controversy between you and me; it is a controversy between you and God.

But I decline to think that the majority of the human race will be finally discomfited. We are in the early morning of Christian

achievement. Soon the tides will turn, and nations will be born in a day; the path of life will be thronged, and the road of sin and death become positively lonesome, and after a while utterly forsaken; not one traveler will be found there, and it will become a matter of amazement to the following centuries that any man could turn his back on God and happiness, when all the reasonable inducements were heavenward. The finally lost as compared with the finally saved will be as the people now in prisons when compared to the uncounted multitudes outside of them.

To be hite Talmage

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CHAPTER XLVIII.

ETERNAL JUDGMENT AND ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. THERE ARE BUT TWO PLACES AND STATES IN THE INVISIBLE WORLD, NAMELY, HEAVEN FOR BELIEVERS,

AND HELL FOR UNBELIEVERS.

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Born in Sin, all are Children of Wrath, and Must be Born Again, in order to Enter God's Kingdom.-No Intervening Purgatory" for the Purification of Imperfect Believers.-Deliverance through the Mediation and Grace of Christ, who Rendered Satisfaction to Divine Justice for the Sins of the World.-Value of the Church's Sacramental Offices, Creeds, Liturgies, Songs, etc.-The Bible the Source and Authority relied upon for Doctrinal Light and Truth.-Christ's Prophetic Revelation of the Last Judgment no Word-Picture or Poetic Description.-The Scriptural "Death of the Soul" is its State of Alienation from God.—Punishment, whether in the Constitution of Human or Divine Assizes, not Remedial or "Reformatory," consequently there is no Restoration from Hell.-The Closing Act in the World's Tragic History, as Portrayed by Christ Himself, Declares the Irreversible and Endless Doom of Some, and there the Curtain Falls.-A New Enthusiasm, the "Enthusiasm of Rescue," Needed in the Church, emphasizing the Fact that Perdition is as Real as Salvation.

By Rev. WILLIAM J. R. TAYLOR, D.D., Pastor of Clinton Avenue Reformed Church, Newark,

N. J.

"It is not to be denied that our age enters with an earnestness and intensity, such as no earlier one has done, into the eschatological examination, and presses forward in the complete development of this doctrine-one sign amongst many that we are hastening towards the great decision.”—Dr. Christian Frederick Kling.

THESE words of an eminent German scholar of our own generation indicate the present significance of the subject of this discussion. Its prominence is not due merely to the controversial habit, nor to the denials of opposers and the liberalism of the times; but, on the contrary, it has been forced to the front by the spirit of the age, and by its relation to personal conduct, public morals, social order, and the physical and moral government of God among the nations. The enormous wrongs, the ruin of character, the insurrec