plunge this dagger to your heart." The poor wretch, listening wholly to his fears, did as he was bidden; he renounced God: whereupon his enemy immediately despatched him, exclaiming "Now I have ruined you body and soul, and am fully avenged." 7th.-Universalists, it seems, are quite wide of the truth in affirming that sinners are here punished for their sins! My opponent has found scriptural proof to the contrary! Well, if this be so we have scripture proof against scripture proof; for the bible saith "the righteous shall be recompensed in the earth, much more the wicked and the sinner." (Prov. xi. 31.) But it is not so; the very authority he quoted is direct against him. (see Psl. lxxiii.) David, in this Psalm, sets out with the declaration that, "truly God is good to Israel, even to such as are of a clean heart;" he goes on to say that he had formerly doubted this fact, and had supposed that the wicked were more favored than the righteous; a merely superficial view of human life had led him to false conclusions in this matter; and he gave way to discontent, supposing that it was in vain that he had cleansed his hands, and preferred the service of God. But when he went into the sanctuary he was undeceived, he there learned that the prosperity of the wicked is but in appearance; that it is unstable, liable to sudden reverses; and, moreover, that they "are utterly consumed with terrors," and subject to be visited with swift desolation. He thence confesses that his former complaints were foolish and brutal, and ends with declaring "It is good for me to draw near to God," &c. Now it must be apparent to all who look candidly into this case, that the very sentiment which David confesses to have adopted hastily and in ignorance of the fact, is now put gravely forth by my opponent as an established revealed truth! I request him to lay his hand upon his heart and ask himself, "Do I regret that I have chosen the service of God (even if there be no hereafter consequence from it) in preference to the pursuits of sin ?" Let him, I say, put this question directly to his conscience; if it render an affirmative answer, its moral state must be such as no true christian can envy: on the other hand, if its response be negative, his doctrine that sin is not here punished, nor virtue rewarded, is refuted by his own experience. 8th. We are asked a question in relation to the suicide, which I confess to be as difficult an one as can be propounded against ment. our system. Allowing that in a long career of crime he received a due amount of punishment for every offence, where does he receive the penalty for the last act, that of self-destruction? I will. endeavor to answer this question: difficult, I acknowledge it, but not insuperable. First, then, I observe that life is a blessing, and when an individual deprives himself of a blessing, he sustains a loss of course, and that loss is a suitable and adequate punishThat life is a blessing, is clearly assumed in the scriptures: length of days is often promised to the righteous, while sinners are menaced with the reverse. If either of you, my auditors, should rashly throw away all your earthly fortune, would not the loss of that fortune be an adequate penalty for your rashness? And Secondly, I observe, that ere a person can consent to part with life by his own act, he must have previously undergone the very extremity of mental suffering; for so deeply seated a sentiment is the love of life in the human bosom, that it is rarely eradicated whilst reason retains its empire. Dreary indeed must be the state of that heart, to which the cold grave becomes a welcome refuge from existence! Self-murder is, indeed, often in itself the penalty of a life of crime: the wretch who becomes his own executioner is frequently driven thereto by the numerous and complex evils which his guilt has brought down upon his head. But more often, it is to be feared, does suicide result from mental misfortunes for which the subject is nowise responsible. : Lastly, we come to the peep into our universalian futurity, with which it pleased my opponent to indulge us. "There," quoth he," are the murderer and his victims-the seduced and the seducer-the tyrant, and his slaves-the crucified son of God, and those who mocked him in his dying agonies." Well; better thus, I trow, than to have this state of things reversed; Jesus prayed for his murderers will it shock his benevolent soul to find his dying prayer answered in their forgiveness? The martyred Stephen supplicated that the bloody deed of those who stored him should not be laid to their charge. Will it grieve him to meet them in a world of universal peace and reconciliation? Paul was one of them, and him, at least, even by my opponent's admission, Stephen will sit down in fellowship with. Pardon me, my friends, if I so far trifle with this subject, as to notice the smart little master's question ralative to the "Babes in the Wood;" by which, it seems, his naughty universalist papa was converted to the comforting belief of an endless hell! I shrewdly suspect, however, that this is but a pious hoax, of the tract family we will look at it nevertheless. Saul, (afterward called Paul), persecuted the saints. My friend will admit that these saints went to heaven, and that Paul went there too will he not persecute them again? Where did Uriah go to after his murder? My friend will probably say "to heaven." And when David died, where went he? "He went to heaven also." But will he not murder Uriah again? And will not Lot get drunk, and commit incest again in that world? And Peter repeat the denial of his Lord? &c. &c. A puerile argument this, you perceive; but my opponent deemed it worthy of serious consideration in favor of his dogma of endless suffering, and it is full worthy of that cause. We may now, I presume, without sacrilege, peep into the futurity of my opponent, Alackaday! we shall see a spectacle of spectacles! Parents, children, wives, husbands, brothers, sisters, neighbors, friends, severed for eternity; some singing in heaven, some screaming in hell! There are in the realms of bliss many niscreants, as red with blood as murder could make them; who cancelled their crimes by a brief term of repentance before death; and they now see far down in the deeps of eternal suffering beneath them, many of the unhappy victims whom they were the instru ments in sending thither with their sins upon their heads! There, among the blest, is Zedekiah, who caused the streets of Jerusalem to flow with blood-there Charles V. of Spain, who drenched nearly the whole eastern continent in gore-Lewis XI. who boasted that he had slaughtered more than 200,000 hereticsSt. Dominic, who founded the Inquisition-Peter the hermit, who instigated the crusades-the bloody Mary of England, and numerous other sainted miscreants, whose names come down to us loaded with the execrations of mankind: but who, nevertheless, are supposed to have died " in the odour of sanctity:" how many of the victims of their cruelty are groaning amongst the damned it is not in human power to estimate!* My friend supposes it a hor * 1 took up a paper a few weeks since, containing the sentence and accompanying address of a judge to a criminal, doomed to execution for the murder of his brother's wife. "You," said the judge, (in substance, I pretend not to give his words,) "will rid result of our faith, that the seducer of innocence should be found at last in heaven, in company with her whom he had sent with a broken heart and ruined reputation to an untimely grave. Alas! if this consequence shocks him, what must he think of his own dogma? according to which the ruined and broken hearted girl may have been driven, not to a premature and ignominious grave merely, but to an unending abode in hell! And the wretch who brought down upon her this temporal and eternal blight, may by timely penitence, have secured for himself an abode among the blest! What, too, must he think of a doctrine which peoples heaven with parents bereaved for ever of their children, and children of their parents, which sunders for eternity those sacred ties by which the God of nature has bound human beings together; and which have for their prototype the relation which he himself bears to every sentient creature of his power? Which, I would ask him, is the more cheering and consistent view to indulge relative to futurity; that which implies a frustration of God's designs in creation, and that men will possess in eternity the dispositions and qualities which characterise them here; or that all the plans and purposes of Jehovah respecting our race shall be fully consummated; and all mankind, saved from sin reconciled to God and each other-assimilated to the divine nature, shall attain to that glory and felicity which is the end of their creation? Let conscience and common sense candidly an swer this question, ere an attempt is made to ridicule an universalian futurity. Thus endeth my reply. have opportunity for making your peace with God, and will receive every aid in this business which it is in the power of the reverend clergymen to give you. Not such was the case with the unhappy woman whom you murdered; she was hurried to the bar of heaven with all her sins upon her soul." Here then is a case in point: the unfortunate sister-in-law is to wail with the lost, and to behold her murderer rejoicing with the saved! Wm. Gibbs, the pirate who was hung some years since at New-York, confessed that he had been accessory to the murder of 400 persons: these were murdered on the high seas, or upon our coasts: all acquainted with this class of persons know that they are usually not over-burthened with a concern about the future; it would therefore be speaking within bounds to say, that 350 out of the 400, were sent to eternity in impenitence, and doomed to an endless hell of course. The pirate, on the contrary, had space allowed him for repentance; was attended upon by his priests, &c. (he was a catholic) and when led out to execution he expressed himself as if assured of forgiveness and a happy futurity. Fancy him now in heaven, looking down upon 350 of his victims in hell! POPULAR DEBATE.-No. III. RELATIVE TO THE CLOSING PARAGRAPH OF MATTHEW XXV. UNIVERSALIAN VIEWS OF SAID PASSAGE. I feel, my auditors, the magnitude of the task I have undertaken elative to the subject before us: it is two-fold in its nature; first, o uproot from your minds prepossessions of long standing, and associated with your earliest remembrances: and secondly, to introduce and impress in their stead ideas entirely novel to you, and in contrariety to those entertained by full fifteen sixteenths of all christendom. Nevertheless, as I have in my own mind the utmost assurance of the truth of my views, and as I know the documents by which I am to sustain them to be clear and unequivocal, I enter upon the undertaking without the smallest solicitude as to the result; requesting only that you will listen to, and weigh with impartial attention, all that shall be adduced on both sides. As my friend of the opposite faith is to follow in a review of my arguments, I shall not anticipate many of his objections; but will attend to them, as they come from himself, in my rejoinder. "When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory : And before him shall be gathered all nations; and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was a hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink I was a stranger, and ye took me in: naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. 'Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee a hungered, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and : |