put in the letter:)-I say, not many such buildings would be erected in America for free schools, for Sunday schools, or for the general intellectual and moral improvement of the people. We would have Spain, Italy, and Portugal manners and customs in their stead. This hint from the Bishop of Ohio I sincerely hope will not soon be forgotten by the friends of humanity in this land of liberty and equal rights. A. C. Discussion of Universalism. MR. SKINNER TO MR. CAMPBELL. No. XV. RICHMOND, Va., December 21, 1837. My dear Sir-YOURS of the 6th instant came to hand last evening. I am quite sorry to find my good friend in such ill humor. But, really, I know of no remedy, if you are angry at having your perversions and misrepresentations pointed out, but for you to break off from your sins by righteousness, and from your transgressions by adopting a candid and honorable style towards your opponent. And although you are determined henceforth to withhold from me "the usual compliments of personal respect," I am not so much grieved thereby as to cease bestowing them on you, in hopes of producing in you a salutary reformation.— From present appearances, "I was in error in not believing those who told me I would never find a gentlemanly" opponent of Universalism in you. Still, I do not wholly despair. One favorable symptom is, your confession, that "to get into a passion and rail" at me, is not the best way. Who knows but the next step may be a practical lesson from the same text? 2. Though you say you "reiterate and stand to every thing" that I say you have misrepresented, like Goldsmith's village schoolmaster, "For e'en though vanquish'd he could argue still;" yet, as you have not told when, where, nor how I ever made the concessions you say I did, respecting your syllogisms, &c., I am content to have pointed out the misrepresentations, and willing to leave the decision of the whole matter to the judgment of our readers, whom I request to review my last, and all there referred to. Their good sense will do the rest. Because I did not attempt to analyze and disprove each of your syllogisms, you conclude I "could not detect in them the slightest error or irrelevancy." Were you to assert that the Rocky Mountains were composed of saw-dust, I should deem it sufficient to say, that has nothing to do with our discufsion, without attempting to show what they were composed of. 3. The phrases introduced in brackets, into the perverted "dogma," were sufficiently marked, and you appear angry at them, only because they preclude the possibility of future perversion. But you say, "To talk about Divine justice being satisfied with penitence and reforma tion, is placing it below our legal justice." No, sir, begging your pardon, it is placing it far above. If our legal justice and its administrators, could invariably and certainly effect penitence and reformation in their subjects, and could know certainly when they were genuine and sincere, would capital punishment ever be inflicted? I trow not. Human justice often fails in producing repentance and reformation. Human tribunals know not when professed repentance is sincere, and hence sometimes deem the public safety to require capital punishment. Not so with Divine justice. That can see, and know, and reform the heart, and never be deceived. 4 In your 6th paragraph you complain of my making short work of your "recapitulation of the acceptations of gehenana." The work, my dear sir, might well be short: for there was nothing to reply to but the quotation of a few texts, all of which, or their parallels, I had before explained, which explanations you had not set aside. You accompany the quotations with several usupported assertions: but assertions are not arguments. In compliance with your request, I refer you to the Magazine and Advocate, of September 3, 1836, for an article from my pen, of six or seven columns, in which I argue future punishment. But because I believe and argue future punishment, does it hence follow, as you intimate, that I must "believe in after death gehenna punishment"? Would it follow that I must believe in after death State's prison punishment? or in post mortem bastinado punishment? Not at all. Though I believe in post mortem punishment, and would very willingly believe that geheana referred to that punishment, if the Bible taught it, yet I say you have not proved so much as this, much less proved from it the horrid doctrine of endless misery. 5. Accompanied with a number of doleful exclamations at my supposed temerity, you seem to think, paragraph 7, that future limited panishment would derogate as much from the Divine character, as endless. But can you be serious in such an idea? Any limited punishment, whether here or hereafter, that is emendatory, salutary, and results in the reformation and good of the punished, is not only compati ble with, but an evidence of, Divine goodness. But endless punishment must be an unmixed and infinite evil, vindictive, unmerciful, and malignant. If God "made his own Son an offering for sin," to redeem and save the world from its bondage, will he, nevertheless, perpetuate sin and misery to all eternity? Impossible. 6. To pronounce, as in your 8th and 9th paragraphs, a position "too ridiculous for grave reply," and to say the authors quoted in proof of it, "are perverted," although fairly and literally quoted, is doubtless much easier than to fairly meet and refute the arguments. I am willing our readers should judge and decide whether the authors whom I fairly quoted, support my gloss or not. 7. In your 10th paragraph, you seem virtually to concede, but yet verbally deny, the fact so clearly proved by the scriptures I referred to, that temporal and physical punishments were both threatened by Christ and his Apostles, and executed under the Gospel dispensation. You appear in great difficulty to know which way to turn, but finally attempt to crawl out by assuming that these punishments were merely the sanctions of the Jewish dispensation! Really, Sir, did the Jewish law point out the punishment of Ananias and Sapphira? Did that threaten bodily sickness and death to the Corinthians, for abusing the Lord's supper? Was it the law of Moses merely that Paul followed when he delivered Hymeneus and Alexander [not Philetus] to Satan, that they might learn not to blaspheme?" and especially when, "in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ," he directed to deliver the incestuous Corinthian "to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit might be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus."-1. Cor. v: 5. Verily you must presume greatly on the credulity of our readers, to suppose you can make them believe all this. 8. The truth is, temporal punishments, as well as rewards, were in existence and employed, in the Divine administration, long before, and independent of, both the Mosaic and Christian dispensations-coeval with the existence of our race-and recognized and more fully explained by both of those dispensations. These facts being indisputable, our readers can judge whether my quotations and arguments "reached within a thousand miles of the point," and whether your former assertion is not a point-blank contradiction of the Bible. Temporal punishments being, then, indubitably threatened to transgressors, in the New Testament, and even gehenna fire (by your own showing in your note on Matt. v: 21) being threatened as a temporal punishment, is there any thing so very absurd in supposing that where gehenna occurs in other similar passages, the same thing is meant, or something analogous to it? But what analogy is there between temporal punishments inflicted for a benevolent purpose, and endless punishment, malignant in character, and utterly destitute of all goodness? 9. The "everlasting destruction" mentioned in one of your quotations, was a temporal destruction, long since executed on the transgressors mentioned, and which followed them for ages. I deny no sanctions which the Gospel reveals. The last struggle you make on the first proposition, is faint indeed-a feeble effort to sustain your sense of gehenna, merely by the antithesis which it sometimes forms to heaven! Your doctrine of antithesis, if fully carried out, would send David and Jonah, and many others, both to an endless hell and an endless heaven? They were once in hell, and you doubtless believe they are now in heaven. If one is endless, why must not the other be? It would make corruptible crowns endless, if incorruptible ones are, because they are used antithetically! 1 Cor. ix: 26. It would make vice and virtue equal in duration, because opposed in character. And, indeed, it seems to be your principal aim to eternize and immortalize sin, unless I will allow that holiness will come to an end! I see no way for you to avoid the adoption of Zoroaster's theory, and allow two Gods, the one good and the other bad, both alike self-existent and co-eternal! But I believe that as evil had a beginning, so it will come to an end. And thus has come to an end your first proposition. Amen. 10. I proceed now to notice what you say on the second proposition. You adopt a curious manœuvre, paragraph 11, to evade the force of my argument on the radical derivation and meaning of AION, from AEI, always, and ooN, being. You "appeal to the reader whether AEI does not, in every" passage cited, "mean duration ENDLESS as the subject with which it is connected?" ENDLESS as the subject, etc. Ah, there's the point! For it is NOT ONCE Connected with an ENDLESS SUBJECT. In every instance where it occurs in the New Testament, it expresses, and applies only to, temporal or limited duration. Is it not strange, Sir, if it naturally and literally mean ENDLESSLY, that it is never so used in the New Testament? 11. You are placed in a singular dilemma. You maintain that ArON ATONIOS, "in their LITERAL sense, are only applicable to God and that world which is itself eternal;" and that they belong, and are applicable to, time only in a FIGURATIVE, METAPHORICAL, or INFERENTIAL sense! See your letter to Mr. Montgomery, and numbers 10 and 14, to me. And yet the word AEI, the only root that imparts to these words the idea of perpetuity of duration, is EIGHT TIMES used in the New Testament, in reference to TIME, or the present state, and IS USED IN NO OTHER SENSE! Verily, the public must form an exalted opinion of your philology and exegetical skill! 12. It may not only be conceded that AEI, (always,) but also that AION and AIONIOS mean duration as endless as the subjects with which they are conducted. And thus virtually, though reluctantly and indirectly, you are at last compelled to allow, what we have all along contended for, that the precise sense of these words is to be gathered from the connection in which they are found, and that the subject they are applied to, gives important modifications to the meaning of the adverb, the substantive, and the adjective. Thus it devolves upon you to prove, and I again, for the THIRD time, call on you to prove, from the NATURE AND OBJECT OF PUNISHMENT ITSELF, that it must be endless. For this must be done before either of these words can afford you the least aid in the support of your dark theory of endless wo. 13. You present our readers with an onerous mass of your lucubrations on the words AION and AIONIOS, which will prove, in the main, as useless to your cause, as you intimate our whole logomachy will be uninteresting to our readers. I shall save myself the trouble of writing, and them the task of reading, a formal reply to all you say; but shall notice all that has any weight or bearing on the subject in dispute. It seems we are nearly enough agreed about the number of occurrences of these words in the New Testament. I shall not dispute your account of the number of times they occur in the Old. For I have not time (wishing to send this immediately to the printer) to collate their occurrences in the Septuagint, nor that of OULEM in the Hebrew. Nor is it at all necessary. You have conceded amply enough for my purpose, without this labor. 14. We are not in dispute whether AION and AIONIOS are ever used to signify endless duration. I not only concede, but argue, that when applied to God and his perfections, they necessarily have this meaningand that from the very nature of the subject. And were you to find them 6000 instead of 600 times, in their various forms and flexions, in the Old and New Testaments, and out of that number, 5900 times applied to God and his perfections, yet if, in the other hundred, they were applied to a variety of things of short duration, and which from their nature could not be endless, you would not have gained one step towards establishing endless punishment from the force of them, unless you proved by something else, that punishment must be endless. 15. You are quite too prone to assume, without any attempt to prove, that the texts you quote, relate to the FUTURE STATE. You assume that the future state of the righteous is referred to in the nine texts cited in your 16th paragraph; whereas it is not certain that EITHER of them has any such reference. The majority of them evidently refer to the SPIRITUAL LIFE of the believer under the Gospel dispensation, without any reference to the endless perpetuity of happiness in the future state: the same as John iii: 36; v: 24, 25; xvii: 3; and their parallels. So, also, with the five texts referred to in your 17th paragraph, you assume that they all relate to the FUTURE STATE OF THE WICKED, which is not conceded with regard to EITHER of them. And until you make some effort to prove that they have that reference, they are utterly useless to you and your cause; and, let me add, equally so even if you do prove that reference, until you can show punishment to be endless, by some stronger term than AION and AIONIOS. 16. You assert, paragraphs 19 and 22, that "there is no word of such frequent occurrence in the sacred dialect, of more definite or ascertainable import than AION," and that I "can not find another adjective of the same construction in the whole New Testament, that is so uniformly rendered by one word in all languages, as this (aionios) is by the strongest word for endless duration." And paragraph 23, you say, ALONIOS in the Old and New Testaments, is "properly and literally translated FIVE HUNDRED AND EIGHT TIMES BY THE STRONGEST TERMS IN HUMAN SPEECH INDICATIVE OF ENDLESS DURATION"! On these declarations I remark, in the first place, that EVERLASTING, ETERNAL, FOREVER, etc. are NOT the "strongest terms in human speech (nor in the English language) indicative of endless duration." The word ENDLESS itself, is much stronger, more emphatical and definite. Why did not our translators use it? Evidently because they knew AIONIOS would not bear it. In the next place, I ask, are not the words God, Christ, man, woman, faith, hope, charity, peace, mercy, truth, and indeed, almost every substantive that occurs in the Bible, of more fixed, uniform, or definite import than AION? Has the meaning of any of them ever been as much disputed about? The phrase "same construction" above, was very artfully inserted; for I know of no adjective of the SAME CONSTRUCTION AS AIONIOS. I have not time now to examine many adjec tives of any kind. But I have just glanced at two-the two first that happened to come into my mind. I find SOPHOS occurs in the Greek New Testament TWENTY-TWO times, and in every instance is translated WISE. Nobody can mistake its meaning. KALOS, KALON, occurs NINETY-NINE TIMES, and is rendered GooD in almost every instance. In a few places it is rendered GOODLY, MEET, WORTHY, and HONEST; but in these places it MEANS GOOD, and might have been so rendered uniformly, with propriety. There can be no dispute about its meaning. Is it so with AIONIOS? I allow that its meaning is easily ascertained by its subjects and connexions. But then its meaning varies exceedingly in different places, even by your own showing, paragraph 20, and note to your 26th. 17. You take much pains, paragraph 24, to parry my argument drawn from the use of the double plural, or the most intensive forms of AION, against its signifying, necessarily, an absolute eternity. You WISH our readers understood the Hebrew-how readily you could convince them by the use of OULEM! And yet, in some of the texts referred to, oULEM does not occur! Perhaps your references are wrong. Well, no matter. For what you have said on the use of English words |