IX.

BY THE REV. PROFESSOR SALMON, D.D.

THE question with which Canon Farrar's Sermons are mainly concerned is a difficulty of natural as much as of revealed religion. If we consider that we have sufficient reason, independently of Christianity, to believe in a future life, we have to form a theory as to what will be the future of those whose present life has been a moral failure. There certainly have been at least some whose earthly life has been quite the reverse of a season of discipline and moral improvement: they have spent it in learning new vices, and getting more hardened in old ones; they have died to all appearance irreformably wicked, and if they then enter on a life which can be described as anything like a natural continuation of the present one, they must do so under conditions infinitely less favourable than those under which they started here. Convinced that vice and misery must go to

gether, we need not inquire about the happiness hereafter of such persons; it is enough to inquire about their goodness. Four theories may be started as to their future. First, it

may be supposed that those whose reformation is hopeless, after death cease to exist. This hypothesis is difficult to reconcile with teaching the immortality of the soul as a doctrine of natural religion. Great moral depravity is known to be compatible with high physical vitality, so that we cannot well think of death as terminating the existence of very bad men, and of such only, without introducing a Divine miraculous intervention either for the destruction of those who perish, or for the bestowal of a new life on those who survive. In either case we travel out of the domain of natural religion. Secondly, it may be supposed that the existence of the wicked is temporarily continued beyond the grave, whether for the infliction of retributive punishment or for further probation, but that after unsuccessful trial their ultimate fate is annihilation. These two hypotheses agree in ascribing immortality to some men, not to others thus really dividing the human race into two essentially different species; and the second is open to the further objection urged by Cicero against a

similar theory of the Stoics, that it concedes the most difficult point-namely, that the soul can survive the dissolution of the body-and refuses to grant what is most natural to think -namely, that what has survived so great a shock must be immortal. The third supposition is, that all who leave this life pass into other scenes of discipline, so devised that all, without exception, are ultimately brought to virtue and happiness. There is nothing in natural religion, as Butler has remarked, which forbids us to think that human creatures, after leaving this world, may pass through different states of life and being. We may well believe that the constitution of all these states will be such as to "make for righteousness," and we cannot pronounce it incredible that, by the discipline of such states, virtue, here but inchoate, may hereafter be strengthened and perfected. But to say that such a process shall be absolutely without possibility of failure in any case, is to make an assertion opposed to the whole analogy of our present experience; and it is the more hazardous to attribute to future discipline this certainty of uniform success, inasmuch as many of the subjects of it enter upon it, as has been already remarked, in a condition far less favourable than

that in which they started here. This third hypothesis, then, cannot be asserted on scientific grounds-that is to say, not because there is any present evidence that the constitution of nature is such as we think it ought to be; but solely on moral grounds, because our faith in the goodness of God induces us to believe that He will hereafter make it so, however little present signs of it there may be. Such an argument can at most inspire but a hope -it is far from yielding an assurance. We must have faith in the goodness of God, if we deserve to be called Theists at all; but we cannot, without extreme rashness, say that God will certainly justify His goodness in exactly the way we may pronounce most befitting Him. If we could have attained our present belief in His omnipotence and goodness without experience of the existing constitution of things, we should most certainly have declared it to be absolutely incredible that evil could find the place in it which it actually does. How the existence of evil can be reconciled with the Divine attributes is a problem which never has been solved. Such considerations as that by physical evil man's faculties are drawn out, that without the possibility of moral evil there would be no room for the

highest kinds of virtue, etc., are not so much solutions as encouragements to hold fast our faith in God, and believe that He can hereafter justify His ways. Still, these considerations give us all the light we have, and we lose all explanation why God should have made us exposed to temptation here if we think it possible that He can hereafter, without annihilating virtue as well as vice, ordain a constitution of things in which the inducements to welldoing shall be so overpowering that wrongdoing shall be impossible.

It is credible that there are other worlds. like ours, and equally credible that at any given period of time hereafter there may be one or more worlds in the same state of development as ours is now, and therefore not unlikely to present the same phenomena as those we have experience of. It is not defined in this third hypothesis how long a period of trial and discipline may be necessary for the reformation of a vicious person: the framers of the hypothesis feel no difficulty in conceding that it may be as long as you please, provided only it be not infinite. What, therefore, this third hypothesis requires us to assert is, that it is reconcilable with the Divine attributes that evil may exist in the