repetition of offences, necessitating ever new punishments for fresh transgressors? May not Plato, in firmly fixing on the "incurable" as monuments of terrible suffering for ever, no longer for their own correction, but as an example, a warning to others, have better interpreted the plans of a benevolence that covers all ages and all worlds than do they who insist that every offender must have eventual impunity? The latter supposition, pushed to its consequences, requires that wrong should never be allowed; for if only forgiven, the reparation is, we repeat, to Cain, not to Abel. Here we come in face of the problem of problems, the origin of evil, the permission of wrong, the toleration of the wicked, what Butler calls "the mystery of God, the great mystery of His suffering vice and confusion to prevail." In all his impetuous flights Canon Farrar barely grazes the surface of that mystery, like a bird skimming over a still but unfathomable deep.

E

V.

BY THE LATE REV. J. BALDWIN BROWN.

THOSE who have taken any fair measure of the wrong which the Kingdom of Heaven has suffered in all ages at the hands of its scribes and priests, will not wonder at the fervid, and indeed passionate, eloquence with which Canon Farrar pleads against the most terrible of all the dogmas by which they have distorted the righteousness of the Divine government, and clouded the glory of the Divine love. Such a book as Canon Farrar's Eternal Hope is deeply significant. Some of us have been for years witnessing against the doctrine of everlasting torment, as horrible in itself, even according to Calvin's confession, and staining with deep dishonour the justice as well as the love of God. But we have been as "voices crying in the wilderness," compared with the testimony which is uplifted by one who speaks with the weight of ecclesiastical dignity, and from the high places of the Anglican Church.

When a man of Canon Farrar's position and influence feels himself so pressed in spirit to preach the Eternal Hope that he can no longer forbear, and gives forth a work so charged with intense conviction as this, the controversy enters on a new phase, and is manifestly nearer to its end.

I do not attempt to criticise Canon Farrar's book in detail, for this simple reason. I have myself been led, under the pressure of the same influences, to very much the same conclusions, which I published three years ago, in an examination of The Doctrine of Annihilation in the Light of the Gospel of Love, and I could but repeat what I then expressed. I can only rejoice at finding that the conclusions to which I was then led, after much anxious thought, and under a very painful sense of responsibility, are sustained by the high authority and the ample learning of the eminent writer who has pleaded so eloquently for the Eternal Hope. Like Canon Farrar, I am unable to accept the dogma of the Universalists, after full consideration of the learned and impressive arguments which I have read upon the subject. I believe too deeply in the sacredness of human freedom to accept a doctrine which seems to me to set an im

perative bound to its decisions; nor can I find it set forth, in any clear, developed form, in the vision of the future which is revealed in the Word of God. But I hold, and each year I seem to hold more firmly, that the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord cannot be the one Divine power in the universe which, for man at any rate, is paralyzed by the hand of Death. Justice, holiness, fidelity to truth, wrath against sin,-these, we are told, and we joyfully believe, live on and rule through all eternity; but one thing, if this awful dogma be true, Death paralyzes the hand of the Divine love. And this, when it is once fairly looked at in the light of Scripture and of reason, is blankly incredible. Whatever else may or may not work on through eternity, we are bound to believe that the love which moved the Father to redeem the world at such infinite cost, must work on, while there is one pang in the universe, born of sin, which can touch the Divine pity, or one wretched prodigal in rags and hunger far from the home and the heart of God. And while we know the wrath of God against evil, which is a dread reality, though always within the sphere of His love, and see that sin can only be purged through terrible pain, we have the right to clasp to our hearts.