I often think that God called you to this beautiful and terrible
ministry when He suffered you to link your destiny with one so
strangely gifted, so fearfully tempted, and that the reward which is
to meet you, when you enter within the veil, where you must soon pass,
will be to see the angel, once chained and defiled within him, set
free from sin and glorified, and so know that to you it has been
given, by your life of love and faith, to accomplish this glorious
change.
I think very much on the subject on which you conversed with me once,
--the future state of retribution. It is evident to me that the spirit
of Christianity has produced in the human spirit a tenderness of love
which wholly revolts from the old doctrine on the subject, and I
observe the more Christ-like any one becomes, the more impossible it
seems for him to accept it; and yet, on the contrary, it was Christ
who said, "Fear Him that is able to destroy soul and body in hell,"
and the most appalling language on this subject is that of Christ
himself. Certain ideas once prevalent certainly must be thrown off. An
endless infliction for past sins was once the doctrine that we now
generally reject. The doctrine as now taught is that of an eternal
persistence in evil necessitating eternal punishment, since evil
induces misery by an eternal nature of things, and this, I fear, is
inferable from the analogies of nature, and confirmed by the whole
implication of the Bible.
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