“Now this creature, thus constituted and circumstanced, passes a few fleeting years on earth, a short, sinful course, in which he does often what, notwithstanding his ignorance and ill-disciplined judgment and conscience, he knows to be wrong, and neglects what he knows to be his duty; and, consequently, for a greater or less measure of guilt, widely different in different offenders, deserves punishment. But ENDLESS PUNISHMENT! HOPELESS MISERY, _through a duration to which the enormous terms above imagined will be absolutely_ NOTHING! I acknowledge my _inability_ (I would say it reverently) _to admit this belief, together with a belief in the divine goodness_,—the belief that ‘God is love,’ that his tender mercies are over all his works. Goodness, benevolence, charity, as ascribed in supreme perfection to him, cannot mean a quality foreign to all human conceptions of goodness: it must be something analogous in principle to what himself has defined and required as goodness in his moral creatures; that, in adoring the divine goodness, we may not be worshipping an ‘unknown God.’ But, if so, how would all our ideas be confounded, while contemplating him bringing, of his own sovereign will, a race of creatures into existence, in such a condition that they certainly will and _must_—_must_ by their nature and circumstances—go wrong, and be miserable, unless prevented by especial grace, which is the privilege of only a small proportion of them, and at the same time affixing on their delinquency _a doom of which it is infinitely beyond the highest archangel’s faculty to apprehend a thousandth part of the horror_!”(199)