“They take from us our Father in heaven, and substitute a stern and unjust Lord. Our filial love and reverence rise up against them. We say, touch any thing but the perfections of God. Cast no stain on that spotless purity and loveliness. We can endure any errors but those which subvert or unsettle the conviction of God’s paternal goodness. Urge not upon us a system which makes existence a curse, and wraps the universe in gloom. If I and my beloved friends and my whole race have come from the hands of our Creator wholly depraved, irresistibly propense to all evil and averse to all good—if only a portion are chosen to escape from this miserable state, and if the rest are to be consigned, by the Being who gave us our depraved and wretched nature, to endless torments in inextinguishable flames—then do I think that nothing remains but to mourn in anguish of heart; then existence is a curse, and the Creator is——. O, my merciful Father! I can not speak of thee in the language which this system would suggest. No! thou hast been too kind to me to deserve this reproach from my lips. Thou hast created me to be happy; thou callest me to virtue and piety, because in these consists my felicity; and thou wilt demand nothing from me but what thou givest me ability to perform!” The following is from the pen of a celebrated writer educated in the Baptist denomination, who finally became a Universalist: John Foster. “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, can not 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 worshiping 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 portion 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.