The gentle spirit of Watts trembled before hell; he expressed his belief in eternal punishment in the strongest and most unequivocal terms, not because he found it plainly in his understanding, but because he found it plainly declared in the New Testament, while yet, like other fathers in the Church, he expresses within himself a latent hope that God has some secret and mitigating decree, and that although we neither dare preach nor speculate upon it, bowing to the word, we yet may hope that Infinite Love will find out a way.[42] Some readers will be surprised to find that among his proofs of a separate state, Watts does not hesitate, although very modestly, to avow some belief in Apparitions. It was the age of superstition and supernatural visitations. Joseph Addison indeed was aiming at a sweeping reform, and attempting to lay all the ghosts in the country. Watts says— CONCERNING THE POSSIBILITY OF APPARITIONS. “At the conclusion of this chapter I cannot help taking notice, though I shall but just mention it, that the multitude of narratives, which we have heard of in all ages, of the apparition of the spirits or ghosts of persons departed from this life, can hardly be all delusion and falsehood. Some of them have been affirmed to appear upon such great and important occasions as may be equal to such an unusual event; and several of these accounts have been attested by such witnesses of wisdom, and prudence, and sagacity, under no distempers of imagination, that they may justly demand a belief; and the effects of these apparitions, in the discovery of murders and things unknown, have been so considerable and useful, that a fair disputant should hardly venture to run directly counter to such a cloud of witnesses without some good assurance on the contrary side. He must be a shrewd philosopher indeed who, upon any other hypothesis, can give a tolerable account of all the narratives in Glanvil’s ‘Sadducisimus Triumphatus,’ or Baxter’s ‘World of Spirits and Apparitions,’ etc. Though I will grant some of these stories have but insufficient proof, yet if there be but one real apparition of a departed spirit, then the point is gained that there is a separate state.