We approach a dread, an awful subject, when we contemplate the condition of those who pass into the unseen world impenitent and faithless; who despise finally, as far as we can trace, the riches of the mercy and the love of God. It is a subject which is occupying the most earnest and solemn thoughts of some of the wisest of our Christian thinkers, and on which a large freedom of judgment will have to be conceded within the visible pale of the Christian Church. It is easy to state the doctrine of universalism, and to offer it as a solution of the dark difficulties with which the subject is surrounded. But it is not easy to get the doctrine of universalism out of the Bible; nay, it is not possible, without grievous violence to some of its plainest and most awful statements: nor, on the other hand, is it easy to harmonize it with any intelligent conceptions of the moral freedom and responsibility of every child of the human race. Others seek refuge, for it is as a refuge that they appear to cling to it, in the theory of annihilation—that is, the annihilation on a vast scale of that which God made to be His masterpiece, which He constituted in His own image, and into which He infused by inspiration the breath of His own life. More grievous violence must be done to the plain language of Scripture by the advocates of this theory than by those of the former; and it seems to us still harder to find for it a place in any intelligent and harmonious conception of the scheme on which God made the worlds. Were it possible for us to hold it, it would seem to unfold a terrible vision of the issue of the great experiment of creation. The free beings whom God made to be the glory of His universe, drooping down in throngs, after a life struggle full of anguish and despair, into the darkness of the everlasting night! One would be tempted to ask passionately in that case, Why was not the dire experiment of liberty ended in the hour of the first transgression? why was not the free universe, parent of such wrongs and miseries, strangled in its birth?