It seems to us impossible to hold the common doctrine on this subject, without having the gospel view of the divine character essentially shaken; it is not possible to regard Him as a being in whom love is the essential attribute. If this is so, as we shall presently undertake to prove, it becomes a matter of vital importance that the doctrine should be disproved and rejected. It is not enough that it should be quietly laid aside: it is due to the truth that it should be distinctly and fully confuted. For this doctrine, if it be false, is deeply dishonorable to God: it takes away his highest glory; it substitutes fear of him, in the place of love, in the human heart; it neutralizes the peculiar power of the gospel; it degrades the quality of Christian piety, and poisons religion in its fountain. The Orthodox doctrine of future punishment is, then, exceedingly simple. There is to be a judgment in the last day, universal and final. All mankind are to be collected before the judgment seat of Christ, and there to be divided into two classes,—one on the right hand, and the other on the left. These are to go upward, to heaven, to be eternally happy; those downward, to hell, to be eternally miserable. There are no degrees of suffering; for the torments of hell are infinite in degree, as well as everlasting in duration. Usually the suffering is made intensively as well as extensively infinite. Sometimes degrees are allowed in suffering. No allowance is made for ignorance, or want of opportunity; for inherited evil, or evil resulting from force of circumstances. The purest and best of men, who does not believe the precise Orthodox theory concerning the Trinity, sits in hell side by side with Zingis Khan, who murdered in cold blood hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children, marking his bloody route by pyramids of skulls. The unbaptized child, who goes to hell because of the original sin derived from Adam, is exposed to God’s wrath no less than Pope Alexander VI, who outraged every law of God and man, and who, says Machiavelli, “was followed to the tomb by the holy feet of his three dear companions—Luxury, Simony, and Cruelty.”(46)