The reasons for the late efforts to support this terrific doctrine are probably to be found in a widespread and increasing disbelief concerning it, pervading the churches nominally Orthodox. This has come from the growing intelligence and progressive movements of thought in the Christian Church. The evidences of this belief are numerous and increasing. Those who reject the Orthodox view are a numerous body, but divided into several parties. There are the old-fashioned Universalists, a valiant race,—men of war from their youth,—who, under the lead of such men as Hosea Ballou and Thomas Whittemore, have spent their lives in fighting the doctrine of everlasting punishment. Very naturally, perhaps, they went to the opposite extreme of opinion, and denied all future suffering. But this view has, we think, ceased to be the prevailing one among the Universalists. The doctrine of ultimate restoration has very generally taken its place. This doctrine also prevails widely in other denominations; not only among the liberal bodies, like the Unitarians, but also among Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists. It has widely spread, as is well known, in Germany. It was held by Schleiermacher, the father of modern German theology. It tinges the writings of such Orthodox men as Tholuck, Hahn, and Olshausen. Others profess to believe in everlasting punishment, but make it a merely negative consequence of lost time and opportunity: one will be always worse off hereafter in consequence of the neglect of duty. Others follow Swedenborg, and make the sufferings of hell rather agreeable than otherwise to those who bear them. Various ineffectual attempts have indeed been made, in all ages of the Church, to soften the austerity of this doctrine. From the days of Origen, these merciful doctors(50) have always been trying to soften this austere dogma, but ineffectually; for the dread of an eternal hell has been one of the chief motives which the Church has used in converting men from sin to holiness. Any suggestion of the possibility of future restoration would, it is feared, cut the sinews of effective preaching. For the baptized who are not fit for heaven the Roman Catholic Church has established, indeed, a temporary hell, with torments of an inferior sort; for bad Catholics there is purgatory, with the hope of ultimate escape from it; but for the unbaptized heathen, for heretics, and for excommunicated persons, there is nothing but eternal punishment. Many, in all ages, have made the everlasting continuance of punishment not absolute, but _hypothetical_—depending on the question, “Will the sinner continue forever to sin?”(51) Others have made future punishment _relatively_ everlasting; that is, because even the repentant sinner will be always just so far behind the position he would have had if he had not sinned. This, however, is taking a material view of progress, as though it was limited, like the going of a horse, to so many miles a day.