Thus intimately are judgment and retribution connected. There is nothing arbitrary about rewards or punishments. They follow naturally and necessarily from the revelation of divine and eternal truth. Sooner or later, the everlasting distinctions between right and wrong, good and evil, make themselves seen and known. The distinctions between right and wrong _are_ eternal. The idea of duration is not connected with eternal punishment or eternal life; for the idea of duration belongs to time, and not to eternity. Human law sentences men, for crime, to be punished by imprisonment for six months, three years, ten years, or for life; but in God’s world there is not, and cannot be, any relation between a man’s guilt and the precise time he is to suffer. He must suffer while he is guilty, be the time longer or shorter. When he ceases to be guilty, he must cease to suffer. He therefore fixes the _duration_ of his suffering himself: that makes no part of the divine sentence. If he judges himself unworthy of eternal life during five, ten, one hundred, or ten thousand million years, that is for himself to say. God will never save him against his will; and God can wait. The sphere of time belongs to man’s freedom; that of eternity, to the freedom of God. And this reconciles the philosophic difficulty. Man, being _free_, can postpone his submission and obedience _indefinitely_; but, being finite, cannot postpone it _infinitely_. At any point of time, he may still resolve to resist the influx of eternal life, and continue in the sphere of death: but eternity surrounds time, and infolds it; and in eternity God’s purposes will be realized, and every knee bow, of things in heaven, and in earth, and under the earth. Universal harmony must prevail at last. “Eternal” and “everlasting” are two wholly different ideas. We fully believe in eternal punishment, but not in everlasting punishment. Eternal life is spiritual life: eternal suffering is spiritual suffering. The whole of antiquity recognizes this distinction; and the Bible is saturated with it. When Jesus says, “He who believes in me has _eternal life_ abiding in him,” there is nothing about duration intended in that. When he says, “This is _life eternal_, to know thee the only true God,” there is nothing about duration implied. It is the quality of the life which is conveyed—spiritual life, life flowing from the sight of God and Christ.