23. Such the punishment, now as to the crime that merits it. It is the crime of high treason to God which pulls down on {389} men this fearful doom. It falls upon men who know the power of God and who have been made partakers of it, and then permit themselves to be so far overcome of the devil that they deny the truth that has been revealed to them and defy the power of God. They deny the Holy Ghost after having received it. They deny the Only Begotten Son of the Father after the Father hath revealed him, and in this crucify him unto themselves anew, and put him to an open shame. They commit the same act of high treason that Lucifer in the rebellion of heaven did, and hence are worthy of the same punishment with him. Thank God, the number who commit that fearful crime is but few. It is only those who attain to a very great knowledge of the things of God that are capable of committing it, and the number among such are few indeed who become so recklessly wicked as to rebel against and defy the power of God.[198] But when such characters do fall, they fall like Lucifer, never to rise again; they get beyond the power of repentance, or the hope of forgiveness. NOTES. 1. The Sectarian Dogma of Eternal Punishment.--There is nothing more obnoxious to a reasonable mind, a loving heart, a soul susceptible to the relative claims of justice and mercy, than the Presbyterian and other old ecclesiastical school doctrines of an eternal, material, unchanging hell of fire and torment in which the unregenerate are doomed to suffer the implacable wrath of an unrelenting Deity forever and forever, worlds without end. * * * And it is not true. It was not and is not a doctrine of Christ. It sprang from the gloom-clothed brains of cloistered monks and heretic-burning priests, bearing not a vestige of the sacred authority vested in the apostles and their immediate associates. It is redolent of the Auto de fe, and stamped with the bloody seal of apostate papal Rome. It breathes of vengeance instead of justice, and banishes sweet mercy {390} from the economy of heaven. It makes God more cruel than the most inhuman mortal. It is a libel on the Almighty and a fruitful cause of atheism, irreverence and doubt.--Penrose. 2. Messiah Preaching to the Spirits in Prison.--In the second and third centuries every branch and division of the Christian church, so far as their record enables us to judge, believed that Christ preached to the departed; and this belief dates back to our earliest reliable sources of information in the former of those two centuries.--Christ's Mission to the Under World, (Huidekoper), fourth edition, p. 49. As Christ died for us, and was buried, so also is it to be believed, that he went down into hell.--Articles of Religion--Church of England--Art. III, Book of Common Prayer, p. 311.