And when we have come to the end of what a legitimate reaction from the teaching of our forefathers restores to us, in the direction of a 'larger hope,' we are still face to {213} face with the fact of 'eternal judgement.' Men, as far as their individual destinies are concerned, are passing towards one of two ends, not towards one only--a divine judgement of approval _or_ of condemnation; and both judgements are represented as final and irreversible; and they are the inevitable outcome of the moral law by which our probation is realized--that voluntary acts form habits, and habits stereotype into a fixed character. It is foolish to look to the process or moment of death for redemption from sin; for death, as far as we know, only transplants us with the character we have made for ourselves, and with continuous consciousness, into the unknown world; so that if in this life we have unfitted ourselves for God, we must find it out beyond death, and know there the full meaning of our awful miscalculation here. And the awakening of the 'lost' to what they have cast away--to the meaning of irreversible self-exclusion from the presence of God--is imaged as unspeakably awful; and their state is pictured in metaphors and phrases descriptive both of torment and finality--'outer darkness,' 'gnawing worm,' 'unquenchable fire,' 'eternal punishment,' 'eternal sin,' 'sin which shall not be forgiven, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come,' eternal 'death,' or exclusion from eternal life, 'eternal ruin,' 'wrath and indignation, tribulation and anguish.' In face of all these sayings, it seems to me indisputable that 'universalism'--the teaching that there are to be none finally lost--is an instance of wilfulness. To speak of that which lies beyond death, even in the case of the worst and most impenitent criminal, as a place 'Where God unmakes but to remake the soul He else made first in vain--which must not be,' is, I cannot but feel, in flat contradiction to the whole tone of the New Testament. {214}