It is permissible to say that there is no such thing as punishment; there are only wrong results. It depends upon your way of putting it. The wrong method produces wrong results in proportion as it is wrong. Wrong results mean wrong conditions; and wrong conditions mean suffering. You may call this the law of God, but it is the law of anything. It is not positive law, it is negative. As a matter of fact, God does not need to put forth a law on the point since everything works that way. What we call sin is simply a wrong method. It may be a wrong method meant to produce wrong; or it may be a wrong method in the hope of producing right. In any case it brings its consequence in pain. That consequence may be corrected in this phase of our being, or it may be carried over into the next. Carried over into the next the individual, according to our ancestral teaching, comes under the sentence in which our fathers delighted as "damnation." Not only did damnation involve the most fiendish torture the Almighty could invent, but the torture was inflicted, without an instant of relief, throughout the eons of eternity. I recall a sermon to which I listened as a boy of nine. It was on a summer's evening, when the windows of the church were open. A moth fluttered about a light. The church stood at the foot of a mountain. The preacher was trying to explain to us the eternal duration of God's punishment. "Think of that moth," he said, "carrying away one grain of sand from that mountain, and going off for a million years, after which it would return and take away another grain. And think of it keeping this up, one grain every million years, till the whole mountain was removed. Well, that would be only a moment as compared with the time you would be in hell." On the generations comforted and fortified by this sort of teaching I have no comment to make; but we of another generation should surely not be reproved for moving away from it. We move away from it in the direction of common sense, since common sense must be an attribute of the Universal Father as it is of the wiser among mankind. XX I revert, then, to my statement that God's relation to punishment is chiefly verbal. His "wrath against sin" is a way of "putting it." If you can best express the suffering which springs from wrong methods as "God's wrath" you are at liberty so to express yourself; but we should not lose sight of the fact that the wrong methods produce the suffering, and not an outburst of fury on the part of One who is put before us as Love.