To your question whether Mr. ---- can be answered, I say deliberately he has been answered a hundred times. I do not think that in all his assaults on the Bible he has advanced a respectable argument or objection that has not been urged and answered again and again long before he was born. The Christian Church has not the least fear for herself from his attacks; indeed, she understands them so well, and has repelled them so often, that she is perhaps too indifferent to anything he may say. The danger is not to the Church, but to those _who want to be convinced that the Bible is not true, and who want to be assured that, however they may live in this life, they have nothing to fear in a life to come_. Indulge me in another letter, and believe me Yours, truly, C----. LETTER II. MY DEAR A----: The two questions that press upon every mind, and that Mr. ---- has shown again and again, with wonderful pathos, by dying beds and at open graves, are pressing upon his, are these: Is there a God? Is there a future state of existence? To these questions the best answer Mr. ---- has to give is, "We do not know." He seems confident that there is no personal God, and "we cannot say whether death is a wall or a door, the beginning or the end of a day, the spreading of pinions to soar or the folding for ever of wings, the rise or the set of a sun." With all this uncertainty, he is absolutely sure that there is no future state of suffering for evil-doers. He does not know whether there is any future at all, but he does know that there is no future of sorrow. He is profoundly ignorant as to the _fact_ of a future, but has decisive knowledge as to the _nature_ of the future, if there is one. "Rather than that this doctrine of endless punishment should be true," he says, "I would gladly see the fabric of our civilization, crumbling, fall to unmeaning chaos and to formless dust, where oblivion broods and even memory forgets."