“Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” asked an eminent servant of God in the opening pages of revelation, Gen. 18:25; and when all is finished, the redeemed, looking over all God’s dealings with man, exclaim with fervent lips, “Just and true are thy ways, thou King of saints.” Rev. 15:3. It is objected that we should raise no question regarding the justness of the doom to which God may devote any portion of our race; because we are not able to judge of his ways. Of things with which we are imperfectly acquainted, or which are above our comprehension, this is undoubtedly true; but respecting our relation to God, the light in which he looks upon sin, and the disposition he will finally make of it, he says to us, “Come, let us reason.” We are never called upon to form an opinion or a decision in regard to things respecting which we are incapable of judging; but we are called upon to reverence God, as a God of love, wisdom, justice, and mercy. We must, therefore, be capable of judging of his character, his mercy, his love, his wisdom, and his justice. Are these characteristics displayed in his future dealings with the wicked, according to the view generally promulgated by the churches of the present day? The question to be decided is this: Is an eternity of torture so intense that the severest pain a person can suffer on earth is but a faint shadow of it, any _just punishment_ for any conceivable amount of sin committed by the worst of men, during the brief period of our mortal life? What is our present life? Something for which we did not ask; something given us without our knowledge or consent; and, in the forcible language of another, “Can any abuse of this unasked-for gift justify the recompense of an existence spent in unending agony?” Between the sins committed in this finite life, and the fiery torment of hell continued through numberless millions of ages, and then no nearer its end than when the first groan was uttered, there is a disproportion so infinite, that few attempt to rest that eternal misery on merely the sins of the present life; and they endeavor to vindicate God’s justice in the matter, or at least to apologize for his course, by saying that the sinner continues to sin, and that is the reason why he continues to suffer. The guilt of all the sins done in the body is soon expiated in the fiery flame; but then they must suffer for the sins committed after they left this mortal state, and commenced their life of agony in hell. And here they are represented as sinning faster than the inconceivable woe of hell can punish. It is affirmed of them, as quoted from Benson in the previous chapter, that “they must be perpetually swelling their enormous sums of guilt, and still running deeper, immensely deeper, in debt to divine and infinite justice. Hence, after the longest imaginable period, they will be so far from having discharged their debt that they will find more due than when they first began to suffer.”