This awful doctrine, these frightful texts, filled the future with fear and flame. Building on these passages, the orthodox churches have constructed a penitentiary, in which nearly all the sons of men are to be imprisoned and tormented forever, and of this prison God is the keeper. The doors are opened only to receive. The doctrine of eternal punishment is the infamy of infamies. As I have often said, the man who believes in eternal torment, in the justice of endless pain, is suffering from at least two diseases--petrifaction of the heart and putrefaction of the brain. The next question is whether Christianity has deprived God of the pardoning power. The Methodist Church and every orthodox church teaches that this life is a period of probation; that there is no chance given for reformation after death; that God gives no opportunity to repent in another world. This is the doctrine of the Christian world. If this dogma be true, then God will never release a soul from hell--the pardoning power will never be exercised. How happy God will be and how happy all the saved will be, knowing that billions and billions of his children, of their fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, wives, and children are convicts in the eternal dungeons, and that the words of pardon will never be spoken! Yet this is in accordance with the promise contained in the New Testament, of happiness here and eternal joy hereafter, to those who would desert brethren or sisters, or father or mother, or wife or children. It seems to me clear that Christianity did not bring "tidings of great joy," but that it came with a "message of eternal grief"--that it did "fill the future with fear and flame," that it did make God "the keeper of an eternal penitentiary," that the penitentiary "was destined to be the home of nearly all the sons of men," and that "it deprived God of the pardoning power." Of course you can find passages full of peace, in the Bible, others of war--some filled with mercy, and others cruel as the fangs of a wild beast. According to the Methodists, God has an eternal prison--an everlasting Siberia. There is to be an eternity of grief, of agony and shame. What do I think of what the Doctor says about the _Telegram_ for having published my Christmas sermon? The editor of the _Christian Advocate_ has no idea of what intellectual liberty means. He ought to know that a man should not be insulted because another man disagrees with him. What right has Dr. Buckley to disagree with Cardinal Gibbons, and what right has Cardinal Gibbons to disagree with Dr. Buckley? The same right that I have to disagree with them both.