'came to tell us of a wrath that nature and conscience have always proclaimed, when it is in fact tidings of deliverance from the wrath, the revelation of " One mighty to save!"

Mr. Spurgeon says, he should be "handling the Word of God deceitfully if he bated one jot from the threatened judgments of the Almighty," to which I can only respond, "God forbid that any believing man should be guilty of such presumption." But why should Mr. Spurgeon,-and here he must allow me to use the language of remonstrance,-imply that those who do not read as he does, are less reverential, less submissive, less disposed to acquiesce in Divine teaching than himself? Why should he write as if the question at issue had anything to do with "murderers being angry with the gallows," or "thieves" protesting "against the laws which punish felony?" He must know that such men disregard or disbelieve not so much eternal punishment as future punishment. He knows too that in human government it is not the severity of a punishment that deters from crime, but the sense of certainty that it will be inflicted. When men come to believe in God at all as a righteous Judge, the extent of penalty attached to transgression has little to do with their avoidance of it.

Mr. Spurgeon allows that it is not for him to judge others; but while saying this, he cannot refrain from wondering that "some men of undoubted piety and great learning have been allured" into the opinions he condemns; that he sees not "how they can conceive that they foster morality by lessening the force of the deterring penalty, or how they can be promoting the cause of Christ by under-estimating the ruin from which His salvation delivers us;" that "few have swerved from the usual belief upon this matter without turning aside on other subjects;" that "error here is a leprous spot betraying the dominion of disease within the soul."

All this surely merits rebuke; for it is uncandid, unjust, and untrue. Granting, as may readily be done, that the identification of our traditional views in relation to future punishment with the true sayings of God, has often led the unstable either to Rome or to infidelity, it by no means follows that doubt is either the necessary or ordinary effect produced on the mind of any true Christian when he has "swerved from the usual belief in this matter;" not because he seeks to lessen the force of any deterrent penalty,-not because he under-estimates the ruin from which Christ's salvation delivers us,-but because, having learnt to separate post-apostolic theology from the revealed facts of Scripture, he dreads lest he should unwittingly fall into heathen error by representing God in a character which does not really belong to Him. The whole subject of future retribution needs

to be reconsidered, not by the ungodly, but by the renewed;it is pre-eminently a believer's question. It can never be rightly estimated by any man who is unable to look at it disinterestedly; who is not himself conscious of reconciliation to God, of complete and entire deliverance both from law and wrath.

One word more. Mr. Spurgeon concludes by asserting,—but without a shadow of evidence to support the statement,--that "the solemn doctrine of eternal wrath gives weight to other truths, as for instance, it manifests the exceeding evil of sin, it reveals the greatness of redemption, and it shows the bitterness. of substitutionary suffering."

Whither would these good men lead us? To what terrible conclusions are they advancing? Is the evil of sin then to be estimated by the severity of its punishment, rather than by its intrinsic wickedness? Is the greatness of the Atonement to be measured, not by its breadth, but by its limitations? Is its glory seen rather in the eternity of physical suffering from which it is supposed actually to deliver at least comparatively few, rather than in the redemption it brings to a ruined race from self, and sin, and Satan?

Surely an atonement that destroys the works of the Devil is more glorious than one that leaves those works in Eternal activity, although in connection with Eternal misery! Surely it was not needful that Christ should become incarnate, and suffer and die, to give weight to,-nay, to give birth to the doctrine of the eternity of evil; or that we should be called upon to believe in eternal torment in order that we may not disbelieve or doubt eternal and atoning love.

I once heard a good man thank God for Infanticide,-especially that of China, supposed then to be carried on on a grand scale, since, on the supposition of the salvation of infants, it delivered so many from an otherwise all but inevitable eternity of misery. I do not believe that Mr. Spurgeon has the slightest sympathy with any conclusion so perverted as this is; but I venture to say to him in spirit, what an English clergyman of true piety has recently said in a "Letter to the Archbishop of York" on this subject:

"You my Lord Archbishop are enthroned in York Minster; and probably there is no man living better qualified by gifts and attainments for that post of danger and honour. It, therefore, becomes an obscure person like me to show very great deference in contravening your assertions on any subject. But I pray you to forgive my expressing warmly what I feel so deeply,-I would not for fifty mitres and the plaudits of a General Council, exchange my idea of God and the Gospel for yours. May God keep us from believing what is false, or denying what is true."

2, THE RECORD AND DR. CUMMING ON LORD PALMERSTON.

THE tendency which ordinary beliefs relative to the future of unconverted men have to promote unreality has rarely been more strikingly manifested than in the case of the great statesman who has so recently been taken from us.

As a rule, there is perhaps nothing from which a well constituted mind more instinctively revolts than from attempting to decide the actual present condition of any one in particular who has passed into the unseen world. Of some indeed we may without presumption assert, that they walked with God, and are not, for God has taken them. But of how many are we obliged to say," they are gone, but whither we know not, for between them and us there is now a great gulf fixed." Like other men they lived and loved, were themselves the objects of affection, had their peculiar virtues and their own faults, were more or less influenced by the tone of the society in which they mingled, and underneath all of this their outward existence they had, we are sure, a hidden life into which the dearest friend could not always penetrate. Regarding the character of that hidden life we know little or nothing. As to their condition in the sight of God, as to their sense of sinfulness or of self satisfaction, as to the extent of their faith or of their unbelief, we can only confess our utter ignorance.

Eminently is this ignorance felt in relation to men who have, in their day, occupied a large space in the public mind; who have rendered, it may be, great services to their country; who have had great temptations, and at times fallen, perhaps, into great sin; but who have nevertheless been distinguished in public affairs by singular integrity, by a high sense of duty,-by all indeed that among men is reckoned honourable and of good report. It may be that, in addition to this public virtue, the life has been marked by many private acts of beneficence, which, performed in unostentatious simplicity, have shed a fragrance around them, which makes their memories blessed.

Such an one has just departed from amongst us, and his decease has very naturally called forth thoughts respecting him which stretch beyond time and touch upon the invisible.

In meditations, of this sort, it is hard to avoid an implied, if not expressed feeling, as to the possible lot of him whom we lament; while it is still more difficult to cherish such impressions without being guilty of a presumption which may easily take the form either of flattery or of unfaithfulness. Yet it cannot be denied that we lose more than half the significance of such events if, in the contemplation of them, we fail to look beyond the present

state of existence, or refuse to bear in mind the broad distinction which Scripture draws between "him that feareth God, and him that feareth Him not."

Two of our public journals having ventured, in the case of Lord Palmerston, to pass the line which usually restrains writers on these topics; it may not be unprofitable to compare the two utterances, and to ask which is most consonant with christian integrity, which most in accordance with the revelations of the Bible?

"Lord Palmerston," says the Pall Mall Gazette, "was a statesman and a patriot, on whose public character not a breath of dishonour can rest. But what was he in private? He was a man of the world, and a man of pleasure. It is at all events certain that whatever the actual truth may have been (as to his personal morals and religion) nineteen-twentieths, at least, of those who followed Lord Palmerston's coffin to the grave with sincere sorrow and admiration, did so in the fullest conviction that he was what we have said—a statesman and a patriot, but a man of pleasure and a man of the world, and that as he lived so he died.

"Such are the facts which candid men must admit to themselves, as they look into the grave which contains the most popular statesman of our age. What is to be inferred from them? We see no way to escape from an alternative which requires the most earnest consideration of every one who is capable of grasping its vast significance. Either the churchmen, the statesmen, the magistrates, the lawyers, and the vast mass of private persons of every position in life who stand round that grave, do not believe their own official creed, or else they are engaged in what approaches very nearly to a mockery."

This, and much that follows, is stern reality. Either, we are all under a complete mistake about Lord Palmerston's character, or what we usually hear preached on Sundays is not the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Dr. Cumming, indeed, with characteristic vanity, tells us that Lord Palmerston once heard him preach, and that on retiring he said to the family in whose pew he sat, "a very useful and a very instructive sermon," "a compliment which he (Dr. Cumming) prized very highly, because it came from one who, was a consummate judge of the goodness of a discourse." On another occasion his lordship actually said to him, "Dr. Cumming, have you forgotten me? Don't you know that I sat under yon at church?" After this who can wonder that Dr. Cumming should assure us that "Lord Palmerston's thoughts of religion were far deeper than he ventured to express," and that "this was shown in his last hours, when he implicitly placed his trust in the Prince of

Peace, and when, with full confidence in the merits of his Saviour, his last sleep introduced him into everlasting bliss. His sufferings over, his eternal happiness commenced. Absent from the body' he was present with the Lord.' His sun gone 'down here, at once he beheld the sunrise of a glorious and blessed eternity, over which the sun ceaselessly shines, where no cloud, or storm, or tempest arises, but where glory encircles all things for ever and ever."

The Record is indignant that it should be said of Lord Palmer'ston that "as he lived, so he died." This, it affirms, is "the effect of the chilly influences of scepticism," adding, "there is hope for the greatest sinner, even to the last hour of his life, and our 'church expresses that hope concerning all who are not found at death living in notorious and unrepented sin, or openly rejecting the only means of salvation. But in regard to Lord Palmerston, our hope rests on a far more solid basis. We are told that as the tones of the well-known voice of one of his relatives, in prayer, fell upon the car of the dying statesman, he opened his eyes as if intimating the soothing satisfaction they occasioned, and gave low but distinct assent to each petition as it was earnestly offered up on behalf of his departing spirit. It is an unspeakable comfort to think that one who, by a remarkable providence has" (by choosing, on the recommendation of Lord Shaftesbury, so many bishops out of the evangelical party,) "been the instrument of such extended good to others, has himself been made partaker of the infinite benefits purchased by the precious blood of the Redeemer."

This, and much that follows, is as unreal as anything can be, for it comes from men who are constantly proclaiming that un less a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God, " and who have illustrated their teaching by throwing doubt on the safety of such men as Dr. Arnold and Mr. Rober, son of Brighton.

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Cont rast with this toadying of the great dead, the language of Dean Stanley in Westminster Abbey. "This illustrious chief-" says he, "did his duty simply, and left the consequences to God. an Englishman above all things; and for that it was ame was known throughout the world. This is the thought which on the present occasion presses most upon us, even to the exclusion of those higher considerations of a future will not now advert to."

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the facts of the case in relation to Lord Palmerston's imply these; "He departed in peace, without