determining, even by a life of fourscore years and ten, the measure of our peace and happiness through all the eternal years? The divine method never is ridiculous, and this would be ridiculous enough "to shake the midriff of despair with laughter." We say that such or such a one has "gone to his reward." What atheism is this! As if the fruit of every action were not immediate! As if the reward of goodness were not in the instant and inevitable enlargement of the faithful soul! What, then, is future punishment? To be that in any future, here or elsewhere, which we have made ourselves by cowardly and mean and selfish ways of life. Swedenborg taught that no one is punished in the other life for deeds. done in this. And with his meaning he was right. For what he meant was that no one is punished there with penalties external to the soul for actions done on this side of the grave. But at the point of death, a man's soul is the result of all his actions in the present life, and his future punishment is to be that soul in the new life, till he has bettered it, as his future heaven is to be the soul which he has moulded by a thousand and ten thousand acts of righteousness and love.

There is another sort of future punishment which rational religion considers equally important with the sort I have already named. And it is the punishment of others for our various misdeeds. It is not vicarious in the sense of those who think to shoulder off the punishment of their sins upon the already infinitely burdened head of Jesus. Our punishment is not lessened, but is

greatened, rather, by the fact that we are members of an illimitable social order, and that the weal or woe of generations yet unborn will be affected by the use we make of every opportunity which we enjoy. To-day the total population of the world is suffering the future punishment of all the generations that have ever lived upon the earth. Thank Heaven it is rejoicing also in all the great rewards which are the outcome of the patience and fidelity of all those who have been patient in labor, faithful unto death. Here is a motive to right-doing which has in it no taint of selfishness.

'Oh may we join the choir invisible

Of those immortal dead who live again
In lives made better by their presence!"

Welcome the controversy which will force a thousand men to ask, "Do I indeed believe this frightful dogma to which I languidly assent?” and which will compel as many to question, as they never have before, the claim of special inspiration and infallibility made for the book which is, when all is said, the stronghold of the gigantic Terror. Alas for all the ingenuity that will go in vain to pick the tangled knot which scientific criticism cuts in an instant with one flash of its bright sword of truth! Alas for the good men who will wrench and torture Bible-texts out of their natural meaning to make them fit into their preconceptions! Better to let them go. Better acknowledge frankly that in the character of the Bible, mine though it be of gold and precious stones,

yet made up, as it is for the most part, of anonymous writings, and made over and over by a thousand loving hands, there is nothing that can justify a reverence and authority over and above what is demanded by the intrinsic beauty, wisdom, rationality of the succeeding parts. Acknowledge this, and, as a consequence, submit the doctrine of eternal punishment in any traditional form to purely rational tests, and see how soon it will go shivering away into that limbo where the old creeds and dogmas jostle each other feebly to make room for those that are forever going down into their silent world of darkness and decay.

THE SACRED SCRIPTURES.

THE question which I shall discuss this morning, "The Sacred Scriptures: What are They?" is one which the majority of Christian people considers capable of but one answer, and that a very short and simple one: The Sacred Scriptures are the Old and New Testaments bound up together in what we call the Bible. The Roman Catholic would add, And those books contained in the socalled Apocrypha. But allowing for the present that the Sacred Scriptures are coextensive with the Old and New Testaments, the question next arises, What are the Old and New Testaments? What is their history, and what their character, that they should be regarded as sacred; and if sacred, to what extent and with what meaning are they so, and what is their relation to other books also esteemed sacred by various religionists beyond the pale of Christendom, and to so much of general literature as has, though never set apart in formal way, any for some of us a special sacredness, at least a very lofty spiritual significance ? This is a large and complex question to discuss