Letters on the Nature and Duration of Future Punishment: Including Remarks on the State of the Dead, and the Views Entertained of a Future Life, With an Introduction and Notes, Illustrative and Explanatory (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Letters on the Nature and Duration of Future Punishment: Including Remarks on the State of the Dead, and the Views Entertained of a Future Life, With an Introduction and Notes, Illustrative and Explanatory

La Bruyere has, indeed, said, that we are come into the world too late to produce any thing new and, accordingly, in Obedience to the aphorism of that accomplished moralist, our Object in the following pages has been only to collect and arrange z - for beyond the general information Of a private gentle man, (who has not always sauntered in the Groves of Academus,) we have no pretensions. Like the bee hastening from flower to flower, and laying up store for the winter of the year, we have only wan dered from thought to thought, and from book to book, groping for light to dissipate the shadows Of death, and looking for hope beyond the confines Of the grave. And our humble purpose has been served, if the result Of our labors, and the reflections they suggest, be in any way calculated to soften the asperity Of intolerance - to infuse more Of the milk of human kindness, and the Spirit of human for giveness, into our dealings one with another - and to pour something like the oil of gladness over the hopes and fears and final destiny of man. Cha rity on earth growing up into love In heaven, is, we verily believe, the whole alchemy of the Gospel of Jesus and he that feels not the' current Of his affec tions changed by the power of its godliness, and running in the direction of an anxious benevolence of purpose, is yet, we fear, of the earth, earthyis yet a stranger to the swell of its mighty and sub duing wisdom.

And something better, it appears to us, is due to such inquiries as we are now pursuing, than the jaded intellects Of our second childhood, when we can no longer cleave to objects of sense, and to means of aggrandizement. Perhaps the drudgery Of busi ness is the doom of the generality of men - and the labour for independence is a sweet and honorable toil; but to suffer the work of accumulation (or Of worldly care of whatever description,) to fix its in satiable desires on our hearts, and to die in its har ness, is to forget God, and serve the idol of a paltry and grovelling ambition and to live up to the last hour Of existence in the bustle of worldly gains and excitement, without seriously attempting to look beyond the curtain Of life, before it closes on this brief and busy scene - and then, perhaps, by some pious fraud, as it falls, to make a virtue of necessity, in the shape of repentance - is really no better than to attempt to deceive God by a contemptible juggle.

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