as his Creator? Hint that such a startling proposition may possibly find no place in Revelation, and the base insinuation is at once repelled with becoming scorn. No, no-you may visit man with any amount of suffering rather than this. The possible contingency of his rolling for ever on billows of agony is a mere bagatelle not worth a thought in comparison with the indignity and degradation of deposing him from his indestructibility. Glorious prerogative,-blessed immortality! When will the god-like Adamites rise in the strength which their Maker has really endowed them withal, and spue such mawkish theology out of their mouths, together with the army of "black-stoled" conjurers whom they have so long subsidised for administering this Popish "mixture" of sugar and wormwood?

The book whose grandiloquent title constitutes the text of our brief essay, and which from internal evidence we conclude to be the work of some royalist divine of the Civil War period, is one continuous piece of scholastic declamation in favour of man's divinity; and but for one casual notice of the "eternal torments prepared for the reprobate" the argument throughout is unbroken by a single shadow of misgiving. It is not very difficult, by the way, to hazard a guess as to who these "reprobates" might be, whose ignominious fate was hardly worthy of a passing sneer; for when he tells us that the advocates of man's liability to extinction were the same miscreants who, having deposed episcopacy and the kingly power, were now proceeding to lay violent hands on themselves, we reach the conviction that the Scots and English rebels of his day would constitute the one exception to the otherwise happy family of man. To all the rest, immortality was a splendid endowment productive only of blessedness; for, as he logically and luminously observes, "this desire for immortality being general, must needs be from nature, and therefore right, and not a vicious rapacity or greediness as Pliny seems to make it and so, being right, cannot be frustrate" (p. 29). In other words, the universal desire proves the universal inheritance. In answer to which, it will probably suggest itself to most minds that if man desire an immortality at all, he desires an immortality of blessedness, for no one surely ever coveted an eternity of woe for the mere honour of ranking with the gods; and the argument from universal desire therefore bestows endless happiness on all. But this is just what your orthodox teachers will never admit.

The latest work by the author of "Recreations of a Country Parson contains a paper on Unconsciousness and Annihilation from which a few passages may here find fitting place. Recalling his school-days when he had been compelled to recite with appropriate gesticulation Cato's soliloquy about the immortality of the soul, the writer observes,-“I inwardly rebelled against that piece, even as I repeated it. In that piece, the accomplished author makes Cato speak of human nature as shrinking from annihilation:

"Whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,
This longing after immortality?

Or whence this secret dread and inward horror
Of falling into nought?"

"I quote no more.

That is the idea, and then it is beaten out thin.

"This is accepted by many without due thought. Is there in human nature this shrinking from annihilation? I doubted it as a little boy. I doubt it much more now. There are some certain facts which look

another way.

"What is the most prevalent vice of humanity? It is the use of intoxicating liquors or drugs. Find human beings where you may, savage and civilised, they have found out something that can intoxicate; and a great many habitually use that to excess. And what is the great end of all intoxicating liquors or drugs? Why, it is unconsciousness. It is to get away from one's self; in fact, it is annihilation for the time. On a day of drenching rain and storm like this, you give a few pence to the poor, soaked, starved, hopeless beggar, and the beggar hurries to spend the pence on a glass of nauseous and disgusting whisky, seeking therein oblivion of his cares. And it is a sorrowful fact that many educated persons, both men and women, pressed by a load of anxiety and misery, do by like means get away from it. Even the trouble which rises no higher than the rank of worry, has sometimes driven to the same wretched relief; which is some way down the inclined plane that conducts to utter perdition. But you see, that far from there being the universal dread and inward horror of falling into nought, there is nothing more longed after by a considerable portion of the race. Every one has known, when terrible physical agony was pressing, the blessed relief of the powerful opiate under which the iron claw of pain relaxes, and you feel yourself floating away into rest. The most beneficent discovery of modern times is assuredly of that anesthetic which makes human beings unconscious through critical times of their life in which consciousness would be agony. Are there not some who have made such a wretched thing of life that its presence is hopeless misery; and the best they wish for is to be relieved of its intolerable load? Poor Burns was perfectly sincere when he wrote,

"O Life, thou art a galling load
Along a rough, a weary road

To wretches such as I.

"And Sophocles meant it when he wrote the famous chorus in the Edipus Coloneus, of which the first lines mean this:- Not to be, is best of all; but when one hath appeared, then to return with swiftest foot to whence he came, is next.' The sum of the matter is, that to many people life is pain; and it is natural to wish to get away from pain anywhere, anyhow.

"Of course, you will say that I am speaking of a very deplorable section of mankind, the forlorn hope of humanity. Yet it is curious how from the higher view, you will find things said which virtually come to the same thing. Mrs. Barrett Browning thought there was no text, even in the Psalms, that sounded so delightful as the renowned one, 'So (it ought to be Surely) He giveth his beloved sleep.' I remember a sermon by that great preacher, Mr. Melvill, in which, after quoting the words, the preacher burst out, What could he give them better?' That is, what could he give that is better than unconsciousness, which is annihilation ? To have a being of which you are not aware, is exactly the same thing as to have no being at all. Nirvana is the thing

6

which millions of human beings think the best thing; and nirvana is annihilation. For absorption into the Deity, or into nature, is to all intents annihilation. The final loss of individual consciousness is annihilation. The little drop of being, falling into the great ocean, and ceasing to have any separate conscious existence, is annihilated as the little drop. It may be worked up again into something else, but it is not that any more. And to me, to my sense and conviction, to say that my soul at death will go out like the extinguished flame that goes nowhere, and to say that it will go back to the great ocean of Being it came from, mean exactly the same thing; and mean annihilation. In either case, I myself should cease to be."-(Landscapes, Churches, and Moralities. p. 33.)

The adoption of the above quotation is not designed to intimate that the clever writer (Mr. Boyd) is exactly of our way of thinking on the matter of man's destiny; though he has the courage and candour to shake himself free from sundry forms of popular delusion. If he had advanced so far as we think by this time he might, in the direction of the master-thought which over-rides all the petty jealousies of the sects, all the quarrels as to side-issues, and all the mystifications and exegetical wire-drawing of rival chairs,-then we fancy that many a shady spot in Mr. Boyd's moral landscapes would be bathed in a more transparent atmosphere, and quenched in a broader sunshine.

JAMES WAYLEN.

CORRESPONDENCE.

"C.'s" DIFFICULTY. DEAR SIR,-Will you allow me to submit a few observations with reference to one or two passages occurring in the paper entitled "My Experiences," published in the July number of the RAINBOW, on the subject of Future Retribution. "C." expresses himself as follows:-"I cannot consider any form of retribution to be God-like, which does not either at once destroy the criminal, or open to him the possibility of a return to righ teousness." "On the other hand, I cannot but see that, if, without any previous punishment, all the unconverted are alike deprived of existence, men would not receive

according to the deeds done in the body; nor can I perceive why, in that case, a judgment-day is called for; or why, indeed, the wicked should be raised from the dead at all." In respect of the

words just quoted (2 Cor. 5-10), an indirect solution of "C.'s difficulty may be found in the fact that this, and many other passages of similar import, are of strictly limited application; being addressed to Christian believers exclusively. This fact, however, especially when it is associated with another of equally authenticated value,-viz., the resurrection of the wicked to a judgment to come,-will serve, possibly, to throw a confirmatory light upon the following suggestion:-That in the infliction of those predicted judgments upon the ungodly may be found the true key to that "opening up of the possibility of a return to righteousness," which to "C.'s" mind presents the one "God-like" alternative form of retribution to that of the immediate destruction-without punishment of the criminal. "When thy judgments are in