Everlasting Punishment and Modern Speculation

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: teaches, that organic changes ever shift the combination of atoms. These are the soporific transcendentalisms which are permeating our fashionable literature, and which, by means of book clubs, circulating libraries, and magazines, are finding their way into the very heart of our homes; or which are being...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: teaches, that organic changes ever shift the combination of atoms. These are the soporific transcendentalisms which are permeating our fashionable literature, and which, by means of book clubs, circulating libraries, and magazines, are finding their way into the very heart of our homes; or which are being greedily imbibed by our sons and daughters at the feet of popular lecturers, who gain the ear of youth, under the pretext of providing for our leisure hours, literary and philosophical reflection. The device requires but to be stript of its guise, to make apparent the true character and purpose of our opponents. Nor can we doubt, that opposition to the doctrine of endless punishment, has come in with that flood of German rationalism, with which we have of late been inundated. The work begun by Coleridge, Carlyle, and Emerson, who have all sat reverently at the feet of German philosophers, has been taken up and completed by others, so that no doctrine, which does not conform with some favourite system of philosophy, or, in other words, which does net harmonise with the dictates of reason, is regarded as worthy of belief; and hence the views for which we contend are pronounced monstrous. But the fact is not new. Paul's denunciation of false philosophy, warns us of its effrontery. The philosophy of his day, was very much the same thing as the rationalism of ours. Such, undoubtedly, is the history of the present movement. Nor is it difficult to account for its popularity. Novelty is the element upon which many subsist: truth established, and long familiar, is not sufficiently attractive: airy speculations accord better with certain tastes: defiance of accepted dogma, has the savour of free and independent thought. Nor can we refrain from the conviction, that theexplanation o...