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THE

RESTITUTION OF ALL THINGS,

&c

MY DEAR C

The account you give of your perplexity, and of the answers with which it has been met by some around you, reminds me, (if one may refer to it in such a connection,) of what happened some months ago in a Sunday-school. The boys in one of the classes were reading the chapter which records how David, as he walked on the roof of his house, saw Bathsheba. One of the boys, looking up through the school-room window at the steep roofs of the houses opposite, after a pause said, — " But, Teacher, how could David walk on the roof of his house? " The teacher, on this point as ignorant as his scholar, at once checked all enquiry by saying, “Don't grumble at the Bible, boy.” Meanwhile the teacher of an adjoining class had overheard the conversation. Leaning over to his fellow-teacher he whispered, “The answer to the difficulty is, ‘With men it is impossible, but not with God, for with God all things are possible,’ ” Such was the solution of “the difficulty:” too true a sample, I fear, of the way in which on the one hand honest doubts are often met, as though all enquiry into what is perplexing in Scripture must be criminal; and on the other, of the absurdities which are confidently put forth as true expositions of God's mind and word.

Your difficulty is, how are we, as believers in Scripture, to reconcile its prophetic declarations as to the final restitution of all things, with those other statements of the same Scripture, which are so often quoted to prove eternal punishment. Scripture, you say, affirms that God our Father is a Saviour, full of pity towards the lost, seeking their restoration; so loving that He has given for man His Only-Begotten Son, in and by whom the curse shall be overcome, and all the kindreds of the earth be blessed; and yet that some shall go away into everlasting punishment, where their worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched. How is it possible, you ask, to reconcile all this? Are not the statements directly inconsistent? And if so, must not the statements of the Bible, as of other books, be corrected by that light of reason and conscience, which is naturally or divinely implanted in every one of us?