“the meekness and gentleness of Christ”; and for many of the chapters of Christ’s life that is the right headline; but there are other chapters which by no possible manipulation can be brought under that heading, and they also are part of the story.  It was Jesus who said that in the day of judgment it should be more tolerable for even Tyre and Sidon than for Bethsaida and Chorazin; it was Jesus who uttered that terrible twenty-third chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel, with its seven times repeated “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” it was Jesus who spoke of the shut door and the outer darkness, of the worm that dieth not, and the fire that is not quenched, of the sin which hath never forgiveness, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come, and of that day when He who wept over Jerusalem and prayed for His murderers and died for the world will say unto them on His left hand, “Depart from Me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels.”  These are His words, and it is because they are His they make us tremble.  He is “gentle Jesus, meek and mild”; that is why His sternness is so terrible.

These things are not said in order to defend any particular theory of future punishment—­on that dread subject, indeed, the present writer has no “theory” to defend; he frankly confesses himself an agnostic—­but rather to claim for the solemn fact of retribution a place in our minds akin to that which it held in the teaching of our Lord.  We need have no further concern than to be loyal to Him.  Does, then, such loyalty admit of a belief in universal salvation?  Is it open to us to assert that in Christ the whole race is predestined to “glory, honour, and immortality”?  The “larger hope” of the universalist—­

          “that good shall fall
      At last—­far off—­at last, to all,
    And every winter change to spring”—­

is, indeed, one to which no Christian heart can be a stranger; yearnings such as these spring up within us unbidden and uncondemned.  But when it is definitely and positively asserted that “God has destined all men to eternal glory, irrespective of their faith and conduct,” “that no antagonism to the Divine authority, no insensibility to the Divine love, can prevent the eternal decree from being accomplished,” we shall do well to pause, and pause again.  The old doctrine of an assured salvation for an elect few we reject without hesitation.  But, as Dr. Dale has pointed out,[63] the difference between the old doctrine and the new is merely an arithmetical, not a moral difference:  where the old put “some,” the new puts “all”; and the moral objections which are valid against the one are not less valid against the other also.  I dare not say to myself, and therefore I dare not say to others, that, let a man live as he may, it yet shall be well with him in the end.  The facts of experience are against it; the words of Christ are against it.  “The