"1. Suppose a torch enclosed in a cell of earth, in the midst of ten thousand thousand torches that shone at large in a spacious amphitheatre. While it is enclosed its beams strike only on the walls of its own cell, and it has no communion with those without; but let the cell fall down at once, and the torch that minute has full communion with all those ten thousand; it shines as freely as they do, and receives and gives assistance to all of them, and joins to add glory to that illustrious place.

"2. Or suppose a man born and brought up in a dark prison, in the midst of a fair and populous city he lives there in a close confinement, perhaps he enjoys there only the twinkling light of a lamp, with thick air and much ignorance; though he has some distant hints and reports of the surrounding city and its affairs, yet he sees and knows nothing immediately, but what is done in his own prison, till in some happy minute the walls fall down; then he finds himself at once in a large and populous town, encompassed with a thousand blessings; with surprise he beholds the king in all his glory, and holds converse with the sprightly inhabitants; he can speak their language, and finds his nature suited to such communion; he breathes free air, and stands in the open light; he shakes himself and exults in his own liberty. Such is a soul existing in a moment in the sepa rate world of holy and happy souls, and before a

present God, when the prison-walls of flesh fall to the ground."

Watts was not one of those divines (unworthily so called) who seem in their own element when revelling in the description of penal and sulphureous fires: yet he took no flattering and false view of human nature, for he saw, and felt, and knew that it was corrupted and fallen. Some he said, imagined, that his retirement from the world, and dwelling much among his own solitary thoughts and old authors, had led him into melancholy and dismal apprehensions of mankind; but on the contrary, he declared that it was his free and public converse with the world in earlier life which had given him his just and distressful views of his fellow-creatures. With old authors, indeed, he

had no very extensive acquaintance. He could call to mind no better one than Eusebius, to enumerate among his spiritual peers in the kingdom of heaven. But from some of those with which he was conversant, he adopted the dreadful notion that measures man's offences by the immeasurable power of the Almighty, and aggravates them in proportion as that is great. Eternal punishment, he says, would not so plainly and evidently seem just and reasonable, "unless upon a supposition that all offences committed against the infinite majesty of God, have a sort of infinite demerit in them! and the offence partaking thus of infinity, the punishment must therefore be eternal." Yet

when he declared his belief in this doctrine, he proclaimed that "whosoever sincerely confesses and repents of sin, and trusts in the all-sufficient atonement and sacrifice of Christ, to remove the guilt of it, has abundant assurance from Scripture that the blood of Christ will cleanse him from all sin, and that the Son of God has been, and will be, his High-priest to reconcile him to God the Father."

There is however a remarkable passage in the preface to the second volume of his Discourses on the World to Come::- "Were he," he said, "to pursue his inquiries into the doctrine of eternal punishment, merely by the aids of the light of nature and reason, he feared that his natural tenderness might warp him aside from the rules and the demands of strict justice, and the wise and holy government of the great God. But he was constrained to follow the unerring word of God, wherein the everlasting punishment of sinners in hell is asserted in the plainest and strongest manner, and that by all the methods of expression which are used in Scripture to signify an everlasting continuance.

"I must confess here," he adds, "if it were possible for the great and blessed God any other way to vindicate his own eternal and unchangeable hatred of sin, the inflexible justice of his government, the wisdom of his severe threatenings, and the veracity of his predictions, if it

were also possible for him, without this terrible execution, to vindicate the veracity, sincerity, and wisdom of the prophets and apostles, and of Jesus Christ his Son, the greatest and chiefest of his divine messengers; and then, if the blessed God should at any time in a consistence with his glorious and incomprehensible perfections, release those wretched creatures from their acute pains and long imprisonment in hell, either with a design of the utter destruction of their beings by annihilation, or to put them into some unknown world upon a new foot of trial, I ought cheerfully and joyfully to accept this appointment of God for the good of millions of my fellow-creatures, and add my joys and praises to all the songs and triumphs of the heavenly world, in the day of such a divine and glorious release of these prisoners.

"But I feel myself under a necessity of confessing, that I am utterly unable to solve these difficulties according to the discoveries of the New Testament, which must be my constant rule of faith, and hope, and expectation, with regard to myself and others. I have read the strongest and best writers on the other side; yet, after all my studies, I have not been able to find any way how these difficulties may be removed, and how the divine perfections, and the conduct of God in his Word, may be fairly vindicated, without the establishment of this doctrine, awful and formidable as it is.

"The ways, indeed, of the great God, and his thoughts, are above our thoughts and our ways, as the heavens are above the earth. Yet I must rest and acquiesce where our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father's chief minister both of his wrath and his love, has left me in the divine revelations of Scripture; and I am constrained therefore to leave these unhappy creatures under the chains of everlasting darkness, into which they have cast themselves by their wilful iniquities till the blessed God shall see fit to release them.

"This would be indeed such a new, such an astonishing and universal jubilee, both for devils and wicked men, as must fill heaven, earth, and hell with hallelujahs and joy. In the mean time, it is my ardent wish that the awful sense of the terrors of the Almighty, and his everlasting anger, which the Word of the great God denounces, may awaken some souls timely to bethink themselves of the dreadful danger into which they are running, before those terrors seize them at death, and begin to be executed upon them without release and without hope."

This is a most curious passage. While on the one hand it expresses, in the strongest and most unequivocal terms, that the writer believed the doctrine of eternal punishment, because he found it plainly to his understanding declared in Scripture, it implies on the other, as obviously as words can imply a meaning, an opinion that the Al