his own character, and unfold and strengthen it forever. When the transgressor of God's law, in serious reflection, dwells on the thought, till its full meaning unfolds on him, it is absolutely appalling to think, "I shall be forever such as I am now; I shall feel forever the same aversion to God and his service, the same ingratitude, pride, and hardness of heart; I shall eternally be controlled by the same groveling desires, the same grasping selfishness, the same tumultuous passions. Forever all the offensive features of this character will grow more offensive. I am binding myself by my acts and feelings every day,-by my own hands I am binding myself with chains of darkness forever." Look forward, thou covetous worldling, thou filthy debauchee, thou proud, self-righteous Pharisee, thou callous despiser of Christ, look forward ten thousand years, and behold projected on the dim and distant clouds of eternity that monstrous and loathsome image, lifting like a Colossus its execrable shape. It is but the image of thyself, magnified by the lapse of ten thousand years. It is but thine own pride, and covetousness, and hatred, and hardness of heart that compose the horrid limbs and features of that colossal monster. Tremble to know that, unless thou repent, thou wilt thyself be what thou now shudderest to behold; and from that point, now far distant in eternity, where that image stands, when thou shalt reach it, thou wilt look forward to still more detestable developments of thine own character.

We are now prepared to see how destitute of force is Foster's principal argument against the endless punishment of sinners, that the punishment is too great for the offence; that it cannot be believed that a whole eternity of agony is to be the penalty for only seventy, or fifty, or twenty years of sin. If, indeed, men will cease to sin at death, and if punishment in hell is to be regarded as stripes or pains inflicted on the sinner by the immediate hand of God tormenting him, the objection may have some weight. But we have been contemplating the punishment of the wicked in a different light. The sinner has formed a sinful character, and, according to a law of the human mind, which we have seen to be an indispensable element in the moral government of God, that character perpetuates itself and becomes confirmed irrevocably. Therefore the man sins forever, and suffers all the torment of sinful passions reigning in his soul; and lies forever under God's frown; for God is holy, and must frown on sin wherever it appears. The eternal misery of the sinner is simply the consequence of the fact that he sins forever. God's eternal punishment of the sinner is simply the expression of his eternal abhorrence of sin, of his unalterable purpose to give it no approbation, no favor, no tolerance forever. No objection can be urged

against the doctrine, thus stated, which does not apply with equal force to the fact that, under the moral government of God, men do sin in this life.

The doctrine which has been elucidated may also help to relieve the perplexity occasioned by the unequal manner in which the blessings of this life are distributed. From the days of Job until now, men have been anxiously asking, "Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, are mighty in power?" It must be admitted that, in the distribution of temporal blessings, little regard seems to be paid to character; the good are depressed, the wicked prospered. But in one respect sin is, in this life, uniformly and immediately followed by evil consequences, and holy actions by the contrary; and these consequences in each case are the most important and enduring. Every sinful act confirms a sinful character, and strengthens the probability that the man will be a sinner forever; than which no result of sin can be more terrible. On the other hand, every holy act confirms a holy character, and helps to secure the man in holiness forever; than which no blessing can be more valuable. Thus, even in this probation, we trace a single line of retribution, in which, without deviation or exception, sin is uniformly and immediately followed by evil, and that the most fatal; and holy acts are uniformly and immediately followed by good, and that the most desirable.

This accords with the apostle's declaration, "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." The harvest shall be the very same in kind with the seed sown. It is not taught that, if a man sows the seed of holiness, he shall reap a harvest of wealth, or honor, or long life; but he shall reap that which he sowed, and that is holiness, increased thirty, sixty, or an hundredfold. "Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness; for they shall be filled." They shall be filled with the very holiness for which they hunger; holiness itself shall be the reward of them that seek it. Grant, then, that the Christian may suffer sickness, poverty, bereavement, martyrdom; yet, by enduring these very sufferings he strengthens those graces which make him like God and prepare him for the blessedness of heaven; and thus, by his very sufferings, he insures and enhances his reward. And it is not taught that if a man sow sin, he shall poverty, sickness, or disgrace; but he shall reap sin, and with a fearful increase. Grant, then, that the covetous man becomes rich by his covetousness; yet, by the very process of accumulating in the spirit of covetousness, he has strengthened that covetousness, and made it more fearfully probable that it will gnaw his soul, when, of all his riches, there will remain

reap

only the bitter memory, like that of Dives, when he heard the significant words, "Son, REMEMBER that thou in thy life-time receivedst thy good things." The sinner's success in sin does but strengthen his sinfulness, and thus insures his punishment. His sin is but a seed which shall produce a harvest of sin a hundred-fold. Then let not the sinner flatter himself that his punishment is far off and uncertain; that he may continue in transgression, and yet escape; for here, amid all the confusion of this life, is a single line of retribution, immediate, uniform, inevitable, and-unless arrested by repentance through the scheme of salvation provided by Christ-necessarily eternal.

And here we may reclaim to its true significance that much abused expression, Sin is its own punishment." Let no man delude himself with this, as if, because sin is its own punishment, therefore that punishment is slight, temporary, little to be regarded. Sin is its own punishment. But the meaning of this is deep and wide as eternity; it expresses the most appalling fact in the history of sin; it means that every sin is a seed planted in the soul to bear the fruit of sin a hundred-fold, and each multiplied harvest sowing and multiplying itself in new harvests of sin forever. It means that sin stamps itself on the very soul, shapes and moulds the immortal spirit into its own hideousness, and compels it to grow forever into its own monstrous deformity and hatefulness. It means that the sinner will be a sinner forever; will forever experience the raging of passion, the agony of unappeasable desire, the burning of hatred, the anguish of remorse; will forever become more and more unlike God; will forever repel him with an increasing aversion, and be repelled by Him from his bosom of holy love. Thus, now, thus during every day of sin, thus through all eternity, will the sinner's own wickedness correct him; and forever will he be seeing and knowing that it is an evil thing, and bitter, that he has forsaken the Lord.

Impossible, then, by any device to continue in sin and yet evade its penalty. Impossible to flee from the wrath to come, except by fleeing from the sins of the present. Impossible to flee from these sins but by repentance and faith in Christ. Then, with overpowering emphasis, does our subject enforce the warning of inspiration, "To-DAY, if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts."

ART. III.—THE BARDS OF THE BIBLE.

The Bards of the Bible. By GEORGE GILFILLAN. New York : D. Appleton & Co., 200 Broadway. Philadelphia: Geo. S. Appleton, 164 Chesnut Street. New Haven: T. H. Pease, 83 Chapel Street. 1851, pp. 325.

MR. GILFILLAN is well known as one of the popular authors of the day. He has written principally about genius, and men of genius-not without a perceptible strain of his own powers. Having finished the uninspired writers of the present age and the past, he now attempts the sacred writers. In one respect he was qualified for the task; the Bible, as he informs us, had been his daily companion from childhood, and he had devoted to its proclamation "the most valued of his years." In another respect he was positively disqualified; he has a puerile admiration of genius, of the spiritual, the genial, the spontaneous, the unconscious; as a consequence, his writings are mainly "puffs" of the demigods whom he worships. Unfortunately, he regards the writers of the Bible as all of them men of genius even beyond any that ever lived, and accordingly he has written about them with all that splendid rhetoric with which he deems it a duty to adorn everything pertaining to the object of his idolatry.

A work on Hebrew poetry, written from genuine poetic impulses and founded on accurate and comprehensive scholarship, thus uniting the excellencies of both Lowth and Herder, would perhaps supply a deficiency in English literature. But Mr. Gilfillan has attempted nothing of this kind. “The main ambition of this book," he tells us in the preface, "is, to be a prose poem," a very poor ambition even for a book to entertain. Literature has nothing quite so offensive to taste as that mongrel called a prose poem. We are further told that the author "has not conformed to the common practice of printing his poetical quotations from the Scriptures as poetry in the form of parallelism." He gives as a reason that, "he never could bring himself to relish the practice;" and then adds, "He may say this the more fearlessly, as translations of the great masterpieces of foreign literature into plain English prose are becoming the order of the day." But what has that to do with the question, whether poetry shall be printed in the form of poetry, or in the form of prose? The Psalms in the common version and the Psalms printed in the form of parallelism do not stand in the same relation to each other as a prose translation-of Homer, for instance-to a poetical one. The author might as well cause

Pope's Homer to be printed as prose is printed, and then call it a prose translation. We hope such logic is not becoming "the order of the day."

The author discusses, in an Introduction, the question why so much of the Scriptures is written in the language of poetry? We propose to follow him in this discussion. But we must first apologize for the mode of our criticism, which will be to take up sentence after sentence and inquire what each one means. Mr. Gilfillan writes almost solely in metaphor. His thoughts, to use his own expression, in speaking of figurative language, "like the swan on still St. Mary's lake, float double;"" or, if at any time he condescends to express himself in literal language, it is with a certain poetical license which makes it very difficult to determine precisely what he means. But the sentences upon which we shall remark, follow each other as in the book, and form an entire paragraph.

The first reason which Mr. Gilfillan alleges, why Scripture is written in the language of poetry, is thus expressed: "As the language of poetry is that into which all earnest natures are insensibly betrayed, so it is the only speech which has in it the power of permanent impression." If the meaning be that all true poets are men of an earnest nature, and that this earnestness gives to poetry its power of permanent impression, the assertion may be true but explains nothing, since it does not exclude the supposition that prose writers may also be men of an earnest nature, and therefore that they may so express themselves as to make a permanent impression. But if the meaning be that all men of such a nature are pocts, the assertion is false, though if it were true, it would be to the point. Bishop Butler writes "with simplicity and in earnest," but the Bishop is not a poet, and yet his writings have made a permanent impression. Swift, Paley, De Foe, and others write in earnest, but it is their prose writings which have made a permanent impression. But we will look at the assertion apart from the reason given for it. If it be true that "poetry is the only speech which has in it the power of permanent impression," it is time for men of letters to revise their vocabularies, and give to Herodotus and Thucydides and Xenophon and Plato and others who have made some tolerably "permanent impressions" on mankind, the name which has been so long denied them; not to say that in this view of the matter, the greater part of the Bible must be of very transient value, or else the Bible is all poetry. The author next proceeds to render a reason why poetry makes its permanent impression. "As it gives two ideas in the space of one, so it writes these before the view, as with the luminousness of fire." It is the