passions, and irrational and violent resentments, there is no way left to keep them in order, but by the terrors of future punishment, and all the pompous circumstances that attend such kind of FICTION! On which account the ancients acted, in my opinion, with great judgment and penetration, when they contrived to bring those notions of the gods and a future state, into the popular belief."

Strabo, who was a Greek geographer and eminent philosopher, says: "It is impossible to govern women and the gross body of the people, and to keep them pious, holy and virtuous, by the precepts of philosophy. This can only be done by the fear of the gods, which is raised and supported by ancient fictions and modern prodigies." And again, he says, that "The apparatus of the ancient mythologies was an engine which the legislators employed as bugbears to strike a terror into the childish imagination of the multitude.”

Seneca says: "Those things which make the infernal regions terrible, the darkness, the prison, the river of flaming fire, the judgment seat, etc., are all a fable, with which the poets amuse themselves, and by them agitate us with vain terrors !" It is here admitted that the doctrine of endless punishment was an "invention". of the heathen, a “fiction" and a "bugbear," contrived to deter those people from sin, who could not be influenced by the rewards and punishments of this life.

The doctrine of endless punishment, then, being of purely Heathen origin, has no claims upon our

regard, any more than idolatry, and the belief of the ancient Jews in the transmigration of souls! It forms no part of divine revelation, and we reject it, because it is a pure fiction of the imagination.. We have not been able to introduce every passage which has been urged in support of the doctrine of endless punishment, but we have examined and explained all the prominent texts, which are relied upon, to prove the doctrine in question, and have shown that they yield no support to this dogma of the church.

In giving our thoughts upon these controverted texts, we have not written so much for the eye of the critic, as to defend the truth. Conscious of its imperfections, we send out this work, with an earnest desire that it may bear some humble part in removing the religious errors of the world, and in bringing many souls to the knowledge of the truth.

NEW EDITION.

D

THE first edition of this work having been exhausted, and the demand for it still continuing, we now present a new, revised and much enlarged edition, embracing a wider range of topics than what we first proposed to discuss, but which have an important bearing upon the great question at issue between Universalists and theologians of the Sacrificial Church. We have written this work with an humble desire to aid the reader in understanding the Sacred Scriptures. We send it forth, hoping that it may be an instrumentality of good, by leading many into a critical investigation of these "Proof-Texts" of endless punishment, and in correcting the erroneous interpretations that have obtained in the Christian world.