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From Historical Hastings
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thing!” To whom? – not to the Christians, but to him who was not a Christian an awful foreboding was all that could be thought of for him. There was not a Christian in that who if the last fire were to overcome the globe on the morrow would suffer the least injury. St. Paul had told them that neither “Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities nor powers, &c., should be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord”. What an awful thing that any should be destined to suffering. That was the only thing to him that had been a difficulty – that when this world was re-formed there would be a place of misery and woe. He had tried to prove it untrue from the Bible, but he could not. His creed was based, not upon what the best men of the day said – not upon what the wisest thought – not upon that which the world generally received – but upon what God had said in His own blessed Word. What a pity it was that Professor Maurice and his coadjutors in those wild and fanciful “Essays”, and the unfortunate Bishop of Colenso – who, poor man, seemed to have been wool-gathering in every other place but his own diocese – should try to show that the state of punishment was not so bad as was sometimes thought. His (the lecturer’s) course would be to not to extenuate the sufferings of the lost, but to tell every human being that there was no reason out of himself why he should ever be sent to the place of torment. There were prisons in London, and there were, doubtless, bridewells in St. Leonards , but they need not go into them. So there was a hell, but that need not affect them individually. . . Salvation was for all who came to God through Christ. . . . . The reverend lecturer cited several authorities – and among them the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland and a Russian Prince – to show that we were on the verge of most stupendous events; that in the impending changes the Papacy would be swept away; and that a period of four or five years from 1862 would suffice for the accomplishment of those great events . . . . In treating of the resurrection said what a blessed thought it was that every dead believer from Adam and, from Abraham to Sarah (the place of whose dust was lately visited by the Prince of Wales, under the oaks of Mamre), down to the infant just dropped from the mother’s bosom in to the lap of God, should instantly the Lord appeared come forth into a renewed body, leaving in the grave only sin, decay, and whatever the Devil introduced six thousand years ago! The Devil would have all these as a present to himself, and the body would come forth from the grave disintegrated from all that was mortal . . . . People had been taught in books, such as the Essays and Reviews, that the resurrection was figurative. The writers were ministers of the Church of England, yet, if there were one doctrine in that church ritual strongly enforced, is was as to the reality of the future resurrection . . . To a God who was omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent, all things were possible that the Bible had said were impossible; hence, it was neither im-