and hell; but it has accepted, unconsciously, from Swedenborg, his teaching that every man carries heaven or hell in his own bosom; and remits to the Past the fearful pictures of Edwards and his cotemporaries, of literal torments and a remorseless and pitiless God."
And with equal truth and plainness (though with a little less candor, perhaps, in not hinting at the real cause) the distinguished pastor of Plymouth Church (Brooklyn), said in a sermon on "Future Punishment" preached some months ago: "that the educated Christian mind of all lands, for the last hundred years [note the period] has been changing" in regard to the nature of punishment in the great Hereafter.
"It is certainly true," he continues, "that theories have been changing from gross material representations [of hell], more and more in the direction of moral representations. It is very true that this subject is not preached as it used to be—not as it was in my childhood. It has not been preached so often, nor with the same fiery and familiar boldness that it used to be. Multitudes of men who give every evidence of being spiritual, regenerate, devout, laborious and self-denying, find themselves straitened in their minds in respect to this question, and are turning anxiously every whither to see whence relief may come to them. There has been a profound change [within the last hundred years, observe] in the sentiment of Christendom in regard to those gross representations of future punishment, which were handed
