PREBENDARY ROW ON RETRIBUTION.
[To 78R EDITOR OP THE " srEctaros...3 Sza,—Your correspondent of Jane 23rd quotes the following passage from your notice of my work on "Future Retribution," in a letter entitled "Destruction, not Annihilation "—"We cannot say that the various words which imply destruction, and which are applied to the impenitent, are at all obviously intended to express annihilation." I have in vain searched for any passage in the work in question in which I have affirmed that they do. On the contrary,' lay down that iihiApo; ciwiNE tee, Ac., bears the same meaning in the Greek which was spoken by the members of the different Christian Churches, which the word " destniction " and words of corresponding meaning bear in our conversational English, and that they are not used by the sacred writers in a technical, but in a wide and in a somewhat vague and general sense. It is true that I have laid down that the ultimate fate of the finally impenitent will be annihilation ; but I have arrived at this conclusion, not because the words Asapoc dwAsica, Ac., necessarily mean this, but on wholly different considerations. One point I think that I have proved beyond the power of contradiction, that it is impossible that they could have conveyed to the Christian-speaking Greek the idea of the endless existence in never-ending misery of popular theology. The following passage at page 387 will, I think, make my general position clear, a passage which both your reviewer and your correspondent seem to have overlooked It is a blessed truth, affirmed by the Christian Revelation, that there is a time coming in the future, when God shall have reconciled all things unto himself, and when evil will cease to exist in the universe which he has created. There are only the ways in which this can be effected—either by the conversion of evil beings, or by causing them to cease to exist. The Universalist affirms that it is in accordance with the divine character that the mode in which this will be effected will be by their ultimate conversion. This, the language of the New Testament, taken in its obvious meaning, denies. It remains, therefore, that the second alternative is the only possible one, that evil beings will be annihilated either by an exertion of God's almighty power, or because he has so constituted the moral universe, that under his providential government the disease of evil will ultimately destroy man's spiritual and moral being, jest as physical disease destroys his bodily life."
To put the matter briefly, as all finite beings were created and are kept in being by the action of the energetic will of the Creator, if it is his good pleasure at some period of the future "to sum up all things in Christ," to "reconcile all things unto himself," and" that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things on earth, and things in the world below, and that every tongue should confess that Jeans Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father," when the purpose of permitted evil has been fully realised, he has simply to withdraw the energy by which he upholds them in existence, and every being opposed to him will cease to exist.—I am, Sir,
C. A. Row.
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