probability of reformation and growth, for suffering is not a penalty in token of disapproval, bat a sign of mercy and an agency of restraint and reformation. The penalty of sin is death—an eternal disability—and the pain that accompanies it is its symptom demanding attention, and the application of curative remedies. As the pain of a burn, the gnawing of hunger, the distress of fever, are symptoms of threatened danger which indicate the localities in jeopardy, the disintegration of the tissues in process, and call for help, and disturb until relieved; so the fiery darts of sin, the cravings from spiritual inanition, and the restless ferment from corrupt desires and vicious practices, give the alarm of moral dissolution, and cry "with groanings unutterable," until the remedies are applied and the cure is effected. So that suffering, physical and spiritual, is the cry for mercy from the depths of transgression, and is the sign of hope and the assurance of a "present help in time of need," unless the desire of sufferers exceeds the measure of the divine and human compassion. If, therefore, life is continuous and pain accompanies penalty, the possibility of recovery from the pain of transgression and of a new opportunity in life must be their concomitants, and last as long as "life and thought and being." So that penalty, so long as it is accompanied with pain, is an evidence of probationary being, and there is certainly no philosophic nor scientific reason, and probably no biblical teaching, incompatible with these two principles—the continuity of life, and the remedial nature of pain; and, therefore, it may confidently be affirmed, where there is pain there is hope.
But probationary life is not hypothecated on continuity of life, nor on any remedial provision in life, but on the essential nature of morality. The phrase "second probation" is misleading, so far as it implies a continuity of condition or state. Each moral act—i.e., each deliberate act for which a moral being is responsible—completes a probationary period, so that a moral life is a succession of periods in which deliberate choice, or the acceptance or rejection of ultimate good, is expressed. Probation is, therefore, of instantaneity and not of continuity, except so far as continuity indicates a succession of moral or probationary processes; character is the tendency evoked by the last determination; virtuous life is a succession of best choices, and finite moral being and morality terminate with probation. There is a disposition in the human mind to repeat its acts, and it acquires the facility of habit by its repetitions, so that one virtuous or vicious act heralds another, but each volition determines, as it also indicates, the character, and therefore, if there be virtue in the future, it must be predicated there as here on a probationary existence, and be secured by deliberate choice. And to the objection that this postulatum renders the conditions of the future as uncertain as in the present, it need only be said that the ordinances of Heaven are not regulated by speculative philosophers or theologians. But why should the conditions of
