Add to all this, the deductions of reason as to the moral nature of the Creator and Governor of all minds. He has power to separate the good and bad; his great design, of which we here see only the _tendencies_, makes it indispensable to the perfect happiness of the good that they be separated from the bad--a _perfectly_ happy commonwealth can not be attained where the bad form a part--while the _sense of justice_ exists in God on a scale far above ours, demanding _added_ penalties for the known and willful destruction of happiness. He, like his children on earth, feels that craving for retributive justice, which can never rest till the guilty and remorseless monster receives the just recompense for his cruelty and crimes.
These teachings of reason and experience lead to the conclusion, not only that there is to be a grand consummation in which all sin and suffering shall be ended in a perfected commonwealth, but also to the conclusion that those excluded from this community of the good are to continue their existence in sin and its natural results for ever.
That any portion, either of matter or mind, is to be annihilated, can not be inferred from any past experience. All that we can learn are the laws of perpetual _succession_ and _change_. One single fact of annihilation has never yet been made known to man by any process of reasoning, or any recorded experience.
There is another question in reference to this awful subject, which is of deepest interest. Although the deductions of reason lead to the doctrine of the eventual separation of mankind into two distinct communities, the good and the evil, what are its teachings as to the _immediate_ state of each individual soul after the event of death?
Here, as before, we have only the nature and past history of mind, from which the future is to be deduced. In this world we have found the changes in the character of individuals and of communities to proceed by slow and imperceptible movement. We have nothing in the past to lead to the belief that this slow process of discipline, culture and change may not proceed on for ages. As in this life, multitudes have the impress and direction of character given in early life, so that the first few years determine all their future history in this world, so the career of this short life may fix the future through eternal years. And yet the process of change to the full consummation of character may involve ages.