DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS |
| DIRECTOR Hoyt Kovac |
ABOUT
Let us, then, distinctly state your penal system, and hastily survey its most striking features. Taking into view the whole world of mankind—the Pagan nations, the Turks, the Jews, and all the Infidels—an immense majority, you say, live and die in their sins. Well, now, this overwhelming majority of humankind are all the proper subjects of your penal system, and are all saved in due time by its influence upon them. Hence, of all the inhabitants of this planet for six thousand years, an innumerable majority are hereafter to come forth out of your penal system, pure as the silver from the furnace, holy as God, and fitted for the happy abodes of the eternally blessed. In one word, your penal fires of hell, or your penal system, saves allils subjects —not one of them is forever lost. It triumphantly saves all—Cain, Ahab, Judas, Nero, Caligula, Heliogabulus, the Devil, and all his angels are its splendid trophies. It is, then, decidedly more powerful, successful, and triumphant than the gospel: for it is conceded on all hands that as yet but comparatively few of those who hear the gospel are saved by it. In this first and grand character of the two systems, the gospel system and the penal system, the latter is incomparably superior to the former—the penal to the gospel plan.
20—But in reply to this you will doubtless allege that the gospel is nevertheless not useless, because it saves some from sin and from the penal fires of your Purgatory; and besides, it has contributed much to the civ ilization and temporal prosperity and happiness of the world. Admit all this, and still it is useless and worse than useless; because, in the first place, had there been no gospel at all, the penal system, seeing it infallibly saves all its subjects, could as easily have saved all that the gospel saves as itdoes all that the gospel fails to save. Indeed those that the gospel saves would he more easily saved by the penal system than those it fails to save. Now it is useless to employ both a perfect and an imperfect system. The former is sufficient without tbe latter.