"By the denial of the intermediate states, the Protestant Reformers perpetrated a more monstrous outrage on the Divine justice, and more frightfully libelled the Divine mercy, than by the broadest stretch of imagination one would have thought it possible. By this arbitrary extinction of some of the loveliest regions of creation, by this wiping out of vast kingdoms of God's tolerance and goodness by the sponge of Protestant reaction, God's whole being was blackened, and every one of His eternal attributes dislocated and driven pell-mell into the limbo of Atheism. I say Atheism, for such a God could not possibly exist as this Protestant theory would have made Him--a God with less justice than the most stupid country squire ever established in the chair of magistracy; with less mercy than an inquisitor or a torturer with his red-hot pincers and iron boots. These atrocities were but the work of moments, but this system made the God of love and the Father of Jesus Christ sitting in endless bliss amid a favoured few, whilst below were incalculable populations suffering the tortures of fires which no period even of millions of years should extinguish, and that without any proportion whatever to the offences of the sufferers! All who were not 'spirits of just men made perfect' were, according to this doctrine, only admissible to this common hell, this common receptacle of the middling, bad, and the most bedevilled of devils! Never could any such monstrous, foul, and detestable doctrine issue from any source but that of the hearts of fiends themselves. None but devils could breed up so black a fog of blasphemy to blot out the image of a loving and paternal God from the view of His creatures. And yet the mocking devil induced the zealous Protestant fathers to accept this most truly 'doctrine of devils,' as an antidote to Popish error. As some glimmering of the direst consequences of this shutting-up of the middle states of the invisible world began to dawn on the Protestant mind, it set about to invent remedies and apply palliatives, and by a sort of spiritual hocus-pocus, it taught that if the greatest sinners did but call on Christ at the last gasp, they were converted into saints, and found themselves in heaven itself with God and the Lamb. This was only making the matter worse, and holding out a premium for the continuance in every sin and selfishness to the last moment. It was an awful temptation to self-deception presented to human selfishness. Millions, no doubt, have trusted to this wretched Protestant reed.... Yet common sense in others rejected and rejects the cruel deceit. A country poet, writing the epitaph of the blacksmith in my native village, expressed the truth on the Protestant theory of no middle regions:--