The _hills_ are called everlasting (secular ?), by those who supposed them to have come into existence two or three thousand years before .-- Only in two passages of the Revelations I could not get over the belief that the writer's energy was misplaced, if absolute eternity of torment was not intended: yet it seemed to me unsafe and wrong to found an important doctrine on a symbolic and confessedly obscure book of prophecy.
Setting this aside, I found no proof of any _eternal_ punishment.
As soon as the load of Scriptural authority was thus taken off from me, I had a vivid discernment of intolerable moral difficulties inseparable from the doctrine.

First, that every sin is infinite in ill-desert and in result, _because_ it is committed against an infinite Being.

Thus the fretfulness of a child is an infinite evil! I was aghast that I could have believed it.

Now that it was no longer laid upon me as a duty to uphold the infinitude of God's retaliation on sin, I saw that it was an immorality to teach that sin was measured by anything else than the heart and will of the agent.

That a finite being should deserve infinite punishment, now was manifestly as incredible as that he should deserve infinite reward,--which I had never dreamed .-- Again, I saw that the current orthodoxy made Satan eternal conqueror over Christ.