"They may be saved; though their intelligence and attainments place their salvation in great jeopardy. The virtues of some, like the vices of others, militate against them, and often decide the fatal issue."
"You greatly alarm and perplex me. As much danger in superior intelligence, and superior virtue, as in vulgar ignorance and offensive vice!"
"Yes, Madam, and sometimes there is more. The Pharisees of the New Testament were intelligent persons, and they were also virtuous and very religious; and yet with what fearful solemnity, and in what terrific forms of expression, did Jesus Christ denounce and condemn them—'Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness. Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?' (Matt. xxiii. 27, 33)."
"My dear Sir, you stagger and confound me with alarm."
"You overlook, my dear Madam, one great fact, which is a solution of the perplexity which confounds you."
"And what is that fact?"
"All have sinned against God; and as a palpable proof of it, the sentence of death has been passed against all. This is a judicial sentence, which could not be inflicted unless there was delinquency, and consequent guilt. As the apostle says, 'Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned' (Rom. v. 12)."
"Then, Sir, am I to understand that all persons—the intelligent and the virtuous, and the ignorant and the vicious—are in the same moral condition—all on the same level?"
"You see that they are all doomed to death; because they have all sinned. The virtue of the most virtuous is no protection against death."
"True, Sir, but may it not prove a safe passport to heaven?"