special passage about the Blasphemy against the Holy Ghost (to which you
refer), I will write you my notions on it in a future letter."

A little later, according, he wrote:

"With regard to your passage of difficulty about the unpardonable sin, I
would say: (1) If that sin is not to be forgiven in the world to come, it
is implied that all other sins _are forgiven in the world to come_. (2)
You must remember that our Lord's parables and teachings mainly concerned
contemporary events and people. I mean, for instance, that in his great
prophecy of _judgment_ he simply was speaking of the destruction of the
Jewish polity and nation. The _principles_ involved apply through all
time, but He did not apply them except to the Jewish nation. He was
speaking then, not of 'the end of the _world_, (as is wrongly
translated), but of 'the end of the _age_'. (Every age is wound up with a
judgment. French Revolutions, Reformations, etc., are all ends of ages
and judgments.) [Greek aion] does not, cannot, will not, and never did
mean _world_, but _age_. Well, then, he has been speaking of the Jewish
people. And he says that all words spoken against the Son of Man will be
forgiven. But there is a blasphemy against the Holy Spirit of God--there
is a confusion of good with evil, of light with darkness--which goes
deeper down than this. When a nation has lost the faculty of
distinguishing love from hatred, the spirit of falsehood and hypocrisy
from the spirit of truth, God from the Devil--_then its doom is
pronounced_--the decree is gone forth against it. As the doom of Judaism,
guilty of this sin, _was then_ pronounced. As the _decree against it had
already gone forth. It is a national warning, not an individual one. It
applies to two ages of this world, and not to two worlds_. All its
teaching was primarily _national_, and is only thus to be rightly read--
if not all, rather _most of it_. If you would be sure of this and