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The Spirits In Prison Life After Death By E. H. Plumptee D.D. Dean Of Wells

…. the teaching of our Lord and his Apostles gives a strange, awful prominence to the fact of a separation between the evil and the good as the last closing scene in the divine drama of the world's history, beyond which there lies only a darkness which we cannot penetrate.

If here and there we meet with divine words which speak, or seem to speak, of a final victory, when God shall be all in all, and all shall be as God wills, all concluded in unbelief, that He may have mercy upon all, when one accordant song of praise and thanksgiving shall rise from the universe which He created, we cannot shut out from our thoughts those other words, which tell us of the sin that hath never forgiveness, and the worm that dieth not and the fire that never can be quenched, and the great chasm which none can pass.

We must be content to leave this seeming contradiction as part of the great mystery of evil from which the veil has never yet been lifted.

We can but say that it has its parallel in that other mystery of the seemingly irreconcilable antagonism between God's foreknowledge and man's free-will, the election before the foundation of the world, which works according to God's good pleasure, and the power to forfeit that election so that it is impossible for those who have so fallen to renew themselves to repentance.