Are penalties imposed on spirits eternal?

Are penalties imposed on spirits eternal?

Interrogate your common sense, your reason, and ask yourself whether an eternal condemnation, for a few moments of error, would not be the negation of the goodness of God?

What is the duration of human life, even though prolonged to a hundred years, in comparison with eternity?

ETERNITY!

Do you rightly comprehend the word?

Sufferings, tortures, without end, without hope, for a few faults?

Does your judgement not reject such an idea?

That the ancients should have seen, in the Master of the Universe, a terrible, jealous, vindictive God is conceivable, for, in their ignorance, they attributed to the Divinity the passions of men, but such is not the God of the Christians who places love, charity, pity, the forgetfulness of offences, in the foremost rank of virtues, and who could not lack the qualities He has made it the duty of His creatures to possess.

Is it not a contradiction to attribute to Him infinite love and infinite vengeance?

You say that God's justice is infinite, transcending the limited understanding of mankind, but justice does not exclude kindness, and God would not be kind if He condemned the greater number of His creatures to horrible and unending punishment.

Could He make it obligatory on His children to be just if His own action towards them did not give them the most perfect standard of justice?

And is it not the very sublimity of justice and of kindness to make the duration of the punishment to depend on the efforts of the guilty one to amend and to mete out the appropriate recompense, both for good and for evil to each, according to his works?