"Some very cruel people, who have made life miserable for others, may deserve a lengthy period of punishment. We may even grant, for the sake of argument, that some deserve thousands of years of intense punishment. But can anyone literally merit unending punishment? It is natural to suppose that each sin a person commits merits some finite degree of punishment. To take an analogy from the legal sphere, we normally suppose that a burglar deserves a few years of imprisonment, and that it would be unjust to imprison him indefinitely. However, to put the point crudely, if each sin an unrepentant sinner commits adds a finite number of years in hell, the total number of years in hell will be finite (assuming the number of sins is finite)." C. Stephen Layman, The Shape of the Good: Christian Reflections on the Fondation of Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1991), p. 33.