CHAPTER III.

THE MYTHOLOGICAL HELL AND THE TRUE ONE, OR THE LAW OF PERDITION.

THE doctrine that there is a material place of torment destined to be the eternal abode of the wicked after death is based on the language of the Bible, supported by the aggregate teachings of the church, and commonly asserted, though with a stricken and failing faith, throughout Christendom at this moment. When any one tries to show the unreasonableness of the belief in this local prison house of the damned, arrayed with the innumerable horrors of physical anguish, he is at once met with the declaration that God himself has declared the fact, and consequently that we are bound to accept it without question, as a truth of revelation. For the reasons which we will immediately proceed to give, this representation must be rejected as a mistake.

The popular doctrine of hell is not a divine revelation, but is a mythological growth. It is a fanciful mass of grotesque and frightful errors enveloping a truth which needs to be separated from them and exhibited in its purity. In the first place, the substance of the doctrine affirmed, the notion of a bottomless pit, or penal territory of fire and torment in which God will confine all the unredeemed portions of the human race after their bodily dissolution, is something wholly apart from morality and religion, something belonging to the two departments of descriptive geography and police history. The existence or nonexistence of a place of material torment reserved for the wicked, is a question not of theology, but of topography. In earlier times it was avowedly included in geography; and numerous caves, lakes, volcanos, as at Lebadeia, Derbyshire, Avernus, Nafita, Etna, and elsewhere were believed to be literally entrances to hell. So famous and eminent a man as Saint Gregory the Great, when the great Sicilian volcano was seen to be increasingly agitated, taught that it was owing to the press of lost souls, rendering it necessary to enlarge the approach to their prison. With the increase of knowledge, the localization of hell was subsequently by many authors, made a part of cosmography, and shifted about among the comets, the moon and the sun, although most people still think that it is the interior of the earth. But, the best theologians of all denominations, the most authoritative thinkers of all schools, now hold that the supernatural revelations of God are limited to the sphere of the spirit, and do not include the data of geology, astronomy, chemistry and mathematics.

God is not a local king, ruling his subjects by means of political machinery and external interferences; he is the omnipresent Creator, spiritually sustaining and governing his creatures from within by means of the laws which determine their experience, the action and reaction between their faculties and their surrounding conditions. Accordingly, the sphere of direct revelations from the spirit of God to the spirit of man is limited to the implications in the divine logic of the soul and its life, that is, to moral and religious truths. The facts of history and cosmology are left for the processes of natural discovery. Whether there be or be not a localized hell of material tortures lies not within the domain of revelation, but is a problem of physical science. And science demonstrates, from the weight of the globe, that it is solid; and not, according to the current belief, a hollow shell containing a sea of flame packed with the floating hosts of the lost.

Furthermore, the only mode in which the truth of such a doctrine could be made known is wholly aside from the method of supernatural revelation. God does not utter his thoughts to his chosen messengers in words or other outward signs as a man does. Men communicate information to one another by voice, gesture, drawing, writing or other mechanical devices. It is the natural mistake of a crude age to suppose that God does the same, breathing verbal formularies into the of minds of his selected servants. But this is not the case. Revelation is not to receive an announcement; it is to perceive a truth. Since God is infinite, we cannot stand out against him and talk with him. Souls in finer and fuller harmony with the works and laws of God, thus fulfilling the human conditions of inspiration, are met by the divine conditions, and obtain new insight of the ways and designs of God. They experience purer and richer ideas and emotions than others, and may afterwards impart them to others, thus transmitting the revelation to them. For this new enlightenment, sanctification, or rise of life, is what alone constitutes a true revelation. Now if there be a local and physical hell, it is not a moral truth which the inspired soul can see, but a scientific fact which can be perceived only by the senses or deduced by the logical intellect. If a man could travel to every nook of the creation he might discover whether there were such a hell or not. But you cannot discover a spiritual truth by any amount of outward travel. When a soul is so delivered from egotism, or the jar of self will against universal law, and brought into such high harmony with the spirit of the whole, as to perceive this divine law of life, "He who dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him," then he is inspired to see a religious truth. He has obtained a divine revelation. But we cannot conceive of any degree of exaltation into unison with God which would enable a man to see the fact that the centre of the earth or the surface of the sun or any other spot, is a place of fire set apart as the penal abode of the damned, and that it is crowded with burning sulphur and unimaginable forms of wickedness and agony. Such a doctrine is out of the province, and its conveyance irreconcilable with the method of revelation, which consists not in an exterior communication of scientific facts to messengers selected to receive them, but in an interior unveiling of religious truths to souls prepared to see them.

In the next place, we maintain, that the doctrine of a local hell, a guarded and smoking dungeon of the damned, ought not to be regarded as a truth contained in a revelation from God, because it is plainly proved by historic evidence to be a part of the mythology of the world, a natural product of the poetic imagination of ignorant and superstitious men. In all ages and lands men have recognized the difference between the good and the bad, merit and crime; have seen that innocence and virtue represented the permanent conditions of human welfare, that guilt and vice represented the insurrection of private or lower and transient desire against public or higher and more lasting good; and have felt that the former deserved to be praised and rewarded, the latter to be blamed and punished. In all ages and all nations society has teemed with devices for the distribution of these returns, prizes to the meritorious, penalties to the derelict. There is scarcely any evil discoverable in nature or inventable in art which has not been used as a means for the punishment of criminals. Enemies captured in battle, or seized by the minions of despots, violators of the laws of the community, arraigned before judicial tribunals, have been in every country subjected to every species of penalty, such as slavery, imprisonment, banishment, fine, stripes, dismemberment. They have been starved, frozen, burned, hung, drowned, strangled by serpents, devoured by wild beasts. The rebellious and hated offenders of the king, while he banquets in his illuminated palace with his faithful servants and favorites around him, are exiled into outer darkness, fettered in dungeons, plied with every conceivable indignity and misery, bastinadoed, bowstrung, or torn in pieces with lingering torture. Here we have the germ of hell. To get the fully developed popular doctrine of hell it is only necessary to concentrate and aggravate the known evils of this world, the horrible sufferings inflicted on criminals and enemies here, and transfer the vindictive and pitiable mass of wretchedness over into the future state as a representation of the doom God has there prepared for his foes. Earthly rulers and their practice, the most impressive scenes and acts experienced among men, have always hitherto furnished the types of thought applied to illustrate the unknown details of the hereafter. The judge orders the culprit to be disgraced, scourged, put in the stocks, or cropped and transported. The sultan hurls those he hates into the dungeon, upon the gibbet or into the flame, with every accompaniment of mockery and pain. So, an imaginative instinct concludes, God will deal with all who offend him. They will be excluded from his presence, imprisoned and tormented forever.

This whole process of comparison and inference, natural as it is, is one prolonged fallacy exemplifying the very essence of all mythological construction in contrast both with inspired perception and logical reasoning. The revealing arrival of a truth in consciousness is when an intuitive thrill announces the action of our faculties in correspondence with some relation in the reality of things. Mythology is the deceptive substitute for this, employed when we arbitrarily project forms of our present experience into the unknown futurity, and then hold the resultant fancies as a rigid belief, or regard them as actual knowledge. This is exactly what has happened in the case of the doctrine of an eternal physical hell beyond the grave. The natural and punitive horrors of the present state have been collected, intensified, dilated, and thrown into the future as a world of unmitigated sin and wrath and anguish, a consolidated image of the vengeance of God on his insurgent subjects.

Now the true desideratum, the only result on which reason can rest, whenever tests are applied to our beliefs, is this: that what is known be scientifically set forth in distinct definitions; that what is unknown be treated provisionally, with theoretic approaches; and that what is absolutely unknowable be fixedly recognized as such. This regulative principle of thought is grossly violated in every particular by the popular belief in a material hell.

Wherever we look at the prevalent doctrines of hell among different peoples, from the rudest to the most refined, we see them reflecting into the penal arrangements of the other world the leading features of their earthly experience of natural, domestic, judicial, and political evils. The hells of the inhabitants of the frigid zones are icy and rocky; those of the inhabitants of the torrid zones are fiery and sandy. Are not the poetic process and its sophistry clear? Nastrond, the hell of the Northmen, is a vast, hideous and grisly dwelling, its walls built of adders whose heads, turned inward, continually spew poison which forms a lake of venom wherein all thieves, cowards, traitors, perjurers and murderers, eternally swim. Is this revelation, science, logic, or is it mythology?

The Egyptian priests taught, and the people seemed to have implicitly trusted the tale, that there was a long series of hells awaiting the disembodied souls of all who had not scrupulously observed the ritual prescribed for them, and secured the pass words and magical formulas necessary for the safe completion of the post mortal journey. The specifications and pictures of the terrors and distresses provided in the various hells are vivid in the extreme, including ingenious paraphrases of every sort of penalty and pang known in Egypt. The same thing may be affirmed with quadruple emphasis of the Hindu doctrine of future punishment. In the Hindu hells, truly, the possibilities of horror are exhausted. To enumerate their sufferings in anything like their own detail would require a large volume. The Vishnu Parana names twenty eight distinct hells, assigning each one to a particular class of sinners; and it adds that there are hundreds of others, in which the various classes of offenders undergo the penalties of their misdeeds. There are separate hells for thieves, for liars, for those who kill a cow, for those who drink wine, for those who insult a priest, and so on. Some of the victims are chained to posts of red hot steel and lashed with flexible flames: others are forced to devour the most horrible filth. Some are mangled and eaten by ravenous birds, others are squeezed into chests of fire and locked up for millions of years. These examples may serve as a small specimen of the infernal ingenuity displayed in the descriptions of the Hindu hells, which are all of one substantial pattern, however varied in the embroidery.

The Parsees hold that when a bad man dies his soul remains by the body three days and nights, seeing all the sins it has ever committed, and anxiously crying, "Whither shall I go? Who will save me?" On the fourth day devils come and thrust the bad soul into fetters and lead it to the bridge that reaches from earth to heaven. The warder of the bridge weighs the deeds of the wicked soul in his balance, and condemns it. The devils then fling the soul down and beat it cruelly. It shrieks and groans, struggles, and calls for help; but all in vain. It is forced on toward hell, when it is suddenly met by a hideous and hateful maiden. It demands, "Who art thou, O, maiden, uglier and more detestable than I ever saw in the world?" She replies, "I am no maiden; I am thine own wicked deeds, O, thou hateful unbeliever furnished with bad thoughts and words." After further disagreeable adventures, the soul is plunged into the abode of the devil, where the darkness and foul odor are so thick that they can be grasped. Fed with horrid viands, such as snakes, scorpions, poison, there the wicked soul must remain until the day of resurrection.

Now, no enlightened Christian scholar or thinker will hesitate with one stroke to brush away all the details of these pagan descriptions of hell, as so much mythological rubbish, leaving nothing of them but the bare truth that there is a retribution for the guilty soul in the future as in the present. But, in the ecclesiastical doctrine of hell, prevalent in Christendom, we see the full equivalents of the baseless fancies and superstitions incorporated in these other doctrines. If the mythological hells of the heathen nations are not a revelation from God, neither is that of the Christians; for they are fundamentally alike, all illustrating the same fallacy of the imaginative association of things known, and the transference of them to things unknown. Not a single argument can the Christian urge in behalf of his local hell which the Scandinavian, the Egyptian, the Hindu or the Persian, would not urge in behalf of his.

We can actually trace the historic development of the orthodox belief in a material hell from its simple beginning to its subsequent monstrousness of detail. The Hebrew Sheol or underworld, the common abode of the dead, is depicted in the Old Testament as a vast, slumberous, shadowy, subterranean realm, gloomy and silent. It grew out of the grave in this manner. The dead man was buried in the ground. The imagination of the survivors followed him there and brooded on the idea of him there. The image of him survived in their minds, as a free presence existing and moving wherever their conscious thought located him. The grave expanded for him, and one grave opened into another adjoining one, and shade was added to shade in the cavernous space thus provided; just as the sepulchres were associated in the burial place, and as the family of the dead were associated in the recollection of the remaining members. Thus Sheol was an imaginative dilatation of the grave.

But it was dark and still; an obscure region of painless rest and peace. How came the notions of punishment, fire, brimstone, and kindred imagery, to be connected with it? We might safely say in general that these ideas were joined with the supposed world of the dead, by the Hebrews, in the same way that a similar result has been reached by almost every other civilized nation, that is, by a reflection into the future state of the retributive terrors experienced here. Since the sharpest torture known to us in this world is that inflicted by fire, it is perfectly natural that men, in imagining the punishments to be inflicted on his victims in the next world by one who has at his command all possible modes of pain, should think of the application of fire there. But happily, we are not left to this possible conjecture.

Few influences sank more deeply into the Hebrew mind then the legend how the earth opened her mouth and swallowed into Sheol, Korah and Dathan and Abiram, the rebels against the authority of Moses, at the same time that fire fell from Jehovah and consumed two hundred and fifty of their confederates. In this story, rebellion against a prophet of God, fire and submersion in Sheol, are fused into one thought as a type of the future punishment of the wicked.

But another narrative has been of far greater importance in this direction, namely, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The Cities of the Plain were situated on a sulphur freighted and volcanic soil. They were inhabited by a people specially abandoned to vices, and specially odious to the chosen people of God. When a terrible eruption took place, overwhelming those cities with all their people, and swallowing them under a flood of bituminous flame, ashes and gas, it was natural that the Hebrews in after time should say that Jehovah had rained fire and brimstone from heaven on his enemies, and then that the history should take form in their proud and pious imaginations as a fixed type of the doom of the wicked. So it did.

At a later period the scenes and events in Gehenna, or the Valley of Hinnom in the outskirts of Jerusalem, confirmed this tendency and completed the Jewish picture of hell. In this detested vale the worship of Moloch was once celebrated by roasting children alive in the brazen arms of the god, in whose hollow form a fierce fire was kept up, and around whose shrine gongs were beaten and hymns howled to drown the shrieks of the victims. Here all the refuse and offal of the city was carried and consumed, in a conflagration whose fire was never quenched, and amidst an uncleanness whose worms never died. This imagery, too, was cast over into the future state as a representation of the fate awaiting the wicked.

Still further, it was the custom of some Oriental kings to have criminals of an especially revolting character, or the objects of their own particular hatred, flung into a furnace of fire, and there burned alive before the eyes of their judges. The example of this given in the Book of Daniel, where Nebuchadnezzar had the furnace heated seven times hotter than was wont, and ordered Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego cast into it, furnished both the Jews and the Christians with another type of the punishment of hell. So striking an image could hardly fail to take effect, and to be often reproduced. It occurs repeatedly in the New Testament. The old dragon, the devil, as the Apocalypse says, is to be chained and cast into a furnace of fire. In the writings of the Church fathers, and in the visions of the monks of the Middle Age, this image constantly occupies a conspicuous place. And thus, finally, the common notion of hell became an underground world of burning brimstone, an enormous furnace or lake of fire, full of fiends and shrieking souls.

Tundale, an Irish monk of the Twelfth century, describes the devil in the midst of hell, fastened to a blazing gridiron by red hot chains, The screams echo from the rafters, but with his hands he seizes lost souls, crushes them like grapes between his teeth, and with his breath draws them down the fiery caverns of his throat. Some of the damned the chronicler describes as suspended by their tongues, some sawn asunder, some alternately plunged into caldrons of fire and baths of ice, some gnawed by serpents, some beaten on an anvil and welded into one mass, some boiled and strained through a cloth. The defenders of the orthodox doctrine of hell will admit that this terrible picture is mere mythology; but they will say it is the product of a benighted age, and long since outgrown. Yet it is no more mythological than the declarations in the Apocalypse which are still literally accredited by multitudes of the believing. And what shall be said of the following extract from a little book called "The Sight of Hell," recently published with high ecclesiastical endorsement, for circulation among the children of Great Britain and America? The writer, the Rev. J. Furniss, describes the different dungeons of hell, and the passage which we quote is but a fair specimen of the entire series of tracts which he has collected in a volume, and which is having a large sale at this very time. "In the middle of the fourth dungeon there is a boy. His eyes are burning like two burning coals. Two long flames come out of his ears. He opens his mouth, and blazing fire rolls out. But listen! there is a sound like a kettle boiling. The blood is boiling in the scalded veins of that boy. The brain is boiling and bubbling in his head. The marrow is boiling in his bones. There is a little child in a red hot oven. Hear how it screams to come out. See how it turns and twists itself about in the fire. It beats its head against the roof of the oven. It stamps its little feet on the floor. Very likely God saw that this child would get worse and worse, and never repent, and thus would have to be punished much more in hell. So God in his mercy called it out of the world in its early childhood." Of these diabolical horrors, drawn out through hundreds of pages, the orthodox Protestant may say, "Oh, this is only a piece of Popish superstition. We all repudiate it as a most repulsive and absurd fancy."

Well, what then will he say if representations, though perhaps not quite so grossly graphic in circumstance, yet absolutely identical in principle, are set before him from the fresh utterances of hundreds of the most distinguished Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian preachers and theologians? It would be easy to present whole volumes of apposite citations. But two or three will be enough. John Henry Newman in that one of his parochial sermons, entitled, "On the Individuality of the Soul," gives us accounts of hell which for unshrinking detail of materiality will compare with the most frightful passages of Oriental mythology. George Bull, Lord Bishop of Saint Davids, in his volume of sermons declares that all who die with any sin unrepented of, "are immediately consigned to a place and state of irreversible misery a place of horrid darkness where there shines not the least glimmering of light or comfort." Mr. Spurgeon asserts, "There is a real fire in hell a fire exactly like that which we have on earth, except that it will torture without consuming. When thou diest thy soul will be tormented alone in hell: but at the day of judgment thy body shall join thy soul, and then thou wilt have twin hells, body and soul together, each brimfull of pain; thy soul sweating in its inmost pores drops of blood, and thy body, from head to foot, suffused with agony; not only conscience, judgment, memory, all tormented, but thy head tormented with racking pain, thine eyes starting from their sockets with sights of blood and woe; thine ears tormented with horrid noises; thy heart beating high with fever; thy pulse rattling at an enormous rate in agony; thy limbs cracking in the fire, and yet unburned; thyself put in a vessel of hot oil, pained, yet undestroyed. Ah! fine lady, who takest care of thy goodly fashioned face, that fair face shall be scarred with the claws of fiends. Ah! proud gentleman, dress thyself in goodly apparel for the pit; come to hell with powdered hair. It ill becomes you to waste time in pampering your bodies when you are only feeding them to be devoured in the flame. If God be true, and the Bible be true, what I have said is the truth, and you will find it one day to be so." Is not this paragraph a disgusting combination of ignorance and arrogance? It is to be swept aside and forgotten along with the immense mass of similar trash, loathsome mixture of superstition and conceit, with which Christendom has for these many centuries been so cruelly deceived and surfeited.

Tearing off and throwing away from the vulgar doctrine of hell all the incrustation of material errors and poetic symbolism, the pure truth remains that God will forever see that justice is done, virtue rewarded, vice punished. Then the question arises, In what way is this done? Not by the material apparatus of a local hell. For the doctrine of such a penal abode is not only a natural product of the mythological action of the human mind in its development through the circumstances of history, but when regarded in that light it is clearly a false representation. It is a figment incredible to any vigorous, educated and free

mind at the present day. Such reception as it now has it retains by force of an unthinking submission to tradition and authority. In the primitive ages, when the soul was imagined to be a fac simile of the body, only of a more refined substance, capable of becoming visible as a ghost, of receiving wounds, of uttering faint shrieks when hurt, of partaking of physical food and pleasure, it was perfectly natural to believe it susceptible of material imprisonment and material torments. Such was the common belief when the doctrine of a physical hell was wrought out. The doctrine yet lingers by sheer force of prescription and unthinkingness, when the basis on which it originally rested has been dissipated. We know great as our ignorance is, we know that the soul is a pure immateriality. Its manifestations depend on certain physical organs and accompaniments, but are not identical with them. Thought, feeling, will, action, force, desire, these are spirit, and not matter. A pure consciousness cannot be shut up in a dungeon under lock and bolt. A wish cannot be lashed with a whip. A volition cannot be fastened in chains of iron. You may crush or blast the visible organism in connection with which the soul now acts; but no hammer can injure an idea, no flame scorch a sentiment. What the spiritual personality becomes, how it exists, what it is susceptible of, when disembodied, no man knows. It is idle for any man, or any set of men to pretend to know. Unquestionably it is not capable of material confinement and penalties. The gross popular doctrine of hell as the fiery prison house of the devil and his angels, and the condemned majority of mankind, therefore, fades into thin air and vanishes before the truth of the absolute spirituality of mind.

In those early times, when military, political, judicial and convivial phenomena furnished the most imposing and instructive phenomena, before exact science and critical philosophy had given us their fitter moulds and tests of thought, it was unavoidable that men should think of God and Satan as two hostile monarchs, each having his own empire and striving to secure his own subjects, and looking on the subjects of his adversary as foes to be thwarted at all points. But when, with the progress of thought evil is discerned to be a negation, the devil vanishes as a verbal phantom, and the bounds of his local realm are blotted out and blent in the single dominion of the infinite God who regards none as enemies, but is the steady friend and ruler of all creatures, everywhere aiming, not to inflict vengeance on the wicked, but to harmonize the discordant, bringing good out of bad and better out of good in perpetual evolution. Sound theology will see that God is the pervading Creator who governs all from within by the continuous action and reaction between every life and its environing conditions. But mythology puts in place of this the incompetent conception of God as a political king, governing by external edicts and agents, by overt decrees and constables. This deludes us with the local and material hell of superstition, which has no existence in reality. Disordered Function is the open turnpike and metropolis of the real hell of experience. The great king's highway, leading to heaven from every point in the universe is the golden Mean of Virtue; but on the right and left of this broad road two tributary rivers, namely, Defect and Excess, empty into hell. The only true hell is the vindicating and remedial return of resisted law on a being out of tune with some just condition of his nature and destiny. The fearful cruelty and tyranny of the mythological hell, supported by the constant drilling of the people on the part of the priesthood whose vested interests and prejudices are bound up in the doctrine, have held the human race long enough in their bondage of pain and terror. In a Buddhist scripture we read, "The people in hell who are immersed in the Lohakumbha, a copper caldron a thousand miles in depth, boiling and bubbling like rice grains in a cooking pot, once in sixty thousand years descend to the bottom and return to the top. As they reach the surface they utter one syllable of prayer, and sink again on their terrific journey. Those who, during their life on earth, reverence the three jewels, Buddha, the Law and the Priesthood, will escape Lohakumbha!" The same essential doctrine resting on the same inveterate basis, selfish love of power and sensation, still prevails, though diminishingly, among us. When at last in the light of reason and a pure faith it vanishes away what a long breath of relief Christendom and humanity will draw!

If we thus dismiss as a vulgar error the belief in a hell which is a bounded region of physical torture somewhere in outward space, it becomes us to acquire in place of this rejected figment some more just and adequate idea. For a doctrine which has played such a tremendous part in the religious history of the world must be based on a truth, however travestied and overlaid that truth may be. This frightful envelop of superstitious fictions cannot be without some important reality within. In distinction, then, from the monstrous mass of mistakes denoted by it, what is the truth carried in the awful word, hell?

Denying hell to be distinctively any particular locality in time and space, we affirm it to be an experience resulting wherever the spiritual conditions of it are furnished. Accordingly, we are not to exclude it from the present state and confine it to the future, as those seem to do who say that men go to hell after death. Being a personal experience and not a material place, many are in it now and here as much as they ever will be anywhere. Neither are we to exclude it from the future and confine it to the present state, as those do who say that all the hell there is terminates with the emergence of the soul from the body. This might be so, if all sins discords and retributions were bodily. But, plainly, they are not. A mental chaos or inversion of order is as possible as a physical one. Hell is anywhere or nowhere, at any time or at no time, accordingly as the soul carries or does not carry its conditions. We are not to say of the sinner that he goes to hell when he dies, but that hell comes to him when he feels the returns of his evil deeds. It is a state within rather than a place without.

The true meaning of hell is, a state of painful opposition to the will of God, misadjustment of personal constitution with universal order or the rightful conditions of being. This is not, as the vulgar doctrine would make it, an experience of unvarying sameness into which all its subjects are indiscriminately flung. It is a thing of endless varieties and degrees, varying with the individual fitnessess. Hell is pain in the senses, slavery in the will, contradiction or confusion in the intellect, remorse or vain aspiration in the conscience, disproportion or ugliness in the imagination, doubt, fear, and hate in the heart. There is a hell of remorse, forever retreading the path of ruined yesterdays. There is a hell of loss, whose occupant stands gazing on the melancholy might have been transmuted now into a relentless nevermore. Every sinner has a hell as original and idiosyncratic as his soul and its contents. As the ingredients of evil experience are not mixed alike in any, hell cannot be one monotonous fixture for all, but must be a process altering with the different elements and degrees afforded, and softening or ending its wretchedness in proportion as the heavenly elements and degrees of freedom, pleasure, clearness, self approval, beauty, faith and love, furnish the conditions of blessedness. Hell being the consciousness of a soul in which private will is antagonistic to some relation of universal law, its keenness and extent, in every instance, must be measured by the variations of this antagonism. But how does such an antagonism arise? What are the results or penalties of it? How can it be remedied? No amount of reflection will enable any man to penetrate to the bottom of all the mysteries connected with these questions. But though we cannot tell why the principles of our destiny should be as we find them, we can see what the facts of the case actually are as revealed in the history of human experience. And this is what chiefly concerns us. Let us, then, try to penetrate a little more thoroughly into the nature of hell.

The rude definition of heaven and hell, regardless of any special place or time, is respectively the experience of good, and the experience of evil. But what are good and evil? Good is the conscious realization of universal order, the absolute fruition of being, the fulfillment of individual function, in accordance with the conditions for the most perfect and prolonged fulfillment of the universal totality of functions. Supposing that there were only one instance and form of conscious life, with no possibility of conflicting claims within or without, then good would be to that life simply the fulfillment of the functions of its nature. But the moment a being is set in relation with other beings like itself, and also made aware of various gradations of importance among its own interior faculties, then the definition of good is no longer the simple fulfillment of function, or the mere gratification of desire; but it becomes the fulfillment of function in such a manner as to secure the greatest total quality and quantity of fulfilled function. Now evil is the opposite or negation of this. It is whatever lessens the fruition of life, prevents the fulfillment of function, contracts or mars the realization of universal order in the consciousness of a living being. Thus evil is not merely the keeping of an individual desire from its own proper good. But every gratification of desire which involves the winning of a less important good at the expense of a more important one is evil; or, on the other hand, the evil of sacrificing or denying a gratification in itself legitimate, becomes good when it is the means for securing a more authoritative gratification. Let us try to make these abstract statements intelligible by illustration.

The appropriation of nutriment is a good, the indispensable method for sustaining life. It is right that we should eat and drink; and the pleasure which accompanies the proper performance of the function is the reflex approval of the Creator. The refusal fitly to take and relish our food brings debility, disease, pain, and premature death. Whether this refusal results from absorption in other employment or from some superstitious belief, it is a violation of the will of our Maker, and the consequent suffering and dissolution are the retributive hell or reflex signals, painfully pointing out our duty. On the other hand, if the pleasure of gratifying appetite becomes a motive for its own sake and leads to excessive indulgence, the superior good of permanent health and vigor is sacrificed to the far inferior transient good of a tickled palate. Thus, the dyspeptic over loading his stomach is plunged into the horrid hell of nightmare: the gourmand, pampering himself with a diet of spiced meats and Burgundy, shrieks from the twinging hell of gout. There is no divine malice in this. It is simply the rectifying rebound of the distorted arrangements of nature. The law of virtue prescribes in every respect that course of action which, on the whole, permanently and universally, will secure the greatest amount and the best quality of life and experience. Vice is whatever inverts or interferes with this, as when a man exalts a physical impulse above a moral faculty, or incurs years of shame and misery in the future for the sake of some passing gratification in the present. God commands man to rule his passions by reason, not slavishly obey them; to exercise a wisely proportioned self denial to day for the winning of a safer and nobler morrow. The degree in which they do this measures the civilization, wisdom, moral valor, and dignity of men. The failure to do this is the condition on which every infernal penalty or reaction of hellish experience hinges. A man may feed an abnormal craving for opium, until all his once royal powers of body and mind are sacrificed, imbecility and madness set in, and his nervous system becomes a darting box of torments. How much better, according to the aphorism of Jesus, to have cut off this single desire, than for the whole man to be thus cast into hell.

Hell is the retributive reflex or return of disarranged order experienced when in the hieriarchy of man higher grades of faculty and motive are subordinated to lower ones. The miser who gives himself up to a base greed for money, separated from its uses, is thereby degraded into a mechanized, self fed and self consuming passion, having no pleasure, except that of accumulating, hoarding and gloating over the idle emblem of a good never realized. His time and life, his very brain and heart, are coined into an obscene dream of money. He knows nothing of the grandest ranges of the universe, nothing of the sweetest delights of humanity. Contracted, stooping, poorly clad, ill fed, self neglected, despised by everybody, dwelling alone in a bleak and squalid chamber, despite his potential riches, his whole life is a conglomerate of impure fears welded by one sordid lust fear of robbery, fear of poverty, fear of men, fear of God, fear of death, all fused together by a lust for money. Is he not in a competent hell? Who would wish anything worse for him? His vice is the elevation of the love of money above a thousand nobler claims. His unclean and odious experience is the avenging hell which warns the spectators, and would redeem its occupant, if he would open his soul to its lessons. So, when a burglar breaks into a bank and bears off the treasures deposited there, scattering dismay and ruin amidst a hundred families, the essence of his crime is that he makes the narrow principle of his selfish desire paramount over the broad principle of the public welfare, setting the petty good of his individual enrichment above the weighty good represented by that respect for the right of property which is a condition essential to the life of the community. The principle on which he acts, if carried out, would cause the dissolution of society. The evil which he seeks to avoid, his lack of the means of life, is incomparably smaller than the evil he perpetrates, the means for the death of society. The resulting sense of hostility between himself and the community, alienation from his fellow men and from God, fear of detection, actual condemnation by his own conscience, and ideal condemnation by all the world, constitute a hell felt in proportion to the delicacy of his sensibility. The spiritual disturbance and pain thus suffered are the effort of Providence to readjust the inverted relation of his low self interest to the higher interest of the general public, and remove the threatened ruinous consequences of his sin by remedying the order it has disbalanced and broken.

These illustrations have prepared the way for a statement of the true idea of hell in its final formula. The will of God is expressed in that gradation of goods or scale of ranks which indicates the fixed conditions of universal welfare and the accordant forces of the motives which should impel our pursuit of them. To seek these goods in their proper order of importance and authority, every level of function beneath kept subservient to every one above, is the law of salvation, or the pathway of heaven through the universe. To substitute our will for the will of God, the intensity of private desires in place of the dignity of public motives, putting the lower and smaller over the higher and greater, is the law of perdition, or the pathway of hell through the universe.

The lowest function of man is a simple momentary gratification of sense, as, for example, an act of nutrition. The highest function of which his nature is capable is the surrender of himself to the universal order, the sympathetic identification of himself with the eternal law and weal of the whole. Between those vast extremes there are hundreds of intermediate functions, rising in worth and authority from the direct gratifications of appetite to the ideal appropriations of transcendental good, from the titillation given by a pinch of snuff to the thrill imparted by an imaginative contemplation of the redeemed state of humanity a million years ahead. But, throughout the entire range, all the sin and guilt from which hell is produced consist in obeying a lower motive in preference to a higher one, making some narrow or selfish good paramount over a wider or disinterested one. A man, educated as a physician, practiced his profession on scientific principles, and nearly starved on an income of seven hundred dollars a year. He then set up as a quack, compounded a worthless nostrum, and, by dint of impudence, advertising, and other charlatanry, made eighteen thousand dollars a year, and justified his conduct on the ground of his success. By falsehood and cheating he preyed on the credulity of the public. If all men were like him, society could not exist. The meanness of his soul, shutting him out from the most exquisite and exalted prerogatives of human nature, is the revenge which the universe takes on such a man the hell in which God envelops him. A manufacturer turns out certain products by means of a chemical process which adds seven per cent. to his profit, but shortens the average life of his workmen five years. All mankind would indignantly denounce him with an instinctive recognition of his wickedness in thus erecting the profane standard of pecuniary gain above the sacredness of the lives of his brothers. But when of two men in deadly peril from an approaching explosion only one can escape, and the stronger, instead of monopolizing the chance, as he might, stands back and lays down his life in saving the weaker, it is a deed of heroic virtue, applauded by all men, supported by the whole moral creation which derives new beauty and sweetness from it. It radiates a peaceful bliss of self approval through the breast before it is mangled and cold, and fills the soul with a serene joy as it flies to God. The essential merit of such an action is the subjection of that selfishness which is the principle of all sin, and whose recoil is the spring trap of hell, to that disinterestedness which is the germ of redemption and the perfume of heaven.

It is not an unfrequent occurrence for a mixture of heaven and hell to be experienced. Here is an able and upright merchant who is about to fail, in consequence of disasters which he could neither foresee nor prevent, and for which he is in no sense responsible. He shrinks from bankruptcy with inexpressible shame and distress. He is mortified, cut to the quick, robbed of sleep, can hardly look his creditors in the face. Now, he reflects, "This is not my fault. I have been honest, prudent, economical, unwearied in effort, I have done my duty to the best of my ability. God approves me, and all good men would if they knew the exact facts." If that assurance does not shed an element of heaven into his hell, spread a soothing veil of light and oil over his stormy trouble, then it is because his pride is greater than his self respect, his vanity more keen than his conscience is strong, his regard for appearances more influential than his knowledge of the truth. And in that case the misery he suffers is the penalty of his excessive self sensitiveness.

The elements of hell are pain, slavery, imprisonment, rebellion, forced exertion, forced inaction, shame, fear, self condemnation, social condemnation, universal condemnation, aimlessness, and despair. He who seeks good only in the just order of its successive standards, gratifying no lower function, except in subservience to the higher ones, escapes these experiences, feels that he fulfills his destiny, and is an approved freeman of God. The service of truth and good alone makes free; all service of evil is slavery and wretchedness. For freedom is spontaneous obedience to that which has a right to command. The thirsty man who quaffs a glass of cold water does an act of liberty; but he who constantly intoxicates himself in satiation of a morbid and despotic appetite, knows that he is a slave, and feels condemned, and chafes in the hell of his bondage.

The dissipated sluggards and thieves who feed the vices and prey on the interests of the community, writhe under the rebuke of the higher laws they break in enthroning their selfish propensities above the cardinal standards of the public good; and in the stale monotony of their indulgences, they know nothing of the glorious zest shed by the best prizes of existence into the breasts of the virtuous and aspiring, whom every day finds farther advanced on their way to perfection. Envy is the very blast that blows the forge of hell. It sets its victim in painful antagonism with all good not his own, actually turning it into evil; while a generous sympathy appropriates as its own all the foreign good it contemplates. The sight of his successful rival keeps an envious man in a chronic hell, but adds a heavenly enjoyment to the experience of a generous friend. Ignorance, pride, falsehood, and hate are the four master keys to the gates of hell keys which sinners are ever unwittingly using to let themselves in, and then to lock the bolts behind.

A character whose spontaneous motions are upward and outward, from the central and lowermost instincts of self toward the highest and outer most apprehensions of good, exemplifies the law of salvation, which guides the conscious soul in an ascending and expanding spiral through the successively greater spheres of truth and life. The character whose spontaneous tendencies are the reverse of this, moving inward and downward, exemplifies the law of perdition, which guides the soul in a descending and contracting spiral, constantly enslaving it to lower and viler attractions of self in preference to letting it freely serve the superior ranks forever issuing their redemptive behests and invitations above. When the members of a family erect their separate wills as independent laws, instead of harmoniously blending around a common authority of truth and love, when they live in incessant collisions and stormy insubordination, a poisonous fret of irritable vanity gnawing their heart strings, a fiery sleet of hate and scorn hurtling through the domestic atmosphere, the whole household are in perdition. Their home is a concentrated hell. To be without love, without soothing attentions and encouragements, without fresh aims, and a relishing alternation of work and rest, without progress and hope, to be deprived of the legitimate gratifications of the functions of our being, and compelled to suffer their opposites what closer definition of hell can there be than this? And this, while avoided or neutralized by virtue, is, in its various degrees, obviously the inevitable result and penalty of sin.

The great mistake in the popular view or mythological doctrine of hell has arisen from conceiving of God under the image of a political ruler, acting from without, by wilful methods, and inflicting arbitrary judgments on his rebellious subjects. He should be conceived as the dynamic Creator, acting from within, through the intrinsic order and laws of things, for the instruction and guidance of his creatures. His condemnation is the inevitable culmination of a discordant state of being, rather than the verdict of a vindictive judge or the sentence of a forensic monarch. Every retribution is an impinge of the creature in the creation, and, so far from expressing destructive wrath, is an act of the self rectifying mechanism of the universe to readjust the part with the whole. With what pernicious folly, what cruel superstition, men have attributed their own miserable passions to their imperturbable Maker, breaking his infinite perfection into all sorts of frightful shapes, as seen through the blur and effervescence of their own imperfections! So the sun seems to go down with his garments rolled in blood, and to set angrily in a stormy ocean of fire: but really the great lamp of the universe shines serenely from the unalterable fixture of his central seat, and all this spectral tempest of blaze and glare is but a refraction of his beams through our vexed atmosphere.

God being infinitely perfect, does not change his dispositions and modes of action like a fickle man. His intentions and deeds are the same here and everywhere, now and always. If we wish to learn in what manner God will prepare a hell and punish the impenitent wicked after death, we must not, as men did in the barbaric and mythological ages, make an induction from the treatment of criminals by capricious and revengeful rulers in this world; we must see how God himself now treats his disobedient children for their demerits here, assured that his eternal temper and method are identical with his temporal temper and method.

Well, then, how does God treat offenders now? Incapable of anger or caprice, he retains his own steady procedures and absolute serenity unaltered, but leaves the culprits to endure the effects of their perverted bearing towards him and towards the order he has established.

If a man lies or defiles himself, or blasphemes, or murders, God does not dash him from a cliff or cast him into a furnace of fire. There would be no connection of cause and effect in

that; and to suppose it, is a gross superstition. He leaves the offender to the reactions of his own acts, the discordant vileness of his own degradation, the devouring return of his own passions, to punish him for his sin, and to purge him of his wrong. The true retribution of every wicked deed is contained in the recalcitration of its own motive. What fitter penalty can the soul suffer than that of being embraced in the hellish atmosphere of its own bad spirit, to teach it to reform itself and cultivate a better spirit?

What, then, is the meaning of the fear, suffering and horror, which so often accompany or follow sin? They do not, as has been commonly supposed, express the indignation and revengefulness of God. No, at their very darkest, they must suggest the shadow of his aggrieved will, not the lurid frown of his rage. A part of the discord which sin is and introduces, they denote the remedial struggles of nature and grace to restore the perverted being to its normal condition. If you put your finger in the fire the burning pain is the reaction of your act, and that pain is not vengeance, but preservative education. When some frightful disease seizes on a man, the inflammation and convulsions which succeed are the violent spring of the constitution on the enemy, its desperate attempt to shake off the fell grasp, and bring the organism to health and peace again. These efforts either succeed, or in the exhausting shocks the body is destroyed. It is the same with the soul. Sin is the displacement of the hierarchy of authorities in the soul, the misbalancing of its energies, the disturbance of its health and peace. And all the varieties of retribution are the recoil of the injured faculties, the struggles of the insulted authorities, to vindicate and reestablish themselves. Now, these efforts, if the soul is indestructible, must always, at last, be successful. Health in the body is the harmonious adjustment of its energies with its conditions; and a sufficient modicum must be obtained or death ensues. Virtue in the soul is the harmony of its powers with the laws of God; the measure of this is the measure of spiritual life; and granting the soul to be immortal, the tendency towards a complete measure of virtue must ultimately become irresistible, and every hell at last terminate in paradise. The persistent forces or laws of the divine environment steadily tend to draw the unstable forces or passions of all creatures into harmony with them, and that harmony is redemption. Perdition is consequently never, as the ecclesiastical doctrine makes it always, a state of fixed hopelessness. Though we make our bed in the nethermost hell, God is there. And wherever God is, penitence and grace, reformation and pardon, have a right of eminent domain between him and the souls of his children.

According to the common doctrine of hell as a physical locality, and the predestination of all men to it through the sin of Adam, birth is a universal gateway of perdition, the whole world one open course to damnation for all except the few elected to be saved through the blood of Christ. The orthodox scheme depicts the lineage of Adam as a dark river of perdition, choked with the souls of the damned, steadily pouring into hell ever since our human generations began. But in addition to the refutation of this terrible belief by its monstrous moral iniquity, science is now doubly refuting it by the proof of the existence of the human race on the earth for unnumbered centuries before the Biblical date of Adam. So this fictitious gate of a fictitious hell is shut and abolished. With it vanishes the horrible picture of this world as floored with omnipresent trap doors to the bottomless pit, and closed fatally around by a dead wall of doom, through which, by one bloody orifice alone, the believers in the vicarious atonement could crawl up into heaven. In place of this, we see the whole universe as one open House of God, traversed in all directions by the free entries of laws of intrinsic justice and love.

And so of the remaining theoretic gates of hell, unbelief, ritual neglect, and the other technicalities on which priests and deluded zealots have always hinged the perdition of such as heed not their authority; none of them shall much longer prevail. With the wiping out of the mythological hell all these fanciful entrances to it likewise disappear. But instead of these visionary ones we should point out and warn men from the substantial gates of the true hell. Whatever is a cause of insubordinate and discordant fruition in body or soul, individual or community, is a real gate of hell. All the moral and social evils, intemperance, war, ambition, avarice, the extremes of poverty and wealth, ignorance, bad example, despotism, disease, every form of vice or crime, all the influences that destroy or mar human virtue, excellence, and harmony, are so many open gates of hell, drawing their victims in. In holding back those who are approaching these fatal gates, in trying to contract them, to shut them up here is a vital work to be done, infinitely more promising than the brandishing of the terrors of that material hell in which sensible men can no longer believe. For the only true hell is the remedial vibration of truth in an uncoordinated soul, even when not remedial for the individual still remedial for the race.

It is not our outward abode, but our inmost spirit, that makes our experience infernal or heavenly: for, in the last result, it is the occupying spirit that moulds the environment, not the habitation that determines the tenant. This is the substance of the whole matter. An accomplished chemist, who was a good man in truth, but a heretic by the standard of orthodoxy, died. Being an unbeliever, of course, he went to hell. Seeing a group of children in torment there, he pitied them very deeply, and straightway began to devise measures, by means of his skill in chemical science, to shield them from the flame. Instantly the whole scene changed. The beauty of heaven lay around him, and all its blandness breathed through him. Forgetting his own sufferings in sympathy for those of others, he had obeyed the law of virtue, subjecting a selfish desire to a disinterested one; and the omnipotent God enveloped him with the heaven of his own spirit. Another man, who was hard and cruel in character, but perfectly sound in the orthodox faith and observances, died. It is true he was an avaricious and hard saint, but then he believed in the atoning blood; and so, of course, he went to heaven. No sooner did he find himself safely seated in bliss than he tried to peep over the golden wall into the pit of perdition, in order to heighten the relish of his favored lot by the contrast of the agonies of the lost. Instantly the celestial scenery about him was changed into infernal, and, by the radiation and return of his own bad spirit, he found himself plunged into hell and writhing under its retributive experience. His character exemplified the law of perdition, enthroning selfishness over disinterestedness, subverting the order of virtue; and the insulted will of God made his imagined heaven a real hell.

Hell is revealed in the experience of the world as a diminishing quantity through the successive periods since war, cannibalism and slavery were universal. Will not the progressive process terminate in the utter extinction of it, paradise everywhere steadily encroaching on purgatory until at last the whole universe of matter and spirit composes an unbroken heaven?

According to the nebular hypothesis, the entire creation was once a measureless chaos confusion, conflict, collisions, explosions, making a universal hell of matter. But the discords and perturbations grew ever less and less, regularity and order more and more, as suns and planets and moons took form and wheeled in their gleaming circles, till now the mazy web of worlds is weaving throughout space the perfect harmony of the creative design. The evolution of incarnate spiritual destinies began later, and is more complex than the material, each mind being as complicated as the whole galaxy. May we not trust that at last it shall be as complete as the evolution of the astronomic motions already is, and a divine empire of holy and happy men be the goal of history? This hope carries the cross through hell, and leaves nothing unredeemed.

CHAPTER IV.

THE GATES OF HEAVEN; OR, THE LAW OF SALVATION IN ALL WORLDS.

HEAVEN, in the crude fancy of mankind, has generally been conceived as a definite, exclusive, material abode; either some elysian clime on the surface of the earth; or some happy isle beyond the setting sun; or this whole globe, renovated by fire and peopled with a risen and ransomed race; or else some halcyon spot in the sky, curtained with inaccessible splendor and crowded with eternal blessings. It was natural that men should think thus of heaven as a place whence all the evils which they knew were excluded and where all the goods which they knew were carried to the highest pitch, God himself visibly enthroned there in entrancing glory amidst throngs of worshippers.

This was unavoidable, because, in an early age, before knowledge and reflection had trained men to the critical examination and correction of their instinctive conclusions, all the data which they possessed would naturally lead them to imagine the unknown God in the glorified form and circumstances of the most enviable being their experience had yet revealed to them; and to paint the unknown future state of perfected souls under the purest aspects of the most desirable boons they had known in the present state. It being a necessity of their uncritical minds to personify God by a definite picture of imagination, and to portray heaven to themselves as an external place, they could not do otherwise than work out the results by means of the most intense experiences and the most impressive imagery familiar to them. The highest idea they had of man, purified and expanded to the utmost, would be their idea of God; and the grandest and happiest conditions of existence within their observation, enhanced by the removal of every limiting ill, would form their notion of heaven. Both would be outward, definite, local, and, as it were, tangible. Royal courts with their pomp of power and luxury; priestly temples, with their exclusive sanctity, their awe inspiring secrets, their processions and anthems, would inevitably furnish the prevailing casts and colors to the dogmas and the scenery of early religion. For what were the most vivid of all the experiences men had among their fellows on earth? Why, the exhibitions of the sultan with his gorgeous ceremonial state, and of the high priest with the dread sacrifice and homage he paid amidst clouds of incense and rolling waves of song; the admission of the favored, in glittering robes, to share the privileges; the exclusion of the profane and vulgar in squalid misery and outer darkness. Consequently, except by a miracle, these sights could not fail largely to constitute the scenic elements for the popular belief concerning God and heaven. What should men reflect over into the unknown to portray their ideals there, if not the most coveted ingredients and the most impressive forms of the known? The great thing, then, inevitably, would be supposed to be to gain the personal favor of the supreme Sovereign by some artifice, some flattery, some fortunate compliance with his arbitrary caprice, and to get into the charmed enclosure of his abode by some special grace some authoritative passport or magic art.

But as soon as science and philosophy, and a spiritual experience rectifying its own errors by reflective criticism, have created a more competent theology it discredits all these raw schemes. It teaches that God, being the eternal omnipresent power and mystery which foreran, underlies, pervades and includes all things, cannot justly be figured as a man, locally here or there, and not elsewhere. He can be justly thought of only as the almighty Creator of the universe, intelligible in the order of his works and ways, but inscrutable in his essence, absent nowhere, present everywhere in general, and specially revealed anywhere whenever a fit experience in the soul awakens a special consciousness of him. This conception of God the only one any longer defensible as the Infinite Spirit, incapable, except in his various incarnations, of particular local enthronement and uncovering to the outward gaze of worshippers, necessitates a correspondent alteration in the vulgar idea of heaven as an exclusive spot in space.

In every form of being, in any portion of the universe, the central idea of a state of salvation, is the fulfillment of the will of the Creator in the faculties of the creature, the fruition of the ends of the whole in the consciousness of the part, the congruity of the forces of the soul with the requirements of its situation. If this definition be accepted, it is clear that no mere place of residence, however excellent, can be heaven. That is but one factor of heaven, and worthless without a corresponding factor of a spiritual kind. Essentially, heaven is a divine experience, not a divine location; yet constructively it is both of these. Ever so serene and pure a space, perfectly free from every perturbation of ill, and surrounded with all the outer provisions of power and order, would be no heaven, until a prepared soul entered it, furnishing the spiritual conditions for the forces to run into fruition, for the melody of blissful being to play. The material elements of the universe, so far as we know, are unconscious dynamics. However perfectly marshalled, they can by themselves compose no heaven. So the conscious soul, as far as we know, is incapable of an independent and unrelated existence in itself. All its experience, when ultimately analyzed, is the resultant of the mutual relations between its own energies and capacities and the forms and forces of things outside of itself. When there is a right arrangement of right realities in the residence, and a right development of faculties and affections within the resident, and such an adjustment of the spiritual states with the surrounding conditions, that, as these act and react upon each other, the laws of the universe break into conscious harmony, or the will of God is realized in a life of blessedness; that harmony, that blessedness, is what we mean by heaven; and the conditions of its realization constitute the law of salvation.

Such being the true idea of heaven, obviously, it cannot be limited to any particular locality. It may be here, elsewhere, anywhere, everywhere, before death, in death, after death; whenever and wherever the proper conditions meet inward state and outward circumstances so adjusted as to produce an experience which fulfills the will of God and realizes the end of the creation. Hereafter this may be, as we know it now on earth, a spiritual fruition in material conditions, or it may be something altered in accordance with the varying exigences of worlds whose details are as yet inconceivable by us, altogether hidden behind the veil of futurity and our ignorance. But its one fundamental condition, its eternal essence under all circumstances which can possibly happen, must always be the same. Whatever changes await the soul, embodied in a new form in the state after death, or remaining in pure disembodiment; whatever be the relation of the immaterial entity of mind to the circumference and contents of its new home, it can be in paradise, it can command peace and bliss, or any equivalent of these terms, only by the fulfillment of the will of God in its being. Heaven is, therefore, the reconciliation and unison of the soul with its divinely appointed lot, the identification of the ideal and the real.

The will of God is expressed in the soul in the submissive services and virtues of a pure and pious character it is expressed in the outward creation by the unbreakable persistency of his laws through all the aberrations and discords of accompaning evil or limitation. Nowhere can it ever be an impossibility to conjoin these and thus to make a heaven. The one thing which everywhere is variable and evanescent, is evil, or the imperfect adjustment of the creature with the works and designs of the Creator. The one thing which forever stays, and steadily invites the intelligent soul to its embrace, is good, that is, the opportunity to realize the divinely intended correspondence of the relations in the part with the relations in the whole, a serene movement of life through the unison of the soul with its true fate. Now, the one predicate which is essential in all things, without whose presence nothing can be, is the will of God. Even could that will be violated or withstood, still it would be there, upholding, forgiving, wooing Salvation, or a life of conscious harmony, is capable of realization, of course, wherever the means are offered for the performance and enjoyment of the will of God; and the infinity of his attributes necessarily makes that condition an omnipresent possibility in the realm of free spirits. Therefore, heaven is not outwardly limited to one place, or to one period, but may be achieved at any time, and anywhere. This throws light on the fallacy of the current, narrow doctrine of a limited probation. The oriental belief that the action of the present is the fate of the future unquestionably covers a profound truth. Yet, if there is always a future there must likewise always be a present, and the right action in this may forever redeem that. Probation is limited by no decree, only by the duration of free being.

Although the essential element in the idea of heaven is forever the same, it may be regarded in three different aspects, or on three different scales as an individual experience, as a social state, as a far off universal event. Heaven, as a private experience, is the harmonized intercourse of the soul with the divineness in its surrounding conditions. Heaven, as a public society, is the blessed communion of blessed souls, a complete adjustment of the lives of kindred natures. Heaven, as a final consummation, is the publication of the vindicated will of God in the total harmony of the universe, all individual wills so many separate notes blent in the collective consonance of the whole.

But, for all practical purposes, we may overlook this triple distinction and think of heaven simply as the correspondence of the life of the soul with those outward conditions which represent the will of God. And towards this conclusion everything, in its profoundest and most persistent tendency, is bearing. In spite of interruptions and seeming exceptions, it is towards this that the entire confluence of forces and beings gravitates and slowly advances. The universal law of evolution, in which a scientific philosophy has generalized its most comprehensive induction, is but a history and prophecy of the progress towards a moving equilibrium of the totality of worlds and intelligences, which can eventuate only in a universal heaven, or unimpeded completion of the creative design.

Do we not see all creatures tending towards the perfection of their respective types, every improvement selectively taken up and carried on, every deteriorating deviation eliminated, all errors and failures doomed to perish or change into new conditions for more hopeful attempts? This confirms the faith first based on the deeper argument. For, since the will of God is the one persistent reality, the one all evolving and all inclusive power of which evil is only the distorted and shadowy negation, that opposition to the will of God which constitutes sin and misery, that discord with him which generates hell, must prove an ever smaller accompaniment of his plan, a transitory phenomenon ceasing in even degree with the spreading conquests of his almighty purpose, as race on race of creatures, and system on system of worlds, sweep into the victorious harmony, until the boundless realm of being shall be boundless heaven.

Heaven, then, in essence, is not merely a favored locality, not merely a resigned soul, but the result of a combination of these in a just relation. It is not a playing power in the material environment nor an inherent attribute of the spiritual instrument; but it is the music which flows from the instrument when it is attuned to react in coordination with the acting environment. Salvation, consequently, is not simply a divine place of abode, not simply a divine state of soul; but it is these two conjoined. It is the experimental deposit between the two poles of rightly ordered conditions in the realm and rightly directed energies in the inhabitant. Heaven, then, in the best and briefest definition we can give, is the will of God in fulfillment, or the law of the whole in uncrossed action.

Hell is the experience produced by the rebound of violated law. Or, if we hold that, strictly speaking, a divine law is incapable of violation; as every seeming resistance to gravitation is in fact a deeper obedience to gravitation, then we may say, in more accurate phrase, hell is the collision and friction of the limitations of different laws. It is the discord of the part with the whole. It is the antagonism of the soul with God. But the perpetual preservation of a perfectly balanced antagonism with God is inconceivable. It must vary, totter, grow either worse or better. If it grows worse, it will finally destroy itself, the aberrant individuality or malign insurgence vanishing in the totality of force, as the filth of our sewers vanishes purely in the purity of the ocean. If it grows better, its improvement will finally transform the opposition into reconciliation, the evil disappearing in good. Therefore, every being must at length be saved from misery, if not by redemptive atonement then by absolvent annihilation, and one absolute heaven finally absorb the dwindling hells.

The question of chief importance to us in relation to heaven is, How can we gain admission into it. The limitations of language necessitate the use of imagery for the expression of religious ideas: and there is no objection to it if it be recognized as imagery, and be interpreted accordingly. Considering, then, that beatific experience of which heaven consists, under the metaphor of a city, what are its ways of entrance? How can we pass to its citizenship?

The obstacles to our entrance exist not in the city itself. Its gates are never closed. The supreme conditions of redemption are spiritual, and not local or material. If there be within no fatal impediments to the free course of the will of God, all outer obstacles easily give way and cease. If we are ever to know heaven, it is within ourselves that we must find it out. Whatever abolishes that internal rebellion of the soul which makes its experience a purgatory, whatever replaces this confusion with an accord of the faculties, is a road to heaven. Whatever removes vices and inserts virtues in their stead, attuning us to the eternal laws of things, leads us through some gate into paradise. And nothing else can no ceremonial artifice, no external transference, no sacramental exorcism, no priestly dodge.

The same mistake generally committed in regard to the nature of heaven, making it a mere local residence, has been as generally committed in regard to the conditions of admission. They have been made arbitrary, whereas they are intrinsic. They are inwrought with the substantial laws of being. The idea of God being first fashioned after the image of a sultan throned in his palace amidst his courtiers, ruling an empire by his whims, it was but natural that heaven, and the terms of entrance there, should be in a similar manner conceived under the forms of court ceremonial with its capricious favoritisms. Thus it has been supposed that by the atoning sacrifice of an incarnate person of the Godhead satisfaction has been made for the sins of the world, which was hopelessly ruined by its original federal representative, and that thus a pardon was offered to those alone who mentally accept the formula of the correspondent belief.

According to this view, the only open gateway of heaven is faith in the vicarious atonement, a baptismal passage through the blood of Christ. Science explodes this narrow and repulsive doctrine by demonstrating its irreconcilableness alike with physical fact and with moral law, first tracing the affiliated lines of our race back to many separate Adams in the shadows of an indeterminable antiquity, and then showing that the divine method of salvation is through substantial rejection of evil and appropriation of good in personal character, and not through royal proclamation and forensic conformity.

The plan of God for the salvation of men, as its culmination is seen in Christ, is the exhibition of the true type of being, the true style of motive and action, for their assimilation and reproduction: but Calvinism, when fundamentally analyzed, reduces it to a monarchical manifesto and spectacular drama working its effects through verbal terms, acts of mental assent and gesticular deeds. Every sound teaching of philosophy refutes this exclusive and arbitrary creed. In fact, its fictitious and mythological nature is obvious the moment we see that the will of God is represented in those laws of nature which are the direct articulations and embodiments of his eternal mind, and not in those political regulations or priestly and judicial formalities which express the perverted desires and artificial devices of men. The wearing of a certain dress, the bending of the knee, the muttering of a phrase, may flatter an earthly sovereign and gain a seat at his banquets. But it is childish folly to fancy any such thing of God. It is absurd to suppose that he has two schemes of government, one for the present state, another for the future; one for the elect, another for the reprobate; one for those who gaze on the spectacle of the crucifixion and make a certain sign, another for those who do not. His laws, identified with the unchangeable nature and course of the creation, sweep in one unbroken order throughout immensity and eternity, awarding perfect justice, and perfect mercy to all alike, making the experience of all souls a hell or a heaven to them accordingly as they strive against or harmonize with the divine system of existence in which they have their being. The mere acceptance of a technical dogma, the mere performance of a ritual action, cannot adjust a discordant character with the conditions of blessedness so as to reinstate an exile of heaven. To imagine that God will, in consideration of some technical device, place in heaven a man whose character fits him for hell, or, in default of that conventionality, place in hell a man whose character fits him for heaven, is to represent him as acting on an eccentric whim. And surely every one who has a worthy idea of God must find it much easier to believe that men have mixed mythological dreams with their religion, than to believe that the infinite God is capable of despotic freaks or melo dramatic caprices.

The poor, odious figment that baptism with the blood of Christ is the sole entrance to heaven, is rebuked by the sweet and awful imperturbableness with which the laws of being act, distributing the ingredients of hell or heaven to every one accordingly as his vices disobey or his virtues obey the will of God.

In a universe of law where God with all his attributes is omnipresent no trick can ever be the pathway into paradise. The true method of salvation is by the production of a good character through divine grace and the discipline of life. Thus, the real law of salvation through Christ consists not in the technical belief that he shed his blood for our redemption, but in the personal derival from him of that spirit which will make us willing to shed our own blood for the good of others.

There was, not long ago, called to her eternal home, a young woman, who, by the sweet gentleness, the heroic generosity and the unspotted fidelity of her whole life, deserves an exalted place on the roll of feminine chivalry and saintliness. Not a brighter name, or one associated with a more fearless and accomplished spirit, is recorded on the list of those Christian women who volunteered to serve as nurses in the great American war of nationality. No soldier was braver, few were more under fire, than she; still plying her holy work with unfaltering love and fortitude, both in the horrid miasma of camps and before the charge of cavalry and the blaze of cannon. Many a time, the livelong night, under the solemn stars, equipped with assuaging stores, she threaded her way alone through the debris of carnage, seeking out the wounded among the dead, lifting her voice in song as a signal for any lingering survivor who might be near. Many a time she broke on the vision of mutilated and dying men, with the light of love in her eyes, a hymn of cheer on her lips, and unwearied ministrations in her hands, transfigured with courage and devotion, gleaming on their sight through the sulphurous flame of battle or the darkening mists of disease like an angel from heaven. Receiving the seeds of fatal illness from her exposures, she returned home to delight with her noble qualities all who knew her, to make a husband happy, and then to die a contented martyr. Meekly folding her hands, and saying: "Thanks, Father, for what thou hast enabled me to do, and still more for the new home to which thou art calling me now" she was gone. The cruel creed of superstition says: "Since she was a Universalist, having no part, by faith, in the mystic sacrifice of Christ, she is doomed to hell." But every attribute of God, every promise written by his own finger in the sacred instincts of our nature, as well as the cardinal teachings of the New Testament, assure us that as the victorious purity and devotedness of her soul bore her away from the tabernacle of flesh, the welcoming Savior said: "Come, thou blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared from the foundation of the world." And heaven swung wide its gate for her; and excited fancy conceives that, as she passed in, there was a gratulatory flutter of wings and waving of palms through the angelic ranks.

In distinction from that hypothetical gate of blood, set up by a crude theology in one narrow place alone, what, then, are the real gates of heaven, which stand open throughout the realms of responsible being? All the causes which bring the will of man into consent with the will of God. Truth is the harmony of mind with the divine order; beauty, the harmony of taste with the divine symmetries; good, the harmony of volition with the divine ends. Everything that secures these for us is an avenue into the peaceful city of bliss. To be in heaven is to be a transparent medium through which the qualities of objects, the reflections of phenomena, the vibrations of aboriginal power, pass in blessed freedom, without deflection or jar, and on which the mysterious attraction of the Infinite exerts its supreme spell. To be there in a superlative degree is to have a mind which is an infinitesimal mirror of the All, and a heart responsive to that mind, every perception of truth in the realm of the intellect generating a correspondent emotion of good in the realm of affection. Not any forensic act of faith in atoning blood, but ingrained piety a modest renunciation before the reality of things is the grand gateway of souls to the blessedness and repose of God. Anselm, the great sainted Archbishop of Canterbury, said: "I would rather be in hell without a fault than in heaven with one." Can any defective technicality damn such a man? No; such a spirit carries and radiates heaven is itself heaven. That spirit is God himself in his creature, and can no more be imprisoned in hell than God can be. On the other hand, any professing Orthodoxist who, according to a horrible doctrine of the Calvinists in former days, should hope in heaven to obtain a sharper relish for his own joy by looking down on the tortures of the damned, and contrasting his blissful safety with the hopeless agony of their perdition, would find himself in hell. The infernal scenery, even there, would burst on his gaze, its atmosphere of pain reek around him, and the detestable turmoil of its experience rage in his breast. The selfishness of his character, in steep contradiction to the public disinterestedness belonging to the divine will, must invert every proper experience of heaven. Could any conventional arrangement, or accident of locality, save such a man, while his character remained unchanged? No; such a spirit carries and radiates hell, is itself hell.

A Mohammedan author says of the seventy three sects into which his coreligionists are divided, that seventy two are wrong ways, terminating in eternal damnation; the remaining one alone, in which are the party of salvation, leads through the true faith into the City of Allah. The same unwise bigotry, the same unripeness of judgment, has been generally shown by Christians. It is time they were ashamed of it, and allowed their souls to mature and expand into a more liberal creed in fuller keeping with the hospitable amplitude of the righteousness and goodness of God. Everything that tends to bring the will of man into loving submission to the infinite Father, to mould the structure of character into correspondence with those established conditions of rightful being represented by the moral and religious virtues, is an open highway of salvation. And all the great cardinal ordinations of life do legitimately tend to this result. Therefore all these are gates of heaven. Some pass in through one of them, others through another; and by means of them all, it is decreed in the sovereign councils of the Divinity, as we believe, that, sooner or later, every intelligence shall reach the goal.

First is the gate of innocence. Little children, spotless youths and maidens who have known no malice or guile, the saintly few among mature men and women who by the untempted elevation and serenity of their temper have kept their integrity unmarred and their robes unsullied, enter by this nearest and easiest gate. Borne aloft by their own native gravitation, we see the white procession of the innocent ones winding far up the cerulean height and defiling in long melodious line into heaven.

The second gate is prosperity. Through this enter those to whom good fortune has served as the guiding smile of God, not pampering them with arrogance, nor hardening them with careless egotism, but shaping them to thankful meekness and generosity. Exempt from lacerating trials, every want benignly supplied, girt with friends, they have grown up in goodness and gratitude, obeying the will of God by the natural discharge of their duties, diffusing benedictions and benefits around them. To such beautiful spirits, saved from wrong and woe by the redemptive shelter of their lot, happiness is a better purgatory than wretchedness. The crystal stream of joy percolating throughout the soul cleanses it more perfectly than any flames of pain can. And so the virtuous children of a favored fortune, who have improved their privileges with pious fidelity, move on into heaven.

Then the third gate is victory. This is more arduous of approach, and yet a throng of heroic souls, the very chivalry of heaven, press through it, wounded and bleeding from the struggle, but triumphant. These are they who have endured hardship with uncomplaining fortitude and fought their way through all enemies, seductions and tribulations. These are they who, armed with the native sacrament of righteousness, inspired with a loyal love, would never stoop their crests to wrong nor make a league with iniquity the conquering champions who tread down every vile temptation, ever hearing their Leader say, "In the world ye shall have trouble and sorrow; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world."

Penitence is another gate of heaven. By the instructions of Providence, by the natural progress of experience, the evolution of wisdom, a sinner may become aware of the ingratitude of his disobedience, ashamed of the odiousness of his guilt; be smitten with a regenerating love of truth, beauty, goodness, God; and, without waiting for the lash of an external judgment to drive him the way he should go, by voluntary preference may grieve over his folly and sin, and turn to his duty and his Savior. Then the blessed gate of a spontaneous repentance stands open before him; and through this hospitable entrance multitudes find admission to the divine home.