There are, in the New Testament, in addition to the relevant metaphors which we have already examined, several others of great impressiveness and importance. We must now explain these, separate the truths and errors popularly associated with them, and leave the subject with an exposition of the real method of the divine government and the true idea of the day of judgment, in contrast with the prevalent ecclesiastical perversions of them.
The part played in theological speculation and popular religious belief by imagery borrowed from the scenery and methods of judicial tribunals, the procedures and enforcement of penal law, has not been less prominent and profound than the influence exerted by natural, political, and military metaphors. The power, the pomp, the elaborate spectacle, the mysterious formalities, the frightful penalties, the intense personal hopes and fears, associated with the trial of culprits in courts or before the head of a nation, must always have sunk so deeply into the minds of men as to be vividly present in imagination to be affixed as typical stamps on their theories concerning the judgments of God and the future world. This process is perhaps nowhere more distinctly shown than in the belief of the ancient Egyptians. Before the sarcophagus containing the mummy was ferried over the holy lake to be deposited in the tomb, the friends and relatives of the departed, and his enemies and accusers, if he had any, together with forty two assessors, each of whom had the oversight of a particular sin, assembled on the shore and sat in judgment. The deceased was put on his trial before them: and, if justified, awarded an honorable burial; if condemned, disgraced by the withholding of the funeral rites. Now the papyrus rolls found with the mummies give a description of the judgment of the dead, a picture of the fate of the disembodied soul in the Egyptian Hades, minutely agreeing in many particulars with the foregoing ceremony. Ma, the Goddess of Justice, leads the soul into the judgment hall, before the throne of Osiris, where stands a great balance with a symbol of truth in one scale, the symbol of a human heart in the other. The accuser is heard, and the deceased defends himself before forty two divine judges who preside over the forty two sins from which he must be cleared. The gods Horus and Anubis attend to the balance, and Thoth writes down the verdict and the sentence. The soul then passes on through adventures of penance or bliss, the details of which are obviously copied, with fanciful changes and additions, from the connected scenery and experience known on the earth.
Taking it for all in all, there perhaps never was any other scene in human society so impressive as the periodical sitting in judgment of the great Oriental kings. It was the custom of those half deified rulers the King of Egypt, the Sultan of Persia, the Emperor of India, the Great Father of China to set up, each in the gate of his palace, a tribunal for the public and irreversible administration of justice. Seated on his throne, blazing in purple, gold, and gems, the members of the royal family nearest to his person; his chief officers and chosen favorites coming next in order; his body guards and various classes of servants, in distinctive costumes, ranged in their several posts; vast masses of troops, marshalled far and near. The whole assemblage must have composed a sight of august splendor and dread. Then appeared the accusers and the accused, criminals from their dungeons, captives taken in war, representatives of tributary nations, all who had complaints to offer, charges to repel, or offences to expiate. The monarch listened, weighed, decided, sentenced; and his executioners carried out his commands. Some were pardoned, some rewarded, some sent to the quarries, some to prison, some to death. When the tribunal was struck, and the king retired, and the scene ended, there was relief with one, joy with another, blood here, darkness there, weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth in many a place.
Dramatic scenes of judgment, public judicial procedures, in some degree corresponding with the foregoing picture, are necessary in human governments. The prison, the culprit, the witnesses, the judge, the verdict, the penalty, are inevitable facts of the social order. Offences needing to be punished by overt penalties, wrongs demanding to be rectified by outward decrees, criminals gathered in cells, appeals from lower courts to higher ones, may go on accumulating until a grand audit or universal clearing up of arrears becomes indispensable. Is it not obvious how natural it would be for a mind profoundly impressed with these facts, and vividly stamped with this imagery, to think of the relation between mankind and God in a similar way, conceiving of the Creator as the Infinite King and Judge, who will appoint a final day to set everything right, issue a general act of jail delivery, summon the living and the dead before him, and adjudicate their doom according to his sovereign pleasure?
The tremendous language ascribed to Jesus, in the twenty fifth chapter of Matthew, was evidently based on the historic picture of an Eastern king in judgment. "When the Son of Man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: and before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: and he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left." If Jesus himself used these words, we suppose he meant figuratively to indicate by them the triumphant installation, as a ruling and judging power in human society, of the pure eternal principles of morality, the true universal principles of religion, which he had taught and exemplified. But unfortunately the image proved so overpoweringly impressive to the imagination of subsequent times, that its metaphorical import was lost in its physical setting.
This momentous error has arisen from the inevitable tendency of the human mind to conceive of God after the type of an earthly king, as an enthroned local Presence; from the rooted incapacity of popular thought to grasp the idea that God is an equal and undivided Everywhereness. In his great speech on Mar's Hill, the apostle Paul told the Athenians that "God had appointed a day in the which he would judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained." Is not this notion of the judgment being delegated to Jesus plainly adopted from the political image of a deputy? The king himself rarely sits on a judicial tribunal: he is generally represented there by an inferior officer. But this arrangement is totally inapplicable to God, who can never abdicate his prerogatives, since they are not legal, but dynamic. The essential nature of God is infinity. Certainly, there can be no substitution of this. It cannot be put off, nor put on, nor multiplied. There is one Infinite alone.
The Greeks located, in the future state, three judges of the dead, Minos, who presided at the trial of souls arriving from Europe; Rhadamanthus, who examined those coming from Asia; and Aacus, who judged those from Africa. They had no fourth and fifth inspectors for the souls from America and Australia, because those divisions of the earth were, as yet, unknown! How suggestive is this mixture of knowledge and ignorance! The heaven of the Esquimaux is a place where they will have a plenty of fine boats and harpoons, and find a summer climate, and a calm ocean abounding with fat seals and walruses. The Greenlander's hell is a place of torment from cold; the Arab's, a place of torment from heat. Every people and every man unless they have learned by comparative criticism to correct the tendency conceive their destiny in the unknown future in forms and lights copied, more or less closely, from their familiar experiences here. Is there not just as much reason for holding to the literal accuracy and validity of the result in one case as in another? The popular picture, in the imagination of Christendom, of Gabriel playing a trumpet solo at the end of the world, and a huge squad of angelic police darting about the four quarters of heaven, gathering the past and present inhabitants of the earth, while the Judge and his officers take their places in the Universal Assize, instead of being received as sound theology, should be held as moral symbol. Taken in any other way, it sinks into gross mythology. Can any one fail to see that this picture of the Last Judgment is the result of an illogical process; namely, the poetic association and universalizing of our fragmentary judicial experiences, and the bodily transfer of them over upon our relations with God? The procedure is clearly a fallacious one, because the relations of men with God in the sphere of eternal truths are wholly different from their relations with each other in the sphere of political society. They are, in no sense, formal or forensic, but substantial and moral; not of the nature of a league or compact, but interior and organic; not acting by fits and starts, or gathering through interruptions and delays to convulsive catastrophes, but going on in unbreakable continuity. God is a Spirit; and we too, in essence, are spirits. The rewards and punishments imparted from God to us, then, are spiritual, results of the regular action of the laws of our being as related to all other being. Consequently, no figures borrowed from those judicial and police arrangements inevitable in the broken and hitching affairs of earthly rulers, can be directly applicable, the circumstances are so completely different. The true illustration of the divine government must be adopted from physiology and psychology, where the perfect working of the Creator is exemplified, not from the forum and the court, where the imperfect artifices of men are exhibited.
God forever sits in judgment on all souls, in the reactions of their own acts. The divine retribution for every deed is the kick of the gun, not an extra explosion arbitrarily thrown in. The thief, the liar, the misanthrope, the drunkard, the poet, the philosopher, the hero, the saint, all have their just and intrinsic returns for what they are and for what they do, in the fitness of their own characters and their harmonies or discords with the will of God, with the public order of creation. Thus is the daily experience of one man made a lake of peace threaded with thrilling rivulets of bliss; that of another, a stream of devouring fire and poison, or a heaving and smoking bed of uncleanness and torment. The virtues represent the conditions of universal good; the vices represent private opposition to those conditions. Accordingly, the good man is in attracting and cooperative connection with all good; the bad man, in antagonistic and repulsive connection with it. In these facts a perfect retribution resides. If any one does not see it, does not feel its working, it is because he is too insensible to be conscious of the secrets of his own being, too dull to read the lessons of his own experience. And this self ignorant degradation, so far from refuting, is itself the profoundest exemplification of the truth of that wonderful word of Jesus: "Verily, I say unto you, they have their reward." Those who consider themselves saints indulge in an unspeakable vulgarity, when they feel, "Well, the sinners have their turn in this world; we shall have ours in the next." The law of retribution in the spiritual sphere is identical with the first law of motion in the material sphere; action and reaction are equal, and in opposite directions. This law being instantaneous and incessant in its operation, there can be no occasion for a final epoch to redress its accumulated disbalancements. It has no disbalancements, save in our erroneous or defective vision.
The true conception of the relation of the all judging Creator to his creatures is that of the Infinite Being who supplies all finite receptacles in accordance with their special forms of organization and character, and who causes exact retributions of good and evil intrinsically to inhere in their indulged modes of thought and feeling and will, their own virtues and vices, fruitions and battlements. This internal, continuous, dynamic view worthily represents the perfection of the Divine government. The incomparably inferior view the external, intermittent, constabulary theory rests, as it seems to us, merely on the traditions of ignorance and fancy. It has, in every instance, originated from the unwarrantable interpretation of a trope as a truth.
For example, the picture of the Last Judgment, supposed to be drawn by Jesus, in the Parable of the Tares, must be considered, not as a rigid prophecy of the end of the earth, and the transmundane destination of souls, but as a free emblem of the approaching close of the Jewish dispensation, and the terrible calamities which would then come on the proud, obstinate and rebellious people. The reaping angels are the Roman and Jewish armies, and other kindred agencies and collisions in the destined evolution of the fortunes of Christianity and mankind in the future. Taken literally, the symbols are incongruous with fact, and absolutely incredible in doctrine. For they are based on the image of a royal land owner, who draws his support from the income of his fields and subjects, and who rewards the faithful bringer of fruits, and punishes the slothful defaulter; who welcomes and stores sheaves, because they are wealth: rejects and burns tares, because they are an injury and a nuisance. But nothing can be riches or a nuisance to the infinite God, who neither lives on revenue nor judges by jerks. Men are not literally wheat, the property of the good sower, Christ; nor tares, the property of the bad sower, the Devil: they are souls, responsibly belonging to themselves, under God. And the pay of the human agriculturists, in the moral fields of the divine King, consists in the daily crops of experience they raise, not in being advanced to a seat at the right hand of their Lord, or in being flagellated and flung into a flaming furnace.
Jesus himself, undoubtedly, used this physical imagery as the vehicle of spiritual truths; it is lamentable that perfunctory minds have so generally overlooked the substance in the dress. He is represented, in Matthew, as having said to his apostles: "When the Son of man shall sit on the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel." Now, that he used this figure to convey an impersonal moral meaning, and that his profound thought underwent a materializing degradation in the minds of his hearers and reporters, appears clearly from the incident related immediately afterward. The wife of Zebedee asked that her two sons might sit, the one on his right hand, and the other on the left, in his kingdom. And Jesus said, "Ye shall drink indeed of my cup, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with: but to sit on my right hand, and on my left, is not mine to give." The imagery meant that the missionary assistants, in forwarding and spreading the kingdom of truth and love he came to establish, would be represented in common with himself in the power it would acquire and sway over the world. When his hearers interpreted the imagery in a physical sense, as indicating that he was hereafter to be a visible king, and that his favorites might expect to share in his authority, honor, and glory, he solemnly repudiated it.
There is yet another and a wholly different style of imagery employed by Jesus to convey his instructions as to the judgment which is to separate the justified from the condemned. The consideration of this species of imagery would afford an independent proof, of a cogent character, that they strangely misapprehend the mind of Jesus who interpret the moral meaning of his parable in an outward and dramatic sense. The metaphors to which we now refer are of a domestic and convivial nature, based on some of the most impressive social customs of the Oriental nations. It was the habit of kings, governors, and other rich and powerful men, to give, on certain occasions, great banquets, to which the guests were invited by special favor. These feasts were celebrated with the utmost pomp and splendor, by night, in brilliantly illuminated apartments. The contrast of the blazing lights, the richly costumed guests, the music and talk, the honor and luxury within, set against the darkness, the silence, the envious poverty and misery without, must have deeply struck all who saw it, and would naturally secure rhetorical reflections in speech and literature. The Jews illustrated their idea of the Kingdom of God by the symbol of a table at which Abraham and Isaac and Jacob were banqueting, and would be joined by all their faithful countrymen. In his parable of the Supper, describing how a king, on occasion of the marriage of his son, made a feast and sent out generous invitations to it, Jesus works up this imagery still more elaborately. What did he really mean to teach by it? Is it not clearly apparent from the whole context that he intended it as an illustration of the fact that the Jews, to whom he first announced his gospel, and offered all its privileges, having rejected it, its blessings would be freely thrown open to the Gentiles, and that they would crowd in to occupy the place of joy and honor, which the chosen people of Jehovah had refused to accept? It is by a pure effect of fancy and doctrinal bias that the parable has been perverted into a description of the Last Judgment. The reference plainly indicates admission to or exclusion from the privileges of the new dispensation, a matter of personal experience in the heart of the disciple and in the society of the church on this earth. The wedding garment, without which no one can come to the royal table, is a holy, humble, and loving character. In consequence of his destitution of this, Judas, although seated at the table, with the most honored guests, in the very presence of his Lord, was proved to have no right there, and was thrust into the outer darkness. His bad spirit, his inability to appreciate and enjoy the pure truths of the kingdom, constituted his expulsion. That such was the idea in the mind of Jesus, something to be experienced personally and spiritually in the present, and not something to be shown collectively and materially at the end of the world, appears from the great number of different forms in which he reiterates his doctrine. Had he meant to teach literally that he was to come in person at the last day, and sit in judgment on all men, would he not have had a distinct conception of the method, and have always drawn one and the same consistent picture of it? But if he meant to teach that all who were fitted by their spirit, character and conduct to assimilate the living substance of his kingdom were thereby made members of it, while all others were, by their own intrinsic unfitness, excluded, then it was perfectly natural that his fertile mind would on a hundred different occasions convey this one truth in a hundred different figures of speech. That in which the images all differ is unessential: that in which they all agree must be the essential thought. Now the parables differ in the forms of judgment they picture. Therefore these forms are metaphoric dress. The parables agree in assigning a different fate to the righteous and the wicked. Therefore this difference is the vital truth. And Jesus nowhere makes righteousness consist in anything national, dogmatic, or ceremonial, but everywhere is something moral.
The doctrine of an unfailing tribunal in the soul, the belief that we are all judged momentarily at the continuous bar of the truth reflected in our own conscience, is too deep, delicate, and elusive a view for the ignorance and hardness of some ages, and of some persons in every age. They cannot understand that the mind of man is itself a living table of the law and judgment seat of the Creator, by its positive and negative polarities, in sympathetic connection with the standards of good and evil, pronouncing the verdicts and executing the sentences deserved. They need to project the scheme of retribution into the startling shape of a trial in a formal court, and then to universalize it into an overwhelming world assize. The semi dramatic figment, no doubt, was an inevitable stage of thought, and has wrought powerfully for good in certain periods of history. But the pure truth must be as much better for all who can appreciate it, as it is more real and more pervasive.
Since God, the indefeasible Creator, is a resistless power of justice and love in omnipresent relations with his creatures, the genuine day of judgment to each being must be the entire career of that being. In a lower degree, every day is a day of judgment; because all acts, in the spirit from which they spring and the end at which they aim, carry their own immediate retributions. If we could survey the whole, at once, from the Divine point of view, and comprehend the relation of the parts to the whole, undoubtedly we should perceive that the deserts and the receipts of each ephemeral existence are balanced between the rise and set of its sun. But death may, with most solemn emphasis, be regarded as the final day of judgment to each man, in this sense; that then the sum of his earthly life and deeds is sealed up and closed from all further alteration by him, passing into history as a collective cause or total unit of influence. As long as the creation rolls in space, and conscious beings live and die, that bequeathal will tell its good or evil tale of him. What sensitive spirit will not tremble at the thought of a judgment so unavoidable and so tremendous as this! The votaries of superstition are mistaken in supposing that the removal of their false beliefs will destroy or weaken the sanctions of duty among men. The removal of imaginary sanctions will but cause the true ones to appear more clearly and to work more effectively.
The judgment of God then, we conclude, is no vengeful wreaking of arbitrary royal volitions; but it is the return of the laws of being on all deeds, actual or ideal. This is, in itself, perpetual and infallible: but it sometimes forces itself on our recognition in sudden shocks or crises caused by the gathering obstacles and opposition made to it by our ignorance, vice, and crime. Every other doctrine of the Divine judgment is either an error or a figurative statement of this one. In the latter case, the physical cover should be dissolved and thrown away, the moral nucleus laid bare and appropriated. But the popular mind of Christendom has unfortunately pursued the contrary course, first exaggerating and consolidating the metaphors, then putting their forms literally in the place of their meaning.
The awful panorama of the last things, as painted in the Apocalypse, the sun becoming as sackcloth of hair, and the moon as blood; the blighted stars dropping; the unveiling of the great white throne, from before the face of whose occupant the frightened heaven and earth flee away; the standing up of the dead, both small and great, the opening of the books, and the judging of the dead out of the things written therein, this scenic array has, by its terrible vividness and power of fanciful plausibility, sunk so deeply into the imagination, and taken such a tenacious hold on the feelings of the Christian world, secured for itself so constant a contemplation and encrusted itself with such a mass of associations, that it has actually come to be regarded as a veritable revelation of the reality, and to act as such. And yet, surely, surely, no one who will stop to think on the subject, with conscious clearness, can believe that books are provided in heaven with the names of men in them and recording angels appointed to keep their accounts by double or by single entry, and that God will literally sit upon a vast white dais raised on the earth, and go through an overt judicial ceremony. On what principle is a part of the undivided apocalyptic portrayal rendered as emblem, the rest accepted as absolute verity? If the blood red warrior on his white horse followed by the shining cavalry of heaven, the horrible vials of wrath, the chimerical angels and beasts, the sky and globe converted into terror struck fugitives, the bridal city descending from God with its incredible walls and its impossible gates and its magic tree of life yielding twelve kinds of fruit, are imagery; then the lake of burning sulphur, and the resurrection trumpet, and the indictment of the dead before the dazzling throne, are imagery too. The reader smiles at the idea that the good Esquimau will sit in Leaven amidst boiling pots of walrus meat, while in hell the fish lines of the bad Esquimau will break, and his canoe be crushed by falling ice. But what better reason can the civilized man give for the reflecting over upon the judgments of the future his present experience in the imagery of criminal courts? The same process of thought is exemplified in both cases. Can any one literally credit the following verses:
"There are two angels that attend, unseen Each one of us, and in great books record Our good and evil deeds. He who writes down The good ones after every action closes His volume and ascends to God. The other keeps his dreadful day book open Till sunset, that we may repent, which doing, The record of the action fades away, And leaves a line of white across the page."
No more should we literally credit the kindred phraseology in the New Testament. It is free metaphor. The sultan may keep in his treasury a book with the names of all his favorites enrolled in it. Is it not a peurility to suppose that God has such documents?
When the Gospels and the Epistles of the New Testament were written, the reappearance of Christ for the last judgment was almost universally supposed by the Church to be just at hand. At any instant of day or night the signal blast might be blown, the troops of the sky pour down the swarms of the dead surge up, and the sheep and the goats for ever be parted to the right and left. Each day when they saw "the sun write its irrevocable verdict in the flame of the west," the believers felt that the supreme Dies iroe was so much nearer to its dawn. But as generation after generation died, without the sight, and the tokens of its approach seemed no clearer, the belief itself subsided from its early prominence into the background. But as it retreated, and became more obscure and vague in its date and other details, it grew ever more sombre, appalling, and stupendous in its general certainty and preternatural accompaniments. When the tenth century drew nigh its close, a literal acceptance of the scriptural text that "the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, after being bound in the bottomless pit for a thousand years," should "be loosed a little season," filled Christendom with the most intense agitation and alarm. From all the literature and history of that period the reverberations of the frightful effects of the general expectation of the impending judgment and destruction of the world have rolled down to the present time. The portentous season passed, all things continuing as they were, and the immense incubus rose and dissolvingly vanished. And the Mediaval Church, like the Apostolic Church before, instead of logically saying: Our expectation of the physical return of Christ was a delusion, fancifully concluded: We were wrong as to the date; and still continued to expect him.
The longer the crisis was delayed, and the more it was brooded over, the more awful the suppositious picture became. The Mohammedans held that the end would be announced by three blasts: the blast of consternation, so terrible that mothers will neglect the babes on their breasts, and the solid world will melt; the blast of disembodiment, which will annihilate everything but heaven and hell and their inhabitants; and the blast of resurrection, which will call up brutes, men, genii, and angels, in such numbers that their trial will occupy the space of thousands of years.
But in the later imagination of Christendom the vision assumed a shape even more fearful than this. The Protestant Reformation, when one party identified the Pope, the other, Luther, with Antichrist, gave a new impulse to the common expectation of the avenging advent of the Lord. The horrible cruelties inflicted on each other by the hostile divisions of the Church aggravated the fears and animosities reflected in the sequel at the last day. Probably nothing was ever seen in this world more execrable or more dreadful than those great ceremonies celebrated in Spain and Portugal, in the seventeenth century, at the execution of heretics condemned to death by the Inquisition. The slow, dismal tolling of bells; the masked and muffled familiars; the Dominicans carrying their horrid flag, followed by the penitents behind a huge cross; the condemned ones, barefoot, clad in painted caps and the repulsive sanbenito; next the effigies of accused offenders who had escaped by flight; then, the bones of dead culprits in black coffins painted with flames and other hellish symbols; and, finally, the train closing with a host of priests and monks. The procession tediously winds to the great square in front of the cathedral, where the accused stand before a crucifix with extinguished torches in their hands. The king, with all his court and the whole population of the city, exalt the solemnity by their presence. The flames are kindled, and the poor victims perish in long drawn agonies. Now can anything conceivable give one a more vivid idea of the terrors embodied in the day of judgment than the fact that it came to be thought of under the terrific image of an Auto da Fe magnified to the scale of the human race and the earth, Christ, the Grand Inquisitor, seated as judge; his familiars standing by ready with their implements of torture to fulfil his bidding; his fellow monks enthroned around him; his sign, the crucifix, towering from hell to heaven in sight of the universe; the whole heretical world, dressed in the sanbenito, helpless before him, awaiting their doom? Who will not shudder at the inexorable horrors of such a scheme of doctrine, and devoutly thank God that he knows it to be a fiction as baseless as it is cruel?
Since the cooling down of the great Anabaptist fanaticism, the millennarian fever has raged less and less extensively. But if the literature it has produced, in ignorant and declamatory books, sermons, and tracts, were heaped together, they would make a pile as big as one of the pyramids. The preaching of Miller, about a quarter of a century ago, with his definite assignment of the time for the appointed consummation, caused quite a violent panic in the United States. Several prophets of a similar order in Germany have also stirred transient commotions. In England, the celebrated London preacher, Dr. Cumming, whose works entitled "The End," and "The Great Tribulation," have been circulated in tens of thousands of copies, is now the most prominent representative of this catastrophic belief. He has, however, made himself so ridiculous by his repeated postponements of the crisis, that he has become more an object of laughter than of admiration. Mathematical calculations, based on mystic numbers transmitted in apocalyptic poetry, are at a heavy discount. And yet there is a considerable sect, called the Second Adventists, composed of the most illiterate believers, and swelled by clergymen wrought up to the fanatic pitch by an exclusive dogmatic drill, who lead an eleemosynary life on mouldy scraps of Scripture, and anxiously wait for the sound of the archangelic trump. Every earthquake, pestilence, revolution, violent thunderstorm, comet, meteoric shower, or extraordinary gleaming of the aurora borealis, startles them as a possible avant courier of the crack of doom. Some of them are said to keep their white robes in their closets all ready for ascension. What a dismal thing it must be to live in such a lurid and lugubrious dream; their best hope for the world the hope that its end is at hand,
"Impatient of the stars that keep their course And make no pathway for the coming Judge!"
But this excited and uneasy anticipation is now a rare exception. In the minds of most intelligent Christians, even of those who still cling to the old Orthodox dogmas, the day of judgment has been put forward as far as the day of creation has been put backward. Less and less do religious believers shudder before the theatric trials depicted in heathen and Christian mythology; more and more do they reverently recognize the intrinsic jurisdiction in the structure of the soul, and in the organism of society. The time is not far remote, let us trust, when the ancient spirit of national separation, political antipathy, and sectarian hatred, whose subjects identify themselves with the party of God, all others with the party of the Devil, and cry, "How long, O Lord, dost thou not judge and avenge us on our enemies," will give way to that better spirit of philanthropy and true piety, which sees brethren in all men, and prays to the common Father for the equal salvation and blessedness of all. Then the faith of the self righteous, who plume themselves on their sound creed, and so relentlessly consign the heretics to perdition, gloating over the idea of the time "when the kings of the earth, and the chief captains, and the rich men, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every freeman, shall hide themselves in dens and caves, saying to the mountains and the rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb; for the great day of his wrath is come, and who shall be able to stand?" then the temper of this faith will be seen to be as wicked as its doctrine is erroneous. It will be recognized as a remnant of the barbaric past in steep contradiction with the whole mind of the modest and loving Jesus, who, when the disciples wished to call down fire from heaven to consume his opponents, rebuked them in words still condemning all their imitators, "Ye know not what spirit ye are of." Many a bigoted and complacent dogmatist, wrapt in that same ignorance to day, fails to read his own heart, and obstinately shuts his eyes to the truth, foolishly fancying himself better and safer, on account of his blind conservatism, than he who fearlessly seeks the guidance of science. Yet are not the principles of science as much glimpses of the mind of God as any sentences in the Bible are? The whole ecclesiastical scheme of eschatology is a delusion. No such gigantic melodrama, no such grotesque and horrible extravaganza, will ever get itself enacted between heaven and earth. Forever, as freshly as on the first morning, the Creator pours his will through his works in irresistible vibrations of goodness and justice; and forever may all his creatures come to him unimpeded, and trust in him without limit.
Away, then, monstrous horrors, bred in the night of the past! Dreadful incubi! too cruelly and too long ye have sat on the breast of man. The cockcrow of reason has been heard, and it is time ye were gone. Fade, terrible dream, painted by superstition on the cope of the sky, picture of contending fiends and angels, fiery rain, a frowning God, and shuddering millions of victims! Away forever, and leave the blue space free for the benignant mysteries of the unknown eternity to lure us blessedly forward to our fate. Come, believers in the merciful God of truth, lend your aid to the glorious work of spiritual emancipation. In this benign battle for the deliverance of the world from error and fear, every free mind should be a champion, every loving heart a volunteer. Free leaders of the free, forward! out of the darkness into the light. Lift your banner in the front of the field of opinions where all may see it, and then follow it as far as truth itself shall lead. On! Progress is the eternal rule. Man was made to outgrow the old and struggle into the new, as every morning the sun mounts afresh out of the dead day, and drives the night before him. Ignorance and despotism have crushed us long. But now, now we fling our fetters off, and, marching from good to better, hope to escape from every falsehood, and to conquer every wrong, under the inspiration of the omnipresent Judge who executes his decrees in the very working itself of that Universal Order whose progressive unfolding will be fulfilled at last, not in any magic resurrection and assize, but in the simple lifting of the veil of ignorance from all souls brought into full community, and the illumination before their opened faculties of the whole contents of history. For we believe that all history is by its own enactment indestructibly registered in the theatre of space, and that every consciousness is educating to read it and adore the perfect justification of the ways of God. The eternal immensity of the universe is the true Aula Regis in which God holds perpetual session, overlooking no suppliant, omitting no case.
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.