These ill.u.s.trations have prepared the way for a statement of the true idea of h.e.l.l in its final formula. The will of G.o.d 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 subst.i.tute our will for the will of G.o.d, 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 h.e.l.l 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 appet.i.te to the ideal appropriations of transcendental good, from the t.i.tillation 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 h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l in which G.o.d 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 G.o.d. 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 h.e.l.l, 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 h.e.l.l 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. G.o.d approves me, and all good men would if they knew the exact facts." If that a.s.surance does not shed an element of heaven into his h.e.l.l, 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 h.e.l.l 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 G.o.d.
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 gla.s.s of cold water does an act of liberty; but he who constantly intoxicates himself in satiation of a morbid and despotic appet.i.te, knows that he is a slave, and feels condemned, and chafes in the h.e.l.l 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 h.e.l.l. 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 h.e.l.l, 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 h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l. 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 h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l has arisen from conceiving of G.o.d 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 superst.i.tion, men have attributed their own miserable pa.s.sions 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.
G.o.d 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 G.o.d will prepare a h.e.l.l 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 G.o.d himself now treats his disobedient children for their demerits here, a.s.sured that his eternal temper and method are identical with his temporal temper and method.
Well, then, how does G.o.d 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, G.o.d 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 superst.i.tion. He leaves the offender to the reactions of his own acts, the discordant vileness of his own degradation, the devouring return of his own pa.s.sions, 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 h.e.l.lish 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 G.o.d. 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 const.i.tution 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 modic.u.m must be obtained or death ensues. Virtue in the soul is the harmony of its powers with the laws of G.o.d; 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 h.e.l.l at last terminate in paradise. The persistent forces or laws of the divine environment steadily tend to draw the unstable forces or pa.s.sions 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 h.e.l.l, G.o.d is there. And wherever G.o.d 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 h.e.l.l 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 d.a.m.nation 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 d.a.m.ned, steadily pouring into h.e.l.l 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 fict.i.tious gate of a fict.i.tious h.e.l.l 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 G.o.d, traversed in all directions by the free entries of laws of intrinsic justice and love.
And so of the remaining theoretic gates of h.e.l.l, 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 h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l. Whatever is a cause of insubordinate and discordant fruition in body or soul, individual or community, is a real gate of h.e.l.l.
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 h.e.l.l, 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 h.e.l.l in which sensible men can no longer believe. For the only true h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l. 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 G.o.d 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 h.e.l.l 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 G.o.d made his imagined heaven a real h.e.l.l.
h.e.l.l is revealed in the experience of the world as a diminishing quant.i.ty 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 h.e.l.l 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 s.p.a.ce 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 h.e.l.l, 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, G.o.d 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 G.o.d in the glorified form and circ.u.mstances 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d; 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 sanct.i.ty, 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 const.i.tute the scenic elements for the popular belief concerning G.o.d 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 pa.s.sport 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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 s.p.a.ce.
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 s.p.a.ce, 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 a.n.a.lyzed, 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 G.o.d is realized in a life of blessedness; that harmony, that blessedness, is what we mean by heaven; and the conditions of its realization const.i.tute 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 circ.u.mstances so adjusted as to produce an experience which fulfills the will of G.o.d 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 circ.u.mstances 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 ent.i.ty of mind to the circ.u.mference 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d; 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d which const.i.tutes sin and misery, that discord with him which generates h.e.l.l, 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 G.o.d in fulfillment, or the law of the whole in uncrossed action.
h.e.l.l 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, h.e.l.l 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 G.o.d. But the perpetual preservation of a perfectly balanced antagonism with G.o.d 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 h.e.l.ls.
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 pa.s.s 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.dhead 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 pa.s.sage 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.similation and reproduction: but Calvinism, when fundamentally a.n.a.lyzed, reduces it to a monarchical manifesto and spectacular drama working its effects through verbal terms, acts of mental a.s.sent and gesticular deeds. Every sound teaching of philosophy refutes this exclusive and arbitrary creed. In fact, its fict.i.tious and mythological nature is obvious the moment we see that the will of G.o.d 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 G.o.d. 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 h.e.l.l 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 G.o.d will, in consideration of some technical device, place in heaven a man whose character fits him for h.e.l.l, or, in default of that conventionality, place in h.e.l.l 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 G.o.d must find it much easier to believe that men have mixed mythological dreams with their religion, than to believe that the infinite G.o.d 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 h.e.l.l or heaven to every one accordingly as his vices disobey or his virtues obey the will of G.o.d.
In a universe of law where G.o.d 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 a.s.sociated 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 fort.i.tude, 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 a.s.suaging 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 n.o.ble 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 superst.i.tion says: "Since she was a Universalist, having no part, by faith, in the mystic sacrifice of Christ, she is doomed to h.e.l.l." But every attribute of G.o.d, every promise written by his own finger in the sacred instincts of our nature, as well as the cardinal teachings of the New Testament, a.s.sure 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d. 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, pa.s.s 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 G.o.d. Anselm, the great sainted Archbishop of Canterbury, said: "I would rather be in h.e.l.l without a fault than in heaven with one."
Can any defective technicality d.a.m.n such a man? No; such a spirit carries and radiates heaven is itself heaven. That spirit is G.o.d himself in his creature, and can no more be imprisoned in h.e.l.l than G.o.d 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 d.a.m.ned, and contrasting his blissful safety with the hopeless agony of their perdition, would find himself in h.e.l.l. 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 h.e.l.l, is itself h.e.l.l.