But in the later imagination of Christendom the vision a.s.sumed 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 m.u.f.fled 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 h.e.l.lish 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 h.e.l.l 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.signment 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. c.u.mming, whose works ent.i.tled "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 sc.r.a.ps 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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 c.o.c.kcrow of reason has been heard, and it is time ye were gone. Fade, terrible dream, painted by superst.i.tion on the cope of the sky, picture of contending fiends and angels, fiery rain, a frowning G.o.d, and shuddering millions of victims!
Away forever, and leave the blue s.p.a.ce free for the benignant mysteries of the unknown eternity to lure us blessedly forward to our fate. Come, believers in the merciful G.o.d of truth, lend your aid to the glorious work of spiritual emanc.i.p.ation. 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 a.s.size, 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 s.p.a.ce, and that every consciousness is educating to read it and adore the perfect justification of the ways of G.o.d. The eternal immensity of the universe is the true Aula Regis in which G.o.d holds perpetual session, overlooking no suppliant, omitting no case.
CHAPTER III.
THE MYTHOLOGICAL h.e.l.l AND THE TRUE ONE, OR THE LAW OF PERDITION.
THE doctrine that there is a material place of torment destined to be the eternal abode of the wicked after death is based on the language of the Bible, supported by the aggregate teachings of the church, and commonly a.s.serted, 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 d.a.m.ned, arrayed with the innumerable horrors of physical anguish, he is at once met with the declaration that G.o.d 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 h.e.l.l is not a divine revelation, but is a mythological growth. It is a fanciful ma.s.s 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 G.o.d 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 h.e.l.l. 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 h.e.l.l 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 G.o.d are limited to the sphere of the spirit, and do not include the data of geology, astronomy, chemistry and mathematics.
G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 h.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.l 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. G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d is infinite, we cannot stand out against him and talk with him. Souls in finer and fuller harmony with the works and laws of G.o.d, thus fulfilling the human conditions of inspiration, are met by the divine conditions, and obtain new insight of the ways and designs of G.o.d.
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 const.i.tutes a true revelation. Now if there be a local and physical h.e.l.l, 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 h.e.l.l 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 G.o.d, and G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 d.a.m.ned, 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 h.e.l.l, a guarded and smoking dungeon of the d.a.m.ned, ought not to be regarded as a truth contained in a revelation from G.o.d, 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 superst.i.tious 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 h.e.l.l. To get the fully developed popular doctrine of h.e.l.l 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 ma.s.s of wretchedness over into the future state as a representation of the doom G.o.d has there prepared for his foes.
Earthly rulers and their practice, the most impressive scenes and acts experienced among men, have always. .h.i.therto furnished the types of thought applied to ill.u.s.trate 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, G.o.d 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 subst.i.tute 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 h.e.l.l 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 G.o.d 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 h.e.l.l.
Wherever we look at the prevalent doctrines of h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.ls 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 h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.ls awaiting the disembodied souls of all who had not scrupulously observed the ritual prescribed for them, and secured the pa.s.s 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 h.e.l.ls 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 h.e.l.ls, 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 h.e.l.ls, a.s.signing each one to a particular cla.s.s of sinners; and it adds that there are hundreds of others, in which the various cla.s.ses of offenders undergo the penalties of their misdeeds. There are separate h.e.l.ls 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 h.e.l.ls, which are all of one substantial pattern, however varied in the embroidery.
The Pa.r.s.ees 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 h.e.l.l, 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 h.e.l.l, 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 h.e.l.l, prevalent in Christendom, we see the full equivalents of the baseless fancies and superst.i.tions incorporated in these other doctrines. If the mythological h.e.l.ls of the heathen nations are not a revelation from G.o.d, neither is that of the Christians; for they are fundamentally alike, all ill.u.s.trating the same fallacy of the imaginative a.s.sociation of things known, and the transference of them to things unknown. Not a single argument can the Christian urge in behalf of his local h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l 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 s.p.a.ce thus provided; just as the sepulchres were a.s.sociated in the burial place, and as the family of the dead were a.s.sociated 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d. 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 h.e.l.l. In this detested vale the worship of Moloch was once celebrated by roasting children alive in the brazen arms of the G.o.d, 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 h.e.l.l. 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 h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l, 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 d.a.m.ned 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 ma.s.s, some boiled and strained through a cloth. The defenders of the orthodox doctrine of h.e.l.l 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 mult.i.tudes of the believing. And what shall be said of the following extract from a little book called "The Sight of h.e.l.l," recently published with high ecclesiastical endors.e.m.e.nt, for circulation among the children of Great Britain and America? The writer, the Rev. J.
Furniss, describes the different dungeons of h.e.l.l, and the pa.s.sage 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 G.o.d saw that this child would get worse and worse, and never repent, and thus would have to be punished much more in h.e.l.l. So G.o.d 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 superst.i.tion. 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 circ.u.mstance, 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, ent.i.tled, "On the Individuality of the Soul,"
gives us accounts of h.e.l.l which for unshrinking detail of materiality will compare with the most frightful pa.s.sages 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 a.s.serts, "There is a real fire in h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l: but at the day of judgment thy body shall join thy soul, and then thou wilt have twin h.e.l.ls, 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 h.e.l.l 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 G.o.d 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 ma.s.s of similar trash, loathsome mixture of superst.i.tion 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 h.e.l.l all the incrustation of material errors and poetic symbolism, the pure truth remains that G.o.d 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 h.e.l.l.
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 circ.u.mstances 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 h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d as a political king, governing by external edicts and agents, by overt decrees and constables. This deludes us with the local and material h.e.l.l of superst.i.tion, which has no existence in reality. Disordered Function is the open turnpike and metropolis of the real h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l. The only true h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l, 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 h.e.l.l who are immersed in the Lohak.u.mbha, 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 Lohak.u.mbha!" 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 h.e.l.l which is a bounded region of physical torture somewhere in outward s.p.a.ce, 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 superst.i.tious fictions cannot be without some important reality within. In distinction, then, from the monstrous ma.s.s of mistakes denoted by it, what is the truth carried in the awful word, h.e.l.l?
Denying h.e.l.l to be distinctively any particular locality in time and s.p.a.ce, 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 h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l 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. h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l when he dies, but that h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l is, a state of painful opposition to the will of G.o.d, misadjustment of personal const.i.tution 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. h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l of remorse, forever retreading the path of ruined yesterdays.
There is a h.e.l.l of loss, whose occupant stands gazing on the melancholy might have been trans.m.u.ted now into a relentless nevermore. Every sinner has a h.e.l.l as original and idiosyncratic as his soul and its contents. As the ingredients of evil experience are not mixed alike in any, h.e.l.l 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. h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l.
The rude definition of heaven and h.e.l.l, 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 quant.i.ty 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 ill.u.s.tration.
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 superst.i.tious belief, it is a violation of the will of our Maker, and the consequent suffering and dissolution are the retributive h.e.l.l or reflex signals, painfully pointing out our duty. On the other hand, if the pleasure of gratifying appet.i.te 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 h.e.l.l of nightmare: the gourmand, pampering himself with a diet of spiced meats and Burgundy, shrieks from the twinging h.e.l.l 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 pa.s.sing gratification in the present. G.o.d commands man to rule his pa.s.sions by reason, not slavishly obey them; to exercise a wisely proportioned self denial to day for the winning of a safer and n.o.bler 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 h.e.l.lish 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 h.e.l.l.
h.e.l.l 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 pa.s.sion, having no pleasure, except that of acc.u.mulating, h.o.a.rding 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 l.u.s.t fear of robbery, fear of poverty, fear of men, fear of G.o.d, fear of death, all fused together by a l.u.s.t for money. Is he not in a competent h.e.l.l? Who would wish anything worse for him? His vice is the elevation of the love of money above a thousand n.o.bler claims. His unclean and odious experience is the avenging h.e.l.l 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 G.o.d, fear of detection, actual condemnation by his own conscience, and ideal condemnation by all the world, const.i.tute a h.e.l.l 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.