ny Roman Catholics on
their dying beds, and it always appeared to me that they accepted the
inevitable with a composure which showed that their belief, whether or
not the best to live by, was a better one to die by than most of the
harder creeds which have replaced it.

In the more intelligent circles of American society one may question
anything and everything, if he will only do it civilly. We may talk
about eschatology, the science of last things,--or, if you will, the
natural history of the undiscovered country, without offence before
anybody except young children and very old women of both sexes. In our
New England the great Andover discussion and the heretical missionary
question have benumbed all sensibility on this subject as entirely, as
completely, as the new local anaesthetic, cocaine, deadens the
sensibility of the part to which it is applied, so that the eye may have
its mote or beam plucked out without feeling it,--as the novels of Zola
and Maupassant have hardened the delicate nerve-centres of the women who
have fed their imaginations on the food they have furnished.

The generally professed belief of the Protestant world as embodied in
their published creeds is that the great mass of mankind are destined to
an eternity of suffering. That this eternity is to be one of bodily
pain--of "torment "--is the literal teaching of Scripture, which has been
literally interpreted by the theologians, the poets, and the artists of
many long ages which followed the acceptance of the recorded legends of
the church as infallible. The doctrine has always been recognized, as it
is now, as a very terrible one. It has found a support in the story of
the fall of man, and the view taken of the relation of man to his Maker
since that event. The hatred of God to mankind in virtue of their "first
disobedience" and inherited depravity is at the bottom of it. The extent
to which that idea was carried is well shown in the expressions I have
borrowed from Jonathan Edwards. According to his teaching,--and he was a
reasoner who knew what he was talking about, what was involved in the
premises of the faith he accepted,--man inherits the curse of God as his
principal birthright.

What shall we say to the doctrine of the fall of man as the ground of
inflicting endless misery on the human race? A man to be punished for
what he could not help! He was expected to be called to account for
Adam's sin. It is singular to notice that the reason