ing of the wolf with
the lamb should be transferred to the dealings of the Creator with his
creatures. "You stirred the brook up and made my drinking-place muddy."
"But, please your wolfship, I couldn't do that, for I stirred the water
far down the stream,--below your drinking-place." "Well, anyhow, your
father troubled it a year or two ago, and that is the same thing." So
the wolf falls upon the lamb and makes a meal of him. That is wolf
logic,--and theological reasoning.

How shall we characterize the doctrine of endless torture as the destiny
of most of those who have lived, and are living, on this planet? I
prefer to let another writer speak of it. Mr. John Morley uses the
following words: "The horrors of what is perhaps the most frightful idea
that has ever corroded human character,--the idea of eternal punishment."
Sismondi, the great historian, heard a sermon on eternal punishment, and
vowed never again to enter another church holding the same creed.
Romanism he considered a religion of mercy and peace by the side of what
the English call the Reformation.--I mention these protests because I
happen to find them among my notes, but it would be easy to accumulate
examples of the same kind. When Cowper, at about the end of the last
century, said satirically of the minister he was attacking,

"He never mentioned hell to ears polite,"

he was giving unconscious evidence that the sense of the barbarism of the
idea was finding its way into the pulpit. When Burns, in the midst of
the sulphurous orthodoxy of Scotland, dared to say,

"The fear o' hell 's a hangman's whip
To haud the wretch in order,"

he was only appealing to the common sense and common humanity of his
fellow-countrymen.

All the reasoning in the world, all the proof-texts in old manuscripts,
cannot reconcile this supposition of a world of sleepless and endless
torment with the declaration that "God is love."

Where did this "frightful idea" come from? We are surprised, as we grow
older, to find that the legendary hell of the church is nothing more nor
less than the Tartarus of the old heathen world. It has every mark of
coming from the cruel heart of a barbarous despot. Some malignant and
vindictive Sheik, some brutal Mezentius, must have sat for many pictures
of the Divinity. It was not enough to kill his captive enemy, after
torturing him as much as ingenuity could contrive to do it. He escaped
at last by death, but his conqueror c