But, of course, that is what no theologian
can venture to say. It is needless to call the Puritan divine, with his
babes of a span long now lying in hell, or that Romanist priest who
revels in describing the most fiendish torture inflicted upon children
by the merciful Creator who made them and exposed them to evil, or any
other of the wild and hideous phantasms that have been evoked by the
imagination of mankind running riot in the world of arbitrary figments.
Nor need we dwell upon the fact, that where theology is really vigorous
it produces such nightmares by an inevitable law; inasmuch as the next
world can be nothing but the intensified reflection of this. It is
enough to say that, if the revelation of a future state be really the
great claim of Christianity upon our attentions, the use which it has
made of that state has been one main cause of its decay. "St. Lewis the
king, having sent Ivo, Bishop of Chartres, on an embassy, the bishop met
a woman on the way, grave, sad, fantastic, and melancholic; with fire in
one hand and water in the other. He asked what those symbols meant. She
answered, 'My purpose is with fire to burn Paradise, and with my water
to quench the flames of hell, that men may serve God without the
incentives of hope and fear, and purely for the love of God.'" "The
woman," adds Jeremy Taylor, "began at the wrong end." Is that so clear?
The attempts of priests to make use of the keys of heaven and hell
brought about the moral revolt of the Reformation; and, at the present
day, the disgust excited by the doctrine of everlasting damnation is
amongst the strongest motives to popular infidelity; all able apologists
feel the strain. Some reasoners quibble about everlasting and eternal;
and the great Catholic logician "submits the whole subject to the
theological school," a process which I do not quite understand, though I
assume it to be consolatory. The doctrine, in short, can hardly be made
tangible without shocking men's consciences and understandings. It
ought, it may be, to be attractive, but when firmly grasped, it becomes
incredible and revolting.

The difficulty is evaded in two ways. Some amiable and heterodox sects
retain heaven and abolish hell. A kingdom in the clouds may, of course,
be portioned off according to pleasure. The doctrine, however, is
interesting in an intellectual point of view only as illustrating in the
naivest fashion the common fallacy of confounding our wishes with our