which
are still in the XVII century. Even there, it is tacitly reserved for
the other fellow.

THE IMPORTANCE OF HELL IN THE SALVATION SCHEME.

The seriousness of throwing over hell whilst still clinging to the
Atonement is obvious. If there is no punishment for sin there can be no
self-forgiveness for it. If Christ paid our score, and if there is no
hell and therefore no chance of our getting into trouble by forgetting
the obligation, then we can be as wicked as we like with impunity inside
the secular law, even from self-reproach, which becomes mere ingratitude
to the Savior. On the other hand, if Christ did not pay our score, it
still stands against us; and such debts make us extremely uncomfortable.
The drive of evolution, which we call conscience and honor, seizes on
such slips, and shames us to the dust for being so low in the scale
as to be capable of them. The "saved" thief experiences an ecstatic
happiness which can never come to the honest atheist: he is tempted to
steal again to repeat the glorious sensation. But if the atheist steals
he has no such happiness. He is a thief and knows that he is a thief.
Nothing can rub that off him. He may try to sooth his shame by some sort
of restitution or equivalent act of benevolence; but that does not alter
the fact that he did steal; and his conscience will not be easy until he
has conquered his will to steal and changed himself into an honest man
by developing that divine spark within him which Jesus insisted on as
the everyday reality of what the atheist denies.

Now though the state of the believers in the atonement may thus be the
happier, it is most certainly not more desirable from the point of view
of the community. The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is
no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a
sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality
of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life. Whether Socrates got
as much happiness out of life as Wesley is an unanswerable question; but
a nation of Socrateses would be much safer and happier than a nation of
Wesleys; and its individuals would be higher in the evolutionary scale.
At all events it is in the Socratic man and not in the Wesleyan that our
hope lies now.

THE RIGHT TO REFUSE ATONEMENT.

Consequently, even if it were mentally possible for all of us to believe
in the Atonement, we should have to cry off it, as we evidently