Hell particularly
and my parents in it--murdered my childish sleep. Then, for no reason
that I can give any account of, it all faded, and boy or man I have never
been troubled at all by Hell or the fear of it.

The strangest part of the whole affair is that no priest, from first to
last, has ever spoken to me in private of any life but this present one,
or indeed about religion at all. I suppose there must be some instinct in
the sacerdotal mind which warns it off certain cases as hopeless from the
first . . . and yet I have always been eager to discuss serious things
with the serious.

There has been no great loss, though--apart from the missing of
sociableness--if one may judge the arguments that satisfy my clerical
friends from the analogies they use in the pulpit. The subject of a
future life is one, to be sure, which can hardly be discussed without
resort to analogy. But there are good and bad analogies, and of all bad
ones that which grates worst upon the nerves of a man who will have clear
thinking (to whatever it lead him) is the common one of the seed and the
flower.

"The flowers that we behold each year
In chequer'd meads their heads to rear,
New rising from the tomb;
The eglantines and honey daisies,
And all those pretty smiling faces
That still in age grow young--
Even those do cry
That though men die,
Yet life from death may come,"

Wrote John Hagthorpe in verses which generations of British schoolboys
have turned into Latin alcaics; and how often have we not 'sat under' this
argument in church at Easter or when the preacher was improving a Harvest
Festival? Examine it, and you see at once that the argument is not _in
pari materia_; that all the true correspondence between man and the
flower-seed begins and ends in this world. As the seed becomes a plant,
blossoms and leaves the seeds of other flowers, so of seed man is
begotten, flourishes and dies, leaving his seed behind him--all in this
world. The 'seed' argument makes an illicit jump from one world to
another after all its analogies have been met and satisfied on this side
of the grave. If flowers went to heaven and blossomed there (which is
possible indeed, but is not contended) it might be cogent. As things are,
one might as validly reason from the man to prove that flowers go to
heaven, as from the flower to prove that man goes thither. St. Paul (as
I do not forget