hey have given up for a moment systems and
theories, and listened to the voice of their own hearts; questions
natural enough to an age which abhors cruelty, has abolished torture,
labours for the reformation of criminals, and debates--rightly or
wrongly--about abolishing capital punishment. Men are asking questions
about the heaven--the spiritual world--and saying--"The spiritual world?
Is it only another material world which happens to be invisible now, but
which may become visible hereafter: or is it not rather the moral
world--the world of right and wrong? Heaven? Is not the true and real
heaven the kingdom of love, justice, purity, beneficence? Is not that
the eternal heaven wherein God abides for ever, and with Him those who
are like God? And hell? Is it not rather the anarchy of hate,
injustice, impurity, uselessness; wherein abides all that is opposed to
God?"

And with those thoughts come others about moral retribution--"What is its
purpose? Can it--can any punishment have any right purpose save the
correction, or the annihilation, of the criminal? Can God, in this
respect, be at once less merciful and less powerful than man? Is He so
controlled by necessity that He is forced to bring into the world beings
whom He knows to be incorrigible, and doomed to endless misery? And if
not so controlled, is not the alternative as to His character even more
fearful? He bids us copy His justice, His love. Is that His justice,
that His love, which if we copied, we should call each other, and
deservedly, utterly unjust and unloving? Can there be one morality for
God, and another for man, made in the image of God? Are these dark
dogmas worthy of a Father who hateth nothing that He hath made, and is
perfect in this--that He makes His sun shine on the evil and on the good,
and His rain fall on the just and on the unjust, and is good to the
unthankful and to the evil? Are they worthy of a Son who, in the fire of
His divine charity, stooped from heaven to earth, to toil, to suffer, to
die on the Cross, that the world by Him might be saved? Are they worthy
of that Spirit which proceeds from the Father and the Son, even that
Spirit of boundless charity, and fervent love, by which the Son offered
Himself to the Father, a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world--and
surely not in vain?"

So men are asking--rightly or wrongly; and they are guarding themselves,
at the same time, from the imputation of disbelief in mor