how much, in a
generation or two, will Twenty-seven Millions, mostly false,
manage to accumulate? The sum of it, visible in every street,
marketplace, senate-house, circulating-library, cathedral,
cotton-mill, and union-workhouse, fills one _not_ with a
comic feeling!

Chapter II

Gospel of Mammonism

Reader, even Christian Reader as thy title goes, hast thou any
notion of Heaven and Hell? I rather apprehend, not. Often as
the words are on our tongue, they have got a fabulous or
semifabulous character for most of us, and pass on like a kind of
transient similitude, like a sound signifying little.

Yet it is well worth while for us to know, once and always, that
they are not a similitude, nor a fable nor semi-fable; that they
are an everlasting highest fact! "No Lake of Sicilian or other
sulphur burns now anywhere in these ages," sayest thou? Well,
and if there did not! Believe that there does not; believe it
if thou wilt, nay hold by it as a real increase, a rise to higher
stages, to wider horizons and empires. All this has vanished, or
has not vanished; believe as thou wilt as to all this. But that
an Infinite of Practical Importance, speaking with strict
arithmetical exactness, an _Infinite,_ has vanished or can vanish
from the Life of any Man: this thou shalt not believe! O
brother, the Infinite of Terror, of Hope, of Pity, did it not at
any moment disclose itself to thee, indubitable, unnameable?
Came it never, like the gleam of preternatural eternal Oceans,
like the voice of old Eternities, far-sounding through thy heart
of hearts? Never? Alas, it was not thy Liberalism then; it was
thy Animalism! The Infinite is more sure than any other fact.
But only men can discern it; mere building beavers, spinning
arachnes, much more the predatory vulturous and vulpine species,
do not discern it well!--

'The word Hell,' says Sauerteig, 'is still frequently in use
among the English People: but I could not without difficulty
ascertain what they meant by it. Hell generally signifies the
Infinite Terror, the thing a man is infinitely afraid of, and
shudders and shrinks from, struggling with his whole soul to
escape from it. There is a Hell therefore, if you will consider,
which accompanies man, in all stages of his history, and
religious or other development: but the Hells of men and Peoples
differ notably. With Christians it is the infinite terror of
being found guilty before the just J