sness that is all consciousness,
without anything outside it that is not consciousness? In such a case,
of what is consciousness the consciousness? Of its content? Or may it
not rather be that, starting from chaos, from absolute unconsciousness,
in the eternity of the past, we continually approach the apocatastasis
or final apotheosis without ever reaching it?

May not this apocatastasis, this return of all things to God, be rather
an ideal term to which we unceasingly approach--some of us with fleeter
step than others--but which we are destined never to reach? May not the
absolute and perfect eternal happiness be an eternal hope, which would
die if it were to be realized? Is it possible to be happy without hope?
And there is no place for hope when once possession has been realized,
for hope, desire, is killed by possession. May it not be, I say, that
all souls grow without ceasing, some in a greater measure than others,
but all having to pass some time through the same degree of growth,
whatever that degree may be, and yet without ever arriving at the
infinite, at God, to whom they continually approach? Is not eternal
happiness an eternal hope, with its eternal nucleus of sorrow in order
that happiness shall not be swallowed up in nothingness?

Follow more questions to which there is no answer. "He shall be all in
all," says the Apostle. But will His mode of being in each one be
different or will it be the same for all alike? Will not God be wholly
in one of the damned? Is He not in his soul? Is He not in what is called
hell? And in what sense is He in hell?

Whence arise new problems, those relating to the opposition between
heaven and hell, between eternal happiness and eternal unhappiness.

May it not be that in the end all shall be saved, including Cain and
Judas and Satan himself, as Origen's development of the Pauline
apocatastasis led him to hope?

When our Catholic theologians seek to justify rationally--or in other
words, ethically--the dogma of the eternity of the pains of hell, they
put forward reasons so specious, ridiculous, and childish, that it would
appear impossible that they should ever have obtained currency. For to
assert that since God is infinite, an offence committed against Him is
infinite also and therefore demands an eternal punishment, is, apart
from the inconceivability of an infinite offence, to be unaware that, in
human ethics, if not in the human police system, the gravity of the
off