is for something trivial. 'Fiery' has
always a noble significance. It denotes such things as faith, courage,
genius. Earth lies heavy, and air is void, and water flows down; but
flames aspire, flying back towards the heaven they came from. They
typify for us the spirit of man, as apart from aught that is gross in
him. They are the symbol of purity, of triumph over corruption. Water,
air, earth, can all harbour corruption; but where flames are, or have
been, there is innocence. Our love of fire comes partly, doubtless,
from our natural love of destruction for destruction's sake. Fire is
savage, and so, even after all these centuries, are we, at heart. Our
civilisation is but as the aforesaid crust that encloses the old
planetary flames. To destroy is still the strongest instinct of our
nature. Nature is still 'red in tooth and claw,' though she has begun
to make fine flourishes with tooth-brush and nail-scissors. Even the
mild dog on my hearth-rug has been known to behave like a wolf to his
own species. Scratch his master and you will find the caveman. But the
scratch must be a sharp one: I am thickly veneered. Outwardly, I am as
gentle as you, gentle reader. And one reason for our delight in fire is
that there is no humbug about flames: they are frankly, primaevally
savage. But this is not, I am glad to say, the sole reason. We have a
sense of good and evil. I do not pretend that it carries us very far.
It is but the tooth-brush and nail-scissors that we flourish. Our
innate instincts, not this acquired sense, are what the world really
hinges on. But this acquired sense is an integral part of our minds.
And we revere fire because we have come to regard it as especially the
foe of evil--as a means for destroying weeds, not flowers; a destroyer
of wicked cities, not of good ones.

The idea of hell, as inculcated in the books given to me when I was a
child, never really frightened me at all. I conceived the possibility
of a hell in which were eternal flames to destroy every one who had not
been good. But a hell whose flames were eternally impotent to destroy
these people, a hell where evil was to go on writhing yet thriving for
ever and ever, seemed to me, even at that age, too patently absurd to
be appalling. Nor indeed do I think that to the more credulous children
in England can the idea of eternal burning have ever been quite so
forbidding as their nurses meant it to be. Credulity is but a form of
incaution. I, as I ha