happiness in this world, you may secure a
great deal of it successfully; but it will be worse for you eventually."

The theory of life as taught and enforced, for instance, in such a work
as Dante's great poem is based upon this crudity of thought. Dante, by
his Hell and his Purgatory, expressed plainly that the chief motive of
man to practise morality must be his fear of ultimate punishment. His
was an attempt to draw away the curtain which hides this world from the
next, and to horrify men into living purely and kindly. But the mind
only revolts against the dastardly injustice of a God, who allows men
to be born into the world so corrupt, with so many incentives to sin,
and deliberately hides from them the ghastly sight of the eternal
torments, which might have saved them from recklessness of life. No one
who had trod the dark caverns of Hell or the flinty ridges of
Purgatory, as Dante represented himself doing, who had seen the awful
sights and heard the heart-broken words of the place, could have
returned to the world as a light-hearted sinner! Whatever we may
believe of God, we must not for an instant allow ourselves to believe
that life can be so brief and finite, so small and hampered an
opportunity, and that punishment could be so demoniacal and so
infinite. A God who could design such a scheme must be essentially evil
and malignant. We may menace wicked men with punishment for wanton
misdeeds, but it must be with just punishment. What could we say of a
human father who exposed a child to temptation without explaining the
consequences, and then condemned him to lifelong penalties for failing
to make the right choice? We must firmly believe that if offences are
finite, punishment must be finite too; that it must be remedial and not
mechanical. We must believe that if we deserve punishment, it will be
because we can hope for restoration. Hell is a monstrous and
insupportable fiction, and the idea of it is simply inconsistent with
any belief in the goodness of God. It is easy to quote texts to support
it, but we must not allow any text, any record in the world, however
sacred, to shatter our belief in the Love and Justice of God. And I say
as frankly and directly as I can that until we can get rid of this
intolerable terror, we can make no advance at all.

The old, fierce Saints, who went into the darkness exulting in the
thought of the eternal damnation of the wicked, had not spelt the first
letter of the Christ