o
did Sir Henry Vane, the eminent Parliamentary leader, who was beheaded
for high treason in 1662.[265] A few Nonconformist congregations adopted
similar opinions. The Cambridge Platonists--insisting prominently, as
most writers of a mystical turn have done, upon that belief in the
universal fatherhood of God, which had infused a gentler tone, scarcely
compatible with much that he wrote, even into Luther's spirit--inclined
to a milder theology. Henry More ventured to hope that 'the benign
principle will get the upper hand at last, and Hades, as Plutarch says,
[Greek: apoleipesthai], be left in the lurch.'[266] But these were
exceptions. For the most part, among religious writers of every school
of thought there was perfect acquiescence in a doctrine of intolerable
never-ending torments, and no attempt whatever to find some mode of
explanation by which to escape from the horrors of the conception.
Pearson and Bull, Lake and Kettlewell, Bentley, Fleetwood,
Worthington,[267] Sherlock, Steele and Addison, Bunyan and
Doddridge--theologians and scholars, Broad Churchmen and Nonjurors,
preachers and essayists, Churchmen and Nonconformists--expressed
themselves far more unreservedly than is at all usual in our age, even
among those who, in theory, interpret Scripture in the same sense. The
hideous imagery depicted by the graphic pencil of Orcagna on the walls
of the Campo Santo was reproduced no less vividly in the prose works of
Bunyan, and with equal vigour, if not with equal force of imagination,
by almost all who sought to kindle by impassioned pulpit appeals the
conscience of their hearers. Young's poem of 'The Last Day,' in which
panegyrics of Queen Anne are strangely blended with a powerful and
awe-inspiring picture of the most extreme and hopeless misery, was
highly approved, we are told, not only by general readers but by the
Tory Ministry and their friends.[268] No doubt the practical and
regulative faith which exercised a real influence upon life was of quite
a different nature. A tenet which cannot be in the slightest degree
realised, except perhaps in special moments of excitement or depression,
is rendered almost neutral and inefficacious by the conscience refusing
to dwell upon it. Belief in certain retribution compatible with human
ideas of justice and goodness cannot fail in practical force. A doctrine
which does not comply with this condition, if not questioned, is simply
evaded. 'And dost thou not,' cried Adam