hat this doctrine and its awful concomitants,
though once promulgated, are now nearly obsolete. It is true that,
in thinking minds and generous hearts, they are getting to be
repudiated. But by no means is it so in the recognised formularies
of the established Churches and in the teachings of the popular
clergy. All through the Gentile world, wherever there is a
prevailing religion, the threats and horrors of a fearful doctrine
of hell are still brandished over the trembling or careless
multitudes. In Christendom, the authoritative announcement of the
Roman and Greek Churches, and the public creeds confessed by every
communicant of all the denominations, save two or three which are
comparatively insignificant in numbers, show that the doctrine is
yet held without mitigation. The Bishop of Toronto, only a year or
two ago, published the authoritative declaration that "every child
of humanity, except the Virgin Mary, is from the first moment of
conception a child of wrath, hated by the blessed Trinity,
belonging to Satan, and doomed to hell!" Indeed, the doctrine, in
its whole naked and frightful extent, is necessarily, in strict
logic, an integral part of the great system of the popular
Christianity, that is, Christianity as falsely interpreted,
paganized, and scholasticized. For if by the sin of Adam the
entire race were totally depraved and condemned to a hopeless
hell, and only those can be saved who personally appropriate by a
realizing faith the benefits of the subsequent artifice carried
out in the atoning blood of the incarnate God, certainly the
extremist advocate of the doctrine concerning hell has not
exceeded the truth, and cannot exceed it. All the necessities of
logic rebuke the tame hearted theologians, and great Augustine's,
great Calvin's, ghost walks unapproached among them, crying out
that they are slow and inefficient in describing the enormous
sweep of the inherited penalty! Many persons who have not taken
pains to examine the subject suppose that the horrifying
descriptions given by Christian authors of the state and
sufferings of the lost were not intended to be literally received,
but were meant as figures of speech, highly wrought metaphors
calculated to alarm and impress with physical emblems corresponding
only to moral and spiritual realities. The progress of
thought and refinement has made it natural that recourse should
often be had to such an explanation; but unquestionably it is a
mistake.