the result of their choice
and action in that hour was to decide their irrevocable fate,
actually forever, to ecstatic bliss or to ecstatic woe; that
during that hour they were left, as far as clear and stable
conviction goes, in utter ignorance and uncertainty as to the
great realities of their condition, courted by opposing theories
and modes of action; and that, when the clock of time knelled the
close of that awful, that most evanescent hour, the roaring gulf
of torture yawned, and its jaws of flame and blackness closed over
ninety nine hundredths of them for eternity! That is a fair
picture of the popular doctrine of temporal probation and eternal
punishment, when examined in the light of the facts of human life.
Of course, no man at this day, who is in his senses and thinks
honestly upon the subject, can credit such a doctrine, unless
indeed he believes that a lawless fiend sits on the throne of the
universe and guides the helm of destiny. And lives there a man of
unperverted soul who would not decidedly prefer to have no God
rather than to have such a one? Ay, "Rather than so, come FATE
into the list And champion us to the utterance."

Let us be atheists, and bow to mortal Chance, believe there is no
pilot at all at the rudder of Creation's vessel, no channel before
the prow, but the roaring breakers of despair to right and left,
and the granite bluff of annihilation full in front!

In the next place, then, we argue against the doctrine of eternal
damnation that it is incompatible with any worthy idea of the
character of God. God is love; and love cannot consent to the
useless torture of millions of helpless souls for eternity. The
gross contradiction of the common doctrine of hell to the spirit
of love is so obvious that its advocates, unable to deny or
conceal it, have often positively proclaimed it, avowing that, in
respect to the wicked, God is changed into a consuming fire full
of hatred and vengeance. But that is unmitigated blasphemy. God is
unchangeable, his very nature being disinterested, immutable
goodness. The sufferings of the wicked are of their own
preparation. If a pestilential exhalation is drawn from some
decaying substance, it is not the fault of any alteration in the
sunlight. But a Christian writer assures us that when "the damned
are packed like brick in a kiln, so bound that they cannot move a
limb nor even an eyelid, God shall blow the fires of hell through
them for ever and ever."