mercy upon all." This is the true spirit of a good man.
And is man better than his Maker? We will answer that question,
and leave this head of the discussion, by presenting an Oriental
apologue.

God once sat on his inconceivable throne, and far around him, rank
after rank, angels and archangels, seraphim and cherubim, resting
on their silver wings and lifting their dazzling brows, rose and
swelled, with the splendors of an illimitable sea of immortal
beings, gleaming and fluctuating to the remotest borders of the
universe. The anthem of their praise shook the pillars of the
creation, and filled the vault of heaven with a pulsing flood of
harmony. When, as they closed their hymn, stole up, faint heard,
as from some most distant region of all space, in dim accents
humbly rising, a responsive "Amen." God asked Gabriel, "Whence
comes that Amen?" The hierarchic peer replied, "It rises from the
damned in hell." God took, from where it hung above his seat, the
key that unlocks the forty thousand doors of hell, and, giving it
to Gabriel, bade him go release them. On wings of light sped the
enraptured messenger, rescued the millions of the lost, and, just
as they were, covered all over with the traces of their sin,
filth, and woe, brought them straight up into the midst of heaven.
Instantly they were transformed, clothed in robes of glory, and
placed next to the throne; and henceforth, for evermore, the
dearest strain to God's ear, of all the celestial music, was that
borne by the choir his grace had ransomed from hell. And, because
there is no envy or other selfishness in heaven, this promotion
sent but new thrills of delight and gratitude through the heights
and depths of angelic life.

We come now to the last class of reasons for disbelieving the
dogma of eternal damnation, namely, those furnished by the
principles of human nature and the truths of human experience. The
doctrine, as we think can be clearly shown, is literally
incredible to the human mind and literally intolerable to the
human heart. In the first place, it is, viewed in the abstract,
absolutely incredible because it is inconceivable: no man can
possibly grasp and appreciate the idea. The nearest approximation
to it ever made perhaps is in De Quincey's gorgeous elaboration of
the famous Hindu myth of an enormous rock finally worn away by the
brushing of a gauze veil; and that is really no approximation at
all, since an incommensurable chasm always separate