uman nature, even when left to its
uncultured instincts, is bound to far other and nobler things.
Radbod, one of the old Scandinavian kings, after long resistance,
finally consented to be baptized. After he had put one foot into
the water, he asked the priest if he should meet his forefathers
in heaven. Learning that they, being unbaptized pagans, were
victims of endless misery, he drew his foot back, and refused the
rite, choosing to be with his brave ancestors in hell rather than
to be in heaven with the Christian priests. And, speaking from the
stand point of the highest refinement of feeling and virtue, who
that has a heart in his

25 Park, Memoir of Hopkins, pp. 201, 202.

bosom would not say, "Heaven can be no heaven to me, if I am to
look down on the quenchless agonies of all I have loved here!" Is
it not strictly true that the thought that even one should have
endless woe "Would cast a shadow on the throne of God And darken
heaven"?

If a monarch, possessing unlimited power over all the earth, had
condemned one man to be stretched on a rack and be freshly plied
with incessant tortures for a period of fifty years, and if
everybody on earth could hear his terrible shrieks by day and
night, though they were themselves all, with this sole exception,
blessed with perfect happiness, would not the whole human race,
from Spitzbergen to Japan, from Rio Janeiro to Liberia, rise in a
body and go to implore the king's clemency for the solitary
victim? So, if hell had but one tenant doomed to eternal anguish,
a petition reaching from Sirius to Alcyone, signed by the universe
of moral beings, borne by a convoy of angels representing every
star in space, would be laid and unrolled at the foot of God's
throne, and He would read thereon this prayer: "FORGIVE HIM, AND
RELEASE HIM, WE BESEECH THEE, O GOD." And can it be that every
soul in the universe is better than the Maker and Father of the
universe?

The popular doctrine of eternal torment threatening nearly all our
race is refuted likewise by the impossibility of any general
observance of the obligations morally and logically consequent
from it. In the first place, as the world is constituted, and as
life goes on, the great majority of men are upon the whole happy,
evidently were meant to be happy. But every believer of the
doctrine in debate is bound to be unutterably wretched. If he has
any gleam of generous sentiment or touch of philanthropy in his
bosom, if he i