iration
fill and animate the whole being. Then, having realized in its
experience the purposes of Christ's mission, the original aims of
its existence, it rejoices in the favor of God. In the harmonious
fruition of its internal efficiencies and external relations, all
things work together for good unto it, and it basks in the beams
of the sun of immortality. Perdition and hell are the condemnation
and misery instantaneously deposited in experience whenever and
wherever a perverted and corrupt soul touches its relations with
the universe. The meeting of its consciousness with the alienated
mournful faces of things, with the hostile retributive forces of
things, produces unrest and suffering with the same natural
necessity that the meeting of certain chemical substances deposits
poison and bitterness. Perdition being the degradation and
wretchedness of the soul through ingrained falsehood, vice,
impurity, and hardness, salvation is the casting out of these
evils, and the replacing them with truth, righteousness, a holy
and sensitive life. To ransom from hell and translate to heaven is
not, then, so much to deliver from a local dungeon of gnawing
fires and worms, and bear to a local paradise of luxuries, as it
is to heal diseases and restore health. Hell is a wrong, diseased
condition of the soul, its indwelling wretchedness and
retribution, wherever it may be, as when the light of day tortures
a sick eye. Heaven is a right, healthy condition of the soul, its
indwelling integrity and concord, in whatever realms it may
reside, as when the sunshine bathes the healthy orb of vision with
delight. Salvation is nothing more nor less than the harmonious
blessedness of the soul by the fruition of all its right powers
and relations. Remove a man who is writhing in the agonies of some
physical disease, from his desolate hut on the bleak mountain side
to a gorgeous palace in a delicious tropical clime. He is just as
badly off as before. He is still, so to speak, in hell, wherever
he may be in location. Cure his sickness, and then he is, so to
speak, saved, in heaven. It is so with the soul. The conditions of
salvation and reprobation are not arbitrary, mechanical, fickle,
but are the interior and unalterable laws of the soul and of the
universe. "Every devil," Sir Thomas Browne says, "holds enough of
torture in his own ubi, and needs not the torture of circumference
to afflict him." If there are, as there may be, two entirely
separ