ery falsehood, and to conquer every wrong, under the
inspiration of the omnipresent Judge who executes his decrees in
the very working itself of that Universal Order whose progressive
unfolding will be fulfilled at last, not in any magic resurrection
and assize, but in the simple lifting of the veil of ignorance
from all souls brought into full community, and the illumination
before their opened faculties of the whole contents of history.
For we believe that all history is by its own enactment
indestructibly registered in the theatre of space, and that every
consciousness is educating to read it and adore the perfect
justification of the ways of God. The eternal immensity of the
universe is the true Aula Regis in which God holds perpetual
session, overlooking no suppliant, omitting no case.

CHAPTER III.

THE MYTHOLOGICAL HELL AND THE TRUE ONE, OR THE LAW OF PERDITION.

THE doctrine that there is a material place of torment destined to
be the eternal abode of the wicked after death is based on the
language of the Bible, supported by the aggregate teachings of the
church, and commonly asserted, though with a stricken and failing
faith, throughout Christendom at this moment. When any one tries
to show the unreasonableness of the belief in this local prison
house of the damned, arrayed with the innumerable horrors of
physical anguish, he is at once met with the declaration that God
himself has declared the fact, and consequently that we are bound
to accept it without question, as a truth of revelation. For the
reasons which we will immediately proceed to give, this
representation must be rejected as a mistake.

The popular doctrine of hell is not a divine revelation, but is a
mythological growth. It is a fanciful mass of grotesque and
frightful errors enveloping a truth which needs to be separated
from them and exhibited in its purity. In the first place, the
substance of the doctrine affirmed, the notion of a bottomless
pit, or penal territory of fire and torment in which God will
confine all the unredeemed portions of the human race after their
bodily dissolution, is something wholly apart from morality and
religion, something belonging to the two departments of
descriptive geography and police history. The existence or
nonexistence of a place of material torment reserved for the
wicked, is a question not of theology, but of topography. In
earlier times it was avowedly included in geography; and numerous
caves,