lakes, volcanos, as at Lebadeia, Derbyshire, Avernus,
Nafita, Etna, and elsewhere were believed to be literally
entrances to hell. So famous and eminent a man as Saint Gregory
the Great, when the great Sicilian volcano was seen to be
increasingly agitated, taught that it was owing to the press of
lost souls, rendering it necessary to enlarge the approach to
their prison. With the increase of knowledge, the localization of
hell was subsequently by many authors, made a part of cosmography,
and shifted about among the comets, the moon and the sun, although
most people still think that it is the interior of the earth. But,
the best theologians of all denominations, the most authoritative
thinkers of all schools, now hold that the supernatural
revelations of God are limited to the sphere of the spirit, and do
not include the data of geology, astronomy, chemistry and
mathematics.

God is not a local king, ruling his subjects by means of political
machinery and external interferences; he is the omnipresent
Creator, spiritually sustaining and governing his creatures from
within by means of the laws which determine their experience, the
action and reaction between their faculties and their surrounding
conditions. Accordingly, the sphere of direct revelations from the
spirit of God to the spirit of man is limited to the implications
in the divine logic of the soul and its life, that is, to moral
and religious truths. The facts of history and cosmology are left
for the processes of natural discovery. Whether there be or be not
a localized hell of material tortures lies not within the domain
of revelation, but is a problem of physical science. And science
demonstrates, from the weight of the globe, that it is solid; and
not, according to the current belief, a hollow shell containing a
sea of flame packed with the floating hosts of the lost.

Furthermore, the only mode in which the truth of such a doctrine
could be made known is wholly aside from the method of
supernatural revelation. God does not utter his thoughts to his
chosen messengers in words or other outward signs as a man does.
Men communicate information to one another by voice, gesture,
drawing, writing or other mechanical devices. It is the natural
mistake of a crude age to suppose that God does the same,
breathing verbal formularies into the of minds of his selected
servants. But this is not the case. Revelation is not to receive
an announcement; it is to perceive a