truth. Since God is infinite,
we cannot stand out against him and talk with him. Souls in finer
and fuller harmony with the works and laws of God, thus fulfilling
the human conditions of inspiration, are met by the divine
conditions, and obtain new insight of the ways and designs of God.
They experience purer and richer ideas and emotions than others,
and may afterwards impart them to others, thus transmitting the
revelation to them. For this new enlightenment, sanctification, or
rise of life, is what alone constitutes a true revelation. Now if
there be a local and physical hell, it is not a moral truth which
the inspired soul can see, but a scientific fact which can be
perceived only by the senses or deduced by the logical intellect.
If a man could travel to every nook of the creation he might
discover whether there were such a hell or not. But you cannot
discover a spiritual truth by any amount of outward travel. When a
soul is so delivered from egotism, or the jar of self will against
universal law, and brought into such high harmony with the spirit
of the whole, as to perceive this divine law of life, "He who
dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him," then he is
inspired to see a religious truth. He has obtained a divine
revelation. But we cannot conceive of any degree of exaltation
into unison with God which would enable a man to see the fact that
the centre of the earth or the surface of the sun or any other
spot, is a place of fire set apart as the penal abode of the
damned, and that it is crowded with burning sulphur and
unimaginable forms of wickedness and agony. Such a doctrine is out
of the province, and its conveyance irreconcilable with the method
of revelation, which consists not in an exterior communication of
scientific facts to messengers selected to receive them, but in an
interior unveiling of religious truths to souls prepared to see
them.

In the next place, we maintain, that the doctrine of a local hell,
a guarded and smoking dungeon of the damned, ought not to be
regarded as a truth contained in a revelation from God, because it
is plainly proved by historic evidence to be a part of the
mythology of the world, a natural product of the poetic
imagination of ignorant and superstitious men. In all ages and
lands men have recognized the difference between the good and the
bad, merit and crime; have seen that innocence and virtue
represented the permanent conditions of human welfare, that g