uilt
and vice represented the insurrection of private or lower and
transient desire against public or higher and more lasting good;
and have felt that the former deserved to be praised and rewarded,
the latter to be blamed and punished. In all ages and all nations
society has teemed with devices for the distribution of these
returns, prizes to the meritorious, penalties to the derelict.
There is scarcely any evil discoverable in nature or inventable in
art which has not been used as a means for the punishment of
criminals. Enemies captured in battle, or seized by the minions of
despots, violators of the laws of the community, arraigned before
judicial tribunals, have been in every country subjected to every
species of penalty, such as slavery, imprisonment, banishment,
fine, stripes, dismemberment. They have been starved, frozen,
burned, hung, drowned, strangled by serpents, devoured by wild
beasts. The rebellious and hated offenders of the king, while he
banquets in his illuminated palace with his faithful servants and
favorites around him, are exiled into outer darkness, fettered in
dungeons, plied with every conceivable indignity and misery,
bastinadoed, bowstrung, or torn in pieces with lingering torture.
Here we have the germ of hell. To get the fully developed popular
doctrine of hell it is only necessary to concentrate and aggravate
the known evils of this world, the horrible sufferings inflicted
on criminals and enemies here, and transfer the vindictive and
pitiable mass of wretchedness over into the future state as a
representation of the doom God has there prepared for his foes.
Earthly rulers and their practice, the most impressive scenes and
acts experienced among men, have always hitherto furnished the
types of thought applied to illustrate the unknown details of the
hereafter. The judge orders the culprit to be disgraced, scourged,
put in the stocks, or cropped and transported. The sultan hurls
those he hates into the dungeon, upon the gibbet or into the
flame, with every accompaniment of mockery and pain. So, an
imaginative instinct concludes, God will deal with all who offend
him. They will be excluded from his presence, imprisoned and
tormented forever.

This whole process of comparison and inference, natural as it is,
is one prolonged fallacy exemplifying the very essence of all
mythological construction in contrast both with inspired
perception and logical reasoning. The revealing arrival of a trut