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in consciousness is when an intuitive thrill announces the action
of our faculties in correspondence with some relation in the
reality of things. Mythology is the deceptive substitute for this,
employed when we arbitrarily project forms of our present
experience into the unknown futurity, and then hold the resultant
fancies as a rigid belief, or regard them as actual knowledge.
This is exactly what has happened in the case of the doctrine of
an eternal physical hell beyond the grave. The natural and
punitive horrors of the present state have been collected,
intensified, dilated, and thrown into the future as a world of
unmitigated sin and wrath and anguish, a consolidated image of the
vengeance of God on his insurgent subjects.

Now the true desideratum, the only result on which reason can
rest, whenever tests are applied to our beliefs, is this: that
what is known be scientifically set forth in distinct definitions;
that what is unknown be treated provisionally, with theoretic
approaches; and that what is absolutely unknowable be fixedly
recognized as such. This regulative principle of thought is
grossly violated in every particular by the popular belief in a
material hell.

Wherever we look at the prevalent doctrines of hell among
different peoples, from the rudest to the most refined, we see
them reflecting into the penal arrangements of the other world the
leading features of their earthly experience of natural, domestic,
judicial, and political evils. The hells of the inhabitants of the
frigid zones are icy and rocky; those of the inhabitants of the
torrid zones are fiery and sandy. Are not the poetic process and
its sophistry clear? Nastrond, the hell of the Northmen, is a
vast, hideous and grisly dwelling, its walls built of adders whose
heads, turned inward, continually spew poison which forms a lake
of venom wherein all thieves, cowards, traitors, perjurers and
murderers, eternally swim. Is this revelation, science, logic, or
is it mythology?

The Egyptian priests taught, and the people seemed to have
implicitly trusted the tale, that there was a long series of hells
awaiting the disembodied souls of all who had not scrupulously
observed the ritual prescribed for them, and secured the pass
words and magical formulas necessary for the safe completion of
the post mortal journey. The specifications and pictures of the
terrors and distresses provided in the various hells are vivid in
the extreme, including