of hell, as so much mythological rubbish, leaving
nothing of them but the bare truth that there is a retribution for
the guilty soul in the future as in the present. But, in the
ecclesiastical doctrine of hell, prevalent in Christendom, we see
the full equivalents of the baseless fancies and superstitions
incorporated in these other doctrines. If the mythological hells
of the heathen nations are not a revelation from God, neither is
that of the Christians; for they are fundamentally alike, all
illustrating the same fallacy of the imaginative association of
things known, and the transference of them to things unknown. Not
a single argument can the Christian urge in behalf of his local
hell which the Scandinavian, the Egyptian, the Hindu or the
Persian, would not urge in behalf of his.

We can actually trace the historic development of the orthodox
belief in a material hell from its simple beginning to its
subsequent monstrousness of detail. The Hebrew Sheol or
underworld, the common abode of the dead, is depicted in the Old
Testament as a vast, slumberous, shadowy, subterranean realm,
gloomy and silent. It grew out of the grave in this manner. The
dead man was buried in the ground. The imagination of the
survivors followed him there and brooded on the idea of him there.
The image of him survived in their minds, as a free presence
existing and moving wherever their conscious thought located him.
The grave expanded for him, and one grave opened into another
adjoining one, and shade was added to shade in the cavernous space
thus provided; just as the sepulchres were associated in the
burial place, and as the family of the dead were associated in the
recollection of the remaining members. Thus Sheol was an
imaginative dilatation of the grave.

But it was dark and still; an obscure region of painless rest and
peace. How came the notions of punishment, fire, brimstone, and
kindred imagery, to be connected with it? We might safely say in
general that these ideas were joined with the supposed world of
the dead, by the Hebrews, in the same way that a similar result
has been reached by almost every other civilized nation, that is,
by a reflection into the future state of the retributive terrors
experienced here. Since the sharpest torture known to us in this
world is that inflicted by fire, it is perfectly natural that men,
in imagining the punishments to be inflicted on his victims in the
next world by one who has at his comm