scarred with the
claws of fiends. Ah! proud gentleman, dress thyself in goodly
apparel for the pit; come to hell with powdered hair. It ill
becomes you to waste time in pampering your bodies when you are
only feeding them to be devoured in the flame. If God be true, and
the Bible be true, what I have said is the truth, and you will
find it one day to be so." Is not this paragraph a disgusting
combination of ignorance and arrogance? It is to be swept aside
and forgotten along with the immense mass of similar trash,
loathsome mixture of superstition and conceit, with which
Christendom has for these many centuries been so cruelly deceived
and surfeited.

Tearing off and throwing away from the vulgar doctrine of hell all
the incrustation of material errors and poetic symbolism, the pure
truth remains that God will forever see that justice is done,
virtue rewarded, vice punished. Then the question arises, In what
way is this done? Not by the material apparatus of a local hell.
For the doctrine of such a penal abode is not only a natural
product of the mythological action of the human mind in its
development through the circumstances of history, but when
regarded in that light it is clearly a false representation. It is
a figment incredible to any vigorous, educated and free

mind at the present day. Such reception as it now has it retains
by force of an unthinking submission to tradition and authority.
In the primitive ages, when the soul was imagined to be a fac
simile of the body, only of a more refined substance, capable of
becoming visible as a ghost, of receiving wounds, of uttering
faint shrieks when hurt, of partaking of physical food and
pleasure, it was perfectly natural to believe it susceptible of
material imprisonment and material torments. Such was the common
belief when the doctrine of a physical hell was wrought out. The
doctrine yet lingers by sheer force of prescription and
unthinkingness, when the basis on which it originally rested has
been dissipated. We know great as our ignorance is, we know that
the soul is a pure immateriality. Its manifestations depend on
certain physical organs and accompaniments, but are not identical
with them. Thought, feeling, will, action, force, desire, these
are spirit, and not matter. A pure consciousness cannot be shut up
in a dungeon under lock and bolt. A wish cannot be lashed with a
whip. A volition cannot be fastened in chains of iron. You may
crush or blast the vi