of the mythological hell, supported by the constant
drilling of the people on the part of the priesthood whose vested
interests and prejudices are bound up in the doctrine, have held
the human race long enough in their bondage of pain and terror. In
a Buddhist scripture we read, "The people in hell who are immersed
in the Lohakumbha, a copper caldron a thousand miles in depth,
boiling and bubbling like rice grains in a cooking pot, once in
sixty thousand years descend to the bottom and return to the top.
As they reach the surface they utter one syllable of prayer, and
sink again on their terrific journey. Those who, during their life
on earth, reverence the three jewels, Buddha, the Law and the
Priesthood, will escape Lohakumbha!" The same essential doctrine
resting on the same inveterate basis, selfish love of power and
sensation, still prevails, though diminishingly, among us. When at
last in the light of reason and a pure faith it vanishes away what
a long breath of relief Christendom and humanity will draw!

If we thus dismiss as a vulgar error the belief in a hell which is
a bounded region of physical torture somewhere in outward space,
it becomes us to acquire in place of this rejected figment some
more just and adequate idea. For a doctrine which has played such
a tremendous part in the religious history of the world must be
based on a truth, however travestied and overlaid that truth may
be. This frightful envelop of superstitious fictions cannot be
without some important reality within. In distinction, then, from
the monstrous mass of mistakes denoted by it, what is the truth
carried in the awful word, hell?

Denying hell to be distinctively any particular locality in time
and space, we affirm it to be an experience resulting wherever the
spiritual conditions of it are furnished. Accordingly, we are not
to exclude it from the present state and confine it to the future,
as those seem to do who say that men go to hell after death. Being
a personal experience and not a material place, many are in it now
and here as much as they ever will be anywhere. Neither are we to
exclude it from the future and confine it to the present state, as
those do who say that all the hell there is terminates with the
emergence of the soul from the body. This might be so, if all sins
discords and retributions were bodily. But, plainly, they are not.
A mental chaos or inversion of order is as possible as a physical
one. Hell is anywh