ere or nowhere, at any time or at no time,
accordingly as the soul carries or does not carry its conditions.
We are not to say of the sinner that he goes to hell when he dies,
but that hell comes to him when he feels the returns of his evil
deeds. It is a state within rather than a place without.

The true meaning of hell is, a state of painful opposition to the
will of God, misadjustment of personal constitution with universal
order or the rightful conditions of being. This is not, as the
vulgar doctrine would make it, an experience of unvarying sameness
into which all its subjects are indiscriminately flung. It is a
thing of endless varieties and degrees, varying with the
individual fitnessess. Hell is pain in the senses, slavery in the
will, contradiction or confusion in the intellect, remorse or vain
aspiration in the conscience, disproportion or ugliness in the
imagination, doubt, fear, and hate in the heart. There is a hell
of remorse, forever retreading the path of ruined yesterdays.
There is a hell of loss, whose occupant stands gazing on the
melancholy might have been transmuted now into a relentless
nevermore. Every sinner has a hell as original and idiosyncratic
as his soul and its contents. As the ingredients of evil
experience are not mixed alike in any, hell cannot be one
monotonous fixture for all, but must be a process altering with
the different elements and degrees afforded, and softening or
ending its wretchedness in proportion as the heavenly elements and
degrees of freedom, pleasure, clearness, self approval, beauty,
faith and love, furnish the conditions of blessedness. Hell being
the consciousness of a soul in which private will is antagonistic
to some relation of universal law, its keenness and extent, in
every instance, must be measured by the variations of this
antagonism. But how does such an antagonism arise? What are the
results or penalties of it? How can it be remedied? No amount of
reflection will enable any man to penetrate to the bottom of all
the mysteries connected with these questions. But though we cannot
tell why the principles of our destiny should be as we find them,
we can see what the facts of the case actually are as revealed in
the history of human experience. And this is what chiefly concerns
us. Let us, then, try to penetrate a little more thoroughly into
the nature of hell.

The rude definition of heaven and hell, regardless of any special
place or time, is respectivel