he far inferior transient good
of a tickled palate. Thus, the dyspeptic over loading his stomach
is plunged into the horrid hell of nightmare: the gourmand,
pampering himself with a diet of spiced meats and Burgundy,
shrieks from the twinging hell of gout. There is no divine malice
in this. It is simply the rectifying rebound of the distorted
arrangements of nature. The law of virtue prescribes in every
respect that course of action which, on the whole, permanently and
universally, will secure the greatest amount and the best quality
of life and experience. Vice is whatever inverts or interferes
with this, as when a man exalts a physical impulse above a moral
faculty, or incurs years of shame and misery in the future for the
sake of some passing gratification in the present. God commands
man to rule his passions by reason, not slavishly obey them; to
exercise a wisely proportioned self denial to day for the winning
of a safer and nobler morrow. The degree in which they do this
measures the civilization, wisdom, moral valor, and dignity of
men. The failure to do this is the condition on which every
infernal penalty or reaction of hellish experience hinges. A man
may feed an abnormal craving for opium, until all his once royal
powers of body and mind are sacrificed, imbecility and madness set
in, and his nervous system becomes a darting box of torments. How
much better, according to the aphorism of Jesus, to have cut off
this single desire, than for the whole man to be thus cast into
hell.

Hell is the retributive reflex or return of disarranged order
experienced when in the hieriarchy of man higher grades of faculty
and motive are subordinated to lower ones. The miser who gives
himself up to a base greed for money, separated from its uses, is
thereby degraded into a mechanized, self fed and self consuming
passion, having no pleasure, except that of accumulating, hoarding
and gloating over the idle emblem of a good never realized. His
time and life, his very brain and heart, are coined into an
obscene dream of money. He knows nothing of the grandest ranges of
the universe, nothing of the sweetest delights of humanity.
Contracted, stooping, poorly clad, ill fed, self neglected,
despised by everybody, dwelling alone in a bleak and squalid
chamber, despite his potential riches, his whole life is a
conglomerate of impure fears welded by one sordid lust fear of
robbery, fear of poverty, fear of men, fear of God, fear of dea