th,
all fused together by a lust for money. Is he not in a competent
hell? Who would wish anything worse for him? His vice is the
elevation of the love of money above a thousand nobler claims. His
unclean and odious experience is the avenging hell which warns the
spectators, and would redeem its occupant, if he would open his
soul to its lessons. So, when a burglar breaks into a bank and
bears off the treasures deposited there, scattering dismay and
ruin amidst a hundred families, the essence of his crime is that
he makes the narrow principle of his selfish desire paramount over
the broad principle of the public welfare, setting the petty good
of his individual enrichment above the weighty good represented by
that respect for the right of property which is a condition
essential to the life of the community. The principle on which he
acts, if carried out, would cause the dissolution of society. The
evil which he seeks to avoid, his lack of the means of life, is
incomparably smaller than the evil he perpetrates, the means for
the death of society. The resulting sense of hostility between
himself and the community, alienation from his fellow men and from
God, fear of detection, actual condemnation by his own conscience,
and ideal condemnation by all the world, constitute a hell felt in
proportion to the delicacy of his sensibility. The spiritual
disturbance and pain thus suffered are the effort of Providence to
readjust the inverted relation of his low self interest to the
higher interest of the general public, and remove the threatened
ruinous consequences of his sin by remedying the order it has
disbalanced and broken.

These illustrations have prepared the way for a statement of the
true idea of hell in its final formula. The will of God is
expressed in that gradation of goods or scale of ranks which
indicates the fixed conditions of universal welfare and the
accordant forces of the motives which should impel our pursuit of
them. To seek these goods in their proper order of importance and
authority, every level of function beneath kept subservient to
every one above, is the law of salvation, or the pathway of heaven
through the universe. To substitute our will for the will of God,
the intensity of private desires in place of the dignity of public
motives, putting the lower and smaller over the higher and
greater, is the law of perdition, or the pathway of hell through
the universe.

The lowest function of man is a