by the best prizes of existence into the breasts of the
virtuous and aspiring, whom every day finds farther advanced on
their way to perfection. Envy is the very blast that blows the
forge of hell. It sets its victim in painful antagonism with all
good not his own, actually turning it into evil; while a generous
sympathy appropriates as its own all the foreign good it
contemplates. The sight of his successful rival keeps an envious
man in a chronic hell, but adds a heavenly enjoyment to the
experience of a generous friend. Ignorance, pride, falsehood, and
hate are the four master keys to the gates of hell keys which
sinners are ever unwittingly using to let themselves in, and then
to lock the bolts behind.

A character whose spontaneous motions are upward and outward, from
the central and lowermost instincts of self toward the highest and
outer most apprehensions of good, exemplifies the law of
salvation, which guides the conscious soul in an ascending and
expanding spiral through the successively greater spheres of truth
and life. The character whose spontaneous tendencies are the
reverse of this, moving inward and downward, exemplifies the law
of perdition, which guides the soul in a descending and
contracting spiral, constantly enslaving it to lower and viler
attractions of self in preference to letting it freely serve the
superior ranks forever issuing their redemptive behests and
invitations above. When the members of a family erect their
separate wills as independent laws, instead of harmoniously
blending around a common authority of truth and love, when they
live in incessant collisions and stormy insubordination, a
poisonous fret of irritable vanity gnawing their heart strings, a
fiery sleet of hate and scorn hurtling through the domestic
atmosphere, the whole household are in perdition. Their home is a
concentrated hell. To be without love, without soothing attentions
and encouragements, without fresh aims, and a relishing
alternation of work and rest, without progress and hope, to be
deprived of the legitimate gratifications of the functions of our
being, and compelled to suffer their opposites what closer
definition of hell can there be than this? And this, while avoided
or neutralized by virtue, is, in its various degrees, obviously
the inevitable result and penalty of sin.

The great mistake in the popular view or mythological doctrine of
hell has arisen from conceiving of God under the image of a
pol