l
doctrine makes it always, a state of fixed hopelessness. Though we
make our bed in the nethermost hell, God is there. And wherever
God is, penitence and grace, reformation and pardon, have a right
of eminent domain between him and the souls of his children.

According to the common doctrine of hell as a physical locality,
and the predestination of all men to it through the sin of Adam,
birth is a universal gateway of perdition, the whole world one
open course to damnation for all except the few elected to be
saved through the blood of Christ. The orthodox scheme depicts the
lineage of Adam as a dark river of perdition, choked with the
souls of the damned, steadily pouring into hell ever since our
human generations began. But in addition to the refutation of this
terrible belief by its monstrous moral iniquity, science is now
doubly refuting it by the proof of the existence of the human race
on the earth for unnumbered centuries before the Biblical date of
Adam. So this fictitious gate of a fictitious hell is shut and
abolished. With it vanishes the horrible picture of this world as
floored with omnipresent trap doors to the bottomless pit, and
closed fatally around by a dead wall of doom, through which, by
one bloody orifice alone, the believers in the vicarious atonement
could crawl up into heaven. In place of this, we see the whole
universe as one open House of God, traversed in all directions by
the free entries of laws of intrinsic justice and love.

And so of the remaining theoretic gates of hell, unbelief, ritual
neglect, and the other technicalities on which priests and deluded
zealots have always hinged the perdition of such as heed not their
authority; none of them shall much longer prevail. With the wiping
out of the mythological hell all these fanciful entrances to it
likewise disappear. But instead of these visionary ones we should
point out and warn men from the substantial gates of the true
hell. Whatever is a cause of insubordinate and discordant fruition
in body or soul, individual or community, is a real gate of hell.
All the moral and social evils, intemperance, war, ambition,
avarice, the extremes of poverty and wealth, ignorance, bad
example, despotism, disease, every form of vice or crime, all the
influences that destroy or mar human virtue, excellence, and
harmony, are so many open gates of hell, drawing their victims in.
In holding back those who are approaching these fatal gates, in
trying