to contract them, to shut them up here is a vital work to
be done, infinitely more promising than the brandishing of the
terrors of that material hell in which sensible men can no longer
believe. For the only true hell is the remedial vibration of truth
in an uncoordinated soul, even when not remedial for the
individual still remedial for the race.

It is not our outward abode, but our inmost spirit, that makes our
experience infernal or heavenly: for, in the last result, it is
the occupying spirit that moulds the environment, not the
habitation that determines the tenant. This is the substance of
the whole matter. An accomplished chemist, who was a good man in
truth, but a heretic by the standard of orthodoxy, died. Being an
unbeliever, of course, he went to hell. Seeing a group of children
in torment there, he pitied them very deeply, and straightway
began to devise measures, by means of his skill in chemical
science, to shield them from the flame. Instantly the whole scene
changed. The beauty of heaven lay around him, and all its
blandness breathed through him. Forgetting his own sufferings in
sympathy for those of others, he had obeyed the law of virtue,
subjecting a selfish desire to a disinterested one; and the
omnipotent God enveloped him with the heaven of his own spirit.
Another man, who was hard and cruel in character, but perfectly
sound in the orthodox faith and observances, died. It is true he
was an avaricious and hard saint, but then he believed in the
atoning blood; and so, of course, he went to heaven. No sooner did
he find himself safely seated in bliss than he tried to peep over
the golden wall into the pit of perdition, in order to heighten
the relish of his favored lot by the contrast of the agonies of
the lost. Instantly the celestial scenery about him was changed
into infernal, and, by the radiation and return of his own bad
spirit, he found himself plunged into hell and writhing under its
retributive experience. His character exemplified the law of
perdition, enthroning selfishness over disinterestedness,
subverting the order of virtue; and the insulted will of God made
his imagined heaven a real hell.

Hell is revealed in the experience of the world as a diminishing
quantity through the successive periods since war, cannibalism and
slavery were universal. Will not the progressive process terminate
in the utter extinction of it, paradise everywhere steadily
encroaching on purgatory until at l