e expression of religious
ideas: and there is no objection to it if it be recognized as
imagery, and be interpreted accordingly. Considering, then, that
beatific experience of which heaven consists, under the metaphor
of a city, what are its ways of entrance? How can we pass to its
citizenship?

The obstacles to our entrance exist not in the city itself. Its
gates are never closed. The supreme conditions of redemption are
spiritual, and not local or material. If there be within
no fatal impediments to the free course of the will of God, all
outer obstacles easily give way and cease. If we are ever to know
heaven, it is within ourselves that we must find it out. Whatever
abolishes that internal rebellion of the soul which makes its
experience a purgatory, whatever replaces this confusion with an
accord of the faculties, is a road to heaven. Whatever removes
vices and inserts virtues in their stead, attuning us to the
eternal laws of things, leads us through some gate into paradise.
And nothing else can no ceremonial artifice, no external
transference, no sacramental exorcism, no priestly dodge.

The same mistake generally committed in regard to the nature of
heaven, making it a mere local residence, has been as generally
committed in regard to the conditions of admission. They have been
made arbitrary, whereas they are intrinsic. They are inwrought
with the substantial laws of being. The idea of God being first
fashioned after the image of a sultan throned in his palace amidst
his courtiers, ruling an empire by his whims, it was but natural
that heaven, and the terms of entrance there, should be in a
similar manner conceived under the forms of court ceremonial with
its capricious favoritisms. Thus it has been supposed that by the
atoning sacrifice of an incarnate person of the Godhead
satisfaction has been made for the sins of the world, which was
hopelessly ruined by its original federal representative, and that
thus a pardon was offered to those alone who mentally accept the
formula of the correspondent belief.

According to this view, the only open gateway of heaven is faith
in the vicarious atonement, a baptismal passage through the blood
of Christ. Science explodes this narrow and repulsive doctrine by
demonstrating its irreconcilableness alike with physical fact and
with moral law, first tracing the affiliated lines of our race
back to many separate Adams in the shadows of an indeterminable
antiquity, and the