hat
thou hast enabled me to do, and still more for the new home to
which thou art calling me now" she was gone. The cruel creed of
superstition says: "Since she was a Universalist, having no part,
by faith, in the mystic sacrifice of Christ, she is doomed to
hell." But every attribute of God, every promise written by his
own finger in the sacred instincts of our nature, as well as the
cardinal teachings of the New Testament, assure us that as the
victorious purity and devotedness of her soul bore her away from
the tabernacle of flesh, the welcoming Savior said: "Come, thou
blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared from the
foundation of the world." And heaven swung wide its gate for her;
and excited fancy conceives that, as she passed in, there was a
gratulatory flutter of wings and waving of palms through the
angelic ranks.

In distinction from that hypothetical gate of blood, set up by a
crude theology in one narrow place alone, what, then, are the real
gates of heaven, which stand open throughout the realms of
responsible being? All the causes which bring the will of man into
consent with the will of God. Truth is the harmony of mind with
the divine order; beauty, the harmony of taste with the divine
symmetries; good, the harmony of volition with the divine ends.
Everything that secures these for us is an avenue into the
peaceful city of bliss. To be in heaven is to be a transparent
medium through which the qualities of objects, the reflections of
phenomena, the vibrations of aboriginal power, pass in blessed
freedom, without deflection or jar, and on which the mysterious
attraction of the Infinite exerts its supreme spell. To be there
in a superlative degree is to have a mind which is an
infinitesimal mirror of the All, and a heart responsive to that
mind, every perception of truth in the realm of the intellect
generating a correspondent emotion of good in the realm of
affection. Not any forensic act of faith in atoning blood, but
ingrained piety a modest renunciation before the reality of things
is the grand gateway of souls to the blessedness and repose of
God. Anselm, the great sainted Archbishop of Canterbury, said: "I
would rather be in hell without a fault than in heaven with one."
Can any defective technicality damn such a man? No; such a spirit
carries and radiates heaven is itself heaven. That spirit is God
himself in his creature, and can no more be imprisoned in hell
than God can be. On the o