ther hand, any professing Orthodoxist
who, according to a horrible doctrine of the Calvinists in former
days, should hope in heaven to obtain a sharper relish for his own
joy by looking down on the tortures of the damned, and contrasting
his blissful safety with the hopeless agony of their perdition,
would find himself in hell. The infernal scenery, even there,
would burst on his gaze, its atmosphere of pain reek around him,
and the detestable turmoil of its experience rage in his breast.
The selfishness of his character, in steep contradiction to the
public disinterestedness belonging to the divine will, must invert
every proper experience of heaven. Could any conventional
arrangement, or accident of locality, save such a man, while his
character remained unchanged? No; such a spirit carries and
radiates hell, is itself hell.

A Mohammedan author says of the seventy three sects into which his
coreligionists are divided, that seventy two are wrong ways,
terminating in eternal damnation; the remaining one alone, in
which are the party of salvation, leads through the true faith
into the City of Allah. The same unwise bigotry, the same
unripeness of judgment, has been generally shown by Christians. It
is time they were ashamed of it, and allowed their souls to mature
and expand into a more liberal creed in fuller keeping with the
hospitable amplitude of the righteousness and goodness of God.
Everything that tends to bring the will of man into loving
submission to the infinite Father, to mould the structure of
character into correspondence with those established conditions of
rightful being represented by the moral and religious
virtues, is an open highway of salvation. And all the great
cardinal ordinations of life do legitimately tend to this result.
Therefore all these are gates of heaven. Some pass in through one
of them, others through another; and by means of them all, it is
decreed in the sovereign councils of the Divinity, as we believe,
that, sooner or later, every intelligence shall reach the goal.

First is the gate of innocence. Little children, spotless youths
and maidens who have known no malice or guile, the saintly few
among mature men and women who by the untempted elevation and
serenity of their temper have kept their integrity unmarred and
their robes unsullied, enter by this nearest and easiest gate.
Borne aloft by their own native gravitation, we see the white
procession of the innocent ones winding