maintain after
this final scene that creeds and faiths have any decisive influence on
our status here or hereafter.

But though now seen to be no more than a variant upon the apocalyptic
tradition and literature which represented that Jesus was to return
speedily to earth and rule among his saints for a thousand years--a
delusion which apparently possessed even the trained intellect of Paul,
and subsequently led to the pseudo-Peter explaining that his
fellow-Christians must not be in too great a hurry, because "a thousand
years are as one day and one day as a thousand years in the sight of
the Lord"--it has done an incalculable amount of harm in the past. It
has shut men's eyes to the awful fact of retribution, administered here
and now, and prevented their realising any punishment other than the
savage, barbarous and wholly vindictive punishment of torturing
eternally by fire. It shuts men's minds to the operation of moral
laws, to the fact that judgment is executed instantaneously upon the
commission of wrong. It has, and it does, to the serious detriment of
moral development, lead man to put off until late in life, sometimes to
the very hour of death itself, restorative work which should have been
undertaken immediately on the recognition or conviction of misdeeds.
The notion that he is not to be called up for judgment until he is
rendered incapable by death of doing any further mischief, has been a
moral obstacle in the path of man, and therefore of the race, wholly
beyond the power of calculation. Foolish priests once thought that by
the invention of the dogma of hell they could terrorise men into
morality, and so they preached their Divinity, the magnified copy of a
fiend, who would have cheerfully created humanity out of nothing and
damned them everlastingly, had not he himself, in the shape of his son,
who is one in being with him, decided to appear upon earth and atone to
himself for the mischief, which presumably he could have very well
foreseen, perpetrated by man.

And what has been the effect of such teaching on humanity? It is
impossible to doubt that it has led to results deplorably,
indescribably wicked. Whence, for instance, arose the horrors of the
mediaeval inquisition, the insensate tortures inflicted upon men like
Huss and Bruno solely for theological errors, if not from belief in
this demon-deity whom the Church worshipped? If their practices were
but a shadow of the horrors he was suppose