to make confession
of his fault or otherwise express his sorrow, we are soberly asked to
believe that the horrors of Tartarus are his eternal doom. Surely the
mediaeval authorities who formulated this precious teaching must have
been bereft of the most elementary notions of ethical law. One act, or
a dozen such acts, do not stamp the delinquent as habitually bad, still
less as one irredeemably wicked. Habits are only generated by a
constant repetition of corresponding acts, just as good habits are
formed with difficulty, and only after persevering and resolute
attention on the part of our wills. So, also, an evil disposition is
only the outcome of a deliberate surrender of our moral nature to
perverse inclinations.

Now, the hell dogma implies that the so-called "lost" are so
irredeemably depraved as to be incapable of as much as a good thought;
they are described in the graphic language of Aquinas and Suarez as
"obstinated in evil," "confirmed immutably in malice"; in fact,
absolutely diabolised. And all this for missing attendance at mass on
one of the Church's festivals! "_Paris vaut bien une messe_," said
Henri Quatre. It would be well worth attending a mass to escape such a
destiny! "There must be something rotten in the state of Denmark,"
where such horrors go stalking about unreproved. As though infinite
justice could be conceivably associated with such a transaction as the
branding of a man as an eternal criminal, blasting every moral
sentiment he ever possessed, arbitrarily reducing him to a condition
infinitely beneath the bestial--and all because he had broken a Church
law in neglecting to attend Divine service. Many of us incline to
believe that our own punishments, inflicted in the name of law, often
tend rather to degrade the prisoner than to improve him. At any rate,
not a man in the land but believes that no punishment should be
administered except with a view of amending what is amiss in the
culprit's character. But contrast this moral attitude of ours with the
method of procedure deliberately ascribed to Deity, and let us ask
ourselves whether the God of some men is not worse than their devil?
No such scruples, apparently, affect that supreme tribunal, but if
bodily death by accident overtake the erring man, then, forthwith, and
as if by magic, the spiritual in him is rendered fiendish, and
henceforth and for ever he is fit for nothing but that genial society
and those edifying occupations