re's no doubt about it. I've been near enough myself
several times to smell the smoke. It isn't around here," I said.

As he looked at me his china-blue eyes grew larger, if that were
possible, and his serious, gentle face took on a look of pained
surprise.

"Before you say such things," he said, "I beg you to read my book."

He took the tract from my hands and opened it on his knee.

"The Bible tells us," he said, "that in the beginning God created the
heavens and the earth, He made the firmament and divided the waters.
But does the Bible say that He created a hell or a devil? Does it?"

I shook my head.

"Well, then!" he said triumphantly, "and that isn't all, either. The
historian Moses gives in detail a full account of what was made in six
days. He tells how day and night were created, how the sun and the moon
and the stars were made; he tells how God created the flowers of the
field, and the insects, and the birds, and the great whales, and said,
'Be fruitful and multiply,' He accounts for every minute of the time in
the entire six days--and of course God rested on the seventh--and there
is not one word about hell. Is there?"

I shook my head.

"Well then--" exultantly, "where is it? I'd like to have any man, no
matter how wise he is, answer that. Where is it?"

"That," I said, "has troubled me, too. We don't always know just where
our hells are. If we did we might avoid them. We are not so sensitive to
them as we should be--do you think?"

He looked at me intently: I went on before he could answer:

"Why, I've seen men in my time living from day to day in the very
atmosphere of perpetual torment, and actually arguing that there was no
hell. It is a strange sight, I assure you, and one that will trouble you
afterwards. From what I know of hell, it is a place of very loose
boundaries. Sometimes I've thought we couldn't be quite sure when we
were in it and when we were not."

I did not tell my friend, but I was thinking of the remark of old
Swedenborg: "The trouble with hell is we shall not know it when we
arrive."

At this point Mr. Purdy burst out again, having opened his little book
at another page.

"When Adam and Eve had sinned," he said, "and the God of Heaven walked
in the garden in the cool of the evening and called for them and they
had hidden themselves on account of their disobedience, did God say to
them: Unless you repent of your sins and get forgiveness I will shut you
up in yon dark a