as always very
active and enterprising, and quite able to manage his own business.
And although his rival, Jehovah, is so dotingly senile as to yield up
everything to his mistress and her son, no one has ever whispered the
least hint of the Devil's decline into the same abject position. But if
his Satanic Majesty needed our aid we should not be loth to give it, for
after carefully reading the Bible many times from beginning to end, we
have come to the conclusion that he is about the only gentleman in it.

We are "on the road to hell." Well, if we must _go_ somewhere, that is
just the place we should choose. The temperature is high, and it would
no doubt at first be incommodious. But, as old Sir Thomas Browne says,
afflictions induce callosities, and in time we should get used to
anything.

When once we grew accustomed to the heat, how thankful we should be
at having escaped the dreary insipidity of heaven, with its perpetual
psalms, its dolorous trumpets, its gruesome elders, and its elderly
beasts! How thankful at having missed an eternity with Abraham, Isaac,
Jacob, David, and all the many blackguards and scoundrels of the Bible!
How thankful at having joined for ever the society of Rabelais, Bruno,
Spinoza, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, John Stuart Mill, and all the great
poets, sages and wits, who possess so much of that carnal wisdom which
is at enmity with the pious folly of babes and sucklings!

On the whole, we think it best to keep on our present course. Let the
bigots rave and the parsons wail. They are deeply _interested_ in the
doctrine of heaven and hell beyond the grave. We believe in heaven
and hell on this side of it; a hell of ignorance, crime, and misery; a
heaven of wisdom, virtue, and happiness. Our duty is to promote the one
and combat the other. If there be a just God, the fulfilment of that
duty will suffice; if God be unjust, all honest men will be in the same
boat, and have the courage to despise and defy him.

CHRISTMAS EVE IN HEAVEN.

(December, 1881.)

Christmas Eve had come and almost gone. It was drawing nigh midnight,
and I sat solitary in my room, immersed in memory, dreaming of old days
and their buried secrets. The fire, before which I mused, was burning
clear without flame, and its intense glow, which alone lighted my
apartment, cast a red tint on the furniture and walls. Outside the
streets were muffled deep with snow, in which no footstep was audible.
All was quiet as dea