UC-NRLF 
 
LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 1 
 
 Class 
 
CANON FAKKAR. 
 
New York 
 
 H. M. Caldwell Co 
 
 Publishers 
 
Copyright, 
 BY H. M CALDWELL Co. 
 
WHAT HEAVEN IS. 
 
 " Let us labour therefore to enter into that rest." HKB. iv., n. 
 
 IN one of our ablest Reviews, a discussion has 
 been going on for some time on the soul and 
 future life ; and it is a sign of the large toleration 
 of the times tnat some of the writers not only 
 glory in expressing a belief that, apart from his 
 body, man has no soul, and no life beyond the 
 grave an opinion, the open expression of which 
 would, twenty years ago, have been received with 
 outbursts of indignation ; but have even arrived 
 at the point of treating with compassionate dis- 
 dain those who still cling to the traditional belief. 
 Now I do not think it needful, brethren, in this 
 nineteenth century after Christ, to argue with you 
 that you have souls, and that your life is not as 
 the life of the beasts that perish. To the end of 
 time the human race will believe this, though 
 from the dawn of History there have been a few 
 philosophers who disputed it. Securus judicat 
 orbis terrarum. These speculations have never 
 
 J08552 
 
2 WHAT HEAVEN IS. 
 
 shaken, will never shake, the fixed convictions of 
 mankind. Those convictions might have been 
 expressed from very early ages in the simple 
 verse of the poet : 
 
 " Life is real, life is earnest, 
 
 And the grave is not its goal j 
 ' Dust thou art, to dust returnest,' 
 Was not spoken of the soul." 
 
 We may freely concede that, of the separate 
 existence of the immaterial soul, and our survival 
 beyond "the intolerable indignities of dust to 
 dust," we have no mathematical demonstration 
 to offer. But this fact does not in the slightest 
 degree trouble us, because neither is there any 
 such proof of the existence of a God. It is per- 
 fectly easy for a man to say, if he will, " I do not 
 believe in a God.' I do not care to offer up any 
 worship, even of the silent sort, even at the altar 
 of "the unknown and the unknowable." I do 
 not even think it worth while to pray that wild 
 prayer once uttered by a criminal upon the scaf- 
 fold : " O God, if there be a God, save my soul, 
 if I have a soul." A man may say all this, and 
 plume himself on this melancholy abnegation of 
 man's fairest hopes ; on this deliberate suicide 
 of the spiritual faculty ; and if he considers such 
 
WHAT HEAVEN IS. 3 
 
 opinions to be a sign of intellectual emancipa- 
 tion, we can offer to him no proof that will 
 necessarily convince him. When Vanini lay in 
 prison on a charge of atheism, he touched with 
 his foot a straw which lay on his dungeon-floor, 
 and said, " that from that straw he could prove 
 the existence of God. We can pluck the mean- 
 est flower of the hedgerow, and point to the 
 exquisite perfection of its structure, the tender 
 delicacy of its loveliness ; we may pick up the 
 tiniest shell out of myriads upon the shore, so 
 delicate that a touch would crush it, and yet a 
 miracle of rose and pearl, of lustrous iridescence 
 and fairy arabesque, and ask the atheist if he 
 feels seriously certain that these things are but 
 the accidental outcome of self-evolving laws. We 
 can take him under the canopy of night, and 
 show him the stars of heaven, and ask him 
 whether he really holds them to be nothing more 
 than " shining illusions of the night, eternal 
 images of deception in an imaginary heaven, 
 golden lies in dark blue nothingness." Or we may 
 bid him watch with us the flow of the vast stream 
 of history, and see how the great laws of it are as 
 mighty currents " that make for righteousness." 
 Or we may appeal to the inner voices of his 
 
4 WHAT HEAVEN IS. 
 
 being, and ask whether they have indeed no 
 message to tell him. But if he deny or reject 
 such arguments as these ; if he treat with arro- 
 gant scorn that evidence of the things unseen 
 which has been enough in all ages for the 
 millions of humanity which was enough in 
 past times for Dante and Shakespeare, and Mil- 
 ton and Newton which was enough till yester- 
 day for Brewster, and Whewell, and Herschel, 
 and Faraday; if he demand a kind of proof 
 which is impossible, and which God has withheld, 
 seeing that it is a law that spiritual things can 
 only be spiritually discerned, and that we walk by 
 faith and not by sight; if, in short, a man will 
 not see God because clouds and darkness are 
 round about Him, although righteousness and 
 judgment are the habitation of His seat, then 
 we can do no more. He must believe or not 
 believe he must bear or must forbear, as seems 
 him best. We cannot argue about colour to the 
 blind. We cannot prove the glory of music to 
 the deaf. If a man shuts his eyes hard, we can- 
 not make him see the sun. " That the blush of 
 morning is fair, and the quietude of grief is 
 sacred, that the heroism of conscience is noble, 
 who will undertake to prove to one who does not 
 
WHAT HEAVEN IS. 5 
 
 see it ? So wisdom, beauty, holiness, are im- 
 measurable things, appreciable by pure percep- 
 tion, but which no rule can gauge, no argument 
 demonstrate." My brethren, if you know God, 
 or rather are known of Him, you will need no 
 proof that He is, and that He is the rewarder of 
 them that diligently seek Him ; and you will not 
 be much troubled by the scepticism of philoso- 
 phers. Oh, let us get near to God by faith and 
 prayer, and we shall break with one of our fingers 
 through the brain-spun meshes of these impotent 
 negations. Prove to us that by the word " God " 
 we ought only to mean " vortices of atoms," or 
 " streams of tendency," and at the end of such 
 triumphant demonstrations we shall but kneel 
 down before Him who made us, and not we our- 
 selves, and with bowed head, and sad yet kind- 
 ling heart, shall pray, if possible, with yet deeper 
 conviction, " Our Father which art in Heaven." 
 And when we thus believe in Him whom we 
 have not seen, all else follows. We believe that 
 He did not befool with irresistible longings, 
 that He did not deceive with imaginary hopes, 
 the man whom He had made. We believe that 
 the breath of life which came from Him shall not 
 pass away. We believe that He sent His Son to 
 
6 WHAT HEAVEN IS. 
 
 die for us and to save us. We believe that be- 
 cause He lives we shall live also. We believe ; 
 we are content ; we do not even ask for further 
 proof. In this belief, which we believe that He 
 inspireth, we shall console ourselves amid all the 
 emptiness and sorrow of life ; we shall advance, 
 calm and happy, to the very grave and gate of 
 death. 
 
 2. I speak to Christians ; to Christians who 
 hope not only to live, but to live in Heaven here- 
 after; and I want this morning to fix your con- 
 templation upon that Heaven, and to ask what 
 are our thoughts of it, and why. And I do this 
 partly because one of the ablest and most elo- 
 quent of the writers to whom I have alluded has 
 spoken with passionate scorn of what he supposes 
 to be our anticipations of Heaven, and of what he 
 is pleased to represent as the necessary result of 
 such anticipations. He says that we are looking 
 for a " vacuous eternity ; " "a future of ceaseless 
 psalmody," " an eternity of the tabour," " so gross, 
 so sensual, so indolent, so selfish," that the belief 
 in it " paralyses practical life, and throws it into 
 discord." " A life of vanity in a vale of tears, 
 followed by an infinity of celestial rapture," is, 
 he says, " necessarily a life of infinitesimal im- 
 
WHAT HEAVEN IS. / 
 
 portance," making men " dull to the moral respon- 
 sibility which, in its awfulness, begins only at the 
 grave," and " little influenced by the futurity which 
 will judge them." " And why," he asks, " should 
 this great end, staring at all of us along the vista 
 of each human life, be forever a matter of dithy- 
 ' rambic hypotheses and evasive tropes ? " 
 
 Now I shall offer you no " dithyrambic hy- 
 potheses," or " evasive tropes," but, eloquent as 
 all this is, I am sure that the most thoughtful of 
 you must have listened to it with amused be- 
 wilderment. It must have been just a little 
 incongruous and unreal to you to hear the 
 Christian's hope of heaven described as though 
 it were some Mohammedan paradise, as being 
 not only gross, selfish, and sensual, but also as 
 paralysing and immoral, when you know what 
 iives it has influenced, what deeds it has inspired. 
 Were the hopes of St. Stephen, think you, dull 
 and immoral, when, with face radiant as the face 
 of an angel, he gazed into the opening heavens ? 
 Was it a dull selfishness which inspired the mar- 
 tyrs as they bathed their hands in the torturing 
 flame, or which nerved the Christian maiden as 
 she knelt awaiting with a smile the tiger's spring ? 
 Was it a paralysing superstition which fills with 
 
8 WHAT HEAVEN IS. 
 
 " tempestuous glory " the sufferings of the good ; 
 which breathed through the calm last words of 
 Richard Hooker; which made Addison tell the 
 young Earl of Warwick to see how a Christian 
 could die ; which inspired the eager " Lord, open 
 to me, open to me," of the dying Lacordaire ; or 
 which has enabled so many thousands of Chris- 
 tians, in every age and every country, to become 
 lovelier in spirit during each hour of life's wan- 
 ing lustre, showing ever " a sublimer faith, a 
 brighter hope, a kinder sympathy, a gentler res- 
 ignation ? " Ah, no ! my brethren, " the rattling 
 tongue of saucy and audacious eloquence" will 
 never persuade you of this ; and you will only 
 listen with a smile when you are assured that the 
 hopes which uplifted such lives, and glorified 
 such ends, were but the confusing fumes of a 
 puerile illusion. We know not indeed; but we 
 believe. We walk by faith, though we cannot 
 walk by sight. But were the arguments of these 
 philosophers ten thousand times more cogent 
 than they are, 
 
 " What can we do, o'er whom the unbeholden 
 
 Hangs in a night wherewith we dare not cope ? 
 What but look sunward, and with faces golden 
 Speak to each other softly of hope ? " 
 
OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF 
 
 WHAT HEAVEN IS. 9 
 
 It will take many a ream of agonistic and nihil- 
 istic literature to rob us of the conviction with 
 which we say : " I believe in God the Father, and 
 God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost ; I believe 
 in the communion of saints, in the forgiveness 
 of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the 
 life everlasting. Amen." 
 
 3. Well, then, my brethien, we believe in 
 Heaven ; but what is Heaven ? Our friends die 
 - men die by myriads ; at every ticking of the 
 clock some fifty souls have passed away ; yet 
 not a breath of sound shakes the curtain of im- 
 penetrable darkness which hangs becween us and 
 the unseen world. A fair child sighs away his 
 innocent soul, and in a moment, perhaps, 
 
 "He hath learnt the secret hid 
 Under either pyramid ; " 
 
 but to his parents, in their agony, comes no 
 faintest whisper from the intervital gloom. Not 
 to one of all the unnumbered generations whose 
 dust is blown upon the desert winds has it been 
 permitted to breathe one syllable or letter of the 
 dim and awful secret beyond the grave. And 
 yet the faith of man has not been shaken, nor for 
 all this deep, unbroken silence, has he ever ceased 
 
IO WHAT HEAVEN IS. 
 
 to believe that He who called us into being will 
 bless, will save, will cherish the souls which He 
 hath made. We feel sure He did not mean us 
 merely " to be born weeping, to live complaining, 
 and to die disappointed," and so cease to be, but 
 that He has a new home for us in other worlds. 
 It is the fact which we believe ; the details are 
 not revealed to us. And hence each race has 
 fancied its own ideal of Heaven. 
 
 " Lo ! the poor Indian, whose untutored mind 
 Sees God in clouds, or hears Him in the wind, 
 His soul proud science never taught to stray 
 Far as the solar walk and milky way, 
 Yet simple nature to his hope has given 
 Behind the cloud-capt hills a humbler heaven. 
 
 To be content *s his natural desire, 
 He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire, 
 But thinks, admitted to that equal sky, 
 His faithful dog shall bear him company. " 
 
 The Greek had his Elysian plains, where the 
 Eidola the shadowy images of the dead < 
 moved in a world of shadows ; and his Islands of 
 the Blest, where Achilles and Tydides unlaced 
 the helmets from their flowing hair. The Scan- 
 dinavian dreamed of his green Paradise here-j| 
 after amid the waste. Few indeed have been 
 
WHAT HEAVEN IS. I I 
 
 the nations who have not imagined that there 
 remains for holy souls beyond the grave some 
 
 " Island valley of Avilion, 
 Where falls not hail or rain, or any snow, 
 Nor ever wind blows loudly." 
 
 And all Christians, that they may be enabled to 
 give some form to that which cannot be uttered, 
 have dwelt with rapture on the glowing symbols 
 of the poet of the Apocalypse the New Jeru- 
 salem descending out of Heaven from God, hav- 
 ing the glory of God, and her light like unto a 
 stone most precious, even unto a jasper stone; 
 and the gates of pearl, and the foundations of 
 precious stones, and the pure river of the water 
 of life, clear as crystal, and the Tree of Life, 
 with its leaves for the healing of the nations. 
 Symbols only, yet exquisite symbols of the 
 poet's vision, which dull philosophies may scorn, 
 but in which a Dante and a Milton delighted; 
 symbols which come back to us with the fresh- 
 ness and sweetness of childhood, as we sing the 
 hymns, so dear to Christian worship, of "Jeru- 
 salem the golden," or " There is a land of pure 
 delight." Yet even these symbolic passages do 
 not thrill the heart so keenly as others, which 
 
12 WHAT HEAVEN IS. 
 
 speak with scarce a symbol, and simply tell of a 
 life without life's agonies, and the vision of God 
 undarkened by mists of sin. " They shall hunger 
 no more, neither thirst any more ; neither shall 
 the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the 
 Lamb that is in the midst of the throne shall feed 
 them, and shall lead them unto living fountains 
 of waters ; and God shall wipe away all tears 
 from their eyes." "And there shall be no more 
 curse, but the throne of God and of the Lamb 
 shall be in it ; and His servants shall serve Him ; 
 and they shall see His face, and Hi$ name shall 
 be in their foreheads." And if we need any 
 symbols to help us, they are symbols of trans- 
 parent meaning : green meadows where men may 
 breathe God's fresh air, and see His golden 
 light ; glorified cities, with none of the filth and 
 repulsiveness of these, but where no foul step 
 intrudes ; white robes, pure emblems of stainless 
 innocence ; the crown and the palm-branch, and 
 the throne of serene self-mastery over our 
 spiritual enemies ; and the golden harp and the 
 endless song which do but speak of abounding 
 happiness, in that form of it which is, of all 
 others, the most innocent, the most thrilling, the 
 most intense. 
 
WHAT HEAVEN IS. 13 
 
 4. To say that there is anything " dull, gross, 
 selfish, sensual " here, is surely an abuse of 
 words. But if you cannot rest in these emblems, 
 there is yet a more excellent way. If you still 
 sigh: 
 
 " O for a nearer insight into heaven, 
 More knowledge of the glory and the joy 
 Which there unto the happy souls is given, 
 Their intercourse, their worship, their employ ; 
 For it is past belief that Christ hath died 
 Only that we unending psalms may sing ; 
 That all the gain Death's awful curtains hide 
 In this eternity of antheming " 
 
 if you say this, do not fear there are other 
 conceptions of Heaven which do not deal in 
 imagery at all. What may be the physical con- 
 ditions of Heaven we cannot tell, and perhaps the 
 very phrase may be meaningless of that place 
 where they neither marry nor are given in mar- 
 riage, but are as the angels of God. But so far 
 as Heaven is a place at all, its fundamental con- 
 ception is that it is a place where sin is not. 
 "Without are dogs." No guilty step may pass 
 the gates of pearl, no polluting presence fling 
 shadows on the golden streets. They who live 
 there are the angels, and just men made perfect, 
 and the spirits of the saints in light. And if we 
 
14 WHAT HEAVEN IS. 
 
 ever get there, we shall be as they ; for to be 
 there is to see the face of God, and to see the 
 face of God is to be changed into the same image 
 from glory to glory. There life's stains shall 
 have been purged away; and the gold shall be 
 mixed with dross no longer ; nor the fine gold 
 dim. There is no slander there ; no envy, no 
 hatred ; no malice ; no lies. There is no mur- 
 der there, nor wounds, nor war. The filth of 
 drunkenness is not in that city of God. No 
 bleared and blighted crowds, degraded out of 
 the semblance of humanity, crawl like singed 
 moths round the flaring houses of multiplied 
 temptations. There are no hearts depraved, 
 corrupted, eaten out by lust ; no victims of 
 man's brutal selfishness, no witnesses of his utter 
 shame. Ah, my brethren, which of us all look- 
 ing back does not sigh : " I am not all that I might 
 have been ; I might have been noble, and I have 
 not been noble ; I might have been kind, and I 
 have not been kind ; I might have been pure, 
 and I have not been pure ? " Would you not 
 think it almost a heaven if, without giving you 
 anything fresh at all, God would but give you 
 back what once He gave ? If He would but 
 restore to you the sweet innocent childhood He 
 
WHAT HEAVEN IS. 15 
 
 once bestowed, that having learnt now that sin is 
 anguish, and that good is best, you might not 
 ravage the fair vineyard of your life, or lay waste 
 its inner sanctities ? Ah, no ! perhaps not, for you 
 feel that you might only fall again ; only be a 
 prodigal again ; only be weak and base and vile 
 again, only despair again of what you feel to be 
 sweetest, and barter for the degraded present the 
 future immortality. But, oh, to have been disen- 
 chanted utterly, forever, from the low aims of 
 the world ! oh, to have been set free forever from 
 the yoke of habit and the power of temptation ! 
 oh, to desire only, and to do only what is good, 
 without evil being ever present to us ! oh, to do 
 perfectly, what here we have but imperfectly 
 attempted ! oh, to be, what here we have only 
 seemed to be or wished to be ! oh, to be honest, 
 true, noble, sincere, genuine, pure, holy to the 
 heart's inmost core ! Is not that Heaven ? is it 
 dull, gross, sensual, selfish, to sigh for that? Is 
 it not a state rather than a place ? is it not a 
 temper rather than a habitation ? is it not to be 
 something rather than to go somewhere ? Yes, this, 
 this is heaven. What more we know not. In 
 other stars, amid His countless worlds, for all we 
 know God may have work for us to do. Who 
 
1 6 WHAT HEAVEN IS. 
 
 knows what radiant ministrations ; what infinite 
 activities; what never ending progress; what 
 immeasurable happiness, what living ecstasies of 
 unimaginable rapture, where all things are lovely, 
 honourable, pure ; where there is no moral ugli- 
 ness ; where repulsive squalor, and degraded art, 
 and insane desire, and loathly vice, and pinching 
 selfishness, shall be no more ; where boyhood 
 shall not so live as to make its own manhood 
 miserable ; where manhood shall not so live as to 
 make old age dishonourable ; where old age shall 
 not so live as to make death ghastly. This, this 
 is heaven ! And why should we not believe that 
 the God who is so good to us hath such good 
 things in store for all who love Him ? All the 
 good and true, all the pure and noble, shall be 
 there : 
 
 " To Milton's trump 
 The high groves of the renovated earth 
 Unbosom their glad echoes ; inly hushed, 
 Adoring Newton his serener eye 
 Raises to heaven." 
 
 And all on earth who have ever been high and 
 sweet and worthy, out of every tribe, and kindred, 
 and nation, and language, ten thousand times 
 ten thousand, and thousands of thousands ! Oh, 
 
WHAT HEAVEN IS. *7 
 
 if this be a dull, gross, selfish, sensual concep- 
 tion, give us a greater and better that we may 
 live on it ; for we can conceive none lovelier than 
 this, and to us this is Heaven. 
 
 5. Let us labour, therefore, to enter into that 
 rest. For, my brethren, if, as we Christians be- 
 lieve, Christ hath died to give us entrance into 
 such a Heaven as this, we must believe the same 
 Gospel which tells us, not obscurely, that it is 
 not a reward but a continuity, not a change but a 
 development. To^v? there you must be thus. It 
 is shocking to hear men and women talk glibly of 
 " going to Heaven," whose whole lives, and well- 
 nigh every action of their lives, whose daily 
 words, whose daily deeds, whose very professions, 
 are disgracing and embittering earth. If we 
 desire Heaven we must seek it here if we love 
 Heaven we must love it now. And thou oh, 
 mean, greedy, avaricious, money-loving soul, 
 whose gaze, even in Heaven, would be on the 
 trodden gold of its pavement ; and thou, base 
 usurer and defrauder, who, hasting to be rich, 
 carest not how little thou art innocent, and whose 
 path in life is wet with orphans' tears ; what hast 
 thou to do with Heaven ? there are no cheatings, 
 or swindlings, or hoardings there ; and thou, 
 
1 8 WHAT HEAVEN IS. 
 
 slanderous whisperer, whose soul is venomous 
 with hate and envy ; and thou, drunkard, who 
 livest only to drown thy senses in wallowing 
 degradation ; and thou, slave of thy lowest lusts, 
 whose uncleanness adds unspeakably to the 
 ~bames and miseries of earth ; and thou, selfish 
 seducer, not afraid 
 
 " To pluck the rose 
 
 From the fair forehead of a maiden shame, 
 
 And set a blister there ; " 
 
 and thou who hatest thy brother with all but 
 murderous detestation ; and thou, bad youth, 
 whose soul is full of fatal ignorance and sensual 
 conceit, and who art drawing iniquity with cords 
 of vanity, and sin as it were with a cart-rope ; and 
 all ye, children of wickedness, not slaves only, 
 but willing slaves of Satan, who go as the ox to 
 the slaughter, and as a fool to the correction of 
 the stocks ; if ye talk of Heaven, what have ye to 
 do with Heaven ? Think you that greed, and 
 malice, and intoxication, and debauchery find 
 entrance there ? Is there not a lie in your right 
 hands ? Think ye to enter Heaven thus in all 
 your vileness, meanness, falsity ? Think ye that 
 the apples of Sodom and the clusters of Gomor- 
 rah can grow in the same soil with the Tree of 
 
WHAT HEAVEN IS. 1 9 
 
 Life ? Oh, while you know what you are, and 
 are what you are, and yet will not be other than 
 what you are, you would not be happy if God 
 placed you there to-morrow. Every pure look of 
 it would be a burning reproach to you ; every 
 rapture of it a burden, every nobleness a shame. 
 If you went there with heart yet unchanged, you 
 would carry hell with you to Heaven, and would 
 make Heaven itself a hell. It could only be 
 Heaven at all by your absence so long as oh, 
 mark this so long as you are what now you are. 
 But, oh, you can be different ; you can be convert- 
 ed ; you can repent. Burdens to yourselves, curses 
 to the world, you can yet become true sons of 
 God ; you, even you, may enter the gates of pearl, 
 and cast no shadow on the golden streets. For 
 does not God love you, even you ? Did not He 
 die for you, even you ? Your souls are worthless 
 to all but His infinite love, but He, in His divine 
 pity, did not think them worthless ; for their life 
 He died. Oh, repent ere it be too late, and 
 be what now you are not, and be all that God 
 meant you to be ! " Wash you, make you clean, 
 put away the evil of your doings from before 
 God's eyes ; cease to do evil ; learn to do well." 
 Repent; and then look towards Heaven. Put 
 
2O WHAT HEAVEN IS. 
 
 away the love of money, and ask God to give you 
 his true riches. Put away selfishness, and ask 
 God to give you the Spirit of His holy love. Put 
 away lying, and be sincere. Put away conceit, 
 and in the ashes of your self-abasement, tie round 
 you with knots the sackcloth of humility. Put 
 away impurity, and ask God to give you a clean 
 heart and put a right spirit within you. Ay, . so 
 shall you begin to know what Heaven is ! so 
 shall you begin to have a foretaste of its happi- 
 ness, even amid the sorrows of earth. So shall 
 there be in your own hearts, amid all darknesses, 
 a circle of radiant peace. Oh, you shall need 
 the aid of no symbols, for you will think of 
 Heaven, not as of some meadow of asphodel be- 
 side the crystal waters, or golden city in the far- 
 off blue, but as an extension, as a development, 
 as an undisturbed continuance of righteousness, 
 and peace, and joy in believing ; you shall know 
 that, whatever else it be or mean, Heaven means 
 holiness; "Heaven means principle;" Jleaven 
 means to be one with God. 
 
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 
 
 " So we that are Thy people, and sheep of Thy pasture, will give 
 Thee thanks forever ; and will always be showing forth Thy praise, 
 from generation to generation." Ps. Ixxix., 13. 
 
 AS the first day of this month was the grand 
 festival of All Saints, so in past cen- 
 turies the second of November was set apart in 
 honour of " All Souls." The motives which led 
 to its abolition were doubtless adequate at the 
 time, but yet we may be allowed to regret its 
 abandonment. Undoubtedly there was a certain 
 grandeur, a certain catholicity, a certain trium- 
 phant faith, a certain indomitable hope in that 
 ancient commemoration of the departed. It was 
 the feast of All Souls. It is true that it was 
 originally intended only for the faithful departed ; 
 for the souls in purgatory. But in the title of 
 the day, at any rate, there was no exception 
 made. On that day men might think, if they 
 would, of all the souls, of all the innocent little 
 ones that have passed away like a breath of 
 vernal air since time began ; of all th souls 
 
22 /S LIFE WORTH LIVING? 
 
 which the great, and the wise, and the aged, 
 have sighed forth in pain and weariness after 
 long and noble lives ; of all the souls of the wild 
 races of hunters and fishermen in the boundless 
 prairies or the icy floes; of all the souls that 
 have passed, worn and heavy-laden, from the 
 roaring city streets; of all the souls of those 
 whose life has ebbed away in the red tide of 
 unnumbered battles, or whose bodies have been 
 dropped into the troubled waves unknelled, un- 
 cofrmed, and, save to their God, unknown ; of all 
 the souls, even of the guilty, and of the foolish, 
 and of the miserable, and of those who have 
 rushed by wild self-murder into their Maker's 
 presence. All Souls' Day was a day of suppli- 
 cation for, of commemoration of, all these. For 
 these too are souls that He created ; into these 
 too He breathed the breath of life ; and all these 
 lie in the hollow of His hand as the snows of 
 the countless water lilies whether white and 
 immaculate, or torn and stained lie all on the 
 silver bosom of the lake. Yes, there is a gran- 
 deur and sublimity in the thoughts of all human 
 souls, as one by one they have passed away and 
 been taken to the mercy of the Merciful ; and a 
 day might well have been set apart to com- 
 
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 23 
 
 memorate, in all humble reverence, their awful 
 immortality. Our finite imaginations may grow 
 dizzy at the thought of these infinite multi- 
 tudes, these who at each ticking of the clock 
 pass from the one thousand millions of the living ; 
 the tribes, the generations, the centuries, the mil- 
 lenniums, the aeons of the dead ; all of which are 
 but the leaves green or fallen of the mighty 
 Tree Existence, the wave after wave of its il- 
 limitable tide. As we think of all these souls, we 
 recall the imagination of the great poet of the 
 Inferno, and seem to be gazing on a white, 
 rushing, indistinguishable whirl of life, sweeping 
 on and on and on, from horizon to horizon, in 
 ever lengthening cycles and infinite processions, 
 endless, multitudinous, innumerable, as the motes 
 that people the sun's beam. To us, inevitably, 
 in this infinitude, all individuality is lost ; human 
 numeration reels at it. But it is not so with 
 Him to whom is known the number of the stars 
 of the heaven, and the sands of the sea, and by 
 
 " Every leaf in every nook, 
 Every wave in every brook," 
 
 who are heard as they sing forth their unending 
 paean all day long. And knowing this, we are 
 
24 IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 
 
 not appalled at the thought of these vast multi- 
 tudes, whose bodies are now the dust of the solid 
 earth, even though so many millions of them 
 have passed away in sin and sorrow, because we 
 can say with the Holy Psalmist of Israel : " O 
 let the sorrowful sighing of the prisoners come 
 before Thee, according to the greatness of Thy 
 power, save Thou those that are appointed to 
 die ; so we, that are Thy people and sheep of 
 Thy pasture, shall give Thee thanks forever, 
 and shall always be shewing forth Thy praise 
 from generation to generation." 
 
 2. But if we cannot say this at all, if we 
 have lost all faith in God, how does life appear 
 to us then ? There are, alas ! many who have 
 lost their faith in God. My brethren, it is not 
 for us to judge them or to blame them; nay, 
 we most heartily pity them; not, believe me, 
 with any supercilious sense of superiority; not 
 with any Pharisaic taint of pride, but for their 
 own sakes, and in sincere and humble brother- 
 hood of sympathy, even if they reject or despise 
 such sympathy. Knowing how terrible, how 
 irreparable, would be the loss of such faith to us, 
 we regret their loss ; and we pray that they, no 
 less than we, may be folded at last in the arms of 
 
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 25 
 
 God's infinite mercy, and led into the radiance 
 of His eternal light. But seeing that the faith 
 of their childhood and of their fathers has suf- 
 fered shipwreck ; seeing that they think, or think 
 that they think, that there is no God, and that 
 we die as the beasts of the field, we cannot 
 wonder that they ask themselves whether life be 
 at all worth the living. Nay, we are glad that 
 they should discuss such questions ; because the 
 deeper their bark sinks, the more sure we are 
 that they must at last reach that bed on which 
 the ocean rests, that God, whose offspring we 
 all are, and in whom, whether we deny Him or 
 have faith in Him, we all live and move, and have 
 our being. 
 
 3. But since this question is now being delib- 
 erately discussed, " Is life worth living ? " ought 
 we not, as Christians, to face it quite fearlessly 
 and quite faithfully ? It is not desirable surely 
 that we should separate the pulpit from the 
 thoughts of the week-day world, or avoid the 
 questions which those who reject and those who 
 scorn religion discuss among themselves. I do 
 not believe, my brethren, in the faith which can 
 only be sheltered by an effeminate clericalism, 
 or a professional conventionality. For myself, 
 
26 IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 
 
 I desire that the creed of a Christian clergyman 
 should be a manly creed, not afraid to be as- 
 saulted not anxious to be spoken of with bated 
 breath. I wish that it should be no mere exotic, 
 which must be kept under glass lest any wind of 
 heaven should visit it too roughly; but that it 
 should be rather like the green blade of the corn, 
 which every rain-storm may drench, and on which 
 the snow may lie, and over, which the scorching 
 heat may burn and the chill wind blow, but which, 
 because God's sunlight falls on it, and it has a 
 principle of life within, in spite of, nay, because 
 of, every freezing or blighting influence, grows 
 up from the tender blade to the green ear, and 
 from the green ear to the rich and ripened corn. 
 
 4. Is then life worth living? Life, I mean, 
 regarded by itself ; life on this earth ; life apart 
 from God ; your life, my life, human life in gen- 
 eral, considered under its purely earthly aspects 
 and relationships ? Let us glance at this ques- 
 tion, it must be inadequately ; it may be mis- 
 takenly; it may be quite superficially, but yet 
 (which God grant us !) with the one merit of a 
 humble endeavour after perfect honesty. 
 
 5. And, in answering the question, let us, my 
 brethren, in no wise exaggerate. Let no personal 
 
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 2/ 
 
 circumstances, let no melancholy temperament, 
 let no pressure of immediate, and it may be 
 passing, trials bias our verdict. Let us, so far 
 as may be, look at life steadily and whole. It 
 is not all darkness ; it has its crimson dawns, its 
 rosy sunsets. It is not all clouds ; it has its sil- 
 ver embroideries, its radiant glimpses of heaven's 
 blue. It is not all winter ; it has its summer 
 days on which "it is a luxury to breathe the 
 breath of life." 
 
 " Life hath its May, and all is joyous then ; 
 The woods are vocal, and the winds breathe music, 
 The very breeze has mirth in it." 
 
 Ask the happy little child with its round 
 cheeks, and bright eyes, and flaxen curls, and 
 pure, sweet face, and the tender, tender love 
 and care that enfold, and encircle, and treasuic 
 it, and smooth its path the whole day long ; ask 
 the happy boy, tingling with life to the finger- 
 tips, making the fields ring with his glad voice on 
 summer holidays, happy in unselfish friendships, 
 in generous impulses, in strong health, in the 
 freedom from all care, in the confidence of all 
 hopes, when u the boy's will is the wind's will, 
 and the thoughts of youth are long ; " ask happy 
 
28 IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 
 
 lovers, when they know the joy of being all in all 
 to each other, and to their glad gaze 
 
 " A livelier emerald twinkles in the grass, 
 A deeper sapphire melts into the sea ! " 
 
 Ask soldiers in the hour of victory; ask great 
 thinkers when some immortal truth bursts upon 
 them ; ask the happy band who gather in the yet 
 unbroken circle round the Christmas hearths : 
 or, take less thrilling moments, and ask fathers 
 and mothers when cares do not press, and the 
 little ones are gone to bed, and they sit together 
 by the fireside through the quiet winter eve ; at 
 such times, perhaps, all these will be inclined to 
 tell you that life is worth the living. And though 
 such hours come not to all, and come not alike 
 to the good and evil, to the wise and foolish, yet 
 we all do have peaceful periods of our lives ; 
 quiet intervals at least between storm and storm ; 
 interspaces of sunlight between the breadths of 
 gloom ; until over every one of us the night at 
 last sweeps down. 
 
 6. Yes, my brethren, let us acknowledge, let 
 us cherish, let us be grateful for, let us, as 
 far as we may without selfishness, multiply these 
 Natural pleasures, these simple, or innocent, or 
 
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 2Q 
 
 holy joys. Let us admit, too, that God is very, 
 very good to us, and that the worst evils of our 
 lives are often in anticipation only, and of our 
 own making, not of God's. The Christian is no 
 pessimist to encourage in himself a view of life 
 needlessly discouraging ; he is no ascetic, think- 
 ing that God cares for pain or sorrow for pain 
 and sorrow's sake ; he is no cynic, who walks of 
 choice in avenues of cypress. And yet if I ask 
 you honestly whether these golden threads of 
 happiness are many enough, or strong enough, 
 to weave either the warp or woof of life, I think 
 I know what your answer must be. Let us grant 
 that childhood at least keen as are its little 
 trials is yet rarely otherwise than happy, and 
 that its tears are dried as swiftly as the dew 
 upon the rose. Let us grant, too, that boyhood, 
 though St. Augustine truly says that the boy's 
 sufferings are as great while they last as those 
 of a man, is generally happy ; happier since the 
 day when Arnold raised the whole tone of our 
 public schools, happier since the day when Shel- 
 ley abhorred the petty tyrannies of Eton, and the 
 life of a shrinking, sensitive boy whose name 
 was William Cowper was darkened here at West- 
 minster. And yet not always happy, I think; 
 
3O IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 
 
 and sometimes the source, through life, of the 
 saddest memories and consequences ; and for- 
 getful, too often, of the "inevitable congruity 
 between seed and fruit." But when swiftly, 
 imperceptibly, boyhood and youth are over, and 
 manhood with all its cares is upon us ; when the 
 golden gates close forever behind us, and we 
 step forth into the thorny wilderness; when the 
 splendid vision fades into the light of common 
 day; when the brilliant ideals and innocent en- 
 thusiasms of early years have been smirched, 
 and vulgarised, and dimmed ; when not one sin- 
 gle ray of illusion or of enchantment rests, were 
 it but for one instant, over the bleak hills and 
 barren wilderness of life worn men and weary 
 women ye who must work, and ye who must 
 weep how is it with us then ? 
 
 7. My brethren, I will not take any one of the 
 great crimes of life, such as every now and then 
 they are revealed to us, when the lurid gaze of 
 publicity is cast upon the interior of some sub- 
 urban villa or small farm. Clergymen and 
 physicians know well that these are more com- 
 mon than are ever made known. I cannot 
 doubt that among these hundreds gathered here 
 v:i this abbey there must be one or other on 
 
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 3! 
 
 whose conscience there lies the burden of some 
 deadly undiscovered sin. On all of us sin strives 
 ^to creep with serpent rustlings, silent, gradual, 
 stealthy ; or to bound from ambush, sudden, 
 irresistible, with tiger springs ; and there must 
 be some here who have been stricken with that 
 poison or crushed beneath that wild beast's force. 
 But I will take no such cases as that of the 
 clever, handsome youth sinking step by step into 
 dissipation, into forgery, into shame unspeakable, 
 and the felon's end ; or as that of one who had 
 lived his life honourably before men, tempted 
 by fatal money into crooked ways, and pleading, 
 with tremulous voice, against a sentence which 
 to him has the agony of death. I will not even 
 take the too common case of the man who wakes 
 suddenly to the horrible truth that he is a drunk- 
 ard, or under the fatal spell of some craving 
 appetite. Who shall say " I am safe " even from 
 such falls ? Yet I will not take these great crimes 
 of life; nor yet will I take its great tragedies. 
 Who has not known cases in which some man 
 has been suddenly beaten down to earth, bruised, 
 bleeding, under the shock of some wholly un- 
 expected, some quite intolerable, catastrophe ? 
 Who has not seen families, bright and prosper- 
 
32 IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 
 
 ous, the whole happiness of whose hearth has 
 been shattered, in one moment, as by the crash 
 of doom ? Who shall say " I and mine are safe 
 from these?" Yet I will not take these cases. 
 No, but I will take the common, common every- 
 day cases of life ; life's daily fever ; life's neces- 
 sary trials. My brethren, our sorrows are quite 
 different sorrows; but which of all of us be 
 he rich or poor, be he noble or insignificant, be he 
 senator or shop-boy, is exempt from them? 
 Take pain : is there one of us who has not known 
 the throbbing head, the aching nerve, the sleep- 
 less night? Take health: are there none here 
 who rarely know what perfect health is? Take 
 reputation: have we not been in anguish when 
 cruel and false things or in yet deeper anguish 
 when cruel things and true things have been said 
 of us ? Take home : is there no household whose 
 graves have been scattered far and wide ? No 
 father who has seen the dust sprinkled over the 
 golden head of his dear little child ? No mother 
 whose heart has not ceased to ache since Death 
 plucked her " wee, white rose ? " No husband 
 from whom the light of his eyes has been taken 
 at a stroke ? No lonely man, whose circle has 
 ever narrowed and narrowed, and whose path in 
 
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 33 
 
 life has been marked by the gravestones of his 
 early friends ? And, short of death, are there no 
 parents whose sons have wrung their hearts by 
 folly and ingratitude ; who have, in some far 
 land, a prodigal who will come back no more ? 
 And, of all the hundreds who are listening to the 
 voice of a weak fellow sinner like themselves, 
 are there not some perhaps many whose 
 hopes do but seem to dwindle and dwindle as 
 life goes on ; on whom 'morning never dawns, 
 but it dawns upon heavy cares, as they think 
 with a sigh of the dreary routine before them ; 
 of the insufficient means which hamper them ; of 
 the debts that hang like a millstone about their 
 necks ; of the chill discouragement of helpless 
 and burdened poverty ? And are there not some 
 who look forward, almost with agony to their 
 day of death, and think how, mayhap, they must 
 leave their dear ones loved wife, and little 
 sons, and little daughters unprotected and un- 
 provided for, to the cold pity and grudging char- 
 ity of a frosty world ? How many might almost 
 sing with the poet as he sat in deep dejection on 
 the shore : 
 
 " Alas 1 I have nor hope, nor health, 
 Wor peace within, nor calm around ; 
 
34 IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 
 
 Nor that content, surpassing wealth, 
 The sage in contemplation found ; 
 
 Others there are whom these surround, 
 Smiling they live, and call life pleasure ; 
 To me that cup hath been dealt in far other measure." 
 
 For, alas, my brethren, I have not yet told 
 anything like the worst ! A man may bear up 
 against sorrow. He may think it no great mat- 
 ter whether he be happy or unhappy. If life be 
 not sweet to him, but bitter, he may yet think it 
 to be borne. If he be a true Christian he may 
 say : " I have received the cross, I have received 
 it at Thy hands ; I will bear it, and bear it till 
 death, as Thou hast laid it upon me." But when 
 to all this sin is added ; when " calamity meets 
 an accusing conscience ; " when a man has the 
 sense of wasted opportunities, the shame of for- 
 saken ideals, the sting of evil memories, and the 
 plague of polluted and polluting thoughts ; when, 
 even at the best, he feels that, in this or that act 
 or phase of his life he was unloving, ignoble, 
 uncandid, not what he ought to have been, not 
 what God would have had him be, ah ! to the 
 noble heart is there not sorrow, is there not an- 
 guish here? Apart from deeper and darker 
 
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 35 
 
 errors, is there not the sense we all must have 
 of duties unfulfilled; of holy things neglected; 
 " of days wasted forever ; of affections in our- 
 selves or others trifled with ; of light within 
 turned to darkness ? " Ah ! when, with our souls, 
 the treacherous dealers have dealt treacherously, 
 yea, the treacherous dealers have dealt very 
 treacherously, and we have been the worst treach- 
 erous dealers to ourselves, does life seem worth 
 having then ? Should we not say : 
 
 " Alas for man if this were all, 
 And nought beyond, O earth " ? 
 
 8. So that, when I look at life I say, " Lead, 
 lead me on, my hopes ! " 
 
 But if you ask me whether life without God 
 in the world, and with no hope beyond, is worth 
 having, I answer, " JV0 /" nor is it I only who 
 say it, but all the best, and greatest, and wisest 
 of mankind. Ask the kings and queens, ask the 
 poets and scholars, ask the warriors and states- 
 men, whose dust lies buried here ! Was Eliza- 
 beth happy ? was Chatham happy ? was Spenser 
 happy ? was even Newton happy ? Ah ! no. 
 Over the volumes of human history is written : 
 " Vanity of vanities ! " and the volumes of biog- 
 
36 IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 
 
 raphy are full of lamentation and moaning and 
 woe. Scripture itself is a record of human sor- 
 row. I am well aware that they who would rob 
 us of all our hopes ; who would take away our 
 Lord out of the sepulchre, so that we know not 
 where they have laid Him ; who would change 
 our God into a struggle of careless forces or a 
 complexity of impersonal laws ; who would turn 
 all creation for us into a mask with no living face 
 behind it, or a hollow eye-socket in which no eye 
 of love or mercy ever shone I know that they 
 tell us that all this makes no difference, and offer 
 us, for God, I know not what goddess of human- 
 ity ; and I know not what " posthumous activity," 
 for a life beyond the grave. My brethren, if 
 they want to take our fine gold from us, we want 
 no dross or tinfoil in its place ; nor for the dia- 
 monds of heaven will we take glass and paste. 
 Some of us, at least, will cling to duty, though 
 duty be robbed of all her sanctions ; and to 
 virtue, though virtue lose every shadow of her 
 reward. We do not need these sham gods and 
 mock eternities ; and as for the world, if religion 
 fail to save it from wickedness, God only knows 
 what atheism will do. It will not be content 
 with lacquer religions and pinchbeck faiths. It 
 
is LIFE WORTH LIVING ? 37 
 
 will go its way, picking and stealing, chambering 
 and wantoning, lying and slandering, till the pit 
 swallow it ; and the sole logical result of scepti- 
 cism is that which is openly proclaimed by the 
 coryphaeus of materialism, the deification of sui- 
 cide, the end of evil and futile misery by the 
 extinction and annihilation of the human race. 
 
 9. But, oh ! my brethren, if you will listen to 
 me for a moment more, how, when it is touched 
 by one ray out of God's eternity, does this blank 
 materialism this grotto of icicles in the Valley 
 of the Shadow of Death melt into mud and 
 nothingness ! How does this glaring metal colos- 
 sus, with its golden head of intellectualism, tum- 
 ble into impotency when the rock of faith smites 
 it on its feet of miry clay ! If there be no hope, 
 and no God, and no things unseen, if there be 
 no atonement for the intolerable wrong, if pray- 
 ing nations uplift their hands in vain, if only a 
 hollow echo followed Christ's prayer of agony 
 upon the cross, then, as far as I can see, life is 
 a revolting nullity and a hideous dream which 
 no poetic make-believes can redeem from its in- 
 tolerable weariness. But let but one whisper of 
 God's voice thrill the deafened sense ; let but one 
 glearn of His countenance flash on the blinded 
 
38 IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 
 
 eyes ; let His hand hold forth to us but one 
 green leaf from the Tree of Life ; and how is 
 all changed ! Ah, how can we then thank God 
 for our creation, preservation, and all the bless- 
 ings of this life ! How can we cry then wit!; 
 bursts of exultation : " Thou, O God, art our 
 Father, our Saviour, our merciful God ; and we 
 that are Thy people and the sheep of Thy pas- 
 ture will give Thee thanks forever ! " If our 
 thoughts have come to us this afternoon " clothed 
 in a cloud," let them depart " encircled with a 
 rainbow." That rainbow may seem at times to 
 be but a watery image, yet it arches the spray 
 of the cataract, it shines upon the menace of 
 the storm. Sorrows ? yes but to us they are but 
 mercies in disguise. Sins ? ah, yes ! but they 
 are forgiven and cast away. Is life worth living ? 
 Ask the atheist, and if he tells you his real 
 thought it must be that of the Greek poet, 
 " That it were best never to have been born, and 
 next best to depart as soon as possible ; " or that 
 of the English poet : 
 
 " Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen, 
 Count o'er thy days from anguish free ; 
 And know whatever thou hast been, 
 'Tis something better not to be." 
 
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 39 
 
 But ask the Christian " Is life worth living ? " 
 and he will answer : " Ay ! indeed, life is infin- 
 itely worth living, and death is even infinitely 
 more worth dying ; for to live is Christ and to 
 die is gain. To live is to have faith in God, and 
 to die is to be with Him forevermore." 
 
 " Death is the veil which they who live call life ; 
 We sleep, and it is lifted." 
 
"HELL" WHAT IT IS NOT. 
 
 " For this cause was the Gospel preached also to them that are dead." 
 i PUT. iv., 6. 
 
 WHEN I spoke from this place last Sunday 
 on the question, "Is life worth living ? " 
 when I preached three Sundays ago on Heaven, 
 some of you may possibly have thought : This 
 is all very well for true Christians ; all very well 
 if in this world there were only saints ; but the 
 saints are few in number, and this world is full 
 of sinners. See what a spectacle it presents! 
 Look at the coarseness and foulness exhibited 
 at every turn in the streets around us. Walk 
 at night in squalid purlieus, not a stone's throw 
 from this abbey, where glaring gin-palaces are 
 busy, .and amid the reek of alcohol you may 
 hear snatches of foul oaths and odious songs; 
 where women sit shuddering in wretched garrets, 
 to think of the brutal hands which will strike, at 
 the brutal feet that will kick them, when the 
 
 4 
 
"HELL" WHAT IT is NOT. 41 
 
 drunkard staggers home ; where the young lads 
 of the schools over which we spend so many 
 millions of money are being daily ruined and 
 depraved by being allured into low haunts of 
 gambling and degradation. Or walk in the 
 thronged haunts of commerce, where myriads are 
 utterly and recklessly absorbed in that hasting to 
 be rich which shall not be innocent; or judge 
 from the vile phases of the stage and the opera, 
 that vice in higher places is none the less dan- 
 gerous from being gilded and perfumed ; note all 
 these facts you may say and then tell us, 
 not in an ideal world, but in this world, which 
 looks too often as though it were a world without 
 souls in this world where there is so much of 
 cruel selfishness, of degraded purpose, of ser- 
 pentine malice, of insane desire, tell us, in 
 such a world as this, how does all that you have 
 said apply ? Alas ! the vast majority of men 
 and women whom we see are not saints, but 
 sinners, and contented with their sins, and 
 living in their sins ; and covetousness, and 
 drunkenness, and lust, and lying, and dishonesty, 
 and hatred, claim each their multitude of votaries 
 and of victims. Have you then any right to 
 paint the world in rose-colour? Is it not mere 
 
42 " HELL - - WHAT IT IS NOT. 
 
 insincerity, mere clericalism, to shut your eyes to 
 patent facts ? We, who, by our very presence 
 here, show that we do not belong to classes 
 openly and flagrantly irreligious, are yet, many 
 of us, great sinners. Even when there is no ( 
 dread crime upon our consciences, many of us 
 are far from God ; our hearts are stained through 
 and through by evil passions ; we are tied and 
 bound with the chain of our sins. You bid us 
 repent; but how many do repent? You the 
 clergy, who stand often by the bedsides of 
 the dying; you who know how men live, and 
 know that in nine cases out of ten they die as 
 they have lived, if your theory of life is to be 
 complete if it is not to be a mere hollow pro- 
 fessional sham what do you think about the 
 future ? Tell us about the lost ! 
 
 2. My brethren, you have the fullest right to 
 ask these questions, and it is our bounden duty 
 to answer them ; and I for one in all deep 
 humility yet, now and always asking God for ' 
 fearless courage and perfect honesty will try 
 to give you such answer as I can. If it be but 
 the fragment of an answer, it is because I believe 
 it to be God's will that no other should be pos- 
 sible ; but at least I shall strive to speak such 
 
"HELL WHAT IT IS NOT. 43 
 
 truth as is given me to see, and to answer no 
 man according to his idols. Those who take 
 loose conjectures for established certainties ; 
 those who care more for authority than for 
 reason and conscience ; those who pretend to 
 dignify with the name of Scriptural argument the 
 " ever- widening spirals " of dim and attenuated 
 inference out of "the narrow aperture of single 
 texts ; " those who talk with the self-complacency 
 of an ignorance that takes itself for knowledge, 
 as though they alone had been admitted into 
 what with unconscious heresy and uninten- 
 tional irreverence they call " the council- 
 chambers of the Trinity," they may be ready 
 with glaring and abhorrent pictures of fire and 
 brimstone ; and those of them who are not ten- 
 der, and not true, may feel the consolatory glow 
 of personal security, as they dilate upon the 
 awfulness and the finality of the sufferings of 
 the damned. But those whose faith must have 
 a broader basis than the halting reconciliation 
 of ambiguous and opposing texts ; they who 
 grieve at the dark shadows flung by human 
 theologians athwart God's light ; they who believe 
 that reason, and conscience, and experience, as 
 well as Scripture, are books of God, which must 
 
44 " HELL ' WHAT IT IS NOT. 
 
 have a direct voice in these great decisions, they 
 will not be so ready to snatch God's thunder into 
 their own wretched and feeble hands ; they will 
 lay their mouths in the dust, rather than make 
 sad the hearts which God hath not made sad ; 
 they will take into account the grand principles 
 which dominate through Scripture no less than 
 its isolated expressions ; and undeterred by the 
 base and feeble notion that virtue would be 
 impossible without the horrors of an endless 
 hell, they will declare their hope and trust if 
 it be not permitted us to go so far in this matter 
 as belief and confidence that, even after death, 
 through the infinite mercy of the loving Father, 
 many of the dead shall be alive again and the 
 lost be found. 
 
 3. I cannot pretend, my brethren, to exhaust 
 in one sermon a question on which whole vol- | 
 umes have been written. There are some of the 
 young in this congregation ; many of you, I re- 
 gret to see, are standing I am reluctant ever 
 to trespass too long on your attention, and cannot 
 therefore profess to-day to meet and to silence 
 all objections. But one thing I can do which 
 is to tell you plainly, what, after years of thought 
 on this subject, I believe ; and what I know to 
 
"HELL WHAT IT IS NOT. 45 
 
 be the belief of multitudes, and of yearly increas- 
 ing multitudes, of the wisest and most learned 
 both of the laity and of the clergy in our English 
 Church. 
 
 4. What the popular notion of hell is, you, my 
 brethren, are all aware. Many of us were scared 
 with it, horrified with it, perhaps almost mad- 
 dened by it in our childhood. It is that, the 
 moment a human being dies at whatever age, 
 under whatever disadvantages his fate is sealed 
 hopelessly and forever ; and that if he die in un- 
 repented sin, that fate is a never ending agony, 
 amid physical tortures the most frightful that 
 can be imagined ; so that, when we think of the 
 future of the human race, we must conceive of 
 "a vast and burning prison, in which the lost 
 souls of millions and millions writhe and shriek 
 forever, tormented in a flame that never will be 
 quenched." You have only to read the manuals, 
 you have only to study the pictures published, 
 though but rarely, by members of our own 
 Church, and more frequently by some Roman 
 Catholics on the one hand, and some sections of 
 Nonconformists on the other, to see that such 
 has been and is the common belief of Christen- 
 dom. You know how Dante, in his vision, comes 
 
46 " HELL "- -WHAT IT IS NOT. 
 
 to a dark wall of rock, and sees blacker in the 
 blackness the chasm of hell's colossal portal, 
 and, over it, in characters of gloom, the awful 
 
 line : 
 
 " All hope abandon, ye who enter here ; " 
 
 and how, passing through it, they reach a place 
 where, in the mere vestibule, and even before 
 they reach the region of more frightful agonies, 
 sighs and wailings trembled through the starless 
 void, and the sound of voices deep and hoarse, 
 and hands smitten wildly together, whirling al- 
 ways through the stained and murky air. But it 
 is even more awful to find such things in our own 
 great writers, who had no belief, like Dante, in 
 that " willing agony," of purgatory, into which 
 poor souls might gladly plunge, assured that at 
 last, redeemed and purified, they too should pass 
 into their paradisal rest. Read how the great 
 Milton, after telling us of " the supereminence of 
 beatific vision," plunges at once into the frightful 
 sentence that they who have been wicked in high 
 places, " after a shameful end in this life (which 
 God grant them), shall be thrown downe eternally 
 into the deepest and darkest gulfe of hell, where 
 under the despightfull controule, the trample and 
 spurn of all the other damned, that, in the an- 
 
"HELL"- WHAT IT is NOT. 47 
 
 guish of their torture, shall have no other ease 
 than to exercise a raving and bestiall tyranny 
 over them as their slaves and negroes, they shall 
 remaine in that plight forever, the basest, the 
 lowermost, the most dejected, most underfoot and 
 downe-trodden vassals of perdition." Or read 
 Bishop Jeremy Taylor's sermon on Christ's Ad- 
 vent to Judgment, and see how his imagination 
 revels in the " Tartarean drench "which he pours 
 over his lurid page, when he tells us how " God's 
 heavy hand shall press the sanies and the intoler- 
 ableness, the obliquity, and the unreasonable- 
 ness, the amazement and the disorder, the smart 
 and the sorrow, the guilt and the punishment, out 
 from all our sins, and pour them into one chalice, 
 and mingle them with an infinite wrath, and make 
 the wicked drink off all the vengeance, and force 
 it down their unwilling throats, with the violence 
 of devils and accursed spirits." Or, once more, 
 read in Henry Smith the silver-tongued Plato- 
 nist of Cambridge how, when iniquity hath 
 played her part, " all the Furies of Hell leap 
 upon the man's heart, like a stage. Thought 
 calleth to Fear ; Fear whistleth to Horror ; Hor- 
 ror beckoneth to Despair, and saith, ' Come and 
 help me torment this sinner.' . . . Irons are laid 
 
48 "HELL" -WHAT IT is NOT. 
 
 upon his body, like a prisoner. All his lights 
 are put out at once." Can we wonder that, re- 
 ceiving and believing such doctrines, the poet 
 Habington writes : 
 
 " Fix me on some bieake precipice, 
 
 Where I ten thousand years may stand, 
 Made now a statua of ice, 
 
 Then by the summer scorch'd and tann'd ! 
 Place me alone in some fraile boate 
 
 ' Mid the horrours of an angry sea ; 
 Where I, while time shall move, may floate, 
 
 Despairing either land or day : 
 Or, under earth my youth confine 
 
 To th' night and silence of a cell, 
 Where scorpions may my limbs entwine, 
 
 O God ! so thou forgive me hell 1 " 
 
 or that Shakespeare, after lines of marvellous 
 power, should exclaim : 
 
 " T is too horrible ; 
 
 The weariest and most loathed earthly life 
 Which age, ache, penury, and imprisonment 
 Can lay on nature, is a paradise 
 To what we fear of death ! " 
 
 5. Well, my brethren, happily the thoughts 
 and hearts of men are often far gentler and 
 nobler than the formulae of their creeds; and 
 custom and tradition prevent even the greatest 
 
"HELL . WHAT IT IS NOT. 49 
 
 from facing the full meaning and consequences 
 of the words they use. 
 
 When Milton talks thus of hell he is but giv- 
 ing form and colour to his burning hatred of irre- 
 sistible tyranny and triumphant wrong ; when 
 Jeremy Taylor and other great divines and poets 
 wrote thus of it, they gave us but the ebullient 
 flashes from the glowing caldron of a kindled 
 imagination. What they say is but, as it were, 
 the poetry of indignation. It is only when these 
 topics fall into vulgar handling, it is only when 
 they reek like acrid fumes from the poisoned 
 crucible of mean and loveless conceptions, that 
 we see them in all their intolerable ghastliness. 
 Many true and loving Christians have, I know, 
 held these views, and have mourned with aching 
 hearts over what seemed to them the fatal neces- 
 sity for believing them. But others, less good 
 and less pure, have exulted in them, and I know 
 nothing more calculated to make the whole soul 
 revolt with loathing from every doctrine of religion 
 than the evil complacency with which some cheer- 
 fully accept the belief that they are living and 
 moving in the midst of millions doomed irrevers- 
 ibly to everlasting perdition. St. Augustine dared 
 to say that infants dying unbaptised would cer 
 
50 "HELL" WHAT IT is NOT. 
 
 tainly be damned, though only with a levissima 
 damnatio. Even St. Thomas of Aquinum lent 
 his saintly name to what I can only call the 
 abominable fancy that the bliss of the saved may 
 be all the more keen because they are permitted 
 to gaze on the punishment of the wicked. Boston, 
 in his " Fourfold State" talks of God holding up 
 the wicked in hell-fire with the one hand, and tor 
 menting them with the other. Now even a saint 
 of God sins when he speaks thus, and is setting 
 up in the place of God the Idol of the Tribe or 
 of the Den, and no language can be stern enough 
 to reprobate the manner in which some, who are 
 not saints of God at all, who are not even the 
 elder brother of the Prodigal, whose religion has 
 resolved itself into a mere feeble heresy-hunting, 
 have turned God's gospel of plenteous redemp- 
 tion into an anathema of all but universal perdi- 
 tion. Which of us has not heard sermons, or 
 read books to the effect that if every leaf of the 
 forest trees, and every grain of the ocean sands 
 stood for billions of years, and all these billions 
 were exhausted, you would still be no nearer 
 even to the beginning of eternity than at the first ; 
 and that (pardon me for reproducing what I ab- 
 hor) if you could conceive an everlasting tooth- 
 
" HELL"- -WHAT IT is IWK 51 
 
 ache, or an endless cautery, or the incessant 
 scream of a sufferer beneath the knife, that would 
 give you but a faint conception of the agony of 
 hell ; and yet in the same breath that the major- 
 ity of mankind are doomed to hell by an absolute 
 predestination ? Which of us has not heard 
 teaching which implied, or did not even shrink 
 from stating this? And dare any one of you 
 regard such teaching as other than blasphemy 
 against the merciful God? If you are not un- 
 affected when " the destitute perish of hunger, or 
 the dying agonise in pain," is there any human 
 being, worthy the dignity of a human being, whose 
 soul does not revolt and sicken at the notion of 
 " a world all worm and flame " ? One who is not 
 of us wrote yesterday to the Times, how, stand- 
 ing in that Parisian prison where the Girondists 
 held their last supper ; whence Danton passed to 
 his scaffold ; where Robespierre, the night before 
 his execution, lay weltering in his blood ; where 
 Marie Antoinette poured out her soul in the last 
 hour of her life ; he saw an exquisite crucifix of 
 ivory in the cell where it had been left since that 
 queen, and wife, and mother had turned to it all 
 night in her last agony ; and he adds that, in such 
 a scene as that, all logic, doctrine, politics, sever- 
 
52 "HELL" WHAT IT is NOT. 
 
 ity of judgment are hushed, and " Human nature 
 asserts its preeminence, and claims the whole field 
 of thought for pity. In presence of that agonising 
 figuie on the cross, the whole soul revolts against 
 judicial terrorism in whatsoever name, by what- 
 soever tyrant committed." He is speaking, of 
 course, of earthly tyrants; but, my brethren, 
 " Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right ? ' 
 and shall the image of the crucified Redeemer 
 inspire, in one who rejects His divinity, the noble 
 pity which seems as if it were alien to many of 
 His sons ? I can sympathise with the living poet 
 when he cries : 
 
 " Were it not thus, O King of my salvation, 
 
 Many would curse to Thee, and I for one, 
 Fling Thee Thy bliss, and snatch at Thy damnation, 
 
 Scorn and abhor the shining of the sun ; 
 Ring with a reckless shivering of laughter, 
 
 Wroth at the woe which Thou hast seen so long, 
 Question if any recompense hereafter 
 
 Waits to atone the intolerable wrong." 
 
 If St. Paul, again and again, flings from him, 
 with a " God forbid ! " the conclusions of an ap- 
 parently irresistible logic, we surely, who have 
 very little logic of any kind against us in this 
 matter, but only questionable exegesis, supported 
 
"HELL WHAT IT IS NOT. 53 
 
 in too many instances by spiritual selfishness and 
 impenetrable prejudice, do in the high name of 
 the outraged conscience of humanity, nay, in 
 the far higher names of the God who loves, of 
 the Saviour who died for, of the Spirit who 
 enlightens us, hurl from us representations so 
 cruel, of a doctrine so horrible, with every nerve 
 and fibre of our intellectual, moral, and spiritual 
 life. Ignorance may make a fetish of such a 
 doctrine if it will; Pharisaism may inscribe it 
 upon its phylacteries; hatred may write it, 
 instead of " Holiness to the Lord," on the 
 sacerdotal petalon in which it degrades and simu- 
 lates the name of love ; but here, in this vast 
 mausoleum of the glorious dead, here amid the 
 silent memorials of the sons of fame and the 
 fathers who begat us, of whom many, though 
 not saints, were yet noble, though erring men, 
 and of whom (though they, and we alike, shall 
 suffer, both here and hereafter, the penalty of 
 unrepentant sin) we yet cannot and will not 
 think as damned to unutterable tortures by irre- 
 versible decrees, I repudiate these crude and 
 glaring travesties of the awful and holy will of 
 God ; I arraign them as ignorantly merciless ; I 
 impeach them as a falsehood against Christ's 
 
54 "HELL -WHAT IT IS NOT. 
 
 universal and absolute redemption ; I denounce 
 them as a blasphemy against God's exceeding 
 and eternal love ! And more acceptable, I am 
 very sure, than the rigidest and most uncompro- 
 mising self-styled orthodoxy of all the Pharisees 
 who have ever judged their brethren since time 
 began more acceptable by far to Him, the 
 friend of publicans and sinners, who, on His 
 cross, prayed for His murderers, and who died 
 that we might live more acceptable, I say, by 
 far, than the delight which amid a deluge of ruin 
 hugs itself upon the plank which it has seized 
 would be the noble and trembling pity so fear- 
 fully unlike the language of divines and school- 
 men, which made St. Paul ready to be 
 anathema from Christ for the sake of his breth- 
 ren; which made Moses cry to his God at 
 Sinai : " Oh, this people have sinned ; and now, 
 if Thou wilt forgive their sin ; and if not, blot 
 me, I pray Thee, out of Thy book which Thou 
 hast written." 
 
 6. But I would ask you to believe, my breth- 
 ren, that I speak now no longer with natural 
 passion, but with most accurate theological pre- 
 cision, when I say that, though texts may be 
 quoted which give prima facie plausibility to such 
 
"HELL" WHAT IT IS NOT. ly 
 
 modes of teaching, yet, to say nothing of the fact 
 that the light and love which God Himself has 
 kindled in us recoil from them, those texts are, 
 in the first place, alien to the broad unifying 
 principles of Scripture ; that they are founded 
 on interpretations which have appeared to many 
 wise men to be demonstrably groundless ; and 
 that for every one so quoted, two can be adduced 
 whose prima facie and literal interpretation tells 
 on the other side. There is an old, sensible, 
 admitted rule, " Theologia symbolica non est demon- 
 strativa " in other words, that phrases which 
 belong to metaphor, to imagery, to poetry, to 
 emotion, are not to be formulated into necessary 
 dogma, or crystallised into rigid creed. Tested 
 by this rule, nine-tenths of the phrases on which 
 these views are built fall utterly to the ground. 
 But even were this otherwise, yet, once more, in 
 the name of Christian light and Christian liberty ; 
 once more in the name of Christ's promised 
 Spirit; once more in the name of the broad- 
 ened dawn, and the daystar which has arisen in 
 our hearts, I protest at once and finally against 
 this ignorant tyranny of isolated texts which has 
 ever been the curse of Christian truth, the glory 
 of narrow intellects, and the cause of the worst 
 
5*> "HELL" WHAT IT is NOT. 
 
 errors of the worst days of the corrupted Church. 
 Tyranny has engraved texts upon her sword; 
 Oppression has carved texts upon her fetters; 
 Cruelty has tied texts around ^er fagots ; Igno- 
 i^nce has set knowledge at defiance with texts 
 woven on her flag. Gin-drinking has been de- 
 fended out of Timothy, and slavery has made a 
 stronghold out of Philemon. The devil, as we 
 all know, can quote texts for his purpose. They 
 were quoted by the Pharisees, not once or twice 
 only, against our Lord Himself, and when St. 
 Paul fought the great battle of Christian freedom 
 against the curse of Law, he was anathematised 
 with a whole Pentateuch of opposing texts. But 
 we, my brethren, are in the dispensation of the 
 Holy Spirit. Our guide is the Scriptures of God 
 in their broad outlines ; the Revelation of God 
 in its glorious unity ; the books of God in their 
 eternal simplicity, read by the illumination of 
 that Spirit of Christ which dwelleth in us, except 
 we be reprobates. Our guide is not, and never 
 shall be, what the Scriptures call " the letter that 
 killeth ; " the tyrannous realism of ambiguous 
 metaphors, the asserted infallibility of isolated 
 words. But if this must be made simply and 
 solely a matter of texts if, "except as a dead 
 
"HELL" WHAT IT is NOT. 57 
 
 anachronism, we mean nothing when we say, " I 
 believe in the Holy Ghost ! " if we prefer our 
 sleepy shibboleths and dead traditions to the 
 living promise, " I will dwell in them and walk in 
 them" then by all means let this question be 
 decided by texts alone. I am quite content that 
 texts should decide it. Only, first, you must go 
 to the inspired original, not to the erroneous 
 translation ; and, secondly, you must take words, 
 and interpret words in their proper and historical 
 significance, not in that sense which makes them 
 connote to you a thousand notions which did not 
 originally belong to them ; and, thirdly, you must 
 not explain away, or read between the lines of 
 the texts which make against the traditional view, 
 while you refuse all limitation of those on the 
 misinterpretation or undue extension of which 
 that view is founded. Now I ask you, my breth- 
 ren, where would be these popular teachings 
 about hell the kind of teachings which I have 
 quoted to you and described if we calmly and 
 deliberately, by substituting the true translations, 
 erased from our English Bibles, as being inade- 
 quate or erroneous, or disputed renderings, the 
 three words, "damnation," "hell," and "ever- 
 lasting " ? Yet I say, unhesitatingly, I say, 
 
58 "HELL"- WHAT IT is NOT. 
 
 claiming the fullest right to speak on this point s 
 I say, with the calmest and most unflinching 
 sense of responsibility, I say, standing here in 
 the sight of God and of my Saviour, and it may 
 be of the angels and spirits of the dead 
 that not one of those three expressions ought to 
 stand any longer in our English Bibles, and that, 
 being in our present acceptation of them in 
 the notion (that is) which all uneducated persons 
 attach to them simply mistranslations , they 
 most unquestionably will not stand unexplained 
 in the revised version of the Bible if the revisers 
 have understood their duty. The verb "to 
 damn " in the Greek Testament is neither more 
 nor less than the verb " to condemn," and the 
 words translated " damnation " are simply the 
 words which, in the vast majority of instances, 
 the same translators have translated, and rightly 
 translated, by " judgment" and "condemnation." 
 The word auxmo?, sometimes translated, "ever- 
 lasting," is simply the word which, in its first 
 sense, means agelong or czonian ; and which is in 
 the Bible itself applied to things which have 
 utterly and long since passed away ; and is in its 
 second sense something " spiritual " something 
 above and beyond time, as when the knowl- 
 
"HELL WHAT IT JS NOT. 59 
 
 edge of God is said to be eternal life. So that 
 when, with your futile billions, you foist into this 
 world alwviog the fiction of endless time, you do 
 but give the lie to the mighty oath of that great 
 angel, who set one foot upon the sea, and one 
 upon the land, and with hand uplifted to Heaven 
 sware by Him who liveth forever and ever that 
 "Time shall be no more." And finally in the 
 Gospels and Epistles the word rendered " hell " 
 is in one place the Greek " Tartarus," borrowed 
 as a name for the prison of evil spirits, not 
 after, but until, the resurrection; in five places 
 " Hades," which simply means the world beyond 
 the grave ; and in twelve places " Gehenna," 
 which means primarily the Valley of Hinnom 
 outside Jerusalem, in which, after it had been 
 polluted by Moloch-worship, corpses were flung 
 and fires were lit ; and is used, secondarily, as a 
 metaphor, not of fruitless and hopeless, but 
 for all at any rate but a small and desperate 
 minority of that purifying and corrective pun- 
 ishment which, as all of us alike believe, does 
 await impenitents in both here and beyond the 
 grave. 
 
 But, be it solemnly observed, the jews to 
 whom and in whose metaphorical sense the word 
 
6O " HELL " WHAT IT IS NOT. 
 
 was used by our blessed Lord, never did, either 
 then, or at any period, normally attach to the 
 word " Gehenna " that meaning of endless torment 
 which we attach to " hell." To them, and in 
 their style of speech, and therefore on the lips 
 of our blessed Saviour, who addressed it to them, 
 and spake in terms which they would understand, 
 it meant not a material and everlasting fire, but 
 an intermediate, a remedial, a metaphorical, a 
 terminable retribution. 
 
 7. Thus, then, finding nothing in Scripture or 
 anywhere to prove that the fate of every man is, 
 at death, irrevocably determined, I shake off the 
 hideous incubus of atrocious conceptions I 
 mean those conceptions of unimaginable horror 
 and physical excruciation endlessly prolonged 
 attached by popular ignorance and false theology 
 to the doctrine of future retribution. But neither 
 can I dogmatise on the other side. I see noth- 
 ing to prove the distinctive belief attached to 
 the word " purgatory." I cannot accept the 
 spreading doctrine of Conditional Immortality ; I 
 cannot preach the certainty of Universalism. 
 That last doctrine the belief that 
 
 " Good shall fall 
 At last, far off, at last to all " 
 
"HELL" WHAT IT is NOT. 61 
 
 does indeed derive much support from many 
 passages of Scripture ; it or a view more or 
 less analogous to it was held by Origen, the 
 greatest and noblest, by Gregory of Nyssa, 
 the most fearless, by Clemens of Alexandria, 
 the most learned, by Gregory of Nazianzus, one 
 of the most eloquent, by Justin Martyr, one of 
 the earliest of the fathers ; it was spoken of in 
 some places with half approval, or with a rejec- 
 tion which even when absolute was sympathetic 
 and respectful, by theologians like St. Irenaeus, 
 St. Athanasius, St. Jerome, St. Ambrose, even 
 St. Augustine himself; in modern times, among 
 many others, it has been held by great and most 
 orthodox theologians like Bengal and Tholuck, 
 and by saints of God like Erskine of Linlathen 
 and Bishop Ewing of Argyll. And further, what- 
 ever may have been the motives which influenced 
 them, the Reformers struck out of the prayer- 
 book the Forty-second Article, which declared 
 that "All men shall not be saved." On such a 
 question as this I care not for individual authority, 
 but this much at least is proved by the many 
 differing theories of wise and holy men that 
 God has given us no clear and decisive revela- 
 tion on the final condition of those who have diecf 
 
62 " HELL " - WHAT IT IS NOT. 
 
 m sin. It is revealed to us that " God is love ; " 
 and that " Him to know is life eternal ; " and that 
 it is not His will that any should perish; and 
 that " as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall 
 all be made alive ; " but how long, even after 
 death, man may continue to resist His will ; how 
 long he may continue in that spiritual death 
 which is alienation from God ; that is one of the 
 secret things which God hath not revealed. But 
 this much, at any rate that the fate of man is 
 not finally and irreversibly sealed at death, and 
 you yourselves, unwittingly perhaps, but none 
 the less certainly, admit, and declare and confess, 
 every time you repeat, in the Apostles' Creed, 
 that Christ descended into hell. For the sole 
 passage which proves that article of the Creed is 
 the passage in St. Peter, which tells us that " He 
 went and preached to the Spirits in prison, which 
 sometimes were disobedient." St. Peter in my 
 text tells you in so many words that " the Gospel 
 was preached to them that were dead," and if, as 
 the Church in every age has held, the fate 01 
 those dead sinners was not irrevocably fixed by 
 death, then it must be clear and obvious to the 
 meanest understanding that neither of necessity 
 is ours. 
 
" HELL "- - WHAT IT IS NOT. 63 
 
 There then is the sole answer which I can 
 give to your question, " What about the lost ? " 
 My belief is fixed upon " that living God " who 
 we are told is " the Saviour of all men." My 
 answer is with Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, 
 that " we are lost here as much as there, and 
 that Christ came to seek and save the lost ; " and 
 my hope is that the vast majority, at any rate, of 
 the lost, may at length be found. If any hardened 
 sinner, shamefully loving his sin, and despising 
 the long-suffering of his Saviour, trifle with that 
 doctrine, it is at his own just and awful peril. 
 But if, on the other hand, there be some among 
 you as are there not? souls sinful indeed, 
 yet not hard in sin ; souls that fail indeed, yet 
 even, amid their failing, long, and pray, and love, 
 and agonise, and strive to creep ever nearer to the 
 light ; then I say, have faith in God. There is hope 
 for you ; hope for you, even if death overtake you 
 Before the final victory is won ; hope for the poor in 
 spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven ; hope 
 for the mourners, for they shall be comforted, 
 though you too may have to be purified in that 
 Gehenna of aeonian fire beyond the grave. Yes, 
 my brethren, " Say ye to the righteous, that it 
 shall be well with him : for they shall eat the 
 
64 " HELL "- - WHAT IT IS NOT. 
 
 fruit of their doings. Woe unto the wicked ! it 
 shall be ill with him : for the reward of his hands 
 shall be given him ; " but say also, as Christ's own 
 Apostles said, that there shall be a " a restitution 
 of all things," that God willeth not that any 
 should perish ; that Christ both died, and rose, 
 and revived that He might be Lord both of the 
 dead and the living; that as in Adam all die, 
 even so in Christ shall all be made alive ; and 
 that the day shall come when " all things shall 
 be subdued unto Him, that God may be all in 
 all" Ttdvra w naaw omnia in omnibus all 
 things in all men. 
 
 THE END. 
 
OVERDUE. 
 
TA UJ/J4