man can ever see the Lord; that sin cannot be forgiven ill it is forsaken and repented of; that the doom, which falls on sin is both merciful and just-we are all agreed and these views will be found enforced in the following pages. If this be all that is generally intended by the doctrine of Hell,-as it is most assuredly all that the Catholic Church, guided by Scripture. requires her children to believe-then this doctrine of Hell I receive and believe. But there are four elements in the current opinion which I consider to be as unsupported by Scripture as they are repugnant to reason; which are matters of opinion only and not of faith;-which the Church of God has never dogmatically sanctioned ;-which have furnished to the atheist his most indisputable argument, and caused to the Christian-if he be a thoughtful Christian—his most intolerable pang. It is these accretions of the true doctrine, and these only, which I have shown reasons to repudiate and condemn. These four elementswhich make the popular view far darker than that held in the Roman Church, and far darker even than that of St. Augustine-are 1, the physical torments,

the material agonies, the "sapiens ignis" of Eternal Punishment;1 2, the supposition of its necessarily endless duration for all who incur it; 3, the opinion that it is thus incurred by the vast mass of mankind; and 4, that it is a doom passed irreversibly at the moment of death on all who die in a state of sin. How frightful are the facts which they must face who hold these common opinions-if indeed they in any way realise the meaning of their own words -is obvious to all, and I have given some proofs of it in their own words. How any man with a heart of pity in him-any man who has the faculty of imagination in even the lowest degree developed-can contemplate the present condition of countless multitudes of the dead and of the living viewed in the light of such opinions ;-how he can at all reconcile them either with all that he learns of God and of Christ in Scripture and by inward experience; -how

1 Minuc. Felix, Oct. 35. "Illic sapiens ignis membra urit et reficit, carpit et nutrit." "In bodily awful, intolerable torture we believe no longer."-F. W. ROBERTSON.

2 See Excursus IV., p. 203.

-as he walks the streets and witnesses the life of our great cities-he can enjoy in this world one moment of happiness however deeply he may be convinced of his own individual salvation-is more than I can ever understand. And it is really painful to think that in this matter the Roman Catholic Church, so rigidly tenacious of what she conceives to be purity of doctrine, so intensely opposed to anything remotely resembling the spirit of scepticism, so inflexibly resolute in opposition to heresies, so rich in her motherhood of saintly souls, has held a doctrine more merciful, less void of pity, than the current belief of modern Protestants. That doctrine the Romanists have held-though they have overlaid it with many untenable inferences-because they inherited it from the early Church. Those who uphold the popular view in all its tetanic rigidity accuse others of looking lightly at sin. Will the most fanatical bigot say that the Roman Church takes a light view of sin? yet that Church has introduced an almost indefinite alleviation into the belief in an endless hell!

Restore the ancient belief in an intermediate state;

C

-correct the glaring and most unhappy mistrans lations of our English version;-judge the words of our Blessed Lord by the most ordinary rules of honest and unprejudiced interpretation;—abstain from pressing the literal acceptance of passages most obviously metaphorical;1-give due weight to the countless passages of Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, which speak of a love, and a mercy, and a triumph of long-suffering over offended justice, which are to us irreconcilable with the belief that the unhappy race of God's children in this great family of man are all but universally doomed to endless torturings, at the very thought of which the heart faints and is sick with horror;-give to the Reason and the Conscience,2 of man some voice in judging of a scheme which seems to outrage all that is noblest and holiest within them; separate from the notions of "Hell" (if the word be restored to its ancient sense) the arbitrary

1 Es ist offenbar dass viele Ausdrücke des Neuen Testaments, welche dieser äusserlichen Zustand Z. B. als ein ewig brennendes Feuer bezeichnen (Matt. xxv. 41) nur bildlich zu nehmen sind." Märtens Ersch. u. Grüber, s. v. 2 Cor. iv. 3.

2

fancies of human ignorance and human passion;accept the merciful opinions which the Church has always permitted though she has not formally adopted them that the fire of Gehenna is metaphorical,-that there is a possibility of future purification—that most men will at last be saved;1-hold that, as the very word "damnation" once implied, the pain of loss,i.e. the loss, it may be for ever, of the beatific visionis, far more than any pain of sense or physical torture, the essence of the sufferings of the lost ;-do this, and you have removed the greatest of all stumbling-blocks from the path of faith, and added incomparably to our love of God and to the peace, the hope, the dignity, the happiness of human life.

On these points as permissible in the Roman Church, see Perrone, Prael. Theol. i. 484. The latter was held by F. W. Faber (Creator and Creature, iii. 332 : “In the use of the Scripture argument the triumph is completely and most remarkably on the milder side"), and the eloquent Lacordaire. H. N. Oxenham, Eschatology, p. 59. He calls some of the vulgar opinions "parasitical accretions . . as startling and repulsive as they are destitute of any reasonable or authoritative basis," and matters of speculation on which in all ages different opinions have been maintained by theologians of unimpeached orthodoxy."