![]() Wherefore God cannot be just, and send a man there cannot be powerful and wise, if he fail to invent, and neglect to create, a world in which nothing shall make hell possible cannot be merciful, if he punish at all from ‘vengeance’ cannot be loving, if he can support, in his eternal bliss, the knowledge that souls are damned cannot be God at all, if he thus makes a world, and fail to make it a ‘success.’ Even the loss of one soul were failure.” He doesn’t know what he is doing: he is too weak to carry through the good he knows: there is not malice enough in the world to warrant hell. “Well, then, however great a sinner, a man cannot deserve that. And the ground they take is moral, involving the whole character of human life on the one side, and our very conception of God upon the other there is nothing in humanity, they would urge, to which hell could be proportionate: punishment which is not medicinal, is in itself immoral God’s justice no less than his mercy, his power equally with his love, are affronted if we conceive of him as creating, or allowing “hell.” Modern minds are not the first to have felt, poignantly, this problem. The revolt against Catholic dogma, out of which issued the Protestant sects, included a contemptuous denial of purgatory, but insisted fiercely upon hell: nowadays, those who believe in after-death suffering at all, insist that it shall be purely purgatorial, and it is hell they will have none of. Probably, however, modern instinct recoils less from the pictured happiness of heaven, than from the fiery scenes of hell.What resent is the whole idea of such appalling punishment, and definitely, that it should be called “eternal.” In fact, this singular phenomenon is seen. We still picture it containing a very sublimated, purified edition of what we judge to be good behavior here heaven is visioned as the supremest form of churchgoing, and the never-ending praise of God as, after all, the recitation of some interminable psalter. This implies not only a confusion of thought which suggests that what we like now is effort, fight, growth as such, and not rather the victory, or at least the expression of strength, that is, of personality and life involved in each moment of these but, a similar reflection into the future life, by means of imagination, of what we are accustomed to in this. Only the lazy, or the very tired, like “peace,” that is, “inertia.” Or again, that no one could spend eternity even in praising God. The simplest example is afforded by the catch-phrases, that white robes, golden crowns, and palms form no alluring prospect and that “if heaven is like that,” we don’t want it. There is a sort of objection which, in itself, must be allowed no weight, but which bulks large in popular imagination, because, precisely, from the imagination it arises. ![]()
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