glorious power. As I said, thou shalt have his wrath not in drops, but in whole showers. It shall thunder upon thy body and soul so fast and so thick, that thou shalt be tormented out of measure. And this thou shalt have without any intermission. Thou shalt not have any ease, not even for so short a space as while a man may turn himself round; but thou shalt have it always, every day, every hour, night and day, for they have no rest from their torment.' And in this condition thou must lie for ever. When thou hast been in hell so many thousand years as there are stars in the firmament, or drops in the sea, or sands on the sea shore, thy misery is no nearer an end; but there thou must lie for ever. Oh, this one word EVER, how will it torment thy soul?"

One more passage, and we have done. Addressing the sinner, Bunyan says: "The devil hath been too hard for thee; thou art now in hell, among a countless crowd of devils, and all thy sins beset thee round; thou art all overwrapped in flames, and canst not have one drop of water to give thee any ease. Thou criest, but thou criest in vain, for nothing will be granted; for neither God nor Christ takes any care to ease or speak comfort to thee. There lie, and swim in flames for ever."

"You shall take a man and tie him to a stake, and with red hot pincers pinch off his flesh by little pieces, for two or three years together, and at last, when the poor man cries out for ease and help, the tormentors answer—“Nay, but we will serve you worse than this, for twenty years together, and after that we will fill your mangled body full of scalding lead, or run you through with a red hot spit. Yet this is but a flea-biting to the sorrow of those that go to hell. He that goes to hell shall suffer ten thousand times worse torments than these, and yet shall never die under them. There they shall be ever whining, pining, weeping, mourning, without ease. If the biggest devil in hell might pull thee all in pieces, and rend thee small as dust, and dissolve thee into nothing, thou wouldst count this a mercy. But here thou must lie, and fry, and scorch, and broil, and burn for ever."

And this is the gospel of the ever blessed God. These are the glad tidings which the merciful Saviour and his blessed ministers bring to suffering mortals. These are the doctrines, these the horrible, outrageous, infernal threats sent out from the pious presses of this city in the year 1857, to frighten the souls of our children from thinking for themselves, and speaking and acting like men. These horrible views took such possession of the naturally noble mind of

Bunyan, that they drove the poor man mad, and hurried him, in his madness, to the very verge of self-murder.

We have the same horrible doctrine in the works of our greatest poets. Thus Milton sings of " A dungeon horrible, on all sides round as one great furnace flamed; yet from these flames no light, but rather darkness visible served only to discover sights of wo. Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace and hope can never come, but torture without end still urges, and a fiery deluge fed with everburning sulphur unconsumed."

In another passage Milton represents the damned as subject to the double tortures of ice and fire. And we have similar views of this dreadful subject in Shakspeare, the most truthful of all our poets. He represents Claudio, when under sentence of death, as saying to his sister, who had been urging him to be firm—

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those, whom lawless and uncertain thoughts
Imagine howling!-'tis too horrible!

The meanest and most loathed earthly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise

To what we fear in death.

The words which he puts in the mouth of the Ghost in Hamlet, are no less terrible, though they are given as a description of Purgatory only.

"But that I am forbid

To tell the secrects of my prison-house,

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word

Would harrow up thy soul; freeze thy young blood;
Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres;
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,

And each particular hair to stand on end
Like quills upon the fretful porcupine."

And we might go on quoting without end. In truth, these are the horrors with which the Bible and the clergy have been torturing mankind for seventeen centuries.

Pinamonti, a Catholic, who wrote a terrible work on hell, mentions in that work a lady saint who was so distressed and tortured with the thought of the horrible pains of hell, and the multitudes of human beings daily rushing into them, that she besought the Lord to allow her to place herself in the gateway, and stand there, amid the smoke

and flames, to warn approaching sinners to draw back. She was willing to share the pains of hell herself, to be scorched by the flames from the eternal fires, for the opportunnity of keeping others from that place of torment. Pinamonti praises her charity, but acknowledges that he cannot imitate it; but he says he would like to place his little book, entitled "Hell Opened," in the gateway, to warn people against rushing into the eternal fire. We propose to do something still better than either of those worthies. Our plan is to blow up the place entirely. It has only an imaginary existence, and a little truth may demolish it, and free men's minds from fear of it for ever. We propose to show that the orthodox doctrine of hell is false, and that we are justified in rejecting it as an insult to reason, and as an outrage on humanity.

1. Christians tell us, their Bible tells us, that God is good-that he is good to all,-and that his tender mercies are over all his works. The Bible speaks of God as our father, as the father of the spirits of all flesh. If these representations of God be true, hell and its horrors are an impossibility. Can a good God doom his creatures to endless and unutterable torments? Could a kind father consign his children to an eternal brimstone fire? The idea is monstrous. The worst father on earth would not roast his children on a common fire, though he knew their sufferings would last but a few moments. And will men tell us that the best of fathers will roast his children on a brimstone fire for ever, and keep them alive by miracle, that their torments may know no end? The vilest, the most debased, the most malignant fiend on earth, would not subject his greatest enemy to such a doom. He would not keep him writhing in brimstone fire for a month. He would relent before he had kept him burning, or heard him wailing, for a single week. Even a Christian would find it hard to keep a heretic or an infidel in a brimstone fire so long. Christians have surpassed all others in devising torments, and in the power to stand by and witness, without relenting, the agonies of their victims. They have kindled green-wood fires round men and women, and patiently looked on while the tardy flames have slowly, and with frightful torments, consumed their victims; but to hold men down in a molten sea of fire and brimstone, and keep them alive and burning, struggling and howling day and night for a whole week, would be too much even for them. Grace can enable them to do a great deal, but it could hardly so thoroughly destroy their humanity, as to make them cruel enough for that. They would find them

.

selves fainting or relenting before the first long day was over. As for common, unregenerate men, the worst among them could not keep a dog roasting and howling for ever, nor even for a day, in a lake of fire. It is not in human nature to think of such cruelty, much less to practise it. And how the idea of such torments could enter into the minds of men, is a mystery. A good God, the father of the spirits of all flesh, force down his children, millions at a time, into an eternal brimstone fire, and keep them alive there in agony for ever! The thought is atrocious. He would sooner extinguish the whole creation and himself along with it. Either a good God, or a decent man, would sooner see the universe perish at once, than that a single being of any kind should be tortured for ever. And it would be better that nothing at all should be, than that any thing should live in endless agony. The men who say that God will damn the great majority of his creatures, nay, the men who say that God will damn a single soul to eternal torments, blaspheme God, they libel him infinitely, and they insult and outrage man.

It is bad enough to be forced to believe that there are human beings so ignorant, so degraded, as to be capable of believing and teaching such a doctrine; it would be exacting too much of us to require us to believe that there is any God, or man, or devil, capable of inflicting such tor

ments.

2. Besides, we know that it is not in the nature of things possible, for a human being to live for ever in fire. Cast a man into a lake of fire, and he is consumed. He ceases to live in an instant. He is turned to gas, and driven off, beyond the reach of the flames. They tell us that with God all things are possible,-but we know they are not. There is no power in the universe that can make things act contrary to their natures. Water will fall, and fire will burn, let priests or laymen say what they will.

3. Again, what becomes of the happiness of heaven, if you are to have an endless hell? Who could enjoy the happiness of heaven, if he knew that there were people just beneath him, suffering the torments of a brimstone hell? Is there a wretch here that could sit and sing while men and women, burning in a lime-kiln, were howling in his ears? And what are the light and momentary pangs of common burning, compared with the eternal torments of a brimstone fire? Where is the seaman who could be happy in the finest bark that ever sailed, if he saw men everywhere around him drowning, and heard them crying for help? And shall we believe it possible that our saints

could be happy, however safe themselves, while they saw men floating,-not drowning,-but floating in worse than mortal agony, on the surface of a sea of brimstone fire?

Dr. Berg and his colleagues, in their reformed hymn book, say they can. The hymn from which I quoted, after describing the damned as lying in lakes of liquid fire, and on burning billows tossed, for ever and for ever lost; exclaims:

But, saints, undaunted and serene,

Your eyes shall view the dreadful scene.

But we cannot believe it. We can believe much as to the power of religion to harden men's hearts; but we cannot believe this. The sight of so much agony would quite unparadise the realms of bliss. The orthodox must therefore either give up their heaven of eternal bliss, or their hell of eternal torments. They cannot have both.

4. No human being can deserve eternal torments in a brimstone fire, or in any other fire. The greatest sinner on earth never deserved such a punishment. The greatest sinners are the saints, who persecute and torture, and put to cruel and lingering deaths, their innocent fellow men, for differences of creed, or for excelling others in making scientific discoveries, in improving or multiplying useful arts, or in promoting important political, social, or moral reforms. Yet even the saints, great and awful as are their crimes, do not deserve the eternal pains of a brimstone hell. Some of those persecutors sin ignorantly. They know not what they do. Some even think they ought to persecute or destroy men who make discoveries which contradict religious opinions, or who seek reforms which threaten the prosperity or stability of the church. They fancy religion true, and imagine it necessary to the happiness of mankind, and look on those who oppose or endanger it, as enemies both of God and of mankind. And great as is the evil of their doings, their ignorance is some excuse. And even those who persecute from earthly, selfish motives, hardly deserve an eternal roasting in a brimstone fire. Their crime is great,-the greatest that can be conceived-the murder of the best and noblest of our race, from the worst and basest motives,-still, eternal torments in a lake of fire and brimstone is too much even for them. They might deserve to be scorched and frizzled in purgatory awhile, or even to be dipped over head once or twice in the boiling brimstone of hell itself; but nothing further. Indeed, if ever they should come to see their deeds in their true light, they will suffer enough from self reproach, and