THE DISCOVERY OF INVISIBLE WORLDS. 501 



a place, and hades is a place" and calls the modern idea of hell 

 a "mystical, superspiritual view." Mr. Talmage, of Brooklyn 

 (Presbyterian), asks : " What is the nse of explaining away a fur- 

 nace of fire, when God says there is one ? . . . I am not opposed 

 to saying it may be figurative ; but I know very well that if it is 

 not fire it is something as severe as fire. . . . God says it is fire, 

 and a furnace of fire. Besides that, I do not know that it is figu- 

 rative. It may be literal. The Bible sixteen times says it is fire." 

 Dr. H. W. Thomas, pastor of the People's Church, Chicago, says 

 that there is now a tacit admission on the part of even the ortho- 

 dox churches that " the teachings of the past on this subject are 

 not wholly true, and that, in some respects at least, they have to 

 be modified or abandoned." 



The proprietor of a great foundry in Germany," says Alger, 

 while he talked one day with a workman who was feeding a 

 furnace, accidentally stepped back, and fell headlong into a vat 

 of molten iron. The thought of what happened then horrifies 

 the imagination. Yet it was all over in two or three seconds. 

 Multiply the individual instance by unnumbered millions, stretch 

 the agony to temporal infinity, and we confront the orthodox idea 

 of hell." * Mr. Alger maintains that the doctrine of a local hell, 

 a guarded and smoking dungeon of the damned, ought not to be 

 regarded as a truth contained in a revelation from God, because 

 it is plainly proved by historic evidence to be a part of the my- 

 thology of the world, a natural product of the poetic imagina- 

 tion of ignorant and superstitious men.f 





-*-♦-♦- 



THE DISCOVERY OF INVISIBLE WORLDS. 



By Dr. KLEIN. 



SOME discoveries have very recently been made in the starry 

 heavens which must be regarded, not only in what they are 

 of themselves, but also on account of the way in which they 

 were made, as among the most interesting of scientific events. It 

 seems, in fact, like a contradiction to say that astronomers in 

 Europe and America have been able to determine the velocity of 

 motion, size, and weight of stars that are not visible in any tele- 

 scope, and which no telescope to be made in the future, no matter 

 how great its power may be, will be able to show. The new sci- 

 ence also has the peculiar property that it recognizes mutual rela- 

 tions between objects apparently lying far from one another, con- 

 nects with one another phenomena which appear to have no com- 



* Future Life, preface to the tenth edition. f Future Life, p. 699. 



