EDITOR'S TABLE. 



629 



To one or other of these places, it was 

 held, all men are bound to go after 

 death ; but to which depended and 

 here the office of the priesthood assumed 

 a terrible importance, for they knew 

 all about it, and had the keys. It is 

 impossible to conceive any other idea 

 of such tremendous power for domi- 

 nating mankind as this ! It raised the 

 priesthood and ecclesiastical institutions 

 into despotic ascendency, brought it 

 into unholy alliance with civil despot- 

 isms, and became the mighty means of 

 plundering the people, crushing out 

 their liberties, darkening their hopes, 

 and cursing their lives. So productive 

 an agency of unscrupulous ambition 

 could not fail to be assiduously culti- 

 vated, and the conception of hell, the 

 most potent element in the case by its 

 appeal to fear, was elaborated with the 

 utmost ingenuity. Language was ex- 

 hausted in depicting the terrors of the 

 infernal regions and the agonies of the 

 damned. "We by no means say that 

 these ideas were mere priestly inven- 

 tions, but only that they grew up under 

 the powerful guidance of a class conse- 

 crated to their exposition, and incited 

 by the most powerful worldly motives 

 to strengthen their influence. In order 

 to enforce belief, to compel obedience 

 to ecclesiastical requirements, to coerce 

 civil submission, and to extort money, 

 people were threatened with the hor- 

 rors of hell, which were pictured with 

 all the vividness of rhetorical and po- 

 etic fanaticism. As the hierarchical 

 spirit grew in strength, and became a 

 tyrannical rule, obedience to its mi- 

 nutest rites was enforced by the most ap- 

 palling intimidations. To neglect some 

 trivial ceremony was sufficient to incur 

 damnation. Alger says, in his " His- 

 tory of the Doctrine of a Future Life : " 

 " The Brahmanic priest tells of a man 

 who, for neglecting to meditate on the 

 mystic monosyllable Om before praying, 

 was thrown down into hell, on an iron 

 floor, and cleaved with an axe, then 

 stirred in a caldron of molten lead till 



covered all over with the sweated foam 

 of torture, like a grain of rice in an 

 oven, and then fastened, with head 

 downward and feet upward, to a chariot 

 of fire, and urged onward with a red- 

 hot goad." 



In noticing the causes of the extent, 

 influence, and perpetuity of this sombre 

 belief, we must not forget that the fu- 

 ture life, being beyond experience and 

 inaccessible to reason, offers an attrac- 

 tive play-ground for the unbridled im- 

 agination. It opens an infinite realm for 

 sensuous imagery and creative inven- 

 tion, stirs the deepest feelings, and con- 

 cerns itself with the mystery of human 

 destiny. It accordingly offers a favorite 

 topic for poetic treatment, and this is 

 more especially true of the darker as- 

 pects of the future world, poets having 

 ever taken with avidity to delineations 

 of hell. From Hesiod to Pollok, pa- 

 gans and Christians have vied with each 

 other in their poetical representations 

 of the tortures and terrors of the infer- 

 nal state. The mythological form of 

 the doctrine figures largely in the great 

 epics of Greece and Eome; the Italian 

 " Inferno " pictures the Christian hell 

 with terrible intensity, and the grand 

 poem of the English language, " Para- 

 dise Lost," has hell at the root of its 

 plot, and hell's master for its hero. 

 Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton, work- 

 ing through poems of immortal genius 

 that have fascinated mankind, some of 

 them through thousands of years, and 

 others through centuries, have thus 

 combined to familiarize countless mill- 

 ions of people with the conception, and 

 to stamp it deep in the literature of all 

 countries. 



Yet the doctrine of hell is now grow- 

 ing obsolete. Originating in ages of 

 savagery and low barbarism, and de- 

 veloped in periods of fierce intoler- 

 ance, sanguinary persecutions, cruel 

 civil codes, and vindictive punishments, 

 it harmonized with the severities and 

 violence of society, and undoubtedly 

 had use as a means of the harsh dis- 



