540 



TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTELY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



Corruption of humanity, a dogma which is of the 

 essence of Christianity, without stimulating the 

 belief in hell, is the hopeless task of proving at 

 once that sin is destructive, and that it has no 

 real existence. 



Canon Farrar may denounce to his heart's con- 

 tent the hell created by savage intolerance, or by 

 the coarse terrorism which outrages the conscience 

 with its elaborate images of physical horror. We 

 may be glad that such denunciations at the pres- 

 ent day imply a cheap show of courage even from 

 an orthodox divine, but the phantasms cannot be 

 finally exorcised so long as the popular imagina- 

 tion is invited and encouraged to dwell upon 

 the future world, and to invert the true order by 

 basing realities upon dreams. Hell, with the lof- 

 tier theologians, meant a stern and righteous ha- 

 tred of sin — a vigorous grasp of the fact that the 

 past is irrevocable, and the future its necessary 

 development — that ill-deeds have consequences 

 reaching forward through all conceivable time, 

 never to be wiped out by any bitterness of repent- 

 ance ; and that, in a world which is one incessant 

 struggle, the triumphant nature must be idealized, 

 not as seated on a throne of everlasting indolence, 

 but with feet planted on the neck of evil, pros- 

 trate, but always ready to burst into renewed ac- 

 tivity upon the least intermission of watchful- 

 ness. Given such sentiments and convictions, 

 and the same method of imaginative projection, 

 they must always be interpreted in the same sym- 

 bolism. Hell must be an integral part of the 

 ideal world so long as the radical convictions of 

 Christianity retain their genuine vitality. Simply 

 to suppress it, is to substitute a vapid optimism 

 which will never satisfy men nourished upon the 

 Christian version of the unmistakable facts of the 

 universe. Eternal damnation is as much a ne- 

 cessity of the imagination as a logical deduction 

 from the fundamental principles of the creed. 



So far, again, as hell was merely a translation 

 into poetical symbols of their genuine beliefs, we 

 must make allowances for the apparently atro- 

 cious language of men like Augustine or even 

 Jonathan Edwards. We pardon a child or a 

 peasant for using language which to us is horri- 

 ble, partly because the immature mind can only 

 use such phrases as infinite and eternal by way 

 of vague superlatives, and partly because it does 

 not so much believe in errors as it fails to distin- 

 guish between belief and fancy. Its discrimina- 

 tion is not logical, but imaginative. The images 

 which it creates are distinguished from the reali- 

 ties which it perceives, not by being less believed 

 in, but by being of a more shadowy texture. The 



same leniency of construction must be extended 

 to great men who were themselves in a more in- 

 fantile stage of mind, or who had inherited infan- 

 tile modes of conception. The underlying emo- 

 tion deserves our respect, although the images 

 which it generated become grotesque and horrible 

 when we have learned to put more bluutly the de- 

 cisive dilemma of fact or fiction. 



The true evil is not that the dreams some- 

 times take hideous shapes, but that all mixture 

 of dreams and realities involves distortion of 

 facts. Dream-land is, of course, the natural em- 

 pire of magic, sacerdotal or other. The phan- 

 toms of the imagination do in fact obey laws dif- 

 ferent from those of reality. In that region 

 fancy determines instead of being determined by 

 fact. A charm cannot turn aside a real bullet, 

 but it may well govern the flight of an imaginary 

 missile. Expiatory rites which dull the pangs of 

 conscience, really release us from the hell which 

 conscience creates. Here, therefore, is the source 

 of all the quack remedies for remorse which as- 

 sume that the past can be wiped out by changing 

 the play of the imagination. Luther was content 

 with abolishing that part of the imaginary world 

 from which priests derived their chief claim to 

 authority. So long as purgatory was admitted, 

 he saw that it would generate the superstitions 

 from which Canon Farrar supposes it to be sepa- 

 rable. Admit that the future state is modifiable, 

 and men will try to modify by the only method 

 available for the imaginary world — some form, 

 namely, of supernatural charm. But Luther's 

 reform still left room for other modes of spiritual 

 quackery. The Protestant could get rid of the 

 hell within him by the simple method of persuad- 

 ing himself that he personally was saved. Con- 

 viction of salvation is salvation in dream-land. 

 If priests had no longer the keys of the next 

 world, the believer could alter his own fate by 

 the paroxysm of excitement which he called a 

 conversion. Such methods do in fact affect a 

 man's dreams, and are inevitably adopted when 

 dream-land is asserted to be the sole reality. 

 The preachers might appeal to good feelings, as 

 the discipline of the Church might be exerted for 

 moral purposes. But the method necessarily 

 generated under certain conditions the corrupt 

 Protestantism which attributed a supernatural 

 value to a mere imaginative change, and the 

 corrupt Catholicism which attributed the same 

 efficacy to external rites. When we abandon 

 ourselves to the guidance of our imagination, wo 

 shall inevitably believe in remedies which have 

 only an imaginary validity. 



