88 MY LIFE 



and as a writer superior in style and ability to his father. The 

 chief subject of it was to exhibit the horrible doctrine of eternal 

 punishment as then commonly taught from thousands of pul- 

 pits by both the Church of England and Dissenters, and to 

 argue that if those who taught and those who accepted such 

 dogmas thoroughly believed them and realized their horror, 

 all wordly pleasures and occupations would give way to the 

 continual and strenuous effort to escape such a fate. I re- 

 member one illustration quoted from a sermon, to enable per- 

 sons to realize to some extent what eternal punishment 

 meant. 



After the most terrible description had been given of the un- 

 imaginable torments of hell-fire, we were told to suppose that 

 the whole earth was a mass of fine sand, and that at the end of 

 a thousand years one single grain of this sand flew away into 

 space. Then — we were told — let us try to imagine the slow 

 procession of the ages, while grain by grain the earth dimin- 

 ished, but still remained apparently as large as ever, — and still 

 the torments went on. Then let us carry on the imagination 

 through thousands of millions of millions of ages, till at last 

 the globe could be seen to be a little smaller — and then on and 

 on, and on for other and yet other myriads of ages, till after 

 periods which to finite beings would seem almost infinite the 

 last grain flew away, and the whole material of the globe 

 was dissipated in space. And then, asked the preacher, is the 

 sinner any nearer the end of his punishment ? No ! for his 

 punishment is to be infinite, and after thousands of such globes 

 had been in the same way dissipated, his torments are still 

 to go on and on for ever ! I myself had heard such horrible 

 sermons as these in one of the churches in Hertford, and a 

 lady we knew well had been so affected by them that she had 

 tried to commit suicide. I therefore thoroughly agreed with 

 Mr. Dale Owen's conclusion, that the orthodox religion of the 

 day was degrading and hideous, and that the only true and 

 wholly beneficial religion was that which inculcated the serv- 

 ice of humanity, and whose only dogma was the brotherhood 

 of man. Thus was laid the foundation of my religious 

 scepticism. 



