88 



MY LIFE 



[Chap. 



that the orthodox ideas as to His nature and powers cannot 

 be accepted. 



I was also greatly impressed by a tract on " Consistency," 

 written by Robert Dale Owen, the eldest son of Robert 

 Owen, 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 pulpits 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 worldly pleasures and occu- 

 pations would give way to the continual and strenuous 

 effort to escape such a fate. I remember one illustration 

 quoted from a sermon, to enable persons to realize to some 

 extent what eternal punishment meant. After the most 

 terrible description had been given of the unimaginable 

 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 

 diminished, 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 milHons 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 



