"Men create their God after their own image," says Mr. Stigand in his "Life of Heine"; and it is a fact that the conception of God changes with the manners and morals of a people. To our Puritan forefathers He was a just but awful Judge, who, from His home in the vast abysses of space, kept an unwinking watch upon us, His creatures, and, with eyes of telescopic minuteness, noted every breach of His commandments, in order that He might visit it with a fiery and fearful vengeance. That man-created God is no more: He is dead, and another God reigns in His stead; but in our natural reaction from the conception of the vindictive God of past generations, we have come, in these days, to lose sight of the fact that our God is a chastening one. Not only have we turned a deaf ear to the thunders and the threats of old-fashioned orthodoxy, with its talk of everlasting punishment and lakes of brimstone, but many of us pooh-pooh the thought of a hell at all, and speak of God as though He were a good-natured and weakly-indulgent parent, on whose leniency we might lightly presume, forgetting that sin—unrepented sin—never can and never must go unpunished.
It was in this contemptuously indifferent way that one whom I knew well on earth was accustomed to speak. He was a man of free and open disposition, with a perfect genius for friendship, but his life would not bear too close an inquiry. I remember his being warned in my presence of the punishment which must await the course he was pursuing, and his answering, as I had often heard him answer before, that even if he were on the road to hell (if, indeed, such a place existed, which he was inclined to doubt), he had at least the consolation of knowing that plenty of other "good fellows" were bound for the same destination, and that he was quite sure that he should feel more at home among the sinners in hell than he should among the saints in heaven.
Well, when I was in hell, I saw a sight there which is worth recording as an example of the ingenuity of the Devil in apportioning to each person the punishment best fitted to his individual case. I say "of the Devil," because I learned that he has a part (under certain restrictions and by Divine permission) in the imposition of necessary chastisement, and he is therefore an unwitting worker in the kingdom of heaven. He has indeed been such a worker from the beginning, for in spite of his serpent-like cunning and subtlety, he was the first fool, and will be the last. The acknowledged and ancient enemy of God, he is and has been playing into the hands of the Almighty for ages, and among all fools none is so simple a fool as he.
The sight, then, to which I have referred was that of a desolate plain, low-lying and unlighted, and in the centre of it there roamed one who called out ever and anon, as if in search of a companion, but to whom there came no answer save the distant echo of his own cry. A more lonely and lifeless spot I have never seen. The silence which brooded over the place seemed sometimes to oppress the forsaken wanderer like a presence, for, with a half-affrighted and despairing cry, he set off at a panic-stricken run, as if seeking to escape this silence by flight; but, notwithstanding his haste, he made, I observed, no progress, for he was but moving round and round in one continuous ring. Of this, however, he seemed unaware; for once, when he passed near me, I heard him cry out as if in despair, "Is there no living soul in all this void and voiceless desert?" And, as he hurried by, and I caught a sight of his face, I saw that it was the face of the man who had said that hell would not be hell to him so long as he and his boon companions were together.
Another former acquaintance that I met there interested me even more. He was a man whom I had always regarded as deeply religious, and his presence in hell (by which I mean as one who was undergoing punishment) was to me the greater cause for surprise.
"What is it," I said to him, "that brings you here? not impurity, surely? and I cannot think of any other reason."
"No," he answered, "it is not impurity, for that was never one of my failings. To this day, I am unable to understand the relish with which most young men (and occasionally, be it said with shame, those who are not young) listen to the kind of conversation which is current sometimes in the smoking-room. We hold our handkerchiefs to our noses when we pass a place where there is an unpleasant odour, and turn hastily away if we come upon a repulsive sight; and impure talk affects me always as does a disgusting object or a nauseous smell.
"You are surprised at finding me here in hell, because you have always believed me to be one who thought much and felt deeply on religious subjects. But you forget that to have religious feeling, and to act upon religious principle, are in many ways distinct. There are men who, though they are naturally incapable of lofty thought, would scorn to do anything immoral or mean; and, on the other hand, there are men who feel intensely on all religious subjects, who pray fervently and often, sing hymns with eyes streaming with tears of heartfelt earnestness, and yet their actions are not seldom unworthy, and their lives will not bear too close an inquiry. 'There is no self-delusion more fatal,' as Mr. Lowell has said, 'than that which makes the conscience dreamy with the anodyne of lofty sentiment, while the life is grovelling and sensual.' It is a delusion which bids a man close his eyes lest he see where he is going; it comes to him with its harlot-beauties daintily draped in the robes of an angel of light, and sings hymns before the very gates of hell. It is because I am one who so deluded, or who tried so to delude himself, that you and I meet here to-day. We set out together with the broad path and the narrow path before us. You, by one fatal and irrevocable step, swerved to the broad path from the narrow, and that single step plunged you headlong and hopeless into this abyss. And I, well, I appeared to myself and to others to be walking in the narrow way; and yet, by the making of continual divergences, so trifling as to seem of but little or no account, I find myself eventually in the same awful abyss that you are in, and on a level fully as loathsome as your own. Though I have committed no such crime as you have committed, I was, in the petty details of my daily life, habitually untrue; and so the time came at last, in which, with every desire to serve God faithfully and to follow the dictates of conscience, I found that the power to make my will subservient to my wishes had slipped unnoticed from me. Habit has the strength of a giant, for good as well as for evil, and the will to do right on every occasion is as much a matter of training as is mere physical strength. The man who is habitually untrue in small things, cannot, even though he wish it, do right in great ones, any more than the man of untrained muscle can, by a mere exercise of volition, lift weights which would try the practised athlete. The only way in which to become Christlike is not to endeavour to feel so, not to seek to arouse sentiment or emotion (as drunkards fly for strength to stimulants), but to make Christliness the persistent and unconditional habit of our lives. We must learn day by day to resist the first rising of a desire to do, or to say, or to think, that which we know diverges by the hundredth part of an inch from the path which conscience would have us to walk; and we must so school ourselves that we can, by sheer force of will, rise above the mood of the moment, so that we act not by impulse or by inclination, but by conscience."
He stopped, and, reading my thoughts, said, in reply to them: "Yes, there is, indeed, something grimly humorous in my setting up to preach to others; but it cost me my hope of heaven, and a lifetime, to learn the lesson, and God knows I have it by heart at last! One more illustration and I have done. Let us suppose that you and I are standing on the deck of a ship which is steering straight for a certain haven, and that you put your hand on the helm and shift her a fraction of an inch from the line on which she is running. The angle at which you have swerved from that line may be so utterly infinitesimal that it might be measured by a hair's breadth, but let that angle be carried out to its ultimate destination, and you will be borne miles and miles away from the harbour for which you are bound.