Furthermore, in the early ages, and among people where castes were prominent, when the learning, culture, and power were confined to one class at the expense of others, it is unquestionable that copious and fearful descriptions of the future state were spread abroad by those who were interested in establishing such a dogma. The haughtiness and selfishness of the hierarchic spirit, the exclusiveness, cruelty, and cunning tyranny of many of the ancient priesthoods, are well known. Despising, hating, and fearing the people, whom they held in abject spiritual bondage, they sought to devise, diffuse, and organize such opinions as would concentrate power in their own hands and rivet their authority. Accordingly, in the lower immensity they painted and shadowed forth the lurid and dusky image of hell, gathering around it all that was most abominated and awful. Then they set up certain fanciful conditions, without the strict observance of which no one could avoid damnation. The animus of a priesthood in the structure of this doctrine is shown by the glaring fact that in the old religions the woes of hell were denounced not so much upon bad men who committed crimes out of a wicked heart, as upon careless men who neglected priestly guidance and violated the ritual. The omission of a prayer or an ablution, the neglect of baptism or confession, a slight thrown upon a priest, a mental conception differing from the decree of the "Church," would condemn a man far more surely and deeply into the Egyptian, Hindu, Persian, Pharisaic, Papal, or Calvinistic hell than any amount of moral culpability according to the standard of natural ethics.
1 See Pope's translation of the Viraf Nameh. Also the Dabistan, vol. i. pp. 295-304, of the translation by Shea and Troyer; and Coleman's Mythology of the Hindus, chapter on the hells.
The popular hells have ever been built on hierarchic selfishness, dogmatic pride, and personal cruelty, and have been walled around with arbitrary and traditional rituals. Through the breaches made in these rituals by neglect, souls have been plunged in. The Parsee priest describes a woman in hell "beaten with stone clubs by two demons twelve miles in size, and compelled to continue eating a basin of putridity, because once some of her hair, as she combed it, fell into the sacred fire." The Brahmanic priest tells of a man who, for "neglecting to meditate on the mystic monosyllable Om before praying, was thrown down in 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 downwards and feet upwards, to a chariot of fire and urged onwards with a red hot goad." The Papal priest declares that the schismatic, though the kindest and justest man, at death drops hopelessly into hell, while the devotee, though scandalously corrupt in heart and life, who confesses and receives extreme unction, treads the primrose path to paradise. The Episcopalian priest dooms the dissenter to everlasting woe in spite of every virtue, because he has not known sacramental baptism in the apostolic line. The Arminian priest turns the rationalist over to the penal fires of eternity, because he is in mental error as to the explanation of the Trinity and the Atonement. In every age it has been the priestly spirit, acting on ritual considerations, that has deepened the foundations, enlarged the borders, and apportioned the victims, of hell. The perversions and excesses of the doctrine have grown out of cruel ambition and cunning on one side, and been received by docile ignorance and superstition on the other, and been mutually fed by traditions and fables between. The excessive vanity and theocratic pride of the Jews led them to exclude all the Gentiles, whom they stigmatized as "uncircumcised dogs," from the Jewish salvation. The same spirit, aggravated if possible, passed lineally into Christendom, causing the Orthodox Church to exclude all the heathen, all heretics, and the unbaptized, from the Christian salvation.
A fifth explanation of the wholesale severity and multiplied details of horror, which came to be incorporated with the doctrine of hell, is to be found in the gloomy theories of certain philosophers whose relentless speculations were tinged and moulded by their own recluse misanthropy and the prevailing superstitions of their time. Out of the old asceticism of the East the false spiritualism which regarded matter as the source of evil and this life as a penance arose the dogma of metempsychosis. The consequence of this theory, rigidly carried out, created a descending congeries of hells, reaching from centre to nadir, in correspondence to an ascending congeries of heavens, reaching from centre to zenith. Out of the myth of the Fall sprang the dogma of total depravity, dooming our whole race to hell forever, except those saved by the subsequent artifice of the atonement. Theories conjured up and elaborated by fanciful and bloodless metaphysicians, in an age when the milk of public human kindness was thinned, soured, poisoned, by narrow and tyrannical prejudices, might easily legitimate and establish any conclusions, however unreasonable and monstrous. The history of philosophy is the broad demonstration of this. The Church philosophers, (with exceptions, of course,) receiving the traditions of the common faith, partaking in the superstitions of their age, banished from the bosoms of men by their monastic position, and inflamed with hierarchic pride, with but a faint connection or intercourse between conscience and intellect or between heart and fancy, strove to spin out theories which would explain and justify the orthodox dogmas.
Working with metaphysical tools of abstract reason, not with the practical faculties of life, dealing with the fanciful materials of priestly tradition, not with the solid facts of ethical observation, they would naturally be troubled with but few qualms and make but few reservations, however overwhelming the results of horror at which they might arrive. Habituated for years to hair drawn analyses and superstitious broodings upon the subject, overshadowed by the supernatural hierarchy in which they lived, surrounded by a thick night of ignorance, persecution, and slaughter, it was no wonder they could believe the system they preached, although in reality it was only a traditional abstraction metaphysically wrought up and vivified by themselves. Being thus wrought out and animated by them, who were the sole depositaries of learning and the undisputed lords of thought, the mass of the people, lying abjectly in the fetters of authority, could not help accepting it. Ample illustrations of these assertions will occur to all who are familiar with the theological schemes and the dialectic subtleties of the early Church Fathers and of the later Church Scholastics.
Finally, by the combined power, first, of natural conscience affirming a future distinction between the good and the bad; secondly, of imperfect conceptions of God as a passionate avenger; thirdly, of the licentious fancies of poets drawing awful imaginative pictures of future woe; fourthly, of the cruel spirit and the ambitious plans of selfish priesthoods; and fifthly, of the harsh and relentless theories of conforming metaphysicians, the doctrine of hell, as a located place of manifold terrific physical tortures drawing in vast majorities of the human race, became established in the ruling creeds and enthroned as an orthodox dogma. In some heathen nations the descriptions of the poets, in others the accounts of the priestly books, were held to be inspired revelations. To call them in question was blasphemous. In Christendom the scriptural representations of the subject, which were general moral adaptations, incidentally made, of representations already existing, obtained a literal interpretation, had the stamp of infallibility put on them and immense perverted additions joined to them. Thus everywhere the dogma became associated with the established authority. To deny it was heresy. Heretics were excommunicated, loaded with pains and penalties, and, for many centuries, often put to death with excruciating tortures. From that moment the doctrine was taken out of the province of natural reason, out of the realm of ethical truth. The absurdities, wrongs, and barbarities deducible from it were a part and parcel of it, and not to be considered as any objection to it. No free thought and honest criticism were allowed. Because taught by authority, it must be submissively taken for granted. Henceforth we are not to wonder at the revolting inhumanity of spirit and horribleness of gloating hatred shown in connection with the doctrine; for it was not the independent thought and proper moral spirit of individuals, but the petrified dogma and irresponsible corporate spirit of that towering hierarchy, the Church.
The Church set forth certain conditional offers of salvation. When those offers were spurned or neglected, the Church felt personally insulted and aggrieved. Her servants hurled on the hated heretics and heathen the denunciations of bigotry and the threats of rage. Rugged old Tertullian, in whose torrid veins the fire of his African deserts seems infused, revels with infernal glee over the contemplation of the sure damnation of the heathen. "At that greatest of all spectacles, the last and eternal judgment," he says, "how shall I admire, how laugh, how rejoice, how exult, when I behold so many proud monarchs groaning in the lowest abyss of darkness; so many magistrates liquefying in fiercer flames than they ever kindled against the Christians; so many sage philosophers blushing in red hot fires with their deluded pupils; so many tragedians more tuneful in the expression of their own sufferings; so many dancers tripping more nimbly from anguish than ever before from applause."2 Hundreds of the most accredited Christian writers have shown the same fiendish spirit. Drexel the Jesuit, preaching of Dives, exclaims, "Instead of a lofty bed of down on which he was wont to repose himself, he now lies frying in the flames; his sparkling wine and delicious dainties are taken from him; he is burnt up with thirst, and has nothing for his food but smoke and sulphur." Jeremy Taylor3 says, in that discourse on the "Pains of Hell" where he has lavished all the stores of his matchless learning and all the wealth of his gorgeous imagination in multiplying and adorning the paraphernalia of torture with infinite accompaniments of unendurable pangs and insufferable abominations, "We are amazed at the inhumanity of Phalaris, who roasted men in his brazen bull: this was joy in respect of that fire of hell which penetrates the very entrails without consuming them;" "husbands shall see their wives, parents shall see their children, tormented before their eyes;" "the bodies of the damned shall be crowded together in hell like grapes in a wine press, which press one another till they burst;" "every distinct sense and organ shall be assailed with its own appropriate and most exquisite sufferings." Christopher Love belying his name says of the damned, "Their cursings are their hymns, howlings their tunes, and blasphemies their ditties." Calvin writes, "Forever harassed with a dreadful tempest, they shall feel themselves torn asunder by an angry God, and transfixed and penetrated by mortal stings, terrified by the thunderbolts of God, and broken by the weight of his hand, so that to sink into any gulfs would be more tolerable than to stand for a moment in these terrors." A living divine, Dr. Gardiner Spring, declares, "When the omnipotent and angry God, who has access to all the avenues of distress in the corporeal frame and all the inlets to agony in the intellectual constitution, undertakes to punish, he will convince the universe that he does not gird himself for the work of retribution in vain;" "it will be a glorious deed when He who hung on Calvary shall cast those who have trodden his blood under their feet, into the furnace of fire, where there shall be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth." Thousands of passages like these, and even worse, might easily be collected from Christian authors, dating their utterance from the days of St. Irenaus, Bishop of Lyons, who flamed against the heretics, to the days of Nehemiah Adams, Congregational preacher of Boston, who says, "It is to be feared the forty two children that mocked Elisha are now in hell." 4 There is an unmerciful animus in them, a vindictiveness of thought and feeling, far oh, how far! removed from the meek and loving
2 De Spectaculis, cap. xxx., Gibbon's trans.
3 Contemplations of the State of Man, ch. 6 8.
4 Friends of Christ, p. 149.