The Destiny of the Soul: A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life

by William Rounseville Alger

In the next place, we maintain, that the doctrine of a local hell, a guarded and smoking dungeon of the damned, ought not to be regarded as a truth contained in a revelation from God, because it is plainly proved by historic evidence to be a part of the mythology of the world, a natural product of the poetic imagination of ignorant and superstitious men. In all ages and lands men have recognized the difference between the good and the bad, merit and crime; have seen that innocence and virtue represented the permanent conditions of human welfare, that guilt and vice represented the insurrection of private or lower and transient desire against public or higher and more lasting good; and have felt that the former deserved to be praised and rewarded, the latter to be blamed and punished. In all ages and all nations society has teemed with devices for the distribution of these returns, prizes to the meritorious, penalties to the derelict. There is scarcely any evil discoverable in nature or inventable in art which has not been used as a means for the punishment of criminals. Enemies captured in battle, or seized by the minions of despots, violators of the laws of the community, arraigned before judicial tribunals, have been in every country subjected to every species of penalty, such as slavery, imprisonment, banishment, fine, stripes, dismemberment. They have been starved, frozen, burned, hung, drowned, strangled by serpents, devoured by wild beasts. The rebellious and hated offenders of the king, while he banquets in his illuminated palace with his faithful servants and favorites around him, are exiled into outer darkness, fettered in dungeons, plied with every conceivable indignity and misery, bastinadoed, bowstrung, or torn in pieces with lingering torture. Here we have the germ of hell. To get the fully developed popular doctrine of hell it is only necessary to concentrate and aggravate the known evils of this world, the horrible sufferings inflicted on criminals and enemies here, and transfer the vindictive and pitiable mass of wretchedness over into the future state as a representation of the doom God has there prepared for his foes. Earthly rulers and their practice, the most impressive scenes and acts experienced among men, have always hitherto furnished the types of thought applied to illustrate the unknown details of the hereafter. The judge orders the culprit to be disgraced, scourged, put in the stocks, or cropped and transported. The sultan hurls those he hates into the dungeon, upon the gibbet or into the flame, with every accompaniment of mockery and pain. So, an imaginative instinct concludes, God will deal with all who offend him. They will be excluded from his presence, imprisoned and tormented forever.

This whole process of comparison and inference, natural as it is, is one prolonged fallacy exemplifying the very essence of all mythological construction in contrast both with inspired perception and logical reasoning. The revealing arrival of a truth in consciousness is when an intuitive thrill announces the action of our faculties in correspondence with some relation in the reality of things. Mythology is the deceptive substitute for this, employed when we arbitrarily project forms of our present experience into the unknown futurity, and then hold the resultant fancies as a rigid belief, or regard them as actual knowledge. This is exactly what has happened in the case of the doctrine of an eternal physical hell beyond the grave. The natural and punitive horrors of the present state have been collected, intensified, dilated, and thrown into the future as a world of unmitigated sin and wrath and anguish, a consolidated image of the vengeance of God on his insurgent subjects.

Now the true desideratum, the only result on which reason can rest, whenever tests are applied to our beliefs, is this: that what is known be scientifically set forth in distinct definitions; that what is unknown be treated provisionally, with theoretic approaches; and that what is absolutely unknowable be fixedly recognized as such. This regulative principle of thought is grossly violated in every particular by the popular belief in a material hell.

Wherever we look at the prevalent doctrines of hell among different peoples, from the rudest to the most refined, we see them reflecting into the penal arrangements of the other world the leading features of their earthly experience of natural, domestic, judicial, and political evils. The hells of the inhabitants of the frigid zones are icy and rocky; those of the inhabitants of the torrid zones are fiery and sandy. Are not the poetic process and its sophistry clear? Nastrond, the hell of the Northmen, is a vast, hideous and grisly dwelling, its walls built of adders whose heads, turned inward, continually spew poison which forms a lake of venom wherein all thieves, cowards, traitors, perjurers and murderers, eternally swim. Is this revelation, science, logic, or is it mythology?

The Egyptian priests taught, and the people seemed to have implicitly trusted the tale, that there was a long series of hells awaiting the disembodied souls of all who had not scrupulously observed the ritual prescribed for them, and secured the pass words and magical formulas necessary for the safe completion of the post mortal journey. The specifications and pictures of the terrors and distresses provided in the various hells are vivid in the extreme, including ingenious paraphrases of every sort of penalty and pang known in Egypt. The same thing may be affirmed with quadruple emphasis of the Hindu doctrine of future punishment. In the Hindu hells, truly, the possibilities of horror are exhausted. To enumerate their sufferings in anything like their own detail would require a large volume. The Vishnu Parana names twenty eight distinct hells, assigning each one to a particular class of sinners; and it adds that there are hundreds of others, in which the various classes of offenders undergo the penalties of their misdeeds. There are separate hells for thieves, for liars, for those who kill a cow, for those who drink wine, for those who insult a priest, and so on. Some of the victims are chained to posts of red hot steel and lashed with flexible flames: others are forced to devour the most horrible filth. Some are mangled and eaten by ravenous birds, others are squeezed into chests of fire and locked up for millions of years. These examples may serve as a small specimen of the infernal ingenuity displayed in the descriptions of the Hindu hells, which are all of one substantial pattern, however varied in the embroidery.

The Parsees hold that when a bad man dies his soul remains by the body three days and nights, seeing all the sins it has ever committed, and anxiously crying, "Whither shall I go? Who will save me?" On the fourth day devils come and thrust the bad soul into fetters and lead it to the bridge that reaches from earth to heaven. The warder of the bridge weighs the deeds of the wicked soul in his balance, and condemns it. The devils then fling the soul down and beat it cruelly. It shrieks and groans, struggles, and calls for help; but all in vain. It is forced on toward hell, when it is suddenly met by a hideous and hateful maiden. It demands, "Who art thou, O, maiden, uglier and more detestable than I ever saw in the world?" She replies, "I am no maiden; I am thine own wicked deeds, O, thou hateful unbeliever furnished with bad thoughts and words." After further disagreeable adventures, the soul is plunged into the abode of the devil, where the darkness and foul odor are so thick that they can be grasped. Fed with horrid viands, such as snakes, scorpions, poison, there the wicked soul must remain until the day of resurrection.

Now, no enlightened Christian scholar or thinker will hesitate with one stroke to brush away all the details of these pagan descriptions of hell, as so much mythological rubbish, leaving nothing of them but the bare truth that there is a retribution for the guilty soul in the future as in the present. But, in the ecclesiastical doctrine of hell, prevalent in Christendom, we see the full equivalents of the baseless fancies and superstitions incorporated in these other doctrines. If the mythological hells of the heathen nations are not a revelation from God, neither is that of the Christians; for they are fundamentally alike, all illustrating the same fallacy of the imaginative association of things known, and the transference of them to things unknown. Not a single argument can the Christian urge in behalf of his local hell which the Scandinavian, the Egyptian, the Hindu or the Persian, would not urge in behalf of his.

We can actually trace the historic development of the orthodox belief in a material hell from its simple beginning to its subsequent monstrousness of detail. The Hebrew Sheol or underworld, the common abode of the dead, is depicted in the Old Testament as a vast, slumberous, shadowy, subterranean realm, gloomy and silent. It grew out of the grave in this manner. The dead man was buried in the ground. The imagination of the survivors followed him there and brooded on the idea of him there. The image of him survived in their minds, as a free presence existing and moving wherever their conscious thought located him. The grave expanded for him, and one grave opened into another adjoining one, and shade was added to shade in the cavernous space thus provided; just as the sepulchres were associated in the burial place, and as the family of the dead were associated in the recollection of the remaining members. Thus Sheol was an imaginative dilatation of the grave.

But it was dark and still; an obscure region of painless rest and peace. How came the notions of punishment, fire, brimstone, and kindred imagery, to be connected with it? We might safely say in general that these ideas were joined with the supposed world of the dead, by the Hebrews, in the same way that a similar result has been reached by almost every other civilized nation, that is, by a reflection into the future state of the retributive terrors experienced here. Since the sharpest torture known to us in this world is that inflicted by fire, it is perfectly natural that men, in imagining the punishments to be inflicted on his victims in the next world by one who has at his command all possible modes of pain, should think of the application of fire there. But happily, we are not left to this possible conjecture.

Few influences sank more deeply into the Hebrew mind then the legend how the earth opened her mouth and swallowed into Sheol, Korah and Dathan and Abiram, the rebels against the authority of Moses, at the same time that fire fell from Jehovah and consumed two hundred and fifty of their confederates. In this story, rebellion against a prophet of God, fire and submersion in Sheol, are fused into one thought as a type of the future punishment of the wicked.