But another narrative has been of far greater importance in this direction, namely, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The Cities of the Plain were situated on a sulphur freighted and volcanic soil. They were inhabited by a people specially abandoned to vices, and specially odious to the chosen people of God. When a terrible eruption took place, overwhelming those cities with all their people, and swallowing them under a flood of bituminous flame, ashes and gas, it was natural that the Hebrews in after time should say that Jehovah had rained fire and brimstone from heaven on his enemies, and then that the history should take form in their proud and pious imaginations as a fixed type of the doom of the wicked. So it did.
At a later period the scenes and events in Gehenna, or the Valley of Hinnom in the outskirts of Jerusalem, confirmed this tendency and completed the Jewish picture of hell. In this detested vale the worship of Moloch was once celebrated by roasting children alive in the brazen arms of the god, in whose hollow form a fierce fire was kept up, and around whose shrine gongs were beaten and hymns howled to drown the shrieks of the victims. Here all the refuse and offal of the city was carried and consumed, in a conflagration whose fire was never quenched, and amidst an uncleanness whose worms never died. This imagery, too, was cast over into the future state as a representation of the fate awaiting the wicked.
Still further, it was the custom of some Oriental kings to have criminals of an especially revolting character, or the objects of their own particular hatred, flung into a furnace of fire, and there burned alive before the eyes of their judges. The example of this given in the Book of Daniel, where Nebuchadnezzar had the furnace heated seven times hotter than was wont, and ordered Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego cast into it, furnished both the Jews and the Christians with another type of the punishment of hell. So striking an image could hardly fail to take effect, and to be often reproduced. It occurs repeatedly in the New Testament. The old dragon, the devil, as the Apocalypse says, is to be chained and cast into a furnace of fire. In the writings of the Church fathers, and in the visions of the monks of the Middle Age, this image constantly occupies a conspicuous place. And thus, finally, the common notion of hell became an underground world of burning brimstone, an enormous furnace or lake of fire, full of fiends and shrieking souls.
Tundale, an Irish monk of the Twelfth century, describes the devil in the midst of hell, fastened to a blazing gridiron by red hot chains, The screams echo from the rafters, but with his hands he seizes lost souls, crushes them like grapes between his teeth, and with his breath draws them down the fiery caverns of his throat. Some of the damned the chronicler describes as suspended by their tongues, some sawn asunder, some alternately plunged into caldrons of fire and baths of ice, some gnawed by serpents, some beaten on an anvil and welded into one mass, some boiled and strained through a cloth. The defenders of the orthodox doctrine of hell will admit that this terrible picture is mere mythology; but they will say it is the product of a benighted age, and long since outgrown. Yet it is no more mythological than the declarations in the Apocalypse which are still literally accredited by multitudes of the believing. And what shall be said of the following extract from a little book called "The Sight of Hell," recently published with high ecclesiastical endorsement, for circulation among the children of Great Britain and America? The writer, the Rev. J. Furniss, describes the different dungeons of hell, and the passage which we quote is but a fair specimen of the entire series of tracts which he has collected in a volume, and which is having a large sale at this very time. "In the middle of the fourth dungeon there is a boy. His eyes are burning like two burning coals. Two long flames come out of his ears. He opens his mouth, and blazing fire rolls out. But listen! there is a sound like a kettle boiling. The blood is boiling in the scalded veins of that boy. The brain is boiling and bubbling in his head. The marrow is boiling in his bones. There is a little child in a red hot oven. Hear how it screams to come out. See how it turns and twists itself about in the fire. It beats its head against the roof of the oven. It stamps its little feet on the floor. Very likely God saw that this child would get worse and worse, and never repent, and thus would have to be punished much more in hell. So God in his mercy called it out of the world in its early childhood." Of these diabolical horrors, drawn out through hundreds of pages, the orthodox Protestant may say, "Oh, this is only a piece of Popish superstition. We all repudiate it as a most repulsive and absurd fancy."
Well, what then will he say if representations, though perhaps not quite so grossly graphic in circumstance, yet absolutely identical in principle, are set before him from the fresh utterances of hundreds of the most distinguished Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian preachers and theologians? It would be easy to present whole volumes of apposite citations. But two or three will be enough. John Henry Newman in that one of his parochial sermons, entitled, "On the Individuality of the Soul," gives us accounts of hell which for unshrinking detail of materiality will compare with the most frightful passages of Oriental mythology. George Bull, Lord Bishop of Saint Davids, in his volume of sermons declares that all who die with any sin unrepented of, "are immediately consigned to a place and state of irreversible misery a place of horrid darkness where there shines not the least glimmering of light or comfort." Mr. Spurgeon asserts, "There is a real fire in hell a fire exactly like that which we have on earth, except that it will torture without consuming. When thou diest thy soul will be tormented alone in hell: but at the day of judgment thy body shall join thy soul, and then thou wilt have twin hells, body and soul together, each brimfull of pain; thy soul sweating in its inmost pores drops of blood, and thy body, from head to foot, suffused with agony; not only conscience, judgment, memory, all tormented, but thy head tormented with racking pain, thine eyes starting from their sockets with sights of blood and woe; thine ears tormented with horrid noises; thy heart beating high with fever; thy pulse rattling at an enormous rate in agony; thy limbs cracking in the fire, and yet unburned; thyself put in a vessel of hot oil, pained, yet undestroyed. Ah! fine lady, who takest care of thy goodly fashioned face, that fair face shall be scarred with the claws of fiends. Ah! proud gentleman, dress thyself in goodly apparel for the pit; come to hell with powdered hair. It ill becomes you to waste time in pampering your bodies when you are only feeding them to be devoured in the flame. If God be true, and the Bible be true, what I have said is the truth, and you will find it one day to be so." Is not this paragraph a disgusting combination of ignorance and arrogance? It is to be swept aside and forgotten along with the immense mass of similar trash, loathsome mixture of superstition and conceit, with which Christendom has for these many centuries been so cruelly deceived and surfeited.
Tearing off and throwing away from the vulgar doctrine of hell all the incrustation of material errors and poetic symbolism, the pure truth remains that God will forever see that justice is done, virtue rewarded, vice punished. Then the question arises, In what way is this done? Not by the material apparatus of a local hell. For the doctrine of such a penal abode is not only a natural product of the mythological action of the human mind in its development through the circumstances of history, but when regarded in that light it is clearly a false representation. It is a figment incredible to any vigorous, educated and free
mind at the present day. Such reception as it now has it retains by force of an unthinking submission to tradition and authority. In the primitive ages, when the soul was imagined to be a fac simile of the body, only of a more refined substance, capable of becoming visible as a ghost, of receiving wounds, of uttering faint shrieks when hurt, of partaking of physical food and pleasure, it was perfectly natural to believe it susceptible of material imprisonment and material torments. Such was the common belief when the doctrine of a physical hell was wrought out. The doctrine yet lingers by sheer force of prescription and unthinkingness, when the basis on which it originally rested has been dissipated. We know great as our ignorance is, we know that the soul is a pure immateriality. Its manifestations depend on certain physical organs and accompaniments, but are not identical with them. Thought, feeling, will, action, force, desire, these are spirit, and not matter. A pure consciousness cannot be shut up in a dungeon under lock and bolt. A wish cannot be lashed with a whip. A volition cannot be fastened in chains of iron. You may crush or blast the visible organism in connection with which the soul now acts; but no hammer can injure an idea, no flame scorch a sentiment. What the spiritual personality becomes, how it exists, what it is susceptible of, when disembodied, no man knows. It is idle for any man, or any set of men to pretend to know. Unquestionably it is not capable of material confinement and penalties. The gross popular doctrine of hell as the fiery prison house of the devil and his angels, and the condemned majority of mankind, therefore, fades into thin air and vanishes before the truth of the absolute spirituality of mind.
In those early times, when military, political, judicial and convivial phenomena furnished the most imposing and instructive phenomena, before exact science and critical philosophy had given us their fitter moulds and tests of thought, it was unavoidable that men should think of God and Satan as two hostile monarchs, each having his own empire and striving to secure his own subjects, and looking on the subjects of his adversary as foes to be thwarted at all points. But when, with the progress of thought evil is discerned to be a negation, the devil vanishes as a verbal phantom, and the bounds of his local realm are blotted out and blent in the single dominion of the infinite God who regards none as enemies, but is the steady friend and ruler of all creatures, everywhere aiming, not to inflict vengeance on the wicked, but to harmonize the discordant, bringing good out of bad and better out of good in perpetual evolution. Sound theology will see that God is the pervading Creator who governs all from within by the continuous action and reaction between every life and its environing conditions. But mythology puts in place of this the incompetent conception of God as a political king, governing by external edicts and agents, by overt decrees and constables. This deludes us with the local and material hell of superstition, which has no existence in reality. Disordered Function is the open turnpike and metropolis of the real hell of experience. The great king's highway, leading to heaven from every point in the universe is the golden Mean of Virtue; but on the right and left of this broad road two tributary rivers, namely, Defect and Excess, empty into hell. The only true hell is the vindicating and remedial return of resisted law on a being out of tune with some just condition of his nature and destiny. The fearful cruelty and tyranny of the mythological hell, supported by the constant drilling of the people on the part of the priesthood whose vested interests and prejudices are bound up in the doctrine, have held the human race long enough in their bondage of pain and terror. In a Buddhist scripture we read, "The people in hell who are immersed in the Lohakumbha, a copper caldron a thousand miles in depth, boiling and bubbling like rice grains in a cooking pot, once in sixty thousand years descend to the bottom and return to the top. As they reach the surface they utter one syllable of prayer, and sink again on their terrific journey. Those who, during their life on earth, reverence the three jewels, Buddha, the Law and the Priesthood, will escape Lohakumbha!" The same essential doctrine resting on the same inveterate basis, selfish love of power and sensation, still prevails, though diminishingly, among us. When at last in the light of reason and a pure faith it vanishes away what a long breath of relief Christendom and humanity will draw!
If we thus dismiss as a vulgar error the belief in a hell which is a bounded region of physical torture somewhere in outward space, it becomes us to acquire in place of this rejected figment some more just and adequate idea. For a doctrine which has played such a tremendous part in the religious history of the world must be based on a truth, however travestied and overlaid that truth may be. This frightful envelop of superstitious fictions cannot be without some important reality within. In distinction, then, from the monstrous mass of mistakes denoted by it, what is the truth carried in the awful word, hell?
Denying hell to be distinctively any particular locality in time and space, we affirm it to be an experience resulting wherever the spiritual conditions of it are furnished. Accordingly, we are not to exclude it from the present state and confine it to the future, as those seem to do who say that men go to hell after death. Being a personal experience and not a material place, many are in it now and here as much as they ever will be anywhere. Neither are we to exclude it from the future and confine it to the present state, as those do who say that all the hell there is terminates with the emergence of the soul from the body. This might be so, if all sins discords and retributions were bodily. But, plainly, they are not. A mental chaos or inversion of order is as possible as a physical one. Hell is anywhere or nowhere, at any time or at no time, accordingly as the soul carries or does not carry its conditions. We are not to say of the sinner that he goes to hell when he dies, but that hell comes to him when he feels the returns of his evil deeds. It is a state within rather than a place without.