The true meaning of hell is, a state of painful opposition to the will of God, misadjustment of personal constitution with universal order or the rightful conditions of being. This is not, as the vulgar doctrine would make it, an experience of unvarying sameness into which all its subjects are indiscriminately flung. It is a thing of endless varieties and degrees, varying with the individual fitnessess. Hell is pain in the senses, slavery in the will, contradiction or confusion in the intellect, remorse or vain aspiration in the conscience, disproportion or ugliness in the imagination, doubt, fear, and hate in the heart. There is a hell of remorse, forever retreading the path of ruined yesterdays. There is a hell of loss, whose occupant stands gazing on the melancholy might have been transmuted now into a relentless nevermore. Every sinner has a hell as original and idiosyncratic as his soul and its contents. As the ingredients of evil experience are not mixed alike in any, hell cannot be one monotonous fixture for all, but must be a process altering with the different elements and degrees afforded, and softening or ending its wretchedness in proportion as the heavenly elements and degrees of freedom, pleasure, clearness, self approval, beauty, faith and love, furnish the conditions of blessedness. Hell being the consciousness of a soul in which private will is antagonistic to some relation of universal law, its keenness and extent, in every instance, must be measured by the variations of this antagonism. But how does such an antagonism arise? What are the results or penalties of it? How can it be remedied? No amount of reflection will enable any man to penetrate to the bottom of all the mysteries connected with these questions. But though we cannot tell why the principles of our destiny should be as we find them, we can see what the facts of the case actually are as revealed in the history of human experience. And this is what chiefly concerns us. Let us, then, try to penetrate a little more thoroughly into the nature of hell.
The rude definition of heaven and hell, regardless of any special place or time, is respectively the experience of good, and the experience of evil. But what are good and evil? Good is the conscious realization of universal order, the absolute fruition of being, the fulfillment of individual function, in accordance with the conditions for the most perfect and prolonged fulfillment of the universal totality of functions. Supposing that there were only one instance and form of conscious life, with no possibility of conflicting claims within or without, then good would be to that life simply the fulfillment of the functions of its nature. But the moment a being is set in relation with other beings like itself, and also made aware of various gradations of importance among its own interior faculties, then the definition of good is no longer the simple fulfillment of function, or the mere gratification of desire; but it becomes the fulfillment of function in such a manner as to secure the greatest total quality and quantity of fulfilled function. Now evil is the opposite or negation of this. It is whatever lessens the fruition of life, prevents the fulfillment of function, contracts or mars the realization of universal order in the consciousness of a living being. Thus evil is not merely the keeping of an individual desire from its own proper good. But every gratification of desire which involves the winning of a less important good at the expense of a more important one is evil; or, on the other hand, the evil of sacrificing or denying a gratification in itself legitimate, becomes good when it is the means for securing a more authoritative gratification. Let us try to make these abstract statements intelligible by illustration.
The appropriation of nutriment is a good, the indispensable method for sustaining life. It is right that we should eat and drink; and the pleasure which accompanies the proper performance of the function is the reflex approval of the Creator. The refusal fitly to take and relish our food brings debility, disease, pain, and premature death. Whether this refusal results from absorption in other employment or from some superstitious belief, it is a violation of the will of our Maker, and the consequent suffering and dissolution are the retributive hell or reflex signals, painfully pointing out our duty. On the other hand, if the pleasure of gratifying appetite becomes a motive for its own sake and leads to excessive indulgence, the superior good of permanent health and vigor is sacrificed to the far inferior transient good of a tickled palate. Thus, the dyspeptic over loading his stomach is plunged into the horrid hell of nightmare: the gourmand, pampering himself with a diet of spiced meats and Burgundy, shrieks from the twinging hell of gout. There is no divine malice in this. It is simply the rectifying rebound of the distorted arrangements of nature. The law of virtue prescribes in every respect that course of action which, on the whole, permanently and universally, will secure the greatest amount and the best quality of life and experience. Vice is whatever inverts or interferes with this, as when a man exalts a physical impulse above a moral faculty, or incurs years of shame and misery in the future for the sake of some passing gratification in the present. God commands man to rule his passions by reason, not slavishly obey them; to exercise a wisely proportioned self denial to day for the winning of a safer and nobler morrow. The degree in which they do this measures the civilization, wisdom, moral valor, and dignity of men. The failure to do this is the condition on which every infernal penalty or reaction of hellish experience hinges. A man may feed an abnormal craving for opium, until all his once royal powers of body and mind are sacrificed, imbecility and madness set in, and his nervous system becomes a darting box of torments. How much better, according to the aphorism of Jesus, to have cut off this single desire, than for the whole man to be thus cast into hell.
Hell is the retributive reflex or return of disarranged order experienced when in the hieriarchy of man higher grades of faculty and motive are subordinated to lower ones. The miser who gives himself up to a base greed for money, separated from its uses, is thereby degraded into a mechanized, self fed and self consuming passion, having no pleasure, except that of accumulating, hoarding and gloating over the idle emblem of a good never realized. His time and life, his very brain and heart, are coined into an obscene dream of money. He knows nothing of the grandest ranges of the universe, nothing of the sweetest delights of humanity. Contracted, stooping, poorly clad, ill fed, self neglected, despised by everybody, dwelling alone in a bleak and squalid chamber, despite his potential riches, his whole life is a conglomerate of impure fears welded by one sordid lust fear of robbery, fear of poverty, fear of men, fear of God, fear of death, all fused together by a lust for money. Is he not in a competent hell? Who would wish anything worse for him? His vice is the elevation of the love of money above a thousand nobler claims. His unclean and odious experience is the avenging hell which warns the spectators, and would redeem its occupant, if he would open his soul to its lessons. So, when a burglar breaks into a bank and bears off the treasures deposited there, scattering dismay and ruin amidst a hundred families, the essence of his crime is that he makes the narrow principle of his selfish desire paramount over the broad principle of the public welfare, setting the petty good of his individual enrichment above the weighty good represented by that respect for the right of property which is a condition essential to the life of the community. The principle on which he acts, if carried out, would cause the dissolution of society. The evil which he seeks to avoid, his lack of the means of life, is incomparably smaller than the evil he perpetrates, the means for the death of society. The resulting sense of hostility between himself and the community, alienation from his fellow men and from God, fear of detection, actual condemnation by his own conscience, and ideal condemnation by all the world, constitute a hell felt in proportion to the delicacy of his sensibility. The spiritual disturbance and pain thus suffered are the effort of Providence to readjust the inverted relation of his low self interest to the higher interest of the general public, and remove the threatened ruinous consequences of his sin by remedying the order it has disbalanced and broken.
These illustrations have prepared the way for a statement of the true idea of hell in its final formula. The will of God is expressed in that gradation of goods or scale of ranks which indicates the fixed conditions of universal welfare and the accordant forces of the motives which should impel our pursuit of them. To seek these goods in their proper order of importance and authority, every level of function beneath kept subservient to every one above, is the law of salvation, or the pathway of heaven through the universe. To substitute our will for the will of God, the intensity of private desires in place of the dignity of public motives, putting the lower and smaller over the higher and greater, is the law of perdition, or the pathway of hell through the universe.
The lowest function of man is a simple momentary gratification of sense, as, for example, an act of nutrition. The highest function of which his nature is capable is the surrender of himself to the universal order, the sympathetic identification of himself with the eternal law and weal of the whole. Between those vast extremes there are hundreds of intermediate functions, rising in worth and authority from the direct gratifications of appetite to the ideal appropriations of transcendental good, from the titillation given by a pinch of snuff to the thrill imparted by an imaginative contemplation of the redeemed state of humanity a million years ahead. But, throughout the entire range, all the sin and guilt from which hell is produced consist in obeying a lower motive in preference to a higher one, making some narrow or selfish good paramount over a wider or disinterested one. A man, educated as a physician, practiced his profession on scientific principles, and nearly starved on an income of seven hundred dollars a year. He then set up as a quack, compounded a worthless nostrum, and, by dint of impudence, advertising, and other charlatanry, made eighteen thousand dollars a year, and justified his conduct on the ground of his success. By falsehood and cheating he preyed on the credulity of the public. If all men were like him, society could not exist. The meanness of his soul, shutting him out from the most exquisite and exalted prerogatives of human nature, is the revenge which the universe takes on such a man the hell in which God envelops him. A manufacturer turns out certain products by means of a chemical process which adds seven per cent. to his profit, but shortens the average life of his workmen five years. All mankind would indignantly denounce him with an instinctive recognition of his wickedness in thus erecting the profane standard of pecuniary gain above the sacredness of the lives of his brothers. But when of two men in deadly peril from an approaching explosion only one can escape, and the stronger, instead of monopolizing the chance, as he might, stands back and lays down his life in saving the weaker, it is a deed of heroic virtue, applauded by all men, supported by the whole moral creation which derives new beauty and sweetness from it. It radiates a peaceful bliss of self approval through the breast before it is mangled and cold, and fills the soul with a serene joy as it flies to God. The essential merit of such an action is the subjection of that selfishness which is the principle of all sin, and whose recoil is the spring trap of hell, to that disinterestedness which is the germ of redemption and the perfume of heaven.
It is not an unfrequent occurrence for a mixture of heaven and hell to be experienced. Here is an able and upright merchant who is about to fail, in consequence of disasters which he could neither foresee nor prevent, and for which he is in no sense responsible. He shrinks from bankruptcy with inexpressible shame and distress. He is mortified, cut to the quick, robbed of sleep, can hardly look his creditors in the face. Now, he reflects, "This is not my fault. I have been honest, prudent, economical, unwearied in effort, I have done my duty to the best of my ability. God approves me, and all good men would if they knew the exact facts." If that assurance does not shed an element of heaven into his hell, spread a soothing veil of light and oil over his stormy trouble, then it is because his pride is greater than his self respect, his vanity more keen than his conscience is strong, his regard for appearances more influential than his knowledge of the truth. And in that case the misery he suffers is the penalty of his excessive self sensitiveness.
The elements of hell are pain, slavery, imprisonment, rebellion, forced exertion, forced inaction, shame, fear, self condemnation, social condemnation, universal condemnation, aimlessness, and despair. He who seeks good only in the just order of its successive standards, gratifying no lower function, except in subservience to the higher ones, escapes these experiences, feels that he fulfills his destiny, and is an approved freeman of God. The service of truth and good alone makes free; all service of evil is slavery and wretchedness. For freedom is spontaneous obedience to that which has a right to command. The thirsty man who quaffs a glass of cold water does an act of liberty; but he who constantly intoxicates himself in satiation of a morbid and despotic appetite, knows that he is a slave, and feels condemned, and chafes in the hell of his bondage.
The dissipated sluggards and thieves who feed the vices and prey on the interests of the community, writhe under the rebuke of the higher laws they break in enthroning their selfish propensities above the cardinal standards of the public good; and in the stale monotony of their indulgences, they know nothing of the glorious zest shed by the best prizes of existence into the breasts of the virtuous and aspiring, whom every day finds farther advanced on their way to perfection. Envy is the very blast that blows the forge of hell. It sets its victim in painful antagonism with all good not his own, actually turning it into evil; while a generous sympathy appropriates as its own all the foreign good it contemplates. The sight of his successful rival keeps an envious man in a chronic hell, but adds a heavenly enjoyment to the experience of a generous friend. Ignorance, pride, falsehood, and hate are the four master keys to the gates of hell keys which sinners are ever unwittingly using to let themselves in, and then to lock the bolts behind.
A character whose spontaneous motions are upward and outward, from the central and lowermost instincts of self toward the highest and outer most apprehensions of good, exemplifies the law of salvation, which guides the conscious soul in an ascending and expanding spiral through the successively greater spheres of truth and life. The character whose spontaneous tendencies are the reverse of this, moving inward and downward, exemplifies the law of perdition, which guides the soul in a descending and contracting spiral, constantly enslaving it to lower and viler attractions of self in preference to letting it freely serve the superior ranks forever issuing their redemptive behests and invitations above. When the members of a family erect their separate wills as independent laws, instead of harmoniously blending around a common authority of truth and love, when they live in incessant collisions and stormy insubordination, a poisonous fret of irritable vanity gnawing their heart strings, a fiery sleet of hate and scorn hurtling through the domestic atmosphere, the whole household are in perdition. Their home is a concentrated hell. To be without love, without soothing attentions and encouragements, without fresh aims, and a relishing alternation of work and rest, without progress and hope, to be deprived of the legitimate gratifications of the functions of our being, and compelled to suffer their opposites what closer definition of hell can there be than this? And this, while avoided or neutralized by virtue, is, in its various degrees, obviously the inevitable result and penalty of sin.