certain unknown quantities. So words are only the
symbols for imperfectly realized ideas. If by "hell" you understand
what that word means to me--the endlessness of life with nothing in it
that makes life worth while--then, if you still want my opinion, I
think that you will most certainly go there. God will not be angry.
God will not send you there, you will have sent yourself--it will not
be God's punishment laid on you, it will be your punishment laid by you
on yourself. But it is not in you to let that come to pass.

All of the "philosophies of life," as they are called, are, I think,
varieties of two. I suppose Materialism and Idealism cover them.
Those who hold with the first are in the air-tight box of years and
call it life. The others are in the box, too, but they call it time.
And they know that, after all, the box is really not air-tight; each of
them remembers the day when he first discovered that there were cracks
in the box, and the day he learned that one could best see through
those narrow openings by coming up resolutely to the hard necessary
walls that hold one in. Then came the astounding enlightenment that
only a shred of reality was within the cramped prison of the box--just
a darkened, dusty bit--that all the beautiful rest of it lay outside.
These are the ones who, pressing up against the rough walls of the box,
see, through their chinks, the splendor of what lies outside--see it
and know that, one day, they shall have it.

The others, the Materialists, never come near the walls of the box,
except to bang their heads. Their reality is inside. These call life
a thing. The Idealists know that it is a process, and there is not a
tree or a flower or a blade of grass or a road-side weed but proves
them right. It is a process, and the end of it is perfection--nothing
less. The perfection of the physical is approximated to here in this
world, and, after that, the tired hands are folded, and the worn-out
body laid away. But even the very saints of God barely touch, here,
the edges of the possible perfection of the soul. Why, it is that that
lifts us--that possibility of going on and on--out of imaginable
bounds, into glory after glory--until the wisdom of the ages is
foolishness and time has no meaning where, in the reaches of eternity,
the climbing soul thinks with the mind of God.

You were going to cut yourself off from that! At the very start, you
were going to fling away your single