wn-trodden,
and the infinitely comfortable assurance of the mystic, firm as
hypnotic conviction, that he is the direct associate and instrument of
the Almighty, whether submissive or arrogant, from Stephen to the Bab,
from Cromwell and Gordon to Bismarck and his Imperial associates,
such a man might well say: "I wish I could be so magnificently
self-confident, so untroubled by doubt. But I can't, for I have to
ask: Is it true?; and I find that these persons base themselves upon
very questionable grounds."

True, that in regard to the place of good and evil in this world the
best theological teachers--

substantially recognize these realities of things, however
strange the forms in which they clothe their conceptions. The
doctrines of predestination, of original sin, of the innate
depravity of man and the evil fate of the greater part of the
race, of the primacy of Satan in this world, of the essential
vileness of matter, of a malevolent Demiurgus subordinate to
a benevolent Almighty, who has only lately revealed himself,
faulty as they are, appear to me to be vastly nearer the truth
than the "liberal" popular illusions that babies are all born
good, and that the example of a corrupt society is responsible
for their failure to remain so; that it is given to everybody
to reach the ethical ideal if he will only try; that all
partial evil is universal good, and other optimistic figments,
such as that which represents "Providence" under the guise of
a paternal philanthropist, and bids us believe that everything
will come right (according to our notions) at last.

...I am a very strong believer in the punishment of certain
kinds of actions, not only in the present, but in all the
future a man can have, be it long or short. Therefore in hell,
for I suppose that all men with a clear sense of right
and wrong (and I am not sure that any others deserve such
punishment) have now and then "descended into hell" and
stopped there quite long enough to know what infinite
punishment means. And if a genuine, not merely subjective,
immortality awaits us, I conceive that, without some
such change as that depicted in the fifteenth chapter of
_Corinthians_, immortality must be eternal misery. The fate of
Swift's Struldbrugs seems to me not more horrible than that of
a mind imprisoned for ever within the _flammantia moenia_