t of intolerable moral difficulties
inseparable from the doctrine. First, that every sin is infinite
in ill-desert and in result, _because_ it is committed against an
infinite Being. Thus the fretfulness of a child is an infinite evil!
I was aghast that I could have believed it. Now that it was no longer
laid upon me as a duty to uphold the infinitude of God's retaliation
on sin, I saw that it was an immorality to teach that sin was measured
by anything else than the heart and will of the agent. That a finite
being should deserve infinite punishment, now was manifestly as
incredible as that he should deserve infinite reward,--which I had
never dreamed.--Again, I saw that the current orthodoxy made Satan
eternal conqueror over Christ. In vain does the Son of God come from
heaven and take human flesh and die on the cross. In spite of him, the
devil carries off to hell the vast majority of mankind, in whom, not
misery only, but _Sin_ is triumphant for ever and ever. Thus Christ
not only does not succeed in destroying the works of the devil, but
even aggravates them.--Again: what sort of _gospel_ or glad tidings
had I been holding? Without this revelation no future state at all (I
presumed) could be known. How much better no futurity for any, than
that a few should be eternally in bliss, and the great majority[2]
kept alive for eternal sin as well as eternal misery! My gospel then
was bad tidings, nay, the worst of tidings! In a farther progress of
thought, I asked, would it not have been better that the whole race of
man had never come into existence? Clearly! And thus God was made
out to be unwise in creating them. No _use_ in the punishment was
imaginable, without setting up Fear, instead of Love, as the ruling
principle in the blessed. And what was the moral tendency of the
doctrine? I had never borne to dwell upon it: but I before long
suspected that it promoted malignity and selfishness, and was the real
clue to the cruelties perpetrated under the name of religion. For he
who does dwell on it, must comfort himself under the prospect of his
brethren's eternal misery, by the selfish expectation of personal
blessedness. When I asked whether I had been guilty of this
selfishness, I remembered that I had often mourned, how small a part
in my practical religion the future had ever borne. My heaven and my
hell had been in the present, where my God was near me to smile or to
frown. It had seemed to me a great weakness in my fa