in doing so, to have escaped the torment
and misery of Hell. There was a time when Hell was taken very
seriously; but the idea of never-ending torment and misery is found,
when steadily faced, to be so intolerable that popular thought, even
in religious circles, is now turning away from it; and so loosely do
men sit, in these "degenerate days," to the old doctrine of eternal
punishment, that "to die" and "to go to heaven" are becoming
interchangeable terms. But if all men are to be admitted to Heaven
(or to its ante-room, Purgatory) at the end of this, their one
earth-life, it is clear that there can be no causal connection
between conduct and salvation. For though there may be degrees of
happiness in Heaven to reward the varying degrees of virtue on
earth, all these are dwarfed to nothing by the unimaginable abyss
of difference which yawns between Heaven and Hell; and the
practical upshot of the current eschatology is that all men--the
self-sacrificing equally with the self-indulgent, the kind and
compassionate equally with the hard-hearted, the spiritually-minded
equally with the worldly, the aspiring equally with the
indifferent--are to reap the same reward. If a man is a notoriously
evil liver, those who have suffered at his hands or been violently
scandalised by his conduct may perhaps find a sombre pleasure in
consigning him to Hell, which, indeed, might otherwise have to put
up its shutters. But though the doors of Heaven may be closed against
a few exceptional scoundrels, they are nowadays thrown open to all
the rest of Mankind; and the maxim, "Live anyhow, and you will be
saved somehow," seems to sum up with tolerable accuracy the popular
attitude towards the twofold problem of duty and destiny.

I do not for a moment suggest that this happy-go-lucky eschatology is
formally countenanced by the Churches and Sects. They would doubtless
repudiate it with indignation; but the fact remains that their
own teaching is largely responsible for it. For not only is the
idea of _natural_ retribution wholly foreign to the genius of
supernaturalism, but also, in the two great schools of Western
theology, there is, and always has been, a strong tendency to
undervalue conduct (in the broad, human sense of the word), and to
make the means of salvation mechanical rather than vital. At any rate
the sacramental teaching of the Catholic Church, and the Calvinistic
doctrine of salvation through faith in the finished work of Christ