nd
finally into the supreme condition which awaits the souls of men; so
that, at death, the souls of good men pass at once into heaven, while the
souls of bad men pass at once into hell; in other words, that the final
and irrevocable severance between the just and the unjust takes place at
death. Believing this, men have lost all faith in an Intermediate State
between death and the Day of Judgment. That intervening sojourn of the
soul has virtually dropped out of recognition in the popular Christianity
of the day, and is quite ignored. If you walk through any resting place
of the bodies of the dead, into your own churchyards and cemeteries, you
will, not seldom, find inscriptions upon tombs, which express the
confident assurance that one, whose death is recorded, has already passed
into heaven; that another has now become an angel of Light, or is singing
the praises of GOD before the throne, is, in short, in the full present
enjoyment of consummate and final bliss. Thus it is that the
Intermediate State between death and the final condition of happiness in
heaven, which can only follow the Day of the Resurrection, is quite
forgotten and overlooked.

2. And the second untruth, which is closely connected with the first, is
this: That there are but two classes of those who pass hence and are no
more seen; classes sharply distinguished, clearly outlined,--on the one
hand, of those who at death go straight to heaven, and, on the other, of
those who at death go straight to the place of final torment. If then
these are the only two clearly marked and sharply defined alternatives,
it follows that, whensoever we dare not be sure of any one soul at death
that it was good enough certainly for heaven, there is nothing for it but
to fear that the worse doom awaits it and that it is lost. For if it is
not, at the moment of death, pure enough or good enough for heaven, into
which there "shall in no wise enter anything that defileth, neither
whatsoever worketh abomination, or maketh a lie," {5} that soul,
according to this false belief, is lost. Yet, in fact, what do we see
within us and around us, as we honestly look into our own lives, and upon
the lives both of the best and of the worst among us? We see this, and
we are convinced that we are not mistaken, that even among the most
marked extremes of good men and evil men, few even of the best are so
free from stain or fault as, at death, to be certainly fit for heaven,
and f