other hand, eternal death
is not to know God, and therefore not to care for His law of love,
and therefore to be without love; as it is written on the other
hand, 'He that loveth not his brother abideth in death.' 'Whosoever
hateth his brother is a murderer;' and ye know that no murderer hath
eternal life abiding in him; and again, 'He that loveth not, knoweth
not God, for God is love.' Eternal death, then, is to love no one;
to be shut up in the dark prison-house of our own wilful and wayward
thoughts and passions, full of spite, suspicion, envy, fear; in
fact, in one word, to be a devil. Oh, my friends, is not that
damnation indeed, to be a devil here on earth, and for aught we
know, for ever and ever?

Do you not know what frame of mind I mean? Thank God, none of us, I
suppose, is ever utterly without some grain of love left for some
one; none of us, I suppose, is ever utterly shut up in himself; and
as long as there is love there is life and as long as there is life
there is hope: but yet there have been moments when one has felt
with horror how near, and how terrible, and how easy was this same
eternal death which some fancy only possible after they die.

For, my friends, were you ever, any one of you, for one half hour,
completely angry, completely _sulky_? displeased and disgusted with
everybody and everything round you, and yet displeased and disgusted
with yourself all the while; liking to think everyone wrong, liking
to make out that they were unjust to you; feeling quite proud at the
notion that you were an injured person: and yet feeling in your
heart the very opposite of all these fancies: feeling that you were
wrong, that you were unjust to them, and feeling utterly ashamed at
the thought that they were the injured persons, and that you had
injured them. And perhaps, to make all worse, the person about whom
all this storm had arisen in your heart, was some dear friend or
relation whom you loved (strange contradiction, yet most true) at
the very moment that you were trying to hate. Oh, my friends, if
one such dark hour has ever come home to you; if you have ever let
the sun go down upon your wrath, and so given place to the devil,
then you know something at least of what eternal death is. You know
how, in such moments, there is a worm in the heart, and a fire in
the heart, compared with which all bodily torment would be light and
bearable; a worm in the heart which does not die: and a fire in