apters of human life till the book is burnt
and a new volume opens.

VI

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF HELL

It is significant of the change that has come over the religious
imagination that a number of representative clergymen have issued a
manifesto of disbelief in Hell and no heresy-hunt has begun. Disbelief
in Hell, it must in fairness be added, not as a symbol of something
sufficiently real, but as a definite place on the map of the Universe,
a gulf of wild flame and red-hot torments without end. There was a
time when to doubt any jot or tittle in the scenery and rhetoric of
Hell would have been thought a kind of atheism, and a world without
Hell would have seemed to many religious minds almost as lonely as a
world without God. Life was conceived chiefly in terms of Hell. It was
a kind of tight-rope walk across a bottomless pit of shooting fires
and the intolerable wailing of the damned. Heaven was sought less
almost for its proper delights than as an escape from the malignance
of the demons in this vast torture-chamber. Hell, indeed, was the most
desperately real of countries. For centuries men studied its
geography with greater zeal of research than we devote to-day to the
geography of Africa. They described its rule and estimated its
population, one author, with how much belief I know not, detailing the
names of seventy-two of its princes with 7,405,926 devils serving
them. In _The Apocalypse of St Peter_, which is as old at least as the
second century, the occupations of the damned are set forth with a
horrid carefulness. Hell is depicted as a continent of lakes of fire
and burning mud, over which adulterers hang by the hair and
blasphemers of the way of righteousness by the tongue. False witnesses
chew tongues of fire in their mouths. Misers roll on red-hot stones
sharper than spikes. Men who have committed unnatural crimes are
endlessly hurled from the top of dreadful crags. And this is but one
of the first of a long line of visions of the hereafter which
appeared, like the season's fruits, all through the early Christian
centuries and the Middle Ages, and achieved their perfect statement in
Dante. Every new writer sought out the most exquisite torments a
sensational imagination could invent, and added them to the picture of
the daily life of Hell and Purgatory. The Monk of Evesham saw in his
dream of Purgatory men being fried in a pan and others "pierced with
fiery nails even to their bones and to the