oppressed and baited
man's revenge. Sleep itself hardly brought greater balm that the
thought of this large engulfing doom for opprobrious neighbours. It
would be unfair, on the other hand, to suggest that the ordinary
Christian ever believed in Hell save in honest misery of heart. "O,
Lord," an old lay evangelist used to pray in the homes he visited,
"shake these Thy children over Hell-fire, but shake them in marcy!"
There you have the voice of one who regarded Hell, not with glee as
the end of his enemies, but with desperate earnestness as a necessary
moral agency--who believed that men must be terrorised into virtue or
never know virtue at all. And, it is interesting to note, a clerical
correspondent has been writing to the _Daily News_ expressing the same
gloomy view. This writer declares, as the fruit of long experience,
that he has never known a case of a man's being converted except
through fear. It is common enough, too--or used to be--to hear
church-going young men profess that if they did not believe in Hell,
they would amaze the earth with their lusts and exploits. Viewed in
this light, the Devil becomes the world's super-policeman, and those
who seek to abolish him will naturally be looked on as dangerous
anarchists who would destroy the foundations of the law. As for that,
it would be foolish to deny the great part played by fear in the lives
both of sinners and saints, but whether morality is ultimately served
by our being afraid of the wrong things is a question that calls for
consideration. Certainly, Hell has produced its crop of devils as well
as of saints upon earth. It was men who believed in Hell who invented
the thumb-screw and the rack, and many of the most fiendish
instruments of torture the world has known.

Whether it is the case that man made Hell because he believed in
torture, or took to torture because he believed in Hell, there is no
denying that the worst period of torture our European civilisation has
known coincided with the time when men believed that God Himself
doomed to savage and eternal torments men, women, and even infants in
the cradle, on the most paltry excuses. And as man's conscience has
more and more decisively forbidden him to use torture as a punishment,
it has also forbidden him to believe that a beneficent Deity could do
such a thing. It may be thought that a beneficent Deity who could
permit cancer and the Putumayo and the factory system at its worst,
might easily en