eful gods both
lead to the theoretic construction of a hell, and to the growth of
doctrines and parables about it, though in a different sort, the
former illustrating a pervasive law which distributes men
according to their deserts, the latter speaking of beings with
human passions, who inflict outward arbitrary penalties according
to their pleasure.

Thirdly, when the general idea of a hell has once obtained
lodgment, it is rapidly nourished, developed, and ornamented,
carried out into particulars by poets, rhetoricians, and popular
teachers, whose fancies are stimulated and whose figurative views
and pictures act and react both upon the sources and the products
of faith. Representations based only on moral facts, emblems
addressing the imagination, after a while are received in a
literal sense, become physically located and clothed with the
power of horror. A Hindu poet says, "The ungrateful shall remain
in hell as long as the sun hangs in heaven." An old Jewish Rabbi
says that after the general judgment "God shall lead all the
blessed through hell and all the damned through paradise, and show
to each one the place that was prepared for him in each region, so
that they shall not be able to say, 'We are not to be blamed or
praised; for our doom was unalterably fixed beforehand.' Such
utterances are originally moral symbols, not dogmatic assertions;
and yet in a rude age they very easily pass into the popular mind
as declaring facts literally to be believed. A Talmudic writer
says, "There are in hell seven abodes, in each abode seven
thousand caverns, in each cavern seven thousand clefts, in each
cleft seven thousand scorpions; each scorpion has seven limbs, and
on each limb are seven thousand barrels of gall. There are also in
hell seven rivers of rankest poison, so deadly that if one touches
it he bursts." Hesiod, Homer, Virgil, have given minute
descriptions of hell and its agonies, descriptions which have
unquestionably had a tremendous influence in cherishing and
fashioning the world's faith in that awful empire. The poems of
Dante, Milton, and Pollok revel in the most vivid and terrific
pictures of the infernal kingdom and its imagined horrors; and the
popular doctrine of future punishment in Christendom is far more
closely conformed to their revelations than to the declarations of
the New Testament. The English poet's "Paradise Lost" has
undoubtedly exerted an influence on the popular faith comparable
with th