the two are
fundamentally the same, and the pagan had earlier possession of
the field.

Furthermore, in the early ages, and among people where castes were
prominent, when the learning, culture, and power were confined to
one class at the expense of others, it is unquestionable that
copious and fearful descriptions of the future state were spread
abroad by those who were interested in establishing such a dogma.
The haughtiness and selfishness of the hierarchic spirit, the
exclusiveness, cruelty, and cunning tyranny of many of the ancient
priesthoods, are well known. Despising, hating, and fearing the
people, whom they held in abject spiritual bondage, they sought to
devise, diffuse, and organize such opinions as would concentrate
power in their own hands and rivet their authority. Accordingly,
in the lower immensity they painted and shadowed forth the lurid
and dusky image of hell, gathering around it all that was most
abominated and awful. Then they set up certain fanciful
conditions, without the strict observance of which no one could
avoid damnation. The animus of a priesthood in the structure of
this doctrine is shown by the glaring fact that in the old
religions the woes of hell were denounced not so much upon bad men
who committed crimes out of a wicked heart, as upon careless men
who neglected priestly guidance and violated the ritual. The
omission of a prayer or an ablution, the neglect of baptism or
confession, a slight thrown upon a priest, a mental conception
differing from the decree of the "Church," would condemn a man far
more surely and deeply into the Egyptian, Hindu, Persian,
Pharisaic, Papal, or Calvinistic hell than any amount of moral
culpability according to the standard of natural ethics.

1 See Pope's translation of the Viraf Nameh. Also the Dabistan,
vol. i. pp. 295-304, of the translation by Shea and Troyer; and
Coleman's Mythology of the Hindus, chapter on the hells.

The popular hells have ever been built on hierarchic selfishness,
dogmatic pride, and personal cruelty, and have been walled around
with arbitrary and traditional rituals. Through the breaches made
in these rituals by neglect, souls have been plunged in. The
Parsee priest describes a woman in hell "beaten with stone clubs
by two demons twelve miles in size, and compelled to continue
eating a basin of putridity, because once some of her hair, as she
combed it, fell into the sacred fire." The Brahmanic priest tells
of a man