who, for "neglecting to meditate on the mystic
monosyllable Om before praying, was thrown down in hell on an iron
floor and cleaved with an axe, then stirred in a caldron of molten
lead till covered all over with the sweated foam of torture like a
grain of rice in an oven, and then fastened, with head downwards
and feet upwards, to a chariot of fire and urged onwards with a
red hot goad." The Papal priest declares that the schismatic,
though the kindest and justest man, at death drops hopelessly into
hell, while the devotee, though scandalously corrupt in heart and
life, who confesses and receives extreme unction, treads the
primrose path to paradise. The Episcopalian priest dooms the
dissenter to everlasting woe in spite of every virtue, because he
has not known sacramental baptism in the apostolic line. The
Arminian priest turns the rationalist over to the penal fires of
eternity, because he is in mental error as to the explanation of
the Trinity and the Atonement. In every age it has been the
priestly spirit, acting on ritual considerations, that has
deepened the foundations, enlarged the borders, and apportioned
the victims, of hell. The perversions and excesses of the doctrine
have grown out of cruel ambition and cunning on one side, and been
received by docile ignorance and superstition on the other, and
been mutually fed by traditions and fables between. The excessive
vanity and theocratic pride of the Jews led them to exclude all
the Gentiles, whom they stigmatized as "uncircumcised dogs," from
the Jewish salvation. The same spirit, aggravated if possible,
passed lineally into Christendom, causing the Orthodox Church to
exclude all the heathen, all heretics, and the unbaptized, from
the Christian salvation.

A fifth explanation of the wholesale severity and multiplied
details of horror, which came to be incorporated with the doctrine
of hell, is to be found in the gloomy theories of certain
philosophers whose relentless speculations were tinged and moulded
by their own recluse misanthropy and the prevailing superstitions
of their time. Out of the old asceticism of the East the false
spiritualism which regarded matter as the source of evil and this
life as a penance arose the dogma of metempsychosis. The
consequence of this theory, rigidly carried out, created a
descending congeries of hells, reaching from centre to nadir, in
correspondence to an ascending congeries of heavens, reaching from
centre to zenith.