sible organism in connection with which the
soul now acts; but no hammer can injure an idea, no flame scorch a
sentiment. What the spiritual personality becomes, how it exists,
what it is susceptible of, when disembodied, no man knows. It is
idle for any man, or any set of men to pretend to know.
Unquestionably it is not capable of material confinement and
penalties. The gross popular doctrine of hell as the fiery prison
house of the devil and his angels, and the condemned majority of
mankind, therefore, fades into thin air and vanishes before the
truth of the absolute spirituality of mind.

In those early times, when military, political, judicial and
convivial phenomena furnished the most imposing and instructive
phenomena, before exact science and critical philosophy had given
us their fitter moulds and tests of thought, it was unavoidable
that men should think of God and Satan as two hostile monarchs,
each having his own empire and striving to secure his own
subjects, and looking on the subjects of his adversary as foes to
be thwarted at all points. But when, with the progress of thought
evil is discerned to be a negation, the devil vanishes as a verbal
phantom, and the bounds of his local realm are blotted out and
blent in the single dominion of the infinite God who regards none
as enemies, but is the steady friend and ruler of all creatures,
everywhere aiming, not to inflict vengeance on the wicked, but to
harmonize the discordant, bringing good out of bad and better out
of good in perpetual evolution. Sound theology will see that God
is the pervading Creator who governs all from within by the
continuous action and reaction between every life and its
environing conditions. But mythology puts in place of this the
incompetent conception of God as a political king, governing by
external edicts and agents, by overt decrees and constables. This
deludes us with the local and material hell of superstition, which
has no existence in reality. Disordered Function is the open
turnpike and metropolis of the real hell of experience. The great
king's highway, leading to heaven from every point in the universe
is the golden Mean of Virtue; but on the right and left of this
broad road two tributary rivers, namely, Defect and Excess, empty
into hell. The only true hell is the vindicating and remedial
return of resisted law on a being out of tune with some just
condition of his nature and destiny. The fearful cruelty and
tyranny