eparable. Its consequences must endure to all time. Our
most agonising repentance cannot undo the past, it can only avail to
safeguard the future. We cannot escape the law of compensation. There
is no magnified man in the skies, swayed by human passions, ready, at
the call and entreaty of prayer, to obstruct the operation of natural
laws. Theories of atonement by blood shedding, sacrifices for the
forgiveness of sins, arose in the days when man believed in such a
deity as that, but we know none such now, and wise are we if we
recognise--oh, how well it had been if in our youth we all could have
known--that the consequences of an act are absolutely inevitable, that
deeds once done, words once spoken, are traced ineffaceably on the
tablets of universal nature and must reverberate throughout the
universe to all time!

Severe teaching, you say. Yes, one pauses here when thoughts of hell
and devils never once made man pause. The truth is, no one really
believes the insensate teaching of the Churches on punishment. Even
their adherents have outgrown them. Nothing is clearer from history
than that fear of hell fire never yet made man moral. It could not
keep the Church of mediaevalism, its priests and its bishops, aye, and
its supreme pontiffs--numbers of them--even decent living men, to say
nothing of morality or virtue. It is worse than useless now;--an
insult to reason and an outrage on religion. But what _will_ hold a
man is the doctrine of compensation, of judgment pronounced _by
himself_ directly his iniquity is accomplished, of sentence
self-executed, unpardonable and irremissible, now and for ever.

And, added to this, the conviction that his crimes are committed, not
"against God," who can in no wise be personally influenced or injured
by man's misdeeds, being wholly destitute of human passions and
emotions, but against his fellow man, or against his sister woman.

One knows, alas! the beginning of the end to which the lost have come.
If only youth had been taught in the opening days of life, when
impressions are so vivid, that there is no such article as the creeds
of the Churches falsely proclaim--"the forgiveness of sin"--that one
only wrong act may, rather must, be the starting point which will one
day precipitate a catastrophe, how many would have been saved from the
nameless depths, of which we must be silent, how many spared the
anguish of an unavailing remorse!

Must this false teaching indeed