immovable moral status is, to all appearances, arbitrarily
imposed upon them for evermore. The impression one gathers is,
therefore, of a large and glorified amphitheatre, tiers rising above
tiers into infinity, seats along them, each of which is tenanted by an
individual elect spirit whose merits are precisely proportioned to its
place.

Now that existence prolonged, I will not say into eternity, but into a
week is the very reverse of inspiring. Of course, we are aware that
Dean Farrar has as effectually explained away the Orientalisms of the
Christian heaven as the Paganisms of the orthodox hell; we are ready to
believe that the Apocalypse--which is held now not to be a Christian
book at all, but a Jewish composition, edited and amended by a
Christian hand--sets forth only figures and types of the great supernal
blessedness. This we know, but our difficulty is not with the form but
with the content, that is, with that which these hyperboles symbolise.
It is fairly inconceivable to us that a matter which, according to the
Churches, merely concerns the body, soon to be resolved into its
component gases, should exercise so miraculous a transformation on the
soul, or the real man. _He_ did not die; his body did, and yet they
would have us believe that that mere physical occurrence, that
catastrophe of flesh and blood, means the subsequent and eternal
stagnation of all psychical life; that men either go forthwith into
scenes with which ninety out of a hundred would be wholly unfamiliar,
or are thrust headlong into a subterraneous locality called Sheol, or
the grave in Hebrew, the English equivalent of which is hell, the only
difference being that, whereas the good can grow no better, the wicked
can and do grow worse.

Doubtless, I shall be reminded that these teachings do not occur
explicitly in the Thirty-nine Articles, any Church Confession, or a
Papal Decree. That may very well be so, as regards them all, but there
can be no doubt that the main assertion is accepted as dogmatically
true by all Christian Churches--namely, that a wonderful and searching
change does occur at the moment of death, whereby "the time of
probation," as it is called, comes to an end, and all possibility of
further "merit before God," or, as we should say, of ethical
advancement, relentlessly cut off. To quote a letter of Cardinal
Newman's, written in 1872 to the Rev. W. Probyn-Nevins, and published
subsequently by him--in the _Nineteent