It is worth while to gaze for a moment at the scene of future felicity; there is the throne of God and rejoicing crowds: "Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets," so goes out the command, and they rejoice because "God has avenged them on her," and again they said "Alleluia, and her smoke rose up for ever and ever." Truly God must harden the hearts of his saints in heaven as of old he hardened Pharaoh's heart, if they are to rejoice over the anguished multitude below, and to bear to live amid the lurid smoke ascending from the burning bodies of the lost. To me the idea is so unutterably loathsome that I marvel how Christians endure to retain such language in their sacred books, for I would note that the awful picture drawn above is not of my doing; it is not the scoffing caricature of an unbeliever, _it is heaven as described by St. John the divine_. If this heaven is true I do not hesitate to say that it is the duty of every human being to reject it utterly and to refuse to enter it. We might even appeal to Christians by the example of their own Jesus, who could not be content to remain in heaven himself while men went to hell, but came down to redeem them from endless suffering. Yet they, who ought to imitate him, who do, many of them, lead beautiful lives of self-devotion and compassion, are suddenly, on death, to lose all this which makes them "partakers of the Divine Nature," and are to be content to win happiness for themselves, careless that millions of their brethren are in woe unspeakable. They are to reverse the aim of their past lives, they are to become selfish instead of loving, hard instead of selfless, indifferent instead of loving, hard instead of tender. Which is the better reproduction of the "mind of Christ," the good Samaritan tending the wounded man, or the stern Inquisitor gloating over the fire which consumes heretics to the greater glory of God? Yet the latter is the ideal of heavenly virtue. Never will they who truly love man be content to snatch at bliss for themselves while others suffer, or endure to be crowned with glory while they are crowned with thorns. Better, far better, to suffer in hell and share the pains of the lost, than to have a heart so hard, a nature so degraded, as to enjoy the bliss of heaven, rejoicing over, or even disregarding, the woes of hell.