endless reproach to his Maker's wisdom, an everlasting and irreparable
mistake.
No amount of argument, however powerful, should make us believe a
doctrine from which our hearts recoil with such shuddering horror as
they do from this doctrine of eternal torture and eternal sin. There is
a divine instinct in the human heart which may be trusted as an arbiter
between right and wrong; no supernatural revelation, no miracle, no
angel from heaven, should have power to make us accept as divine that
which our hearts proclaim as vile and devilish. It is not true faith
to crush down our moral sense beneath the hoof of credulity; true faith
believes in God only as a "Power which makes for _Righteousness_" and
recks little of threats or curses which would force her to accept that
which conscience disapproves. And what is more, if it were possible that
God were not what we dream, if he were not "righteous in all his ways
and holy in all his works," then were it craven cowardice to worship him
at all. It has been well said, "that to worship simple power, without
virtue, is nothing but devil-worship;" in that case it were nobler to
refuse to praise him and to take what he might send. Then indeed we
must say, with John Stuart Mill, in that burst of passion which reads so
strangely in the midst of his passionless logic, that if I am told that
this is justice and love, and that if I do not call it so, God will send
me to hell, then "to hell I'll go."
I have purposely put first my strong reprobation of eternal hell,
because of its own essential hideousness, and because, were it ever
so true, I should deem myself disgraced by acknowledging it as
either loving or good. But it is, however, a satisfaction to note the
feebleness of the arguments advanced in support of this dogma, and to
find that justice and holiness, as well as love, frown on the idea of an
eternal hell.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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