knowledge one finds less and less ground for indignation in the conduct of one’s fellow-men. When the being involved is by definition the very personification of love the idea of offence becomes ridiculous; it is impossible for any philosophic mind to admit the bare conception of offending God, or of drawing down upon one, in the Biblical phrase, his anger or his vengeance. Fear of an external sanction, or of any sanction other than that of conscience, is therefore an element that the progress of the modern mind tends to exclude from morality. It is in vain for the Bible to say that fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; morality does not truly begin until fear ceases to exist, fear being, as Kant said, pathological, not moral. Fear of hell may have possessed in former times a certain social utility, but it is essentially a stranger in modern society, and, _a fortiori_, will be in the society of the future. Moreover, respect for the happiness of people in general is becoming less and less adulterated by any admixture of fear. This respect, mingled with love and even engendered by love, is coming to be an altogether moral, and an altogether philosophic sentiment, purified of anything in the nature of mysticism, and in the best sense religious. [62] See the author’s _Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction_, p. 188, etc. [63] “If God had consciously created the human will of such essential perversity as to find its natural expression in thwarting Him, He would be impotent in the face of it; could only show Himself compassionate; could only regret His own act in creating it. His duty would not be to punish mankind but to the utmost possible degree to lighten their sufferings, to show Himself gentle and good directly in proportion to this evil; and the damned, if they were truly incurable, would be in greater need of the joys of heaven than the elect themselves. Either the sinner can be reclaimed; and in that event hell would be nothing more than an immense school, an immense house of correction for preparing the culpable with the utmost possible rapidity for heaven; or the sinner is incorrigible, is analogous to an incurable maniac (which is absurd), and then he is eternally to be pitied and a supreme Goodness would endeavour to compensate him for his misery by every imaginable means by showering upon him every bliss that he was capable of enjoying. Turn it as one will, the dogma of hell stands thus in direct opposition to the truth.