Heaven is not a reward but a continuity, not a change but a development. It means a place of love and goodness where we are one with God and playfellows with the angels. Present science would change God into a struggle of careless forces or a complexity of impersonal laws. Let us reject the Chinese idea; they believe in God, but worship the devil, because they think the devil's rule predominates. Let us discard the pagan _deification of annihilation_, and the modern agnostic's plea for _suicide_, and the Greek poet's pessimistic postulate: "It were best never to have been born, and next best to depart as soon as possible." Let us grieve at the dark shadows flung by theologians athwart God's light upon those who believe that human reason, conscience, and experience, as well as Scripture, are the books of God. Phrases which belong to metaphor, to imagery, to poetry, to emotion should not be formulated into dogmas, or crystallized into creed. Discard the tyrannous realism of ambiguous metaphors, the asserted infallibility of isolated words. Canon Farrar says: "Erase from our Bible the erroneous disputed renderings of the three words, 'damnation, hell and everlasting.' Not one of these three expressions ought to stand any longer in our English Bible." He says further: "There has never been a human being yet since time began, however beautiful, gifted, bright with genius, or radiant with fascination, who has sinned with impunity." Evil and punishment, as Plato said, walk this world with their heads tied together, and the rivet that links their iron link is of adamant. It needs no lightning stroke, or divine interposition, no miraculous message to avenge God's violated laws. They avenge themselves. The hell fire of the Bible was a spiritual fire which does not burn the flesh, but purifies the spirit. Not a material fire, but self-kindled fire, an internal fever--in fact, remorse for remembered sins--a figurative representation of a moral process by which restoration shall be effected. When earthly life vanishes and we see in the visions of the soul an endless life and being in countless worlds of destiny, death has no terrors. The thought of the pale, cold body enwrapt in its winding sheet, coffined and alone in the narrow grave, its last sad dwelling place, with the grass growing above, where the lonely cricket chirps through the silent night, does not disturb the calm and reasoning soul. A few years hence and we shall all cross the dark river to the shadowy unknown shore and learn the mysteries that lie beyond. But where is that wondrous shore, and where will all of the now living inhabitants of earth be a century hence? Not floating in the marvelous belt of atmosphere which surrounds the earth. Nor on a changeful planet like our earth. Not floating in the frigid ether of space, but, if my hypothesis is correct, they will be celestial residents in the self-luminous, all-life-giving sun.