To understand what I mean, consider any animal—a dog, for instance—how
much every animal has in it what men have,—a body, and brain, and heart;
it hungers and thirsts as we do, it can feel pleasure and pain, anger and
loneliness, and fear and madness; it likes freedom, company, and
exercise, praise and petting, play and ease; it uses a great deal of
cunning, and thought, and courage, to get itself food and shelter, just
as human beings do: in short, it has a fleshly nature, just as we have,
and yet, after all, it is but an animal, and so, in one sense, we are all
animals, only more delicately made than the other animals; but we are
something more, we have a spirit as well as a flesh, an immortal soul.
If any one asks, what is a man? the true answer is, an animal with an
immortal spirit in it; and this spirit can feel more than pleasure and
pain, which are mere carnal, that is, fleshly things; it can feel trust,
and hope, and peace, and love, and purity, and nobleness, and
independence, and, above all, it can feel right and wrong. There is the
infinite difference between an animal and a man, between our flesh and
our spirit; an animal has no sense of right and wrong; a dog who has done
wrong is often terrified, but not because he feels it wrong and wicked,
but because he knows from experience that he will be punished for doing
it: just so with a man’s fleshly nature;—a carnal, fleshly man, a man
whose spirit is dead within him, whose spiritual sense of right and
wrong, and honour and purity, is gone, when he has done a wrong thing is
often enough afraid; but why? Not for any spiritual reason, not because
he feels it a wicked and abominable thing, a sin, but because he is
afraid of being punished for it, because he is afraid that his body, his
flesh will be punished by the laws of the land, or by public opinion, or
because he has some dim belief that this same body and flesh of his will
be burnt in hell-fire; and fire, he knows by experience, is a painful
thing—and so he is _afraid_ of it; there is nothing spiritual in all
that,—that is all fleshly, carnal; the heathens in all ages have been
afraid of hell-fire; but a man’s spirit, on the other hand, if it be in
hell, is in a very different hell from mere fire,—a spiritual hell, such
as torments the evil spirits, at this very moment, although they are
going to and fro on this very earth. This earth is hell to them; they
carry about hell in them,—they are their own hell. Everlasting shame,
discontent, doubt, despair, rage, disgust at themselves, feeling that
they are out of favour with God, out of tune with heaven and earth,
loving nothing, believing nothing, ever hating, hating each other, hating
themselves most of all—_there_ is their hell! _There_ is the hell in
which the soul of every wicked man is,—ay, is now while he is in _this_
life, though he will only awake to the perfect misery of it after death,
when his body and fleshly nature have mouldered away in the grave, and
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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