If the man resists the burning of God, the consuming fire of Love, a terrible doom awaits him, and its day will come. He shall be cast into the outer darkness who hates the fire of God. What sick dismay shall then seize upon him! For let a man think and care ever so little about God, he does not therefore exist without God. God is here with him, upholding, warming, delighting, teaching him--making life a good thing to him. God gives him himself, though he knows it not. But when God withdraws from a man as far as that can be without the man's ceasing to be; when the man feels himself abandoned, hanging in a ceaseless vertigo of existence upon the verge of the gulf of his being, without support, without refuge, without aim, without end--for the soul has no weapons wherewith to destroy herself--with no inbreathing of joy, with nothing to make life good;--then will he listen in agony for the faintest sound of life from the closed door; then, if the moan of suffering humanity ever reaches the ear of the outcast of darkness, he will be ready to rush into the very heart of the Consuming Fire to know life once more, to change this terror of sick negation, of unspeakable death, for that region of painful hope. Imagination cannot mislead us into too much horror of being without God--that one living death. Is not this to be worse than worst Of those that lawless and incertain thoughts Imagine howling? But with this divine difference: that the outer darkness is but the most dreadful form of the consuming fire--the fire without light--the darkness visible, the black flame. God hath withdrawn himself, but not lost his hold. His face is turned away, but his hand is laid upon him still. His heart has ceased to beat into the man's heart, but he keeps him alive by his fire. And that fire will go searching and burning on in him, as in the highest saint who is not yet pure as he is pure. But at length, O God, wilt thou not cast Death and Hell into the lake of Fire--even into thine own consuming self? Death shall then die everlastingly, And Hell itself will pass away, And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day. Then indeed wilt thou be all in all. For then our poor brothers and sisters, every one--O God, we trust in thee, the Consuming Fire--shall have been burnt clean and brought home. For if their moans, myriads of ages away, would turn heaven for us into hell--shall a man be more merciful than God? Shall, of all his glories, his mercy alone not be infinite? Shall a brother love a brother more than The Father loves a son?--more than The Brother Christ loves his brother? Would he not die yet again to save one brother more?