Editorial March 31, 1906 Issue

Sin its own Punishment

Archibald McLellan

The following excerpts from an editorial in the Philadelphia North American entitled "Reflections on Hell," are strikingly in accord with the teachings of Science and Health, and they indicate in a measure at least the extent to which Mrs. Eddy's views are influencing the opinions of thinking men upon the vital facts of religion. The North American says,—

"The fair, reasonable supposition is that men in the other world are just about what they were in this world. Possibly there may be some process of intensification or large development of personal qualities; but, upon the whole, there can hardly be any immediate revolutionary change at the moment of death. If, then, a man who is depraved and degraded and filled with greed and uncleanness, shall be struck by lightning and killed at the very moment another man dies who has lived a life of spiritual exaltation and selfsacrifice, how could the claim be made that both went at once to the same place and entered into similar circumstances in the world beyond?

"Nobody can help believing that both men, an hour after death, were just what they had been an hour before death; and, as they could not have been congenial companions in this life, there is a fair inference that they could not have fellowship or love for the same things in the other life. Of all the miracles that have been recorded as fact, or have been invented or guessed at, no miracle could be more amazing or more incredible than that involved in a proposition that a man's entire inner nature—the real man, indeed—can be completely transformed by the dissolution of his body. As well ask us to believe that a man may divest himself of his personality when he puts off his overcoat.

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