Article August 9, 1913 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from G. Stanley Russell

[The Outlook.]

There is a great deal of flippant talk about the abolition of hell. It seems to be the impression of many people that the possibility of suffering, symbolized by a material place of torment, has been eliminated from human life. As a matter of fact, hell, in the sense of inevitable and unmistakable punishment, is today far more a reality than it has ever been before. Whatever may be the sufferings through which men must go in the future in order to be purged of impurity, there is no question about the sufferings which they undergo in this present life. The answer of the man who was asked if he believed in hell, "I do not believe in it; I know, because I am in it," is a terse statement of what may be called the modern view of punishment for sin. It is not a punishment which is relegated to the future; it begins the moment the sin is committed. It is not a punishment which is local and exterior; it is a punishment which is wrought out in a man's nature. It is a thousandfold more terrible than the conception of hell as a place of external torment; for the hell of today gets its more tragic aspect from the fact that the men who are in it are often unconscious that they are in a place of torment.

It is unspeakably pathetic to see a human being go down the hill of life physically from higher to lower levels, becoming less and less pure and more and more a slave; but the most terrible tragedy lies in the fact that the victim is often unconscious of the increasing degradation. It is the deadening of moral sensibilities, the blinding of the moral sight, the decay of the moral faculties, the dulness of vision, that constitute the real moral tragedy of living men and women voluntarily submitting without struggle to temptation; gradually, and often unconsciously, losing the power of seeing the difference between health and disease. They cut themselves off from the spiritual world, and are made skeptical by their blindness of vision. They cannot see the mountains or the stars which to people who have not injured their power of sight are always visible.

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Article

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENTS