A discussion as to the nature of hell appeals to mankind...

John H. Wheeler

Kansas City (Mo.) Star

A discussion as to the nature of hell appeals to mankind in proportion to their ethical mood to receive it, but the essential premise upon which to search for a truthful conclusion concerning it must first include a sympathetic and faith-lighted conception of God and His infinite kingdom of heaven, in order to comprehend understandingly the negative or converse nature of this claim of evil which is commonly styled hell, for its whole pretense, place, and power is the very antipode of God and His creation, even as Jesus said: "A liar, and the father of it."

The Pharisees once asked Jesus "when the kingdom of God should come." The deep unrest of sin and its full measure of human wretchedness in mortal life impelled them to demand of the great prophet his views on this mooted question. The reply was: "The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you." And one is forced to conclude that the spiritual culture which is gained through self-abnegation alone reveals this inner heaven, while "an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is evil;" and this, in turn, is the essence of hell, seen daily in every walk of mortal experience.

Jesus once narrated how a Pharisee and a publican went up into the temple to pray. Their differing methods presented a striking contrast, and served to reveal the awakened germ of genuine goodness in the self-condemned consciousness of the contrite sinner who, as he stood afar off and "would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven," said: "God be merciful to me a sinner;" while the unrepentant and austere self-righteous Pharisee's prayer seemed a parody on humility. Christian Science teaches that we make our own heaven through righteous thought and living during our mortal experience, or else we perpetuate our own hell through sinful thought and action.

Again, heaven ever stands as the true or permanent nature of God's character and infinite presence; to gain it one must be "pure in heart," for such only shall see God, said our Saviour. All who have thus attained will daily think and act from motives wholly in keeping with their pure heart's ideal. This is a foretaste of heaven and a corresponding destruction of the illusively sinful or human sense of life, rightly named hell, which can only bring upon its victims great mental confusion or anguish. Holy Writ declares God to be everywhere present, which presence is heaven, harmony, and the unchanging bliss of immortality. The presence of evil, be it consciously or unconsciously entertained, and one be in sympathy with it, only perpetuates a mortal sense of life and all of the tragedy we call hell.

Christ Jesus came as a light unto this world of sin, and in so doing he encountered the bad mental realm of humanity until its multitudes crucified him. He did the work necessary for him to do in order to prove by example that if his pure mentality and sinless career were adopted in the sin-sick world, it would insure a new state of being, and this change would constitute in itself the destruction of hell for all individuals concerned. In the translation of the Bible from the original text four words, sheol, hades, gehenna, and tartaros are used interchangeably, to show that the evil mentality or sinful condition of mortals is always hell in its degree, while sin's bondage of human weakness is but the temporary and unreal opposite of spiritual being, which only vanishes before the truth of God's word, for Paul declared that "at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, ... every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord;" and thus death and hell shall be eventually swallowed up in the victory of pure thinking.

The only hell possible in human experience lies in the delay we allow, pending the new birth and the transformation of our human nature into the divine. Mrs. Eddy wrote thus: "Think of this inheritance! Heaven right here, where angels are as men, clothed more lightly, and men as angels who, burdened for an hour, spring into liberty, and the good they would do, that they do, and the evil they would not do, that they do not" (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 251). Jesus taught: "If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death," the culmination of sin. St. John the divine wrote: "And I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write, Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: ... that they may rest from their labors; and their works do follow them." Conclusively, then, Paul's admonition, "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus," involves the destruction of all pretense to a false belief by the understanding of ever-present Love.

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