The awful panorama of the last things, as painted in the Apocalypse,— the sun becoming as sackcloth of hair, and the moon as blood; the blighted stars dropping; the unveiling of the great white throne, from before the face of whose occupant the frightened heaven and earth flee away; the standing up of the dead, both small and great, the opening of the books, and the judging of the dead out of the things written therein,-this scenic array has, by its terrible vividness and power of fanciful plausibility, sunk so deeply into the imagination, and taken such a tenacious hold on the Ceelings of the Christian world, secured for itself so constant a contemplation and encrusted itself with such a mass of associations, that it has actually come to be regarded as a veritable revelation of the reality, and to act as such. And yet, surely, surely, no one who will stop to think on the subject, with conscious clearness, can believe that books are provided in heaven with the names of men in them and recording angels appointed to keep their accounts by double or by single entry, and that God will literally sit upon a vast white dais raised on the earth, and go through an overt judicial ceremony. On what principle is a part of the undivided apocalyptic portrayal rendered as emblem, the rest accepted as absolute verity? If the blood-red warrior on his white horse followed by the shining cavalry of heaven, the horrible vials of wrath, the chimerical angels and beasts, the sky and globe converted into terror-struck fugitives, the bridal city descending from God with its incredible walls and its impossible gates and its magic tree of life yielding twelve kinds of fruit, are imagery; then the lake of burning sulphur, and the resurrection trumpet, and the indictment of the dead before the dazzling throne, are imagery too. The reader smiles at the idea that the good Esquimau will sit in leaven amidst boiling pots of walrus-meat, while in hell the fish-lines of the bad Esquimau will break, and his canoe be crushed by falling ice. But what better reason can the civilized man give for the reflecting over upon the judgments of the future his present experience in the imagery of criminal courts? The same process of thought is exemplified in both cases. Can any one literally credit the following verses: "There are two angels that attend, unseen Each one of us, and in great books record Our good and evil deeds. He who writes down The good ones after every action closes His volume and ascends to God. The other keeps his dreadful day-book open The record of the action fades away, No more should we literally credit the kindred phraseology in the New Testament. It is free metaphor. The sultan may keep in his treasury a book with the names of all his favorites enrolled in it. Is it not a peurility to suppose that God has such documents? When the Gospels and the Epistles of the New Testament were written, the reappearance of Christ for the last judgment was almost universally supposed by the Church to be just at hand. At any instant of day or night the signal blast might be blown, the troops of the sky pour down the swarms of the dead surge up, and the sheep and the goats for ever be parted to the right and left. Each day when they saw "the sun write its irrevocable verdict in the flame of the west," the believers felt that the supreme Dies ira was so much nearer to its dawn. But as generation after generation died, without the sight, and the tokens of its approach seemed no clearer, the belief itself subsided from its early prominence into the background. But as it retreated, and became more obscure and vague in its date and other details, it grew ever more sombre, appalling, and stupendous in its general certainty and preternatural accompaniments. When the tenth century drew nigh its close, a literal acceptance of the scriptural text that "the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, after being bound in the bottomles pit for a thousand years," should "be loosed a little season," filled Christendom with the most intense agitation and alarm. From all the literature and history of that period the reverberations of the frightful effects of the general expectation of the impending judgment and destruction of the world have rolled down to the present time. The portentous season passed, all things continuing as they were, and the immense incubus rose and dissolvingly vanished. And the Medieval Church, like the Apostolic Church before, instead of logically saying: Our expectation of the physical return of Christ was a delusion, fancifully concluded: We were wrong as to the date; and still continued to expect him. The longer the crisis was delayed, and the more it was brooded over, the more awful the suppositious picture became. The Mohammedans held that the end would be announced by three blasts: the blast of consternation, so terrible that mothers will neglect the babes on their breasts, and the solid world will melt; the blast of disembodiment, which will annihilate everything but heaven and hell and their inhabitants; and the blast of resurrection, which will call up brutes, men, genii, and angels, in such numbers that their trial will occupy the space of thousands of years. But in the later imagination of Christendom the vision assumed a shape even more fearful than this. The Protestant Reformation, when one party identified the Pope, the other, Luther, with Antichrist, gave a new impulse to the common expectation of the avenging advent of the Lord. The horrible cruelties inflicted on each other by the hostile divisions of the Church aggravated the fears and animosities reflected in the sequel at the last day. Probably nothing was ever seen in this world more execrable or more dreadful than those great ceremonies celebrated in Spain and Portugal, in the seventeenth century, at the execution of heretics condemned to death by the Inquisition. The slow, dismal tolling of bells; the masked and muffled familiars; the Dominicans carrying their horrid flag, followed by the penitents behind a huge cross; the condemned ones, barefoot, clad in painted caps and the repulsive sanbenito; next the effigies of accused offenders who had escaped by flight; then, the bones of dead culprits in black coffins painted with flames and other hellish symbols; and, finally, the train closing with a host of priests and monks. The procession tediously winds to the great square in front of the cathedral, where the accused stand before a crucifix with extinguished torches in their hands. The king, with all his court and the whole population of the city, exalt the solemnity by their presence. The flames are kindled, and the poor victims perish in long-drawn agonies. Now can anything conceivable give one a more vivid idea of the terrors embodied in the day of judgment than the fact that it came to be thought of under the terrific image of an Auto da Fé magnified to the scale of the human race and the earth,-Christ, the Grand Inquisitor, seated as judge; his familiars standing by ready with their implements of torture to fulfil his bidding; his fellow monks enthroned around him; his sign, the crucifix, towering from hell to heaven in sight of the universe; the whole heretical world, dressed in the sanbenito, helpless before him, awaiting their doom? Who will not shudder at the inexorable horrors of such a scheme of doctrine, and devoutly thank God that he knows it to be a fiction as baseless as it is cruel? Since the cooling down of the great Anabaptist fanaticism, the millennarian fever has raged less and less extensively. But if the literature it has produced, in ignorant and declamatory books, sermons, and tracts, were heaped together, they would make a pile as big as one of the pyramids. The preaching of Miller, about a quarter of a century ago, with his definite assignment of the time for the appointed consummation, caused quite a violent panic in the United States. Several prophets of a similar order in Germany have also stirred transient commotions. In England, the celebrated London preacher, Dr. Cumming, whose works entitled "The End," and "The Great Tribulation," have been circulated in tens of thousands of copies, is now the most prominent representative of this catastrophic belief. He has, however, made himself so ridiculous by his repeated postponements of the crisis, that he has become more an object of laughter than of admiration. Mathematical calculations, based on mystic numbers transmitted in apocalyptic poetry, are at a heavy discount. And yet there is a considerable sect, called the Second Adventists, composed of the most illiterate believers, and swelled by clergymen wrought up to the fanatic pitch by an exclusive dogmatic drill, who lead an eleemosynary life on mouldy scraps of Scripture, and anxiously wait for the sound of the archangelic trump. Every earthquake, pestilence, revolution, violent thunderstorm, comet, meteoric shower, or extraordinary gleaming of the aurora borealis, startles them as a possible avant-courier of the crack of doom. Some of them are said to keep their white robes in their closets all ready for ascension. What a dismal thing it must be to live in such a lurid and lugubrious dream; their best hope for the world the hope that its end is at hand, "Impatient of the stars that keep their course But this excited and uneasy anticipation is now a rare exception. In the minds of most intelligent Christians, even of those who still cling to the old Orthodox dogmas, the day of judgment has been put forward as far as the day of creation has been put backward. Less and less do religious believers shudder before the theatric trials depicted in heathen and Christian mythology; more and more do they reverently recognize the intrinsic juris diction in the structure of the soul, and in the organism of society. The time is not far remote, let us trust, when the ancient spirit of national separation, political antipathy, and sectarian hatred, whose subjects identify themselves with the party of God, all others with the party of the Devil, and cry, "How long, O Lord, dost thou not judge and avenge us on our enemies," will give way to that better spirit of philanthropy and true piety, which sees brethren in all men, and prays to the common Father for the equal salvation and blessedness of all. Then the faith of the selfrighteous, who plume themselves on their sound creed, and so relentlessly consign the heretics to perdition, gloating over the idea of the time "when the kings of the earth, and the chief captains, and the rich men, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every freeman, shall hide themselves in dens and caves, saying to the mountains and the rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb; for the great day of his wrath is come, and who shall be able to stand?"-then the temper of this faith will be seen to be as wicked as its doctrine is erroneous. It will be recognized as a remnant of the barbaric past in steep contradiction with the whole mind of the modest and loving Jesus, who, when the disciples wished to call down fire from heaven to consume his opponents, rebuked them in words still condemning all their imitators, 66 Ye know not what spirit ye are of." Many a bigoted and complacent dogmatist, wrapt in that same ignorance to-day, fails to read his own heart, and obstinately shuts his eyes to the truth, foolishly fancying himself better and safer, on account of his blind conservatism, than he who fearlessly seeks the guidance of science. Yet are not the principles of science as much glimpses of the mind of God as any sentences in the Bible are? The whole ecclesiastical scheme of eschatology is a delusion. No such gigantic melodrama, no such grotesque and horrible extravaganza, will ever get itself enacted between heaven and earth. Forever, as freshly as on the first morning, the Creator pours his will through his works in irresistible vibrations of goodness and justice; and forever may all his creatures come to him unimpeded, and trust in him without limit. Away, then, monstrous horrors, bred in the night of the past! Dreadful incubi! too cruelly and too long ye have sat on the breast of man. The cockcrow of reason has been heard, and it is time ye were gone. Fade, terrible dream, painted by superstition on the cope of the sky,-picture of contending fiends and angels, fiery rain, a frowning God, and shuddering millions of victims! Away forever, and leave the blue space free for the benignant mysteries of the unknown eternity to lure us blessedly forward to our fate. Come, believers in the merciful God of truth, lend your aid to the glorious work of spiritual emancipation. In this benign battle for the deliverance of the world from error and fear, every free mind should be a champion, every loving heart a volunteer. Free leaders of the free, forward! out of the darkness into the light. Lift your banner in the front of the field of opinions where all may see it, and then follow it as far as truth itself shall lead. On! Progress is the eternal rule. Man was made to outgrow the old and struggle into the new, as every morning the sun mounts afresh out of the dead day, and drives the night before him. Ignorance and despotism have crushed us long. But now, now we fling our fetters off, and, marching from good to better, hope to escape from every falsehood, and to conquer every wrong, under the inspiration of the omnipresent Judge who executes his decrees in the very working itself of that Universal Order whose progressive unfolding will be fulfilled at last, not in any magic resurrection and assize, but in the simple lifting of the veil of ignorance from all souls brought into full community, and the illumination before their opened faculties of the whole contents of history. For we believe that all history is by its own enactment indestructibly registered in the theatre of space, and that every consciousness is educating to read it and adore the perfect justification of the ways of God. The eternal immensity of the universe is the true Aula Regis in which God holds perpetual session, overlooking no suppliant, omitting no case. CHAPTER III. THE MYTHOLOGICAL HELL AND THE TRUE ONE, OR THE LAW OF PERDITION. THE doctrine that there is a material place of torment destined to be the eternal abode of the wicked after death is based on the language of the Bible, supported by the aggregate teachings of the church, and commonly asserted, though with a stricken and failing faith, throughout Christendom at this moment. When any one tries to show the unreasonableness of the belief in this local prison-house of the damned, arrayed with the innumerable horrors of physical anguish, he is at once met with the declaration that God himself has declared the fact, and consequently that we are bound to accept it without question, as a truth of revelation. For the reasons which we will immediately proceed to give, this representation must be rejected as a mistake. The popular doctrine of hell is not a divine revelation, but is a mythological growth. It is a fanciful mass of grotesque and frightful errors enveloping a truth which needs to be separated from them and exhibited in its purity. In the first place, the substance of the doctrine affirmed, the notion of a bottomless pit, or penal territory of fire and torment in which God will confine all the unredeemed portions of the human race after their bodily dissolution, is something wholly apart from morality and religion, something belonging to the two departments of descriptive geography and police history. The existence or nonexistence of a place of material torment reserved for the wicked, is a question not of theology, but of topography. In earlier times it was avowedly included in geography; and numerous caves, lakes, volcanos,- -as at Lebadeia, Derbyshire, Avernus, Nafita, Etna, and elsewhere-were believed to be literally entrances to |