Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/141

 The discussion is thus launched, and the author proceeds to get such abounding proofs of hell out of the most modern science as must raise the spirits of his desponding flock. The advance of science does not trouble him; he accepts its latest conclusions in the most liberal spirit, but finds them all subservient to his purpose. After proving immortality on scientific grounds, He goes on to establish that—

This is a pretty strong programme, but what does the Rev. W. H. Platt really mean by "hell"? One is led to suppose from the way he starts off that he means to stick to the literal, old-fashioned notion, and not yield to any amelioration of modern theology in regard to this important term. Indeed, he gives a side-thrust at Mr. Beecher by putting a passage from Beecher's San Francisco lecture into the mouth of his skeptic as follows: "'Any way,' said the skeptic, 'the old creed and religion must give way. There is just as certainly a change in the whole religious thought of the race as that the sun shines. Doctrines taught fifty years ago are neither taught now as they then were nor believed as they then were believed.'" This the preacher stoutly denies. But, when he says "antipathy of evil to good is hell," is he not making a new definition that would have been scouted by orthodox theologians half a century ago? Again, he says, "'Suffering makes all places hell—just as mental suffering is greater than bodily suffering so its hell is worse,' said the preacher. 'We have been taught that hell is a locality, and so it is. The shadow and the beam each have its place. But as a village is nothing to an empire, to a continent, to a hemisphere; as the center is nothing to a circumference; as a point is nothing to all space, so is the placed hell of past teachings as nothing to the unplaced hell of science. To the evil 'all places are hell.' Hell is in the presence of broken law, whether in mind or matter, in time or eternity.'"

A quarter of a century ago this would have passed for flat Universalism.

unreadable book by a very devout but foolish man, who is in a state of anxious alarm at the progress of science, and proposes to resist it by clinging with increasing desperation to the most literal orthodox interpretation of Scripture. We do not by any means intimate that the author is a fool; on the contrary, he is what is called "learned"; that is, he quotes strange lingos all through his text, and has, no doubt, been through college. He can not be strictly said to be ignorant of nature, but he is in a far worse state of mind than that of simple ignorance. There would be some hope of teaching a Digger Indian many elementary truths concerning natural things, because he has no fatal prepossessions respecting them; but this enlightened ChristainChristian [sic] has got his head so filled with the details of a great theological system, and is so palsied with fear lest it should be disturbed, that no real knowledge of nature can get entrance or hospitable reception in his mind. For example, in his chapter on our present geology and astronomy, he insists that "we may yet find that God chose to do all that work of creation in twenty-four, or in one hundred and sixty hours of our present time, which it is absurd to doubt that he could do." Of what use are proofs to an intellect in such a condition as this? When many years ago the fossil shells of marine life were found on the tops of high mountains, and the question arose how they came there, the monks readily replied that they were created at first in their fossil forms with the divine intention of testing men's faith in the power of God to do things exactly as he pleased. This is now regarded as sufficiently absurd, and is often quoted to illustrate the stupidity of the monks; but their frame of mind survives in our author. In a foot-note he says: "Indeed, it is far more rational to think that the eternal Lord made in a moment of time all this nature, and with its suggestiveness to the merely worldly mind of long processes of creation, meaning this as one of those mysteries of spiritual discipline which we find everywhere else, and which are greater than all matter, thus trying and training our