Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/345

Rh We need not trouble ourselves, then, with considering how the lowest types of humanity will act under the supposed régime; what we are concerned with is the effect likely to be produced upon the mass of society. As regards men in general, will natural morality exert a sufficient regulative force? To this question I should be inclined to answer unhesitatingly yes, provided only proper means be taken to bring the new system home to people's understandings. No one will pretend that the theology now in possession exerts all the regulative influence that could be desired. For one thing, it can not make itself believed by large multitudes; and, in the second place, very many of those who do believe it, or who profess to do so, are far from leading edifying lives. Every leading religious denomination has numerous representatives in our jails and penitentiaries, as official documents show; while, if we turn to the records of the insolvency courts, we shall find ample evidence that men can be at once zealous supporters of a church and sadly inexact—to say the least—in money matters. Why do I mention these things? Surely not to cause any one pain, but simply to show how the question stands. Some people argue as if we had now a perfect regulative system, which the new opinions are in danger of disturbing. But no; we have a very imperfect regulative system, upon which it is hoped a great improvement may be made. Theologians have, for some time past, been sensible of the shortcomings of the old teaching, for they have been trying to graft upon it the idea of the naturalness of the rewards and punishments to be meted out to right-and wrong-doers respectively. We hear now that sinners will not be overtaken by any external penalties, but will be left to the simple and inevitable consequences of their own misconduct. They would not be happy, we are told, in heaven, because their characters are not adapted to that abode of bliss; and, upon the whole, therefore, they are better off on the other side of the great gulf. How all this can be reconciled with the teaching of the Bible, where hell is represented, not as prepared by the sinner for himself, but as prepared by God for the devil and his angels, and heaven, in like manner, as something specially prepared for the righteous, who there enjoy a felicity with which the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared, it is not for me to say. One thing is clear, however, and that is, that such glosses as these are recognitions of and concessions to the principle of development. Heaven, according to this hypothesis, is the developed life of righteousness, and hell the developed life of moral rebellion; but, though theology may dally with this view, it can never do more than dally with it; it can never make it its own, seeing that the text of the Bible so plainly declares the cataclysmal nature of the change which takes place at death. But, if theology has to dally with development, how much better founded, and how much better adapted for acting upon men's minds, must a system be which, from first to