Page:The Gospel of Christianity and the Gospel of Freethought.pdf/12

 this good news tells us is to be the lot of the majority of the human race. Listen to the gospel of Christianity: "Strait is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. Wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat." So says Jesus himself. Hear the Roman Catholic Church; hear Spurgeon; hear the English Church in the person of one of her bishops. This is the good news to the world; this is the gospel of Christianity. Good news to the world that it shall be damned for ever in hell: that it shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the Lamb for ever and ever, and the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever, and they have no rest day nor night. Strange minds and hearts must Christians have if they really consider this horrible gospel to be good news. I marvel sometimes where this gospel of hell-fire had its birth; in what poor human heart, wrung with passionate hatred to mankind, embittered and soured by terrible wrongs, fired with fierce longing for revenge, did this awful phantom first take shape and form? Who first imaged out this ghastly notion of a heavenly Moloch, sitting on his throne, and wreaking on men an eternal hatred, mocking the helpless agony of his victims, and in bitter irony forcing them to call him their Father and a God of love. Never let Christianity dare to call itself good news, so long as hell is part of its gospel to mankind; never let it boast of the immortality it proclaims, so long as to the majority of mankind it only proffers an immortality of anguish unspeakable. If this gospel were true—nay, if there were even any probability of its being true—then every man and woman with a human heart would make a stern resolution never again to bring a child into the world who might be doomed to an eternity of suffering; never again would they co-operate with God, so as to form a body which God might thereafter be enabled to curse with the terrible gift of an immortal soul.

The gospel of Secularism has neither heaven nor hell to offer to the world. On the subject of immortality its lips are dumb. Science tells it nothing which points to continued life after death; all analogy is against it; we have never met life apart from organisation; we cannot conceive of mind as apart from matter. Life is, to us, an attribute of matter, under certain conditions, just as brightness is an attribute of the polished steel, sharpness of the