Page:The Message and Ministrations of Dewan Bahadur R. Venkata Ratnam, volume 2.djvu/207

 an article of faith opposed alike to 'sense' and 'sweetness.' The human soul is an off-spring of the Spirit of God; and a deity that can condemn his own issue to everlasting suffering is, as Herbert Spencer feelingly remarks, immeasurably crueller than that Fijian God who is alleged to feast on the souls of the departed. As Tennyson puts it in his own happy style, the God of Love and the God of Hell— together they cannot be thought. Yet the dogma of eternal hell seems to be the strongest 'apology' for the dogma of "vicarious atonement;" for as that eminent English Theist, the Rev. Charles Voysey, has acutely observed, granted that there is no eternal hell and that punishment is only remittent and remedial, there would be no need or justification for Vicarious atonement .' How noble, then, is the touching utterance, 'Hell is the hospital of God!'—It is not, however, clear to us how the orthodox Hindu dogma of the transmigration of the soul is the only alternative to the orthodox Christian dogma of eter-