Page:The New View of Hell.djvu/167

 the literal sense of the Word, and generally accepted among Christians a hundred years ago! It presents us not with an angry and vindictive God delighting in the sufferings of his disobedient children, but with a tender and loving Father pitying their infirmities, and pursuing them with outstretched arms of mercy through all their wanderings, and even into the lowest depths of degradation and sin. And if, in the exercise of the freedom vouchsafed to every human being, they choose to unfold only the lower or sensuous part of their nature—choose to make their bed in hell, behold the loving Father is there, restraining, correcting, controlling and governing them in the manner best suited to their condition and needs; chastising them for their own good, and granting them the enjoyment of such delights as belong to the life which they have developed within them and made their own; mercifully closing their minds against the light of heaven, that they may not see where and what they really are; providing for each and all a home in the society of congenial spirits—a home which their nature impels them to seek, and to which they go as freely and as willingly as the inebriate goes to the gin-shop or the leopard to his lair.

And the practical tendency of this doctrine, like that of every other that is true, is most salutary. While it proclaims the infinite love and mercy of God, and his ceaseless desire and effort to save all, it at the same time shows us that salvation is a work which not even almighty