Page:The New View of Hell.djvu/211

 And to escape hell, is to come into the opposite kingdom—heaven.

"If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments." This is the only way—the way pointed out by God's own finger—to escape hell and reach heaven. "The commandments" are the laws of the heavenly life. For all life has its laws; and it is only by conformity to these, that the blessings of any kind of life can be enjoyed.

Take, for example, our corporeal life. This has its laws; and these laws must be obeyed if we expect to enjoy physical health. Our bodies require food, and drink, and exercise, and sleep, and pure air, and protection from rain and frost. These requirements are the body's laws—unchangeable, God-appointed laws. And in the degree that they are transgressed, the body suffers. And this suffering is the penalty with which the Framer of our bodies visits such transgression. The transgression and the suffering, the violation and the penalty, are inseparably connected, like cause and effect.

And the soul, too, has its laws, as well as the body. And these can no more be violated with impunity, than can the laws which preside over our physical organism. In the violation of spiritual as in that of physical laws, a penalty follows with undeviating certainty;—not a penalty arbitrarily inflicted, or in the way that human tribunals punish offenders against civil enactments, but a