Page:The New View of Hell.djvu/39

 lived on the subject of reward and punishment, than by reading any amount of theological treatises. Let any one look at that; let any one see the enormous gigantic coils of fiends and men; let any one look at that defiant Christ that stands like a superb athlete at the front, hurling his enemies from him and calling his friends toward him as Hercules might have done; let any one look upon that hideous wriggling mass that goes plunging down through the air—serpents and men and beasts of every nauseous kind, mixed together; let him look at the lower parts of the picture, where with pitchforks men are by devils being cast into caldrons and into burning fires, where hateful fiends are gnawing the skulls of suffering sinners, and where there is hellish cannibalism going on—let a man look at that picture and the scenes which it depicts, and he sees what were the ideas which men once had of hell and of divine justice. It was a nightmare as hideous as was ever begotten by the hellish brood itself; and it was an atrocious slander on God. . . . I do not wonder that men have reacted from these horrors—I honor them for it." (Plymouth Pulpit for Oct. 29, 1870.)

And this bold and eloquent divine further adds in the same discourse:

"To allow such a stream of human existence to be fed and renewed in every generation, which was pouring over the precipice at the rate of thirty millions a year, into such torments as the old method of representation