Page:The New View of Hell.djvu/40

 presented to us, and at the same time to teach that God was a loving Father—these two things have seemed so difficult to multitudes of persons, that they have fled from the attempt to reconcile them, and have abandoned all belief in them."

And how does Mr. Beecher himself reconcile them? Or how does he understand and interpret the language of the Bible which refers to the future state of the wicked? He frankly confesses his own blindness and confusion here. He don't know what to make of this language. "It goes to my heart to say these things," he says—i. e. the things he finds in the Bible. "Yet it is there, and if I am faithful to my whole duty I must preach it. As a surgeon does things that are most uncongenial to himself, so sometimes do I. And I do this with tears and with sorrow. It makes me sick."

It is plain, then, what was the old and universally received doctrine among Christians concerning hell at the time Swedenborg wrote.

Very few, however, believe this doctrine now. The light that has been flowing into all minds from out the new angelic heavens for the last hundred years, has so clearly revealed its hideousness, that you will hardly find an intelligent Christian of any denomination now-a-days, who does not reject it. Most people have no rational and clearly defined doctrine to take the place of the old; but this latter nobody now accepts.

The old doctrine, therefore, being such as we find it—