Page:The New View of Hell.djvu/45

 great mass of them wholly unconcerned, and when I feel that God only can save them, and yet He does not do so, I am struck dumb. It is all dark, dark, dark, to my soul, and I cannot disguise it."

How many other good men are there among the Christian ministers of to-day, who, if they would but confess the honest truth, would tell you that they are in just the same darkness and distress that Dr. Barnes here confesses to—if not upon the same subjects, then upon some others no better understood. Yet Dr. Barnes himself, I presume, was so confirmed in all the dogmas of the Presbyterian church, that the light of heaven as it beams out from the luminous pages of Swedenborg, would have seemed to him darkness as thick, perhaps, as that in which he confessed himself to be;—it could hardly have seemed more dense. Verily, "the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not."

Certainly, then, a new revelation concerning the nature of hell, or concerning the condition of the wicked in the great Hereafter, was greatly needed when Swedenborg wrote; and therefore it was to be expected.

Let us now examine the New doctrine on this subject, and see whether it is really worthy of the origin claimed for it; or whether it be as irrational as the Old one which it comes professedly to displace.

According to the new doctrine of the immortal life, the human soul is in the same form as the material body—that is, the human form. It is organized of spiritual