Page:The New View of Hell.djvu/57

 of nature; and should maintain that it has no reference to the condition of the righteous in the other world—for, in its obvious literal sense it has not.

The word in the original Hebrew, translated heaven in our English version, is shâmayim; and the literal signification of this is, the firmament, or the space above the earth. It comes (so the best linguists tell us) from an obsolete root, shâmâ, whose meaning in the cognate Arabic language is, to be high, or lifted up. And to this Arabic radical lexicographers refer the Hebrew term as denoting an elevated locality—a high place. The Greek equivalent of this Hebrew word is ouranos, which is also translated by our English heaven, and means the same as shâmayim; that is, the space above the earth, or the vast concave that surrounds the earth. And according to most philologists it comes from the Greek radical orao, which means to see—referring to the space above or around the earth, where by means of the sun's light objects are visible.

We find, therefore, that the words heaven and hell, which occur so often in the sacred Volume, refer—in their plain, obvious, literal sense, as gathered from the Hebrew and Greek terms—to merely natural localities; one, to a place that is high, or to a region above the earth, involving also the idea or possibility of clear-seeing; the other, to a place that is low, or to a region beneath the earth, involving also the idea of darkness, or great difficulty in seeing. And if the literalists, or