Page:The New View of Hell.djvu/81

 He must accept the conditions, else he can never reach there. The proprietor of the country uses no compulsion. He simply says: There it lies; and this is the way to it; and there is no other. Go or stay, as you please. But remember, the going involves labor and hardship. If you are willing to endure these, that beautiful country, or as much of it as you desire, shall be yours forever.

Let this desert region represent man's natural state, and the beautiful country yonder, the state which he is made capable of attaining through spiritual labor and conflict with the foes of his own household, and the illustration is complete. By rising out of or migrating from that state of life denoted by hell, we come into the state denoted by heaven. It is not by any change of place, nor through any exercise of immediate Divine mercy that this is effected. It is a purely spiritual migration. It is a passing out of a low or exterior spiritual condition, into a higher or more interior one.

And though this change of state is as much a matter of the individual's own volition as an act of natural migration, or a change of natural locality, and cannot, indeed, take place without the exercise of his own free choice, yet it has its laws or conditions; and without the observance of these the change cannot be effected. And no one can be forced to comply with the conditions. He is left to his own free choice. He may remain in Egypt, and delve there under the lash of his old task-masters,