Page:The Other Life.djvu/203



E now approach that dark and doleful world which is the opposite of heaven; where love is turned into hatred and wisdom into folly; light into darkness and pleasure into pain; which the Scriptures symbolize to us as a "bottomless pit" or the "lake burning with brimstone and fire," and which men have in all ages imagined to be a fearful prison-house down, down deep in the caverns of the earth, or far beyond the faintest ray of sun or star in the darkness of the outermost abyss.

What is it? Where is it? How came it? What will become of it?

Anxious, startling, but not irreverent questions! They have been partially answered. The veil has been lifted from this portion of the spiritual world also. We have new light, new knowledge to displace our old errors and crude notions. We have more terrible conceptions of the nature of sin, and a clearer vindication of the character of God.