Page:The Other Life.djvu/217

 spection, contrition. So long as a particle of conscience remains, so long as conviction of sin and feelings of remorse are possible, hell to that soul is impossible. Sin destroys the conscience, which is simply the pleading voice of God in the heart. The devils have no conscience. They deny God; they deny heaven; they deny sin. They call evil good, the false true. They delight in their wicked lusts and passions. They find an infernal delight in their hatred, contentions and cruelties. Their misery results from the restraints to which their inordinate desires are necessarily subjected.

The same inflowing life from God which tends to organize everything upon the spiritual principles involved in the structure of the Human Form, operates in hell as well as in heaven. Evil spirits, as well as good ones, are organized into societies related in their spiritual functions or uses to the corresponding organs and functions in man. Some member of the society speaks for all the rest, so that many appear as one devil—"My name is Legion, for we are many." The infernal society is a deformed Man—a monster. All the hells together appear to the Lord, who alone can occupy the infinite standpoint from which they are visible, under the form of a vast monster, the opposite of the