Page:The Other Life.djvu/229

 God's displeasure, but excites his pity. He suffers a dreadful organic change in his own spiritual nature which entails upon him eternal and painful consequences; but they are not legal punishments of sin, but necessary effects of a cause which he himself has put into operation, viz., the turning himself away from God so as to receive the influx of his life into a perverted and disorderly form. Hell is only punishment of sin as a burn is the punishment for putting your hand in the fire.

Hell, therefore, is not created by God at all, but by man, and it is created through his violations of the divine laws. Hell is not governed by any other laws or with any other spirit than the laws and spirit which prevail in heaven. The miseries of hell flow from the influx and operation of the laws and spirit of heaven into perverted and disorderly forms. Man changes; God is unchangeable. God gives his bread to all alike, but evil spirits turn it into a stone; fish, but they change it into a serpent; flowers, but in evil hands they become poisonous weeds.

If God is not responsible for hell, even in a legal sense, why does he not change, suppress, or destroy it?

If the hearts of all the devils could be changed