Page:The kernel and the husk (Abbott, 1886).djvu/308

292 and profound for me, and I give up the problem. All that I know is, that there will be hereafter a just retribution.

Yet if I am to tell you my own conjectural imaginations—for who can help at times imagining what the infinite unknown may be, however loth he may be to insist or dogmatize about it, or even to bestow much attention on it, when the urgent present presses its superior claims?—I will say for myself that I cannot believe I shall have served all my apprenticeship to righteousness in my brief life upon this earth, or that I shall be fit immediately after death, for that closest communion with God which appears to me the Heaven of Heavens. Some cleansing retribution, some further purification, seems to me necessary and likely for myself—and, I must add, for the greater number of those human beings with whom I have had to do—before we attain to that blessed consummation.

"So you believe in a Purgatory then?" How do I know? Say rather, I conjecture there may be many heavens. In any case, I find it very easy to imagine a retribution and a purification that shall be purely spiritual, without having recourse to any material flames or physical horrors. Some people find a difficulty in this notion: they consider it, but deliberately put it aside; as if mere remorse, sorrow, and self-condemnation, could never be bitter enough to constitute a just Hell. I do not think they have ever realized—perhaps they have never tried to realize—the pain that may be felt by a spirit sitting alone, away from this familiar world and every well-known face, and quietly judging and condemning itself. A mere accident, a ludicrous accident, once gave me a moment's experience of this feeling, and I have never been able to forget it, never been able to put aside the conviction that that feeling, intensified, might constitute Hell.

It happened in this way. Some years ago, before