Heaven and Hell

I wonder what the old saints in heaven think of modern spirituality. Certainly to all appearance the nineteenth century is a very exceptional time. But then I have misgivings that all times seem so, as they are passing. Each generation magnifies the good and exaggerates the evil of its own day, while in history one century falls back into the lap of another in a very quiet, unexciting, and commonplace manner. However it is plain that the nineteenth century is not a congenial season for oldfashioned things; and, as in other things, so in the matter of spirituality, there are changes. The great books of the seventeenth century certainly inno vated upon the elder writers in many not insignificant respects. Even in one religious order, the Jesuits, we find the school of Nigronius and Lancicius very different from that which prevailed less than a century later. Certainly, just now, the Church is singularly mixed up with the world. The public action of catholic charity is materially changed. Increased luxury, combined perhaps with other causes, has superinduced a valetudinarian state over a large portion of society. Fewer men can fast. Fewer women can wear instru ments of penance. People take cold more easily. "VVe cannot think of a hermit in the fens of Lincolnshire, or in the wet woods of Picardy, without marvelling how his life contrived to be anything but a chronic rheumatism. There is less simplicity; and hence the exercises of some virtues become more difficult, especially ostensible practices of humility. More civilization gives us less individuality; and hence the danger of singularity cuts off many opportunities of sanctification. Mental habits are different, more rapid, more introverted, more self-conscious; and this must necessarily tell hugely upon the whole subject of prayer. All these things seem to indicate, that we must have spiritual systems for our own day, just as our fathers had them for their day. Nevertheless I often sit and think, in a forlorn kind of way, what a disconsolate thing it is to part company with any old traditions, however insignificant;

and the more so in a subject-matter of the most urgent concern to all of us, and in a time, which seems to labour under a special unfitness for readapting to its use the older spirituality of the saints. You see, while times change very much, souls change very little, and

God not at all. So I cannot help thinking, that, though a few things may want moving just now to different places, the antique spirit has to return again, in matters which regard both the ecclesiastical and the ascetic temper. Some day or other, we shall have to go back to the Fathers of the Desert, or to Richard of

St. Victor, or to the earliest school of Jesuit ascetics.

The day has not come yet, and will not in our time.

So we must take what heart we can, and face the sickly unsupernatural spirituality we see around us, and do what good we can by condescensions and adaptations, which may save a soul or two here and there, taking care all the while, for the sake of our own sanctification, to keep grumbling about that antique spirit and that oldfashioned wisdom, which We believe to be the only real thing.

Now I want to speak about a little matter in the conduct of modern pious people, which I am so sure is wrong that I cannot be content to let it alone; and I will try to be goodnatured, while I am discontented; and as little sarcastic as I can help being, remembering that there is no piece of modern piety of which I know so little good as I do of my own. I only wish I knew whether the old saints in heaven really thought, that our pleasant, unoffending, moderate, contented, polished, civilized spirituality was so much as safe. People rebel, if you try to put more upon them; and do we, as a matter of fact, get much more out of ourselves? One question we are sure we never can solve, the way to serve both God and mammon: but how near may we come? Yes! look at upper-class piety in London and Paris, and then ask, how near may we come? We dare not be sure we are right in being contented, because it looks so unlike the right of old times. We dare not be sure we are wrong; for, then, what consequences follow, what wholesale delusions, what cashiering of multitudes in the armies of perfection and devotion, what rough work with vocations, abso lutions, and the like! Sometimes it is so weary a problem, that we are fain to think men would be holier with a sounder and more robust holiness, if they would leave the Counsels, and take to the Commandments.

Now to my subject, without further elegy. The great want of modern piety is a real, deep, vigorous, inward repentance. If you dance till four in the morning, and go to communion at ten, I do not believe in your abiding sorrow for sin. If you are in the theatre till midnight, I do not credit the compunction of your morning s meditation. If you are just like any other fashionable person, I can set no value upon your profession of devotion. Piety and gaiety do not mix; and in this matter, to speak shortly, and once for all, I do not believe in mixtures. But I say modern piety is defective in the matter of inward repentance: I do not say it is destitute of it, but seriously defective; and I prove it as follows.

We see persons on all sides of us, who are certainly good persons. They are endeavouring to avoid sin, and on the whole successfully. They would fain, eschew worldliness; but in that effort they are hardly so successful. Truly it is a more difficult affair. They are making some profession of strictness and devotion. They rank with pious people. Yet penance is plainly not a feature of the lives they are leading. Their love of pleasure, their appearance at places of worldly resort, their unstinted enjoyment of the prevailing fashions and amusemeats, nay, the very ease, elegance, propriety, equability, and smoothness of their spirituality, all betoken a very imperfect idea of abiding sorrow for sin, or of that inward self-revenge, which should in crease in us daily the older we grow. The way in which worldliness and religion are pounded up together is quite decisive as to their inadequate notion of inward repentance. It is fortunate for such persons, if their piety does not degenerate into a mere familiarity with sacred names and things, which will be a great impediment to their future conversion.

The systems of spirituality, which are most in vogue, are marked by the same characteristics. It seems as if they were arranged for a lower standard of holiness than that of God; as if the souls, for which they were meant, were the rule and measure of sanctity, and not the evangelical counsels or the exceedingly holy law of God. To do as those around us do, so long as it is not plain sin, is part of their wisdom. To avoid singularity does not mean, in the language of these systems, what ifc means in old spiritual writers. Here it signifies that we are to go with the stream, and to put our piety out of the Avay when it is likely to be distasteful to those, who make no profession of piety at all. To be at peace is the highest attainment of this philosophy; and what ever disquiets a soul is, on that account alone, a positive evil, and to be eschewed. Thus, if a soul is deluded, it must remain deluded: if it is lukewarm, it must remain lukewarm: if it is sluggish, its slumbers must be respected. Now think of the proportion of good people, as they are called, who are either deluded, or lukewarm, or sluggish; and then reflect on the inevitable consequences of this undiscerning and promiscuous avoidance of what is disturbing and discomforting. Of a truth, it would be a safer rule to lay down, that we can none of us be too much or too often discomforted, provided only we can bear being dis comforted without being discouraged also. Penance can be no child of such lax and slatternly systems as these. Yet how many souls in these days dread what they call exciting direction a thousand times more than they abhor a mortal sin! Indeed they do not know what they mean by exciting direction, and could not define it, if you called upon them to do so. What they intend to express is only an instinct against reality and earnestness.

Here is another feature of modern piety, which meets us at almost every turn: the continual mistaking of common graces for uncommon ones. The lower and the higher graces are counterparts of each other. A very high grace may wonderfully resemble a very low grace; and, unless we have tasted it, that is, had experimental knowledge of it, we may easily confound it with its analogue among much lower tilings. We think we feel what the saints have recorded that they felt, because the description of it in language is too coarse to convey a right notion of an operation so delicate. Then, if we satisfy ourselves on any one point, it brings a change over our whole spiritual life; be cause a spiritual life is a very inveterate unity. It changes our method of prayer, and interprets our position towards God quite in a new way, and, as it happens, in an erroneous way. Now this mistake comes of every body in these times being in such a hurry to get out of the purgative way; and this impatience of commencements partly bears witness to a want of inward repentance, and partly increases the want, as rendering us unable to appreciate it. This is a long subject, and we must not say more of it now.

There is moreover a deeply imbedded naturalism, which betrays itself everywhere in the modern views of the spiritual life. There is an evident desire to sacrifice the supernatural to the prejudices of those who dislike it. Men are eager to fix the charge of extravagance upon those who stand up boldly for the rights of God, and speak uncompromisingly about worldliness. The vague notions people have of voca tions, and their jealousy of the whole subject, are additional evidences of this naturalism. Low practical views of the sovereignty of God arise from the same source. The lives of the saints, indulgences, and devo tions connected with purgatory, are the touchstones of this naturalism. Real searching inward repentance changes a man s whole notions about all these subjects. It unlocks the hidden wisdom of the church-system to him, and transforms his sympathies and instincts into those of the saints. Naturalism is impatient of godliness, because it has no taste for God: and how much depends precisely upon having this taste for God! Under the auspices of naturalism, spirituality tends to become a mere literature to intellectual curiosity, or a mere pleasurable excitement to unearnest and half hearted devotion, or a relish to worldliuess by way of contrast.¹

The amount of almsgiving, and the manner in which it is given, also inspire me with a distrust of modern piety, especially in regard to the reality of its inward repentance. A very inward thing always, or almost always, has very outward results; and these outward results are congenial to itself. Penance is the best guarantee for the inwardness of our repentance, and almsgiving is notably a chief part of penance. Inward repentance is not a feeling within us, but a change within us; and it is not easy for us to be changed inwardly without manifesting it outwardly. Thus I cannot bring myself to believe that a professedly pious person, who is very guarded in giving alms, has the genuine spirit of inward repentance. Now in the present day it is not uncommon to see pious people acting, as if they really thought their piety in other respects was almost a dispensation from almsgiving. Others, again, when they give, give in ways which minister to their own humours; so that even in almsgiving self-love shall find its account. Moreover generosity is not almsgiving. The quantity given must have reference

HEAVEN AND HELL. S61 to the means of the giver, but still more to the amount of sacrifice and self-denial which his alms entail upon him. Expensiveness is perhaps not a distinct sin in itself, though even that may be questioned; but it is the mother of many sins, and it is remarkably uncongenial to the spiritual life. Yet pious people are particularly given to be expensive, when they have the means. An alms, which does not put the giver to inconvenience, is rather a kindness than an alms; and certainly the alms, which is to be a satisfactory evidence of inward repentance, ought to reach the point of causing some palpable inconvenience, of involving some solid self-denial. Now, if a professedly pious person has to retrench, and begins his retrenchments with his charities, does not this suggest grave suspicions as to the inward self- revenge of his repentance? Does it look as if his sins were always before him, or as if he had the scriptural fear of forgiven sin, or as if he wor shipped the exactions of divine justice with anything like a hearty and vigorous worship? Depend upon it, a man s parting with his money is one of the proofs of his having right views about God and sin. which is o o f least liable to delusion or self-deceit. If we look to the dress, and the equipage, and the furniture, and the children first, and then to God afterwards, it is pretty plain that God s real place in the heart, no matter what the feelings may say, is after the dress, and the equipage, and the furniture, and the children. For, feelings are easily fancied, and are also often themselves very fanciful even when they are genuine.

In nothing is the genuine worth of real spirituality more tried than in the performance of works of mercy. An interior spirit proves itself in these external opera tions. To work for the poor in a spiritual way requires many graces, and often graces of a high order. ^Natural activity, which helps the beginnings of works, comes at last to generate weariness, and so to fight against their perseverance. A slight admixture of natural feeling, or the indulgence of natural affection, is often sufficient to forfeit God s blessing on a difficult undertaking. ISTo one carries out charitable plans, or conducts benevolent institutions, successfully, unless he is at once detached from his work and attached to it. But the harmony of these apparently opposite qualities implies a well-grounded spirituality. Patience, love, vigilance, inventiveness, wide judgments, a large heart, and an obstinate cheerfulness are all necessary to the persevering success of real works of mercy, together with that humble, bashful earnestness which is such a peculiar feature of Christian compassion. To beg for a work of charity is an exercise of holy poverty, which few have the grace to go through without a multitude of venial sins, perhaps in God s sight the most venial of venial sins that can be. The criticisms of idle men, the doubts of icy men, the narrowness of good men, and the censoriousness of all men, are also hard to bear; and yet a work is worth little, and does not make the devil uneasy, if it has not had to endure these irritating molestations. From some points of view, an active saint is a more complicated work of grace than a contemplative one.

But let us look at the popular modern spirituality in connection with this test of external works of mercy. The London season does not more surely bring with it new modes of dress, than it brings also with it new plans of doing good and benefiting the poor. When we have not had much experience, we respect all this. Anything seems good which is for the poor. What a

HEAVEN AND HELL. 3G3 gain that the rich of this world should take a fancy to any works of mercy, no matter what! But this satisfaction soon passes away, when the vexatious sight of money squandered, of time wasted, of beginnings dis continued, of inert committees organized, of the obvious pursuit of excitement and self-love in the whole matter, has tried our patience year after year. It is also the more difficult to keep our temper with inefficient charity, because it is so seldom innocuous as well as inefficient. Now we get a glimpse of what this spirituality is worth. A Mahometan with his five posture-penances a day is a happy man; for he feels he must do something to make his conscience easy, something for God, something in the way of religion: and he has done it, done enough to make him feel he has done something. So it is with these annual fashions of charity. Christians must feel as if they were doing something for God; or else they will not be easy. So they get up a good work. It takes some time to call on others, and talk it over. Some further time to take the advice of half a dozen popular preachers or directors. A little more time to decide on following the advice of none of them. Then some clerical head has to be chosen for the work, and that takes time. After that, the Lent services render any other excitement unnecessary just then. Now Easter has come, and there is an interruption because of people going down into the country. Then the Month of Mary has excitements of its own; and it is well advanced before the committee is formed. When it is formed, it has to meet. When it meets, it naturally talks. What would happen if it began to do anything, it is impossible to say. We cannot think of that without some degree of consternation. However there is the excitement of having to work with strange people, the important excitement in some cases of having to try to get government aid or to call on philanthropic magistrates, and the peculiar -excitement perhaps of having to work with our inferiors in rank and station, and so to practise the condescensions of a sort of Christian freemasonry, which somehow or other satisfies some nameless craving in our conscience. Meanwhile the season thickens, and at last closes. All that was wanted has been done; for all that was wanted was the self-righteous feeling that we were very busy for God, and also the manifold satisfaction of half a dozen kinds of self-love. The excitement has been pleasant, the feeling of being good more pleasant still; and the fact, that it has all come to an end without our having had to pay anything for it, has been without doubt the pleasantest feature of the transaction. It has got us through the season. We could enjoy our expensiveness more comfortably, while we believed ourselves on the road to some considerable imaginary alms. An hour of committee, besides being chatty and agreeable, will sanctify long, long hours of shopping. What a wonderful exercise of humility was that conventual bazaar 1 Our intense delight in the salient woiidliness of the year, whatever it was, has been well counteracted by the dim vision of romantic garrets, or of interesting orphans, or of palsied pension ers, or of picturesque young thieves, or of reclaimed children in tasteful uniforms, or of distant idolaters, or of domestic hungerbitten heathen. It has all been the ounce of God to the hundredweight of the world, the adequate corrective, the proper proportion of alkali to our acid.

Yet almsgiving was not exactly meant as a corrective of worldliness. Might not light be let into many minds, if they -would distinctly put before themselves the final cause of riches? Why are there any rich people at all, and what does God mean by them? For there is only one real truth about any of the facts of the world, and that truth is God s meaning of the fact, God s intention in the ordering or permitting of it. Now what are rich people meant for? They are not made rich for their own good. That is quite plain. A man s good consists in the saving of his soul; but it is plain riches do not help him to save his soul, rather the contrary. Jesus would not have riches, when He came. Nay, He pronounced woe to those who have them. When the saints have had them, they have made away with them as fast as they could. Riches, if the Gospel be true, are the unheavenliest of all earthly things. Why then are some men put into a less advantageous position than others, so far as regards the salvation of their souls, by having riches allotted to them? What are rich people meant for? To be the prey of the poor. Prey! there is no other word for it. The rich are meant for the poor. The poor are the cause and the significancy, as they will be also the salvation, of the rich. The poor are God s eagles to beset, infest, and strip the rich. He alone is happy in his riches, who lets these eagles of God tear him with least resistance. That process, rich man! is what thou art meant for. God had no other intention in thee. If there be a heaven and a hell, there is nothing which it more behoves thee to know than this peculiarity of thy position. Are the poor wearisome, grasping, unseasonable, insatiable, unreasonable, innumerable, unbearable? It is more unreasonable in thee to complain. They were meant to prey upon thee: thou wert meant to be their prey. That is the whole account- of thee. Give then, and be silent.

To sum it all up: Look at the eccentricities in almsgiving, at the appetite for novelties, at the neglect of old charities, at the infinite subdivision of efforts which are thus completely neutralized, at the prominence of self, at the self-opinionatedness, at the folio volumes of talk or the duodecimo volumes of note-paper, at the subordinate position of God in the matter, at the little amount of keen sympathy for the misery to be dealt with, at the less amount of self-denial in the dealing with it, and, last of all, at the astounding moderation of the subscriptions. Surely all this testifies to a huge amount of delusion and fond inward natter ing of self in the spirituality around us. It sometimes almost makes one think that works of mercy are simply an imposture. But, all the while, the imposture lies in a spirituality without solid mortification. Tried in the balance of outward charity, how much fair-looking interior piety is grievously found wanting! If all this is illnatured, is it not also true? Depend upon it, genuine mercy is very rare. Real almsgivers must have either an unusual nobility of natural character, or a very solid virtue. Devotion to the poor is, in its disinterested purity, the rarest grace in sanctity. In its debased state, it is one of the commonest features of a piety, the unsoundness of which is testified by nothing so much as the unreality of its mercy.

Many feel this, and so take no pains about works of mercy. Indeed we might not unreasonably find fault with modern piety altogether, for its want of balance between inward and outward things, between spiritual exercises and works of mercy for the poor. We do not become interior by trying not to be exterior. If wo try to be interior only, we soon cease to be interior afc all, if ever we were so before. For the most part a spiritual exercise costs nothing; it is clone in secret; and it may be done in a hundred ways, from the highest strain of reverential attention down to the slovenliness of lolling postures and voluntary distractions. It costs no money. It involves no personal trouble. Hence it is no evidence of sincerity. Least of all, is it any token of the spirit of penance. The eagerness, with which we are told that external mortifications are almost worthless compared with interior mortifications, breeds distrust. The proposition itself is most true; and there are times and places, in which it needs preaching forcibly. It is not the proposition, then, which makes us distrustful. It is the eagerness with which it is urged, which is the suspicious symptom. I fear that a great deal of this private soul-saving, which is so much the fashion just now, indicates little more than an unwillingness to part with money, or a reluctance to be teased, fretted, and hard worked by plans for the poor. Anyhow we may be sure of this, that there is always a holy * restlessness, an insatiable activity, about the spirit of inward repentance, whose deportment is very different from this easy-going, money-saving, stay-at-home devotion.

Modern piety has also a guilty instinct for a false discretion, which is very unlike the swift straightforwardness or the headlong generosity of inward repentance. If you listen to the conversation, for example, of devout ladies, who habitually form themselves into a kind of self-nominated Congregation of the Index about sermons, direction, vocations, religious orders, spiritual books, and the like, you would imagine that half catholic London is disciplining itself to blood, that there are two or three hundred hairshirts at the Opera every night, that the floor of the palace is strewn with horrid, nondescript instruments of penance after every drawing-room or royal ball, that the health of the West End, which so successfully resisted late hours and turning night into day, is now succumbing under lentils and long prayers and bodily macerations, and that parents and husbands, who were once thrown into a fever by the dangers of an early communion and a few mouthfuls of fresh air taken fasting between home and church, are now obliged to act the spy on those they love, because of the murderous excesses of fanatical penance. This is what you would suppose from the conversation of these good ladies. You may not think their conversation very wise; still you would infer from it that nobody is lukewarm, that nobody wants stirring up, that everybody wants holding back. Whereas, when you come to know a little of the facts, you will agree with them so far as this, that the want of discretion is the prevailing stupidity of the day: only you will apply it differently. You will see that people are indiscreetly tepid, indiscreetly self-indulgent, neglecting prayer and weekday mass indiscreetly, indiscreetly niggard in almsgiving, indiscreet in doing so little for God, indiscreet in making so much of the little they do. All this is hideous indiscretion; and, if our lady-congregation of the Index can get rid of any of this for us, we should be forward to bless their labours. Unhappily their discretion lies quite on the other side. Their notion of discretion is to come so close to hell, that even angels tremble to see them, and then just to swerve clear of it. The worst of this is, that, while it is a risk often run, we may fear that its issue is seldom felicitous. We may fear that many of them just swerve into hell; another moment, and they will be clear> like a wheel that is only for an instant over the ledge: but unluckily that moment never comes, and the momentary swerve turns out to be eternal. A moderation, which consists in taking immoderate liberties with God, is hardly what the Fathers of the Desert meant, when they preached their crusade in favour of discretion. When we meet with these apostles of the new discretion, we feel that the matter is so serious, that wc? ought to be serious with them; I regret that I am not habitually so: only one has such a tendency to see the ludicrous side of things; and then also we may plead as a further excuse, that unreal persons are always so amusingly, because they are so unconsciously, humorous* However our consciences need not prick us; for experience shows that no good is done to these people by being serious with them. They are not serious themselves. They have no notion of seriousness except being angry; and the best way to cure anger is to punish it by being amused at it. For our present pur pose it is plain, that a discretion, whose prominent trait is its aptitude to take umbrage at penance, can hardly be a manifestation of the spirit of penance.

The next fault to find with modern piety is its shallowness. Perhaps people were always as silly as they are now; yet I can hardly imagine that people always thought as little as they do now. The rapidity, with which modern people live, hinders their seeing the depths of anything, just as the enormous superficies, over which their education strains to ex tend itself, hinders their being well-educated. Even in reading, men now-a-days will not stop to think; and they have too much to read to enable them to read twice. Thought is manifestly at a discount just now;

although there will be a change soon, as shallowness is tiresome, and men always abandon what bores them, when the bore reaches to a given point. However, this rapidity, which hinders people from seeing the depths of anything, affects nothing so much as their religion and their relations to God, because religion is all depth, and we might almost say of our relations to God, that they lie too deep to have any surface visible at all. It sometimes looks as if piety had an intrinsic tendency to be silly. It is to be hoped it is not so. Nevertheless piety is often disfigured by silliness, except when it coexists either with great grace, or with considerable intellect, or with a keen sense of humour. It would not be fair to say, that piety is always silly when it is not earnest, because unearnest piety is not piety at all. It is only an illdone caricature. ]Sfow the deepest of all spiritual things is inward repentance. It is based on a supernaturally illuminated self-knowledge. It implies a profound view of the sinfulness of sin. It lives in a clear vision of the perfections of God, which almost anticipates the brightness of the Vision hereafter. It is entangled with all manner of supernatural things, with secrets of prayer, with saintlike instincts, with curious operations of grace, and with, the nameless fruits of patient meditations. Rapid livers, and rapid thinkers intake rapid worshippers; and rapid worshippers are rapid penitents; and the spirit of inward repentance fares ill with all this. Deep work is too slow for our modern pace. A railway embankment is another thing from a Roman road.

Another feature of modern piety is its fastidiousness. This is a very stronghold of Satan. It hides God. It refuses to study His mysteries. It saps the foundations of holy fear. It derogates from devotion to the Passion.

It forms a screen, behind which unchaste spirits work at leisure. Every one is familiar with this fastidiousness. I need not speak of it at length here, as I have dwelt upon it in my book upon the Passion, and shall have to refer to it later on in this Conference. It is sufficient to say that the fastidiousness here complained of is neither an elegance nor a delicacy, but a plain demand on the part of the world, that we should practically give up a part of the Gospel. It manifests itself by an impatience with anything like devotion to the Passion in detail, as involving horrors which harrow up the soul, and dislodge that precious peace, which modern spirituality watches over as if it were the palladium of holiness, and which is in reality nothing but the sleep of death. Alas! how much better should we be, if we could be harrowed up. a little now and then! We should shrink more from. sin, if we shrank less, from the physical atrocities of the Passion. The same fastidiousness is angry and disgusted with sermons on hell. But of this hereafter. No more need be said here, than that, ordinarily speaking, a reluctance to look hell in the face is a bad sign in devotion, and affords no insignificant probability that we shall really go there at last. Now observe: the Passion and Hell are the two great fountains, out of which men learn a profound hatred of sin: they are the two wellheads, of sacred fear; they are two revelations of God most necessary to complete a true idea of Him. But inward repentance turns upon the hatred of sin, upon fear,- and upon the completeness of our idea of God. Thus our modern fastidiousness does what it can to render inward rcpen-. tance inadequate, by holding a veil before- the two revealed objects out of which that inward repentance is to draw its life. If this fastidiousness were the unassisted mawkishness of natural effeminacy, it might be despised as such. But it is in reality a very intelligent contrivance of the arch-deceiver, and very fatal to the interests of God, because it is a trap into which good people fall.

I have another unpopular complaint to make. The oldfashioned hatred of heresy is becoming scarce. God is not habitually looked at as the sole truth; and so the existence of heresies no longer appals the mind* It is assumed that God must do nothing painful, and His dominion must not allow itself to take the shape of an inconvenience or a trammel to the liberty of His crea tures. If the world has outgrown the idea of exclusiveness, God must follow our lead, and lay it aside as a principle in His dealings with us. What the many want they must have at last. This is the rule and the experience of a constitutional country. Thus discord in religion, and untruth in religion, have come to be less odious and less alarming to men, simply because they are accustomed to them. It requires courage, both moral and mental, to believe the whole of a grand nation in the wrong, or to think that an entire century can go astray. But theology, with a brave simplicity, concludes a whole world under sin, and sees no difficulty in the true church being able to claim only a moderate share of the population of the earth. The belief in the facility of salvation outside the church is very agreeable to our domestic loves and to our private friendships. Moreover, if we will hold this, the world will pardon a whole host of other superstitions in us, and will do us the honour of complimenting the religion God gave, as if it were some literary or philosophical production of our own. Is this such a huge gain? Many seem amazingly pleased with it, and pay dear for it quite contentedly. Xow it is plain that this belief must lower the value of the church in our eyes. It must relax our efforts to convert others. It must relax our efforts to convert ourselves. Those, who use the system of the church least, will of course esteem it least, and see least in it; and are therefore least fitted to be judges of it. Yet it is just these men who are the most forward and the most generous in surrendering the prerogatives of the church to the exigencies of modern smoothness and universalism. It would be strange, if divine truths were not sometimes harsh to a world lost in corruption and sin. Yet we have not the bravery to hold fast to our principles. We should think priest, and sacrament, and churchmembership, of the last consequence to ourselves, if we were dying. But we regard them of too little consequence to our neighbour, to justify a candour which might savour of unpoliteness, or a sincerity which may be unpopular. Or is it, that we really do not care whether he be saved or not? However, our want of hatred of heresy first lowers our doctrines, and then our standard of practice. Hence it is, that, with the spirit of inward repentance, a love of the church grows also; and that, where there is cordial hatred of sin, cordial hatred of heresv is not v far off. All these are antiquated notions: yet I keep running into them unconsciously. I believe we should be more really and validly repentant, if we had a trifle more of the spirit of the old inquisitors about us. I know I ought to be ashamed of this in the meridian splendour of the nineteenth century: but it is a weakness which I cannot overcome, perhaps because I have not made sufficiently earnest efforts to overcome it. Up to this time I continue to hold, that hatred of heresy will go along with genuine inward repentance.

I beg of God, in His infinite compassion, to keep alive in me to the last hour of my life the intense hatred of heresy, with which He has inspired me, and which I recognize as His gift. I beg of Him to make it grow in me to an abhorrence far greater than it is yet. Heaven is the land of love; but the hatred of heresy will not diminish there; for the hatred of heresy is the adoring love of God s ever-blessed truth.

Once more: I have spoken of a low standard of doctrine bringing with it a low standard of practice. It is in this matter of a standard that the whole faultiness of modern spirituality consists. But it is difficult to make it clear. Let us try. If we put an absurdly high ideal before us, it ceases to be an ideal at all, because we have no idea of acting up to it. We never reach it. But this does not shame us, because we never expected to reach it. The whole thing was a sham from the first. On the other hand, if we take a very low ideal, we shall never learn humility, because we shall be always succeeding; only our success will have no progress about it. A success, in which it is not worth our while to succeed, is but a success in name. Considering the shortness of life, such a success is almost a failure, because of the waste of time which it implies. Perhaps what I want to find fault with in modern piety may be expressed thus: that it lives on too low things by pretending to live on too high things. Does this sound enigmatical? Then I must try to make it plainer still. We intend to be moderate and discreet, that is, we do not intend to be like the cano nized saints. We intend to avoid mortal sin, and not to be singular by any uncommon out-of-the-way pieties. But, notwithstanding this sage and very intelligible decision, we intend at once to breathe the atmosphere of the saints, and to imitate their liberty of spirit. We will at once soar above the fatigues of meditation, and pray a more free and unshackled prayer. We will dismiss the terrors of our recent conversion, and at once participate in the calm of advanced holiness. "We will put aside hell as a motive, and serve God out of a disinterested love. "We will throw off the degrading trammels of custody of the senses, and be at once as Gertrude and Teresa were, when they had spent years in that painful custody. There is something vulgar and plebeian in ascetical books: we must have the larger, more airy, less regimental system of the mystics. Thus we make our piety a jumble. In truth, we are still in bed with the fever of a raw and half-complete conversion; but we will drink wine, and now are light headed, and fancy we are wheeling round mountain pinnacles with the strong- winged eagles of God. We are doing a tinker s work with a watchmaker s tools. We might just as reasonably, in our natural lives, dwell in this city of raw fogs and obstructed sunshine, perse cuted by our great English appetites, and yet resolve to go without victuals and drink, as the angels do above.

13 at see what practically comes of all this. In order to be true penitents, we must be continually dissatisfied with ourselves; whereas in this state of things we are never dissatisfied with ourselves, because we are living among unrealities. We certainly have not succeeded in making such seraphic acts of love as St. Teresa: but then we never expected to do so. Neither have we failed in snubbing some low bad passion, such as envy and gluttony, as a converted ticket-of-leave man does, because, to say the truth, we never tried to do so. Thus it is, that even socalled pious people do not

S76 HEAVEN AND HELL.

think themselves sinners, except in a conventional sense. The theological generality is highly inoffensive, and they do not object to be included under that. But, as to anything more individual, and so more humbling, it is a mere matter of words with them, not a spiritual reality which they have tasted inwardly. Yet they are quite unconscious of all this delusion, because they have confused the whole matter by giving high names to low things. The real practical wisdom is this to take a high standard, but to take low things as our present working tools, because they are best for doing the IOAV work, the far-off work, the initial work, which belongs to us just now.

Of such importance does this matter seem to me, that the whole of the rest of this Conference will be devoted to one illustration of it. It is this: we strain at motives, which are so far above us that they have no reality to us. "We aim at disinterested love, before we have half learned interested fear. We leave the notions of rewards and punishments almost out of the spiritual life. Heaven and hell are not cogent daily motives with us. Nothing but experience would make us believe to what an extent this amazing folly, for it is rather a folly than a conceit, is perpetrated. In a word, one crying want of modern spirituality is more of heaven and hell, as the natural and secure means of getting more inward repentance.

But I am met on the threshold with all manner of objections to the consideration of heaven and hell as habitual, homely, familiar motive-powers. As to heaven, we are told that all detailed accounts of it must be so entirely fanciful. They, who think so, have little idea how much ascertained theology there is upon this subject, how much scripture tells us, how much the fathers have warrantably inferred, how much has been revealed to the saints, or how much becomes plain to us in humble persistent prayer. Then, again, we are told heaven is too unworldly, that is, it is too unlike the life we are now leading, or the earth we are now living on. It is so unlike, as to be practically powerless as a motive, This needs no refutation. Again, it is said of heaven that it requires meditation before it can be known, and that, when a man has already acquired a habit of meditation, he will not need to be spurred on by the mercenary consideration of heaven. We may answer shortly, that what was practical to David and St. Paul can hardly be too low for us. But, it is rejoined, Isaias and St. Paul both say that eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor man s heart conceived, the joys which make up the life of heaven; and therefore that we shall only be losing ourselves in resplendent mysteries, if we strive to familiarize ourselves with details of heaven. I reply, Is the incomprehensibility of God admitted as a valid reason for not meditating upon His perfections? It is added, that a consideration of such a purely interested character is opposed to the modern spirit which talks so grandly against low motives. Granted: the modern spirit does talk grandly; but does it act grandly? Is it not the spirit of material prosperity, of railway speculations, of commercial frauds, of Stock Exchange diplomacy? But in truth no man ever began with making heaven a consideration of interest, who did not soon come to find it a consideration of love; and the thought of hell, which began with fear for ourselves, ends in devotion to the sanctity of God. Finally, we are told that such meditation is likely to lead to dreaminess. I reply, that, in the first place, I should like to meet with a few of these dreamy people, first to be sure of the fact, which I venture to doubt, and secondly to be sure I should condemn their dreaminess, which I dDubt also. I can quite conceive a dreaminess, which would be better than that misty vagueness of religious convictions, which half-earnest men are so fond of just now.

But, if meditation on heaven is objectionable, any thing like a studious scrutiny of hell is still more so. First of all it is exciting. Now let me ask you, and be honest with me, Did you ever try it and find it so your self? You are only theorizing. Exciting! I should say no, rather that it was saddening, sobering, subduing, snubbing: though, after all, if it was exciting, it might perhaps be the very thing for you. You probably need exciting. Most people do, in the matter of religion. Secondly, fastidiousness puts in its objection. As noises must be kept from invalids, so all the coarse horrors of hell must be relegated to the background, and not be allowed to intrude upon our calmness or our gentility. They do no good. They only startle, and scare. Here, again, I ask in return, Is it so certain that you do not require startling? Is it quite beyond a doubt, that a scaring would be a great help to your salvation? Kindness is cruel, as I told you when we were speaking of weariness in welldoing, to those who have taken opium, in order that it may be the more really kind. It walks them about, when they piteously entreat to lie down and sleep. It beats them on the soles of their feetj and on the palms of their hands. It chafes them, until they are scarified. "What if modern spirituality has something analogous to opium in it? In that case, a similar treatment of the patient might be recommended*

But I am not contented with this answer. I would ask some further questions; for this is an important matter. Who made these " coarse horrors?" God. Then they must be worthy of Him, and in some way manifest His perfections? Assuredly. Now did He make them with the intention that they should be concealed and unknown? Did He wish sinners to remain in ignorance of them, that so the intensity of their punishment should take them by surprise, when they died? If so, why did He reveal them? If so, why did our meek, gentle, loving Lord talk of the undying worm, and the unquenched fire, and the outer darkness, and the weeping, and the wailing, and the gnashing of teeth? Why did He repeat His words about the worm and the fire, like the burden of a song, as if He wished to impress them upon us? Why did He bid His sweet-tongued disciple St. John to speak twice of the lake that burns with fire and brimstone? Surely He meant hell to be made much of, and diligently pondered. The old spirituality, which put the Four Last Things so prominently forward in its system, was more evangelical, than the fastidious system which pro claims the new principle of keeping out of sight those frightening objects, of w r hich the Old Testament says,² that he who remembers them shall never sin, and the apostles, that knowing the terror of the Lord they persuade men.f Is it really meant to assert that, in these polished days, religion is to be allowed no office except to soothe? Who can help being reminded of those scriptures, wherein, twice over,$ Jeremias makes God to say, They healed the breach of the daughter of my people disgracefully, saying, Peace, Peace; and there was no peace; or again, where Ezekiel speaks of the spiritual directors of his day> Woe to them that i Jer. vi. 14. viii. 11. \ Ezech. xiii. 18.

sew cushions under every elbow, and make pillows for the heads of persons of every age?

I grant that there is one thing in modern spirituality, which does tend to make a definite and detailed consideration of hell unpractical. It is that its largeness, its laxity, and,its opiates make every one take for granted, that he at least shall never go there. It insures salvation to any one. It bids us cast out fear, as if we already had perfect love. The question, which God leaves to hang in doubt, it solves and settles, in order to annihilate the doubt because it is a painful and disturbing one. In a prison, a hulk, a convict settlement, or among the exceedingly poor, we are at liberty to use hell. It is a vulgar subject for vulgar minds. Alas! if our languishing upperclass piety did but so much as dream of the realities of grace which there are among the exceedingly poor, it might blush for the child s play of devotion, with which it strives to gild its worldliness without subduing self!

Once more; we are told to be chary in bringing hell forward, inasmuch as in these days it angers men rather than cows them, and is suggestive of temptations against the faith, and of irritabilities against God s dominion and sovereignty. But at this rate we may go on keeping back first one part of God s revelation, and then another. Each age has some portion of divine truth, of which it is specially impatient. God knew all this when He gave revelation to men. He does not bring forward a dispensation every century. He does not give each generation a bible of its own, He does not condescend so far to the noisy trivialities which strut across history, and call themselves the spirit of the age. Each century makes too much of itself, and is mistaken both in thmkinoitself so very peculiar, and in considering its peculiarities to be of much consequence. If men are rather irritated than frightened by the preaching of hell, it is certainly an index that the gift of faith is less abundant or less vigorous; but it is no argument against bringing forward a part of divine truth, which will find souls to save, even though others may rebel. Our Lord foresaw, that His Gospel would be a stumblingblock, and St. Paul found that it looked like foolishness to many. As I said before, God knew all this, and yet revealed it; and in all the nineteen centuries of the Gospel there has never been one heretofore, whose spirituality was not fed from the contemplation of the Four Last Things. As to these temptations against the faith, which, like exacting invalids, claim such a specialty of delicate forbearance, I get to respect them less, the older I grow. They abound in unreality. They are the most unearnest of temptations. They are not unfrequently a form of conceit in the young, and a mode of self-importance in the middle-aged. I have so often been taken in by them, that I find it difficult to treat them as gravely as I wish to do, or to give a very careful attention to them: they mean so much less than they sound, and so much less than those, who utter them, imagine. I see a real, good, solid, wholesome work to be done in real, good, solid, Wholesome souls, by frequent meditation on hell; and I cannot bring myself to sacrifice it to the sickly insincerities and dishonest ignorances, out of which so large a proportion of temptations against the faith arise.

I cannot, therefore, concede all that these various objections imply. But I know that no private opinions are so obstinate as those which concern practical religion; and therefore I am willing to concede part for the present, in the hope of gaining the whole from you hereafter. I should like to take the oldfashionecl heaven and the oldfashioned hell, and put them in their old places. But you would not go along with -me. Let us, therefore, make a compromise. You shall at least admit the principle of finding a motive in rewards and punishments. You shall stoop to be more mercenary and self-interested about your own salvation. Mean while I will be content to bring heaven before you with the heaven left out, that is without the Beatific Vision; as it seems that it is the theology of the Vision which is considered so fanciful, and too unlike our present joys to exercise much of a practical influence over us. Most men, especially if their family ties and domestic affec tions are very strong, are tempted to wish for an eternity of virtuous earth; not a mere everlasting Bagdad of the Arabian Nights, not a mere unending "golden prime of the good Haroun Alraschid," but really an eternity of virtuous earth, a soul of developed faculties, a finer field of action, the negation of all kinds of unhappiness, and, above all, the old penates, the well-known household gods, gathering round him without danger of parting or growing old. This I must heighten, modify, and scripturalize a little: but still there shall be no inexplicable Vision, with its wordless beauties and its unimaginable splendours. In like manner, in the hell I put before you, there shall be no stress laid upon the indescribable pain of losing God; and I will also leave out the fire, the worm, the brimstone, the weeping, the wailing, and the gnashing of teeth. This is the only heaven many socalled good people care to reach: this is the only hell many socalled good people think they are called upon to avoid. Moreover it is the only hell they will consent to look at, as in keeping with the decencies and proprieties of polite life. I believe the cause of inward repentance will gain even bj the consideration of such modified rewards and punishments as these: a truly sober heaven for unimaginative men, a truly inoffensive hell for the squeamishness of modern discretion!

Now let us come down from the crazy heights of detachment, pure love, and other attainments of the saints, among which we have been wandering to no purpose in our dreams, while in our waking hours we have just eaten, and drunk, and spoken, and slept, and enjoyed ourselves as we pleased, in the midst of modern comforts. Let us look at our promised reward, at what David calls (rod s retribution; and let us see if looking at it will not hinder our fainting so often, and fallinor so o * o far short in the observance of the Ten Commandments and in the conscientious discharge of our relative duties. Leaving all mysteries aside, what kind of a life shall we lead in heaven?

First of all, it is a life of inability to sin. "Who is not burdened by his proneness to evil? Who is not vexed with the facilities of sin? It is true we love God poorly. Yet we love Him well enough to make it a positive pain to us to offend Him. Even in our present state of low attainments there is something wonderfully attractive in a life of inability to sin. But it would be much more so, if we loved as the saints loved. It will be much more so, by God s grace, before we have done. Then think also of the painful ascetic vigilance which we are now obliged to keep up. That will all be gone. There will be no more possible discomfort of conscience. It will be the joy of our life to be secure, that all we do will be sweet music and beautiful worship in the sight of God. But this is not all. Our life will be one of facility in worship, of an endless unmtermitting inundation of spiritual sweetness. We read wonderful things of this sweetness, in the lives of the saints. We have had no such experiences as theirs.. But we have had, from time to time, little tastes of sweetness; and what have they been like? Now let us be deliberate. I think that, without any exaggeration, life has never given us anything like them. They have been few, and transient, and doubtless of the lowest kind. Yet the joy of them was not a thing to put into words, it was so very, very sweet. But heaven will be always that. No! not so. Heaven, the lowest heaven for the lowest of us, will be a life of spiritual sweetness far beyond what the highest saints have ever experienced on earth. Now we have to strive, in order to pray. It is hard to keep our thoughts up to God. But in heaven no sort of effort will be required; but we shall enjoy a most delightful facility in the most sublime and cxtatic contemplations, with the keenest sensations of delight, of which the raptures of the world s most glorious artists, in the heat of their grand creations, is but an unworthy figure. All this will be continuous and unwearied, and yet ever gushing, as it were, afresh and anew from the glad soul, accompanied with such magnificent expansions both of intellect and heart as are beyond our present dreams, even when they are boldest and wildest.

Then think of the life of peace in heaven. Peace! let us stay to suck the word as if it were a honeycomb. Peace! Peace! how unlike life, how unlike earth, how unlike even the fatiguing activities of grace! How we have longed for it all life through, and long for it now, alas! more than we long for God! Imagination can hardly picture to itself a life without trouble or distrust, a life without a past to excite regrets, or a present to gall with a yoke, or a future all dim and misty in its uncertainty. The sleep of happy honest labour is an image of this delicious calm. The way in which land and sea, lakes and woodlands, as if their display of morning beauty had tired them, seem to lie down afresh, and sleep in the noonday sun, is an emblem of our heavenly rest. The starry skies at soundless midnight give us a feeling which we cannot express, but which helps us to a notion of the utter peace of that blissful Hereafter. Yet, after all, it is like no other peace; for it is a participation in that peace of God which over passes human understanding. Can all this be for us? Is it actually one of our possibilities? Nay, more than that, nearer than that, likelier than that. An ocean of heavenliest peace, bound in mysterious and glad tranquillity, inviting us to sail upon its bosom, onward into brightness for ever and for ever, Oh if this were all, if there were nothing but this peace, is it not a more than sufficient reward for a long life of austerest holiness?

Then, after the resurrection, there are the pleasures of sense. Who can tell the powers of enjoyment which there will be in the glorified bodies of the just, raised up in the likeness of Jesus? In this world of faith, the senses seem stronger than God, because we do not yet see Him. They lead all men captive with a passionate captivity. Other pleasures, marvellous as they are, exercise no such thraldom over our souls. The world goes wild with the intoxicating enchantments of sensual pleasures. How exquisite they are! Think of the delight of the eye in contemplating the beauties of nature, and expatiating over magnificent scenery, or feeding itself on some fascinating work of art. Or, again, reflect how the ear revels in sweet sounds and is entranced with the spells of music. Hours pass, and the lapse of time is all unheeded. The rest of the outer world has faded away, and the soul hangs over the abysses of harmony, as if it would break away from the body, and drown itself in those deeps of wavy sound for ever. Or, again, think with w T hat exquisite tranquil encroachment the odours of sweet flowers and aromatic gums steal over us, and dislodge cares, and weariness, and revive the drooping soul, and put a new life into us, and a life of such peculiar spell-bound gentleness and love. All these things will be in heaven. They will be there unintermittingly. Only, they will exist in infinitely higher degrees than are possible on earth. Yet all this is but a little thing to say of the senses of the glorified body. Countless kinds of new and unimaginable pleasures will be opened out to us there, each one far surpassing those of earth, pleasures worthy of the extasies of heaven, worthy of the magnificence of God.³ Moreover we may not only give ourselves up to them with unreserved abandonment as utterly sinless: we may do more. They are not only faultless, but they are all of them fresh exercises of the grandest holiness. Was there ever a fairy tale like this? W: - -

But the sweetest of all earthly joys is love: and the life in heaven is a life of love. Love, more than any human passion, has controlled the destinies of the world. It has been historically the greatest natural motive-power on earth. Nay, what of natural brightness each life of man on earth possesses, whence comes it, if not from love? What should we be at this moment, if we had none to love? How all our light would become darkness for a while, until our eyes could bear the light of God! Xot to have God to love is hell. Yet the love of all passionate lovers upon earth, thrown together, could not equal the love of the lowest and the calmest soul in heaven. Eternity will give us new powers of loving. "We shall love with some great nameless love, of which parental, filial, conjugal, fraternal loves only represent some portions or some elements. The jubilee of this immense power of loving is inconceivable. The objects of our love will be multiplied ten thousand-fold; and yet the very multiplication of its objects will only quicken the intensity of the love. Then consider, that the whole of this ocean of affection will always be poured out gloriously in the immortal vehemence of a spotless love, unutterably blissful because unutterably holy.

If we were bidden to say which were the greater joy, to love, or to be loved, it would be hard to give a judgment. We all crave for love. Our whole nature expands under its influence. It gives us new charac ters. It converts the deepest misery into happiness, and it makes heroes out of cowards. So far as our pleasure is concerned, there seem to be no limits to our capabilities of receiving love. What an amount of it we can drink in, even now and here, while our souls are undeveloped, and our lives narrow, and our hearts shallow, compared with what they will be! Surely, then, in heaven we shall be able to absorb oceans of love: and as surely there will be oceans to absorb. Each one of the Blessed will love us with a might of love far beyond all earthly love; and the Blessed are innumerable. The wide strong fiery natures of the angels will be poured out upon us in love, a love which we cannot now define, but a love more deep, more beautiful, and more possessing than human love; and of these angels there are legions upon legions. "Who can think of the bliss of that love with which the sinless Mother of God will endow us? No fond earthly mother, rapt in the exclusiveness of an excessive love, ever hung over her firstborn and her onlyborn with a fondness like to that, which the Mother of Jesus will testify to each of the Redeemed. Shall I dare to speak of the Sacred Humanity, or of how we shall share in the love which Peter once enjoyed upon the shores of Gennesareth, or John when he leaned upon the Bosom in which the Sacred Heart was beating? We have no measures for a bliss like that. Yet all this put together, saints, angels, Mary, Human Heart of Jesus, it is not such a love as the one which still awaits us. Glorified though we shall be, we shall still be little, finite, weak: and yet out of every Perfection of the immense, omnipotent, all-knowing, all-holy, incomprehensible, jubilant God there will flow into us torrents of bewildering love in perpetual inundations, overpowering us with thrills of a vast new life, taking away our breath, and sus pending all the faculties of our souls far, far up amid unthought-of regions of light, in extasies of an incomparable beatitude, like to the Beatitude of God Himself. "We shall be eternally swallowed up in eternal love.

The exceeding imperturbable contentment of heaven is another feature of its life. All the joys, whether singly or collectively, are more satisfying than we be lieved they could be. Widened, deepened, strengthened as our natures are, each joy fills our whole nature to the brim. Yet there is no satiety, even while there is no craving. A delightful hunger for more, and more, and always more, has possession of us: but it is only the joyous, fresh, vital feeling of hunger, and in no wise a sense of want. Each joy seems every moment as if it could not be surpassed, and yet every moment it is surpassing itself, and every moment being surpassed by some other joy. That immortality should be able to endure such vehement pulsations of gladness will be an eternal miracle. Eternal! this is the last feature of this blissful life. But the word is rather music than meaning. Eternal! distracting thought even when we meditate upon it the most undistractedly! It is a bliss which shall have no end, because it is out of His bliss who had no beginning. It is a glory always in excess, yet always equable, immutable yet not monotonous, exhilarating yet immortally calm, multitudinous yet simple and undistracting, an incredible extasy incredibly new for an incredible eternity.

What a life to lead! But is this heaven? I answer both Yes and No. It is the poor part of heaven. It is the minor joys of heaven. It is the secondary accompaniments of the real grand joy. It is heaven with the heaven left out, heaven without the Beatific Vision of our dear God. I have not even dwelt upon the spiritual blessedness of heaven, because I should have had to imply the Vision. Yet what a life does even this faint, thin, weak, overclouded, lower heaven present to our minds! If we were continually meditating upon it, until we familiarized ourselves with it, would it not marvellously draw us onward towards God? Would it not exorcise many a spirit of worldliness, which now dwells contentedly amidst the unreali ties of our spiritual life? Above all, would it not breed in us a far deeper abhorrence of sin, a far more genuine spirit of inward repentance, a far more abiding sorrow for our miserable, ungenerous past? Yet who are they who have reached that fair haven of their peace? Those, and those alone, who on earth took up the Cross, and took it up daily; and so, and only so, and always so, have followed Christ.

Let us now turn to hell. It is fearful to think upon the union of God s power, wisdom, and justice in pro ducing this world of punishment, this wonderful, mysterious, and terrific part of creation, which is in its desolate mysteries as much beyond our conception as the joys of heaven are in their resplendency. Nevertheless we will leave the Great Evil, the loss of God, out of view, and all the horrible details of the cruelties of physical torture. Bating all these things, what sort of a life will the life in hell be, after the resurrection?

It will be a life where every act is the most hateful and abominable wickedness. "We shall understand sin better then, and be able more truly to fathom the abysses of its malice. Yet every thought we think, every word we speak, every action we perform, we shall be committing sin, and committing it with a guilty shame and terror which will be insupportable. Even the sins of others will be excruciating tortures to us. If we were awakened at midnight in our houses, and held by strong men in the lone darkness, while their accomplices were murdering before our eyes some one whom we loved most tenderly, how terrible, how desperate, would the torture be! Our reason would be not unlikely to give way. The agonizing moan, the wild enquiring eye so glazily fixed upon us, the pale contracted face of the sufferer, the fiendlike gestures of the murderers, and the staring red stain every where, these would haunt us all through life. Yet I suppose the sight of the hideous wickedness of hell must be incomparably more horrible than this. Nevertheless amid it all we have to live, as best we may, eternally, drowned in shame and misery and hopelessness.

It is a life, for I will speak of it in the present tense, in which all possible kinds of bodily agony are united in the highest degree. Think of the countless diseases to which men may be subjected. Some of them kill with sheer pain in a few moments. Every limb, every deeply hidden nerve, every cell which life informs, has a cluster of torments belonging to itself. Think only of what the head, the teeth, the ears, the eyes can suffer! Then consider all the variety of wounds which may be inflicted upon our wincing flesh and our ting ling bone, whether upon a field of battle, or in surgical operations. Consider also the exquisite ingenuity of the tortures of medieval prisons, or of the inhuman contrivances from which the criminal law of England and Scotland has not been free till quite late in modern history. All these, always at the highest stretch, always up to the point of the intolerable and beyond it,- such is the life of hell. Nay it is not such; for, besides these, there will be an excess of new undreamed of tortures of our flesh, which has lost even the poor mercy of being able to lie down and die.

This is terrible: but to this you must add the mental agonies of hell. Envy, despair, spite, rage, gloom, sadness, vexation, wounded sensitiveness, weariness, loathing, oppression, grief, dejection, wildness, bitterness, all these are there, in all their kinds, and in unspeakable intensity. Think of a violent access of sorrow now, think of the rawness of lacerated feeling, think of a day s leaden load of dark oppression. Xow, without pause, without alleviation, without even vicissitude of suffering, here is a blank, huge, superincumbent eternity of all these things, with an undistracting multiplicity of wretchednesses far beyond the worst degrees they could ever reach on earth. But earth does not half exhaust the mind s power to suffer, either in degree or kind. The life in hell will disclose to us indescribable novelties of unhappiness. Our vast immortal spirits will become alive with misery and woe. New faculties of wretchedness will spring to life. We shall be for ever discovering new worlds of intensest sorrow, of most intolerable anguish. But is this to be endured? It must be endured. We must lie there in disconsolate helplessness for ever. Our minds have lost also their last poor mercy of being able to go mad. The life in hell is a life also, from which there is a total absence of sympathy and love. This is an easy thing to say; but it is not easy to penetrate into its significance. The mind loses itself when it attempts to traverse an interminable desert eternity, where no flowers of love, nor even their similitude, can grow. Shall a kind voice never speak to us more? Shall a kind eye never look at us again? Shall even the hearts of the Blessed in heaven, who loved us once with such surpassing tenderness, only beat the more happily because the justice of God is done upon us forlorn impenitent offenders? Who can live without love? I know not: I cannot think how it can be: but I know that we must live without it there. Nay, more than this; hatred will be all around us. Every lost soul, every lost demon, will hate us, hate us individually with a concentration of rage and hatred, which it is terrible to think of. There is something insupportable in being hated, something maddening. Even when we are hated, though few men are really hated with a genuine hatred, by only one man, and unjustly, and with love all round us, coming in from every other point of the compass, see how we run to God, and cling to Him, that He may make up to us what we are suffering, and take our part, as a just Father, against our unjust brother! But in hell we shall be inundated with scorn and rage and hatred, and we shall, one while, cower in our shame, as knowing how richly a confirmed enemy of God merits even more than this; and then, another while, we shall rave with equal scorn, and rage, and hatred against every one else, even while we are being crushed by the hollow, vacant impotence of our unutterable fury, A life of universal hatred, sinking ever lower and lower in the depths of torturing shame, with screams of rage which are not madness, but a concentrated intelligent misery, this is the life of hell, the life that follows upon an over-estimate of earthly love. The life in hell is also a life of terror. Fear may be reckoned as one of the greatest tortures to which human nature can be submitted. It " betrays the succours of reason" without bringing also the unconsciousness of insanity. It is hard to say whether the visible approach of some great evil, or the agony of an uncer*- tain evil, or the distracted fright of a present evil, may be considered as the worst to bear. Ordinarily speaking, life is not greatly tortured by fear. It is, for the most part, but an occasional visitant, and an extremely transient one. In truth,, life would be hardly liveable, if it were not so. Yet how its visits burn themselves in upon the memory as unforgotten dates! But the whole life in hell is a life of fear, and of such exceeding fear as is not known on earth. It is a com mingling of all unholy fears, and a commingling of them in the highest possible degree, and an addition to them of new fears of such terrific aspect and gigantic features as shall be in proportion with the Tearfulness of hell. Our whole nature, keen, sensitive, immortal as it has become, will be saturated with fear. -Its very pulses will be startings and quakings of horror, horror never removed but ever new, to which we never grow accustomed, but which will strangely magnify itself to all eternity. We can only picture our feelings by comparing them to the torture of a suffocated scream, when we fear to betray ourselves, or to a terrified death bed without death coming. One feature of hell will enable us to bring this home to ourselves. We shall be in the hands of devils, quailing under the cruel manipulation of those hideous, incorporeal, shapeless, formless, gigantic spirits. They will do what they will with us. It is their office to distress, to rack, to torture us, with a vindictive cruelty and a demoniacal skill, of which we can form no conception. Mighty creatures! and yet their magnitude, their fury, their oppressive fiery natures cannot crush the wretched life out of us their trembling, awe-struck victims. To be thrown down amidst a herd of wild horses, to be confined for a night with an unchained frenzied murderer in his condemned cell, to be locked in, bound hand and foot, amidst a crowded ward of howling maniacs, all loose and free, what light and easy endurances these would be, compared with those wild panics of terror in hell, a terror which can neither escape, nor hide) itself, nor die.

It is a life also without pauses, diminutions, or vicis situdes. "No angel ever wings his way thither on an errand of consolation. All the united eloquence of hell could not bring one drop of water from earth s thousand fountains, to cool the torture for one lightning s flash of time. All is unintermitting. Our nature has become many-sided to bear its million agonies -which are separately gnawing at it. It has become stronger than adamant, that it may not be shivered in pieces by the colossal tortures of those appalling, monstrous execu tioners. To this unintermittingness should be added a threefold anguish, which may be considered as the per manent disposition of the sufferers in hell. There is the anguish of impotence. We can do nothing. "VVe are tied down. We cannot stir. We cannot even roam and wander over the lurid regions round about us. We cannot use any activities which might distract us, or put forth any energies which might give us occupation. We are helpless in a desperate intelligent paralysis. We cannot even toss to and fro, or turn from side to side. We are fastened to our place. Look at it. We shall never move from it any more, never, never, never. It is the anguish of immobility, under which we are helpless without being passive. It seems a cruelty, enough to drive us wild to think of. Yet to this impotence we must add also an intolerable restlessness, but an unshifting restlessness. Every limb will throb with uneasiness, every nerve vibrate with restlessness. It will peck at the heart as a vulture pecks at its prey. The soul will thrill with unrest, until it makes every sense tingle, as with burning needles, because of the unbearable torture of this rest lessness. Every moment, even an immortal soul, even a deathless body, will feel as if this nervous and mental agony of restlessness could be borne no longer; and yet it must be borne still, and it must be borne for ever, and it must be borne without its ever becoming easier to bear. that scared tumult of eternal sleeplessness! who shall endure it? Yet a third agony adds itself to 1 the other two, growing out of them, out of the impotence and the restlessness. It is. the misery of an impatience which has no hope, an impatience which can only be a spirit of blasphemy, a loathsome- burning abhorrence of God, which the lost creature is obliged himself to abhor, even while he inwardly raves with the fever of it. "We cannot fancy what it is not to hope. We cannot put into form and figure in our own minds the unimaginable blackness of a soul, from which all expectation, all prospect, all future has been removed. Its only future is the everlastingness of its intolerable present. We have sometimes a flash of pain, which just darts over the limit of what is bearable, and we utter a peculiar shriek. It is heard on the battlefield when the diaphragm is stabbed through. It occasionally accompanies the crash of apoplexy. It is the body s uttermost cry. Conceive an inward life of a deep, broad soul, which shall be for ever in itself the spiritual reality of which that corporal cry is the most inadequate expression.

Yet this is the bright side of hell! How bitter the words sound; yet it is not bitterness which prompts them, but the intense fear which pierces through me like splinters of ice at this moment. This is hell, with the hell left out, the crowning woe, the loss of God. This is hell without the fire, and the brimstone, and the darkness, and the discordant noises, and the weeping, and the wailing, and the gnashing of teeth. It is the minor adjuncts of hell, the torments to be thought least of, the miseries which come nearest to being bear able. Could we persistently meditate on all this, and still be what we are? Are we quite clear that this will not be our eternal destiny? Is there anything in life to be compared for importance with the barest possibility of this? Are our lives at all a sensible effort to avoid this? What is our inward repentance like? What are our mortifications, our tears, our cries, our alms, our unworldlinesses? How do we stand towards our past sins in the way of penance and contrition? How are we dealing with our present temptations and occasions? What pains are we taking about our reso lutions for the future? Even at the best, it is not clear of any one of us that we shall escape hell. To all of us hell is an imminent possibility. The saints tell us that they, who feel surest of not going there, are the likeliest to be mistaken. Have we an attachment to any sin, however venial? Are we bargaining with God, and trying to evade strictness? These are the begin nings of hell already in our souls. But which of the dead have avoided hell? Those, and those only, who on earth took up their Cross, and took it up daily; and so, and only so, and always so, have followed Christ.

Now, dear, blood-ransomed souls of men! how does modern spirituality look in the soft light of heaven, and in the grim light of hell? I have put before you but thin shadows of their lesser realities. I did not think you would bear more. But I hope these thin shadows will lead you on, until the oldfashioned heaven and the oldfashioned hell come into you, and take their right place in your spiritual life. By the light of these things, then, what judgment shall we pass on much of the popular spirituality of the day? On that jumble of theatres, operas, balls, shows, pageants, and expensivenesses, with churches, hospitals, confessionals, altar-steps, penances, and charitable committees, on that neglect of the relative duties of our stations to parents, to servants, to children, for church -functions, and fancy devotions, on that favourite confusion of the purgative, illuminative, and unitive ways of holiness, on the las doctrine of vocations, on that oblivion of the old-fashioned capital sins, such as envy and idleness, on that fastidiousness which is the secret fuel of impurity, on that eternal gossip of direction and criticism of sermons, on that impatience of dry painstaking meditation, on that appetite for liberty of spirit, and a vain imitation of the saints, on that hankering after Counsels without heeding the interior and spiritual observance of the Commandments, on that inordinate craving for inward peace at any cost, on all this what judgment shall we pass? Meditate on heaven and hell, and then you will be fitting judges. I do not ask you to do so because it will make you happier. It will make you happier, because it will make you holier. But I want you to do so, because gently and in time, solidly yet without violence, it will lead you to do braver penance for your sins, and to repent of them with a more inward repentance: and this inward repentance is the grand necessity of the day. I shall be more content with your spirituality, when you can say to God with David,⁴ in unabashed simplicity, I have inclined my heart to do Thy justifications for ever, because of the reward.

Footnotes

1. This question of naturalism is one of the most important in these days of catholic revival. It were greatly to be wished that Dom Gueranger s exceedingly interesting volume could be compressed, and reduced to form, so as to present to impatient readers the principles of naturalism, its dan gers and its remedies, in a compact and lucid way. The successive criti cisms of M. de Broglie s book distract the reader, and disconnect the subject. Nevertheless it is a most valuable contribution to catholic literature, even in its present unattractive form. Essais sur le. Naturalisme Contemporain par R. P. D, Gueranger. Julien, Lanier et Cie, Paris. ↩

2. Ecclus vii. 4d. f 2 Cor. v. n. ↩

3. II est des Emotions tellement delicates et dcs objects si ravissants, qu on ne saurait lea exprimer qu avec dcd couleurs cm des sons. Joubert, Pensees. ii. 2,. ↩

4. Ps. cxviii. 112. ↩