HEAVEN AND HELL.

  ————

Is Christianity Going Cranky ? 

———

Old and New Versions of the Hereafter. 

———

The spread of Rationalism, Materialism, Socialism, and "isms", of various kinds is nowadays playing sad havoc, not so much with Christianity itself as it is with those who live, or, as it is often, truly, said, "loaf," upon Christianity. So widespread are becoming the effects of the teachings of Evolutionists, whose theories of the world's foundation and formation upset and even uproot the basic teachings of Christianity, which teach an unregenerate world to laugh at and scorn the idea of the story of Eden, of Adam and Eve, that the clerics of to-day view with consternation the revolution of the human mind which portends for the cleric that his day is over. The average parson of to-day is in a sad and sorry pickle. Those who have fat and comfortable livings foresee a future where the parson will be regarded as a curiosity, while the general preacher already has a hard battle for his daily crust. He has, in order to fill his Bethel, to resort to all sorts of dodges. He uses the newspapers as a medium for keeping himself in the public eye. His advertisements of the "novelties" which he is offering at his Sabbath Conventicle show him to be a close student of the theatrical. He is ever prone to depart from true theology and the teachings of Christ to enter the arena of every day politics. There is not a social question arising with which to grapple we look to our politicians, but the parson pokes an inquisitive snout. He endeavors to take the lead in matters where the economic rights of the people are concerned. He drops the Gospel to preach politics. His cunningly-worded advertisements in the daily Press are traps for "traybits." Originality and novelty nowadays, seem to form the watchword of the sky-pilot. He will thunder against anything or anybody if it insures a full church, and so utterly degraded is the parson of to-day that it cannot be wondered at if his attempts to fill his church are considered by the ungodly to be nothing but "silver coin admission gaffs." The battle for bread and butter is a strenuous one. The "pilot" must live; if he fails to live by preaching the Gospel, is it any wonder that he sets out on the Sabbath day to vie with the theatrical management of the previous six days?

 * * *

 We are not disposed to enter into any heavy and serious controversy on theological matters. We live in a materialistic age, in which the Church, apart from Christianity, has lost caste with the masses. The Church, not Christianity, has alienated itself from the sympathies of the masses, because throughout history, excepting, perhaps, at the very inception of Christianity, the preachers of the Gospel have arrayed themselves on the side of wealth. The whole history of Christian preachers is one of avarice and greed, avarice of gold and greed of power, and no power, was ever more tyrannical, cruel and unjust than the power wielded by those who, preaching the forgiveness of sins, and the teachings of the Son of God, set at nought, by their own example, the gentleness, the holiness, and the true spirit of loving thy neighbor as thyself, as taught by Jesus Christ. It is no wonder, with the spread of education and the inculcation of Rational belief, that the toiling and moiling masses have revolted, not against the Christianity as preached by Christ, but against the Christianity of those who set up themselves as His representatives on earth. Education is the most virile enemy of superstition. An ignorant and credulous community could easily be imposed upon. It was the Church which ever set its face against the education of the masses, and now that the whole world is being enlightened, the cleric shrinks in terror from the oncoming host, and little by little the Church retrogrades, conceding first one principle, then another, until in this twentieth century the parson, baffled and beaten, unable to exercise that terrorism which has darkened the world's history, is forced to admit that it is all more or less superstition, and, cutting his cloth accordingly, is offering to the world "reformed" religion, utterly denuded of the terroristic spirit. To the idea of the evolution of man the parson offers no opposition. He cannot reconcile with science the story of the Creation. To-day parsons everywhere are beginning to preach doubt concerning the existing of heaven and hell itself. This, of course, is no new doctrine, because Lecky, in his great work, "The History of Morals in Europe," says :

 It is, indeed, probable that religious terrorism played a more important part in the monastic phase of Christianity than it had done even in the great work of the conversion of the pagans. Although two or three amiable theologians had made faint and altogether abortive attempts to question the eternity of punishment ; although there had been some slight differences of opinion concerning the future of some pagan philosophers who had lived before the introduction of Christianity, and also upon the question whether infants who died unbaptised were only deprived of all joy, or were actually subjected to never-ending agony, there was no question as to the main features of the Catholic doctrine. According to Patristic theologians, it was part of the gospel revelation that the misery and suffering the human race endured upon earth is but a feeble imagine of that which awaits it in the future world; that all its members beyond the Church, as well as a very large proportion of those who are within its pale, are doomed to an eternity of agony in a literal and undying fire.

 Rob the Christian Church of the terrors of the fire of hell, and the Church immediately loses its hold on those whom, by the preaching of terror, it keeps in its grasp. Already, one cleric in Wellington has openly disavowed the existence of hell and heaven, and the latest in the field is Dr. Crossley, the Anglican Bishop of Auckland, whose sermon at St. Mary's Cathedral, Auckland, one Sunday evening lately, threw further doubt on the existence of the torments of hell which await the sinner on earth. The Bishop does not deny the existence of Hades and Paradise, modern terms for Hell and Heaven, but, in effect, he tells us that just now, and presumably for thousands of years, heaven and hell are empty, that there is not a soul there, that the dead are simply sleeping to be awakened by Gabriel's horn on the last day, when we shall be judged by the Almighty. Christianity certainly seems to be going cranky.

 * * *

 These notions on the hereafter, coming from Christian clerics, denote a complete revolution in thought, and show that those who preach, or pretend to preach the Gospel are keeping an eye on the steady advance of Rationalism, which, if it does not deny the existence of a Supreme Being, has smashed into smithereens, because it is scientifically true, all the old-fangled ideas which the early Fathers taught. The cleric of to-day, with his advanced views of heaven and hell, is at variance with the Saints of the Past. If the twentieth century view is right, the early Fathers were very wrong. If the early teachings were superstitious, how can the cleric of to-day reconcile his position, which amounts to the preaching of modified superstition? Let us go back to the early Fathers and take their views on hell. St. Macarius, we learn, while walking through a desert, struck a human skull with his staff, and it spoke to him. It was the skull of a pagan priest whose soul was then in hell. "As high as the heaven is above the earth, so high does the fire of hell mount in waves above the souls that are plunged into it," was the pagan's picture. The damned souls, the saint was told by the skull of the pagan sinner, were pressed together, back to back, and the poor old pagan requested the prayer of the saint that he might be turned face to face, as the sight of a brother's face might afford him some consolation. Then the story of St. Gregory, who successfully prayed for the partial freedom from the torments of hell of the damned soul of the Pagan Emperor Trajan, who had once relieved the distress of a widow. The saints professed to have seen damned souls carried down the craters of volcanoes, and the agitation of the volcanoes in Sicily were due to the great press of the damned in hells, which rendered it necessary to enlarge the portals of the Infernal Regions. Other saints represented the devil bound by red-hot chains on a burning grid-iron in the centre of hells, and his screams of never-ending agony echoed and reverberated throughout. His hands were free, and with these he seized lost souls and crushed them against his teeth, and swallowed them "down the fiery cavern of his throat." Demons were pictured as possessing hooks of red-hot iron, on which they impaled their victims, and alternately plunged them into ice and fire. The damned were hung up by their tongues, others were drawn asunder, others beaten together on an anvil, strained through a cloth, while others were embraced by demons whose limbs were of flame. In comparison with the fire of earth, we learn that the fire of hell was so intense that it alone could be called real. Sulphur was mixed with partly to increase the heat, and partly, too, in order that an abominable stench might be added to the other refined tortures. The fire emitted no light, in order that "the horror of darkness might be added to the horror of pain." There is, also, according to one of the Saints, a narrow bridge, spanning an abyss, from which the souls of sinners were plunged into the dark below. These are the descriptions of the ancients, but here is a picture of hell, written, not so many years ago, which — will it be believed?— was intended for children :

See! On the middle of that red-hot floor stands a girl; she looks about sixteen years old. Her feet are bare. She has neither shoes nor stockings. Listen! She speaks. She says: "I have been standing on this red-hot floor for years. Day and night my only standing-place has been this red-hot floor. Look at my burnt and bleeding feet. Let me go off this burning floor for one moment, only for one single short moment." The fourth dungeon is a boiling kettle. ... In the middle of it there is a boy. . . . His eyes are burning like two burning coals. . . . Two long flames come out of his ears. Some-times he opens his mouth, and blazing fire rolls out. But, listen! There is a sound like a kettle boiling. . .. . The blood is boiling and bubbling in his head. The marrow is boiling in his bones! The fifth dungeon is the red-hot oven. The little child is in this red-hot oven. Hear how it turns and twists about in the fire. It beats its head against the roof of the oven. It stamps its little feet on the floor. God was very good to this child. Very likely God saw it would get worse and worse, and punished much, more in hell. So God, in his mercy, called it out of the world in its early childhood.

The blasphemy of it! No wonder the cleric of to-day thinks it time that the pains and torments of hell were modified or entirely abolished.

 * * * 

We could quote in extenso many pictures of hell which were seriously imagined by the early Fathers, and religiously exhibited by later fathers and parsons to maintain clerical terrorism over the world. The age in which we live is too advanced to be imposed upon by such fantastic pictures. There is greater hell on earth than the hell which our pastors and preachers picture for us, and the working classes have been made to suffer those torments. With the cleric who spreads his particular or peculiar brand of Christianity, a crisis has arrived. Hell has no terrors now, and the parson, who for centuries has hung on to this cruel doctrine of a Just and Good God being transformed into a Fiend Incarnate, finds that it is a game which will not work, and he is now obliged to reluctantly admit that he has been preaching superstition. The Bishop of Auckland has not yet gone the length of denying the existence of Paradise and Hades. He has done the next best thing—to declare that such places are empty. What liars the Old Fathers must have been if Bishop Crossley's view is worthy of credence.

Truth (Brisbane, Qld. ), Sunday 26 May 1912, page 1

 https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/201748386