bitter fruits," there is no help for it: that though "an evil deed, like newly-drawn milk, does not all at once turn sour, yet, smouldering like fire covered by ashes, it follows the fool" into the unseen world: that, if "a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage," a most significant comparison. As you will remember we used to read in Hegel, punishment is not something arbitrary; it is "the other half of crime." It is not primarily nor necessarily remedial, but vindictivea stern truth, which the jargon of so-called philanthropists has done much to obscure for the present age. Every great religion, every profound thinker, has realized as vividly as Christianity itself the tremendous, the far-reaching nature of sin. You remember the passage in Plato-it is in the Phædo --where he says that the wicked would be too well off if their evil deeds came to an end with death, and that other passage at the end of the Republic, where one spirit asks another, "Where is Ardiæus the Great'?"-the tyrant who a thousand years before had desolated one of the cities of Pamphylia -and is answered, "He has not come forth from hell; he is not likely to come forth." It is a most striking thing that the two founders of religions, who, as you will allow, have been most full of pity for men, Jesus the Messiah, and Gotama the Buddha, have presented the most terrible pictures of the consequences, in another existence, of moral

CHAP. IV.] “THE OTHER HALF OF CRIME.”

265

evil in this. Think of Dives, the heartless glutton, asking in vain for a drop of water to cool his tongue in the unquenchable flame. Think of the monk Kokâliya, of whom we read in the Sutta Nipata, condemned, for speaking evil of the brethren, to the Paduma hell, where the wicked are beaten with iron hammers, and boiled in iron pots in a mixture of blood and matter, and fed on food resembling red-hot balls of iron, and plunged into the accursed river Vetaranî, difficult to cross, and flowing with streams of sharp-edged razors, and where their torments last 512,000,000,000 times as long as it would take to clear away a large load of tiny sesamum seed, at the rate of one seed in a hundred years. If, as Catholics believe, God is the final end of man-to love Him above all things, our friend in Him, our enemy for him, our great good-and if this life is a time of probation, what can we reasonably conjecture as to the destiny which any one shapes for himself who deliberately turns away from that final end, and rejects that great good, who takes side with His enemies, and says, "Evil, be thou my good"? "L'enfer," says Bossuet, "c'est le péché même, l'enfer c'est d'être eloigné de Dieu." He whose lips were full of grace, speaks of eternal sin-"reus æterni delicti,"1-a pregnant expression indeed. There is a fine passage in the Qur'an, depicting with much boldness the "Dies

1 ἁμαρτήματος, not κρίσεως, is unquestionably the true reading of the passage, St. Mark iii. 29.

Iræ," as the Muslim prophet conceived of it, "when the heavens shall be rent asunder, and the stars shall be dispersed, and the seas shall be mingled, and the sepulchres shall be overthrown, and every soul shall know what it hath done and left undone." On that great and exceeding bitter day, in each man's hand shall be put the book of his deeds; his account exactly stated; himself called to witness that "the Lord will not deal unjustly with any one." The vision which you have conjured up, I of course put aside as the mere phantasm of a disordered imagination. God is infinitely loving, as well as infinitely just. And of this we may be confident—it seems to me blasphemous to doubt it -that the eventual condition of every soul will be such as is best for that soul; the best that is possible for it, as being what it is, what it has made itself to be. This is the "larger hope," which we not only may faintly trust, but should assuredly believe: the one ray of celestial light in this great darkness. "Thou lovest all the things that are, and abhorrest nothing that Thou hast made. Thou sparest all, for they are Thine, O Lord, Thou Lover of Souls!''

PYTHIAS. Well, it is satisfactory to learn "que le bon Dieu n'est pas si noir qu'on le croit." But I have a train to Richmond to catch, and time is going on. Let me go on too, and touch upon another point, I mean the difficulties which history presents to the claims of Christianity, and especially of Catholicism. Thus we can trace the develop

2

CHAP. IV.]

IIISTORICAL DIFFICULTIES.

267

ment of the Theistic idea among the Hebrews, as an historical fact, from the anthropomorphic national or tribal Deity, Yahveh, to the Eternal God proclaimed by Jeremiah and the later prophets. We can trace the growth of the Trinitarian idea from the dim semi-Platonic notion in which it first appears, until it receives its full embodiment at Nicæa. We know when a belief in purgatory came in: we can follow step by step the growth of the cultus of the Virgin. Put even when apparently fixed, stereotyped, so to speak, in symbols and formulas, religious ideas really change. Modern Catholicism would be, to no small extent, strange to a mediaeval Catholic. Nineteenth-century Protestantism would certainly considerably astonish Luther or Calvin. It is not difficult to imagine what effect either would produce on St. Peter or St. Paul. πάντα ῥεῖ.

DAMON. And why not? To live is to change. I am not in the least concerned to deny that the earliest Hebrew conceptions of Deity were anthropomorphic. It was natural that they should be so. The Lord God, walking in the garden in the cool of the day, or speaking to Moses face to face, as a man is wont to speak to his friend, these and the like notions belong to a primitive state of religious belief. Here as elsewhere—

The thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns. Ideas are like seeds; they germinate in the human mind, they assimilate nutriment from all sides, they

grow and are transformed in the growing; and[all this takes place by a divinely ordained law, analogous to that which rules in the vegetable world, as might indeed have been expected, since both are the expression of the same Supreme Mind. It is perfectly true that the word Trinity did not come into use until the second century; it is equally true that the conception which that word expresses may be traced back to Apostolic times and long before. The doctrine of purgatory, as we find it in Pope St. Gregory's day, was, in some sort, new. But the notion of a place of purification, where the imperfect, "saved, yet so as by fire," abide—

In prison for the debt unpaid, I

Of sins committed here,

until its uttermost farthing is discharged, and the Divine Law is satisfied, is as old as Christianity, and far older. And so of other doctrines of the faith. There is really nothing more to be said on this subject than has been said by Cardinal Newman in his Essay on Development.

PYTHIAS. So that when

John P.

Robinson, he

Sez they didn't know everything down in Judee,

he speaks wiser than he is aware of.

DAMON. Yes. The theological statement of Mr. Robinson's proposition, if you care to have it in the words of Cardinal Laurence Brancata, is "Multæ veritates, initio ecclesiæ, aut obscuræ erant, aut