He looked at me intently:  I went on before he could answer: 

“Why, I’ve seen men in my time living from day to day in the very atmosphere of perpetual torment, and actually arguing that there was no hell.  It is a strange sight, I assure you, and one that will trouble you afterwards.  From what I know of hell, it is a place of very loose boundaries.  Sometimes I’ve thought we couldn’t be quite sure when we were in it and when we were not.”

I did not tell my friend, but I was thinking of the remark of old Swedenborg:  “The trouble with hell is we shall not know it when we arrive.”

At this point Mr. Purdy burst out again, having opened his little book at another page.

“When Adam and Eve had sinned,” he said, “and the God of Heaven walked in the garden in the cool of the evening and called for them and they had hidden themselves on account of their disobedience, did God say to them:  Unless you repent of your sins and get forgiveness I will shut you up in yon dark and dismal hell and torment you (or have the devil do it) for ever and ever?  Was there such a word?”

I shook my head.

[Illustration:  “He reached into his pocket and handed me a little paper-covered booklet”]

“No, sir,” he said vehemently, “there was not.”

“But does it say,” I asked, “that Adam and Eve had not themselves been using their best wits in creating a hell?  That point has occurred to me.  In my experience I’ve known both Adams and Eves who were most adroit in their capacity for making places of torment—­and afterwards of getting into them.  Just watch yourself some day after you’ve sown a crop of desires and you’ll see promising little hells starting up within you like pigweeds and pusley after a warm rain in your garden.  And our heavens, too, for that matter—­they grow to our own planting:  and how sensitive they are too!  How soon the hot wind of a passion withers them away!  How surely the fires of selfishness blacken their perfection!”

I’d almost forgotten Mr. Purdy—­and when I looked around, his face wore a peculiar puzzled expression not unmixed with alarm.  He held up his little book eagerly almost in my face.

“If God had intended to create a hell,” he said, “I assert without fear of successful contradiction that when God was there in the Garden of Eden it was the time for Him to have put Adam and Eve and all their posterity on notice that there was a place of everlasting torment.  It would have been only a square deal for Him to do so.  But did He?”

I shook my head.

“He did not.  If He had mentioned hell on that occasion I should not now dispute its existence.  But He did not.  This is what He said to Adam—­the very words:  ’In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground:  for out of it thou wast taken:  for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.’  You see He did not say ’Unto hell shalt thou return.’  He said, ‘Unto dust.’  That isn’t hell, is it?”