evil, his will consenting as well as his infirmity, and conscience seared by persisted disobedience, what course can such a wilful, rational, responsible being pursue than one perpetually erratic?  How should it not be that he gets worse and worse in morals, and more and more miserable in fact? and when to this we add, that such wretched creatures are to herd together, continually flying further away from the only source of Happiness and Good; and to this, that they have earned by sin, remorses and regrets, and positive inflictions; how probable seems a hell, the sinner’s doom eternal.  The apt mathematical analogy of lines thrown out of parallel, helps this for illustration:  for ever and for ever they are stretching more remote, and infinity itself cannot reunite their travel.

This, then, as a passing word; a sad one.  Honest thinker, do not scorn it, for thine own soul’s sake.  “Now is the time of grace, now is the day of salvation.”  To return.  A place of punishment exists; to what quarter shall we look for its anterior probability?  I think there is a likelihood very near us.  There may be one, possibly, beneath us, in the bowels of this fiery-bursting earth; whither went Korah and his company?  This idea is not without its arguments, just analogies, and scriptural hints.  But my judgment inclines towards another.  This trial-world, we know, is to be purified and restored, and made a new earth:  it was even to be expected that Redemption should do this, and I like not to imagine it the crust and case of hell, but rather, as thus:  At the birth of this same world, there was struck off from its burning mass at a tangent, a mournful satellite, to be the home of its immortal evil; the convict shore for exiled sin and misery; a satellite of strange differences, as guessed by Virgil in his musings upon Tartarus, where half the orb is, from natural necessities, blistered up by constant heats, the other half frozen by perennial cold.  A land of caverns, and volcanoes, miles deep, miles high; with no water, no perceptible air:  imagine such a dreadful world, with neither air nor water! incapable of feeding life like ours, but competent to be a place where undying wretchedness may struggle for ever.  A melancholy orb, the queen of night, chief nucleus of all the dark idolatries of earth; the Moon, Isis, Hecate, Ashtaroth, Diana of the Ephesians!

This expression of a thought by no means improbable, gives an easy chance to shallow punsters; but ridicule is no weapon against reason.  Why should not the case be so?  Why should not Earth’s own satellite, void, as yet, be on the resurrection of all flesh, the raft whereon to float away Earth’s evil?  Read of it astronomically; think of it as connected with idols; regard it as the ruler of earth’s night; consider that the place of a Gehenna must be somewhere; and what is there in my fancy quite improbable?  I do not dogmatize as that the fact is so, but only suggest a definite place at least as likely as any other hitherto suggested.  Think how that awful, melancholy eye looks down on deeds of darkness how many midnight crimes, murders, thefts, adulteries, and witchcrafts, that would have shrunk into nonentity from open, honest day, have paled the conscious Moon!  Add to all this, it is the only world, besides our own, whereof astronomers can tell us, It is fallen.