Let heaven and hell alone, but think of Hades, with Tantalus, Sisyphus, Tityus, and all the rest of them.  How futile were the attempts of the old Greeks and Romans to lay before us any plausible conception of eternal torture.  What were the Danaids doing but that which each one of us has to do during his or her whole life?  What are our bodies if not sieves that we are for ever trying to fill, but which we must refill continually without hope of being able to keep them full for long together?  Do we mind this?  Not so long as we can get the wherewithal to fill them; and the Danaids never seem to have run short of water.  They would probably ere long take to clearing out any obstruction in their sieves if they found them getting choked.  What could it matter to them whether the sieves got full or no?  They were not paid for filling them.

Sisyphus, again!  Can any one believe that he would go on rolling that stone year after year and seeing it roll down again unless he liked seeing it?  We are not told that there was a dragon which attacked him whenever he tried to shirk.  If he had greatly cared about getting his load over the last pinch, experience would have shown him some way of doing so.  The probability is that he got to enjoy the downward rush of his stone, and very likely amused himself by so timing it as to cause the greatest scare to the greatest number of the shades that were below.

What though Tantalus found the water shun him and the fruits fly from him when he tried to seize them?  The writer of the “Odyssey” gives us no hint that he was dying of thirst or hunger.  The pores of his skin would absorb enough water to prevent the first, and we may be sure that he got fruit enough, one way or another, to keep him going.

Tityus, as an effort after the conception of an eternity of torture, is not successful.  What could an eagle matter on the liver of a man whose body covered nine acres?  Before long he would find it an agreeable stimulant.  If, then, the greatest minds of antiquity could invent nothing that should carry better conviction of eternal torture, is it likely that the conviction can be carried at all?

Methought I saw Jove sitting on the topmost ridges of Olympus and confessing failure to Minerva.  “I see, my dear,” he said, “that there is no use in trying to make people very happy or very miserable for long together.  Pain, if it does not soon kill, consists not so much in present suffering as in the still recent memory of a time when there was less, and in the fear that there will soon be more; and so happiness lies less in immediate pleasure than in lively recollection of a worse time and lively hope of better.”

As for the young gentleman above referred to, my father met him with the assurance that there had been several cases in which living people had been caught up into heaven or carried down into hell, and been allowed to return to earth and report what they had seen; while to others visions had been vouchsafed so clearly that thousands of authentic pictures had been painted of both states.  All incentive to good conduct, he had then alleged, was found to be at once removed from those who doubted the fidelity of these pictures.