In the more intelligent circles of American society one may question anything and everything, if he will only do it civilly.  We may talk about eschatology, the science of last things,—­or, if you will, the natural history of the undiscovered country, without offence before anybody except young children and very old women of both sexes.  In our New England the great Andover discussion and the heretical missionary question have benumbed all sensibility on this subject as entirely, as completely, as the new local anaesthetic, cocaine, deadens the sensibility of the part to which it is applied, so that the eye may have its mote or beam plucked out without feeling it,—­as the novels of Zola and Maupassant have hardened the delicate nerve-centres of the women who have fed their imaginations on the food they have furnished.

The generally professed belief of the Protestant world as embodied in their published creeds is that the great mass of mankind are destined to an eternity of suffering.  That this eternity is to be one of bodily pain—­of “torment “—­is the literal teaching of Scripture, which has been literally interpreted by the theologians, the poets, and the artists of many long ages which followed the acceptance of the recorded legends of the church as infallible.  The doctrine has always been recognized, as it is now, as a very terrible one.  It has found a support in the story of the fall of man, and the view taken of the relation of man to his Maker since that event.  The hatred of God to mankind in virtue of their “first disobedience” and inherited depravity is at the bottom of it.  The extent to which that idea was carried is well shown in the expressions I have borrowed from Jonathan Edwards.  According to his teaching,—­and he was a reasoner who knew what he was talking about, what was involved in the premises of the faith he accepted,—­man inherits the curse of God as his principal birthright.

What shall we say to the doctrine of the fall of man as the ground of inflicting endless misery on the human race?  A man to be punished for what he could not help!  He was expected to be called to account for Adam’s sin.  It is singular to notice that the reasoning of the wolf with the lamb should be transferred to the dealings of the Creator with his creatures.  “You stirred the brook up and made my drinking-place muddy.”  “But, please your wolfship, I couldn’t do that, for I stirred the water far down the stream,—­below your drinking-place.”  “Well, anyhow, your father troubled it a year or two ago, and that is the same thing.”  So the wolf falls upon the lamb and makes a meal of him.  That is wolf logic,—­and theological reasoning.