Inferno.  It is not much talked about nowadays to ears polite or impolite.  Humanity is shocked and repelled by it.  The heart of woman is in unconquerable rebellion against it.  The more humane sects tear it from their “Bodies of Divinity” as if it were the flaming shirt of Nessus.  A few doctrines with which it was bound up have dropped or are dropping away from it:  the primal curse; consequential damages to give infinite extension to every transgression of the law of God; inverting the natural order of relative obligations; stretching the smallest of finite offenses to the proportions of the infinite; making the babe in arms the responsible being, and not the parent who gave it birth and determined its conditions of existence.

After a doctrine like “the hangman’s whip” has served its purpose,—­if it ever had any useful purpose,—­after a doctrine like that of witchcraft has hanged old women enough, civilization contrives to get rid of it.  When we say that civilization crowds out the old superstitious legends, we recognize two chief causes.  The first is the naked individual protest; the voice of the inspiration which giveth man understanding.  This shows itself conspicuously in the modern poets.  Burns in Scotland, Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, in America, preached a new gospel to the successors of men like Thomas Boston and Jonathan Edwards.  In due season, the growth of knowledge, chiefly under the form of that part of knowledge called science, so changes the views of the universe that many of its long-unchallenged legends become no more than nursery tales.  The text-books of astronomy and geology work their way in between the questions and answers of the time-honored catechisms.  The doctrine of evolution, so far as it is accepted, changes the whole relations of man to the creative power.  It substitutes infinite hope in the place of infinite despair for the vast majority of mankind.  Instead of a shipwreck, from which a few cabin passengers and others are to be saved in the long-boat, it gives mankind a vessel built to endure the tempests, and at last to reach a port where at the worst the passengers can find rest, and where they may hope for a home better than any which they ever had in their old country.  It is all very well to say that men and women had their choice whether they would reach the safe harbor or not.

     “Go to it grandam, child;
     Give grandam kingdom, and it grandam will
     Give it a plum, a cherry and a fig.”

We know what the child will take.  So which course we shall take depends very much on the way the choice is presented to us, and on what the chooser is by nature.  What he is by nature is not determined by himself, but by his parentage.  “They know not what they do.”  In one sense this is true of every human being.  The agent does not know, never can know, what makes him that which he is.  What we most want to ask of our Maker is an unfolding of the divine purpose in putting human beings into conditions in which such numbers of them would be sure to go wrong.  We want an advocate of helpless humanity whose task it shall be, in the words of Milton,