“Why then, if Christianity be a Divine Truth, are not all people Christians?  As well ask, if music and poetry are good things, why all men are not poets and musicians.  Art seeks art; in like manner God seeks God—­that is, He seeks portions of His own essence among His creatures.  Christ Himself said, ’Many are called, but few are chosen;’ and it stands to reason that very few souls will succeed in becoming pure enough to enter the Central Sphere without hindrance.  Many, on leaving Earth, will be detained in the Purgatory of Air, where thousands of spirits work for ages, watching over others, helping and warning others, and in this unselfish labour succeed in raising themselves, little by little, higher and ever higher, till they at last reach the longed-for goal.  It must also be remembered that not only from Earth, but from all worlds, released souls seek to attain final happiness in the Central Sphere where God is; so that, however great the number of those that are permitted to proceed thither from this little planet, they can only form, as it were, one drop in a mighty ocean.

“It has been asked whether the Electric Theory of Christianity includes the doctrine of Hell, or a place of perpetual punishment.  Eternal Punishment is merely a form of speech for what is really Eternal Retrogression.  For as there is a Forward, so there must be a Backward.  The electric germ of the Soul—­delicate, fiery, and imperishable as it is—­can be forced by its companion Will to take refuge in a lower form of material existence, dependent on the body it first inhabits.  For instance, a man who is obstinate in pursuing active evil can so retrograde the progress of any spiritual life within him, that it shall lack the power to escape, as it might do, from merely lymphatic and listless temperaments, to seek some other chance of development, but shall sink into the form of quadrupeds, birds, and other creatures dominated by purely physical needs.  But there is one thing it can never escape from—­memory.  And in that faculty is constituted Hell.  So that if a man, by choice, forces his soul downward to inhabit hereafter the bodies of dogs, horses, and other like animals, he should know that he does so at the cost of everything except Remembrance.  Eternal Retrogression means that the hopelessly tainted electric germ recoils further and further from the Pure Centre whence it sprang, always bearing within itself the knowledge of what it was once and what it might have been.  There is a pathetic meaning in the eyes of a dog or a seal; in the melancholy, patient gaze of the oxen toiling at the plough; there is an unuttered warning in the silent faces of flowers; there is more tenderness of regret in the voice of the nightingale than love; and in the wild upward soaring of the lark, with its throat full of passionate, shouting prayer, there is shadowed forth the yearning hope that dies away in despair as the bird sinks to earth again, his instincts not half satisfied.  There is no greater torture than to be compelled to remember, in suffering, joys and glorious opportunities gone for ever.