And meanwhile—­as was to be expected from a generation which abhors torture, labours for the reformation of criminals, and even doubts whether it should not abolish capital punishment—­a shaking of the heavens is abroad, of which we shall hear more and more, as the years roll on—­a general inclination to ask whether Holy Scripture really endorses the Middle-age notions of future punishment in endless torment?  Men are writing and speaking on this matter, not merely with ability and learning, but with a piety, and reverence for Scripture which (rightly or wrongly employed) must, and will, command attention.  They are saying that it is not those who deny these notions who disregard the letter of Scripture, but those who assert them; that they are distorting the plain literal text, in order to make Scripture fit the writings of Dante and Milton, when they translate into ‘endless torments after death,’ such phrases as the outer darkness, the undying worm, the Gehenna of fire—­which manifestly (say these men), if judged by fair rules of interpretation, refer to this life, and specially to the fate of the Jewish nation:  or when they tell us that eternal death means really eternal life, only in torments.  We demand, they say, not a looser, but a stricter; not a more metaphoric, but a more literal; not a more careless, but a more reverent interpretation of Scripture; and whether this demand be right or wrong, it will not pass unheard.

And even more severely shaken, meanwhile, is that mediaeval conception of heaven and hell, by the question which educated men are asking more and more:- ’Heaven and hell—­the spiritual world—­Are they merely invisible places in space, which may become visible hereafter? or are they not rather the moral world—­the world of right and wrong?  Love and righteousness—­is not that the heaven itself wherein God dwells?  Hatred and sin—­is not that hell itself, wherein dwells all that is opposed to God?’

And out of that thought, right or wrong, other thoughts have sprung—­ of ethics, of moral retribution—­not new at all (say these men), but to be found in Scripture, and in the writings of all great Christian divines, when they have listened, not to systems, but to the voice of their own hearts.

‘We do not deny’ (they say) ’that the wages of sin are death.  We do not deny the necessity of punishment—­the certainty of punishment.  We see it working awfully enough around us in this life; we believe that it may work in still more awful forms in the life to come.  Only tell us not that it must be endless, and thereby destroy its whole purpose, and (as we think) its whole morality.  We, too, believe in an eternal fire; but we believe its existence to be, not a curse, but a Gospel and a blessing, seeing that that fire is God Himself, who taketh away the sins of the world, and of whom it is therefore written, Our God is a consuming fire.’