If it were further asserted that
this existence would be one of unmixed happiness, there would be at
least a show of compensation. But, of course, that is what no theologian
can venture to say. It is needless to call the Puritan divine, with his
babes of a span long now lying in hell, or that Romanist priest who
revels in describing the most fiendish torture inflicted upon children
by the merciful Creator who made them and exposed them to evil, or any
other of the wild and hideous phantasms that have been evoked by the
imagination of mankind running riot in the world of arbitrary figments.
Nor need we dwell upon the fact, that where theology is really vigorous
it produces such nightmares by an inevitable law; inasmuch as the next
world can be nothing but the intensified reflection of this. It is
enough to say that, if the revelation of a future state be really the
great claim of Christianity upon our attentions, the use which it has
made of that state has been one main cause of its decay. "St. Lewis the
king, having sent Ivo, Bishop of Chartres, on an embassy, the bishop met
a woman on the way, grave, sad, fantastic, and melancholic; with fire in
one hand and water in the other.
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