As the only rule of the association was that no man should talk long upon any matter, Floud, the fiery and aggressive little Baptist, hereupon savagely reviewed a late treatise on the ethnic Trinities, put out by a professor of ecclesiastical history in a New England theological seminary.  Floud marvelled that this author could retain his orthodox standing, for he viewed the Bible as a purely human collection of imperfect writings, the wonder-stories concerning the birth and death of Jesus as deserving no credence, and denied to Christianity any supernatural foundation.  Polytheism was shown to be the soil from which all trinitarian conceptions naturally spring—­the Brahmanic, Zoroastrian, Homeric, Plotinian, as well as the Christian trinity—­the latter being a Greek idea engrafted on a Jewish stalk.  The author’s conclusion, by which he reached “an undogmatic gospel of the spirit, independent of all creeds and forms—­a gospel of love to God and man, with another Trinity of Love, Truth and Freedom,” was particularly irritating to the disturbed Baptist, who spoke bitterly of the day having dawned when the Church’s most dangerous enemies were those critical vipers whom she had warmed in her own bosom.

Suffield, the gaunt, dark, but twinkling-eyed Methodist, also sniffed at the conclusion of the ethnic-trinities person.  “We have an age of substitutes,” he remarked.  “We have had substitutes for silk and sealskin—­very creditable substitutes, so I have been assured by a lady in whom I have every confidence—­substitutes for coffee, for diamonds—­substitutes for breakfast which are widely advertised—­substitutes for medicine—­and now we are coming to have substitutes for religion—­even a substitute for hell!”

Hereupon he told of a book he had read, also written by an orthodox professor of theology, in which the argument, advanced upon scriptural evidence, was that the wicked do not go into endless torment, but ultimately shrivel and sink into a state of practical unconsciousness.  Yet the author had been unable to find any foundation for universalism.  This writer, Suffield explained, holds that the curtain falls after the judgment on a lost world.  Nor is there probation for the soul after the body dies.  The Scriptures teach the ruin of the final rejecters of Christ; Christ teaches plainly that they who reject the Gospel will perish in the endless darkness of night.  But eternal punishment does not necessarily mean eternal suffering; hence the hypothesis of the soul gradually shrivelling for the sin of its unbelief.

The amiable Presbyterian sniffed at this as a sentimental quibble.  Punishment ceases to be punishment when it is not felt—­one cannot punish a tree or an unconscious soul.  But this was the spirit of the age.  With the fires out in hell, no wonder we have an age of sugar-candy morality and cheap sentimentalism.

But here the Unitarian wickedly interrupted, to remind his Presbyterian brother that his own church had quenched those very certain fires that once burned under the pit in which lay the souls of infants unbaptised.