Number Seven is of a different way of thinking and feeling.  He insists upon it that the churches keep in their confessions of faith statements which they do not believe, and that it is notorious that they are afraid to meddle with them.  The Anglo-American church has dropped the Athanasian Creed from its service; the English mother church is afraid to.  There are plenty of Universalists, Number Seven says, in the Episcopalian and other Protestant churches, but they do not avow their belief in any frank and candid fashion.  The churches know very well, he maintains, that the fear of everlasting punishment more than any or all other motives is the source of their power and the support of their organizations.  Not only are the fears of mankind the whip to scourge and the bridle to restrain them, but they are the basis of an almost incalculable material interest.  “Talk about giving up the doctrine of endless punishment by fire!” exclaimed Number Seven; “there is more capital embarked in the subterranean fire-chambers than in all the iron-furnaces on the face of the earth.  To think what an army of clerical beggars would be turned loose on the world, if once those raging flames were allowed to go out or to calm down!  Who can wonder that the old conservatives draw back startled and almost frightened at the thought that there may be a possible escape for some victims whom the Devil was thought to have secured?  How many more generations will pass before Milton’s alarming prophecy will find itself realized in the belief of civilized mankind?”

Remember that Number Seven is called a “crank” by many persons, and take his remarks for just what they are worth, and no more.

Out of the preceding conversation must have originated the following poem, which was found in the common receptacle of these versified contributions: 

        Tartarus.

   While in my simple gospel creed
   That “God is Love” so plain I read,
   Shall dreams of heathen birth affright
   My pathway through the coming night? 
   Ah, Lord of life, though spectres pale
   Fill with their threats the shadowy vale,
   With Thee my faltering steps to aid,
   How can I dare to be afraid?

   Shall mouldering page or fading scroll
   Outface the charter of the soul? 
   Shall priesthood’s palsied arm protect
   The wrong our human hearts reject,
   And smite the lips whose shuddering cry
   Proclaims a cruel creed a lie? 
   The wizard’s rope we disallow
   Was justice once,—­is murder now!

   Is there a world of blank despair,
   And dwells the Omnipresent there? 
   Does He behold with smile serene
   The shows of that unending scene,
   Where sleepless, hopeless anguish lies,
   And, ever dying, never dies?