This is but another way of expressing that our troubles and our terrors alike are based on selfishness, and that if we are really concerned with the welfare of others we shall not be much concerned with our own.

The difficulty in adopting the Christian theory is that God does not apparently intend to cure the world by creating all men unselfish.  People are born selfish, and the laws of nature and heredity seem to ordain that it shall be so.  Indeed a certain selfishness seems to be inseparable from any desire to live.  The force of asceticism and of Stoicism is that they both appeal to selfishness as a motive.  They frankly say, “Happiness is your aim, personal happiness; but instead of grasping at pleasure whenever it offers, you will find it more prudent in the end not to care too much about such things.”  It is true that popular Christianity makes the same sort of appeal.  It says, or seems to say, “If you grasp at happiness in this world, you may secure a great deal of it successfully; but it will be worse for you eventually.”

The theory of life as taught and enforced, for instance, in such a work as Dante’s great poem is based upon this crudity of thought.  Dante, by his Hell and his Purgatory, expressed plainly that the chief motive of man to practise morality must be his fear of ultimate punishment.  His was an attempt to draw away the curtain which hides this world from the next, and to horrify men into living purely and kindly.  But the mind only revolts against the dastardly injustice of a God, who allows men to be born into the world so corrupt, with so many incentives to sin, and deliberately hides from them the ghastly sight of the eternal torments, which might have saved them from recklessness of life.  No one who had trod the dark caverns of Hell or the flinty ridges of Purgatory, as Dante represented himself doing, who had seen the awful sights and heard the heart-broken words of the place, could have returned to the world as a light-hearted sinner!  Whatever we may believe of God, we must not for an instant allow ourselves to believe that life can be so brief and finite, so small and hampered an opportunity, and that punishment could be so demoniacal and so infinite.  A God who could design such a scheme must be essentially evil and malignant.  We may menace wicked men with punishment for wanton misdeeds, but it must be with just punishment.  What could we say of a human father who exposed a child to temptation without explaining the consequences, and then condemned him to lifelong penalties for failing to make the right choice?  We must firmly believe that if offences are finite, punishment must be finite too; that it must be remedial and not mechanical.  We must believe that if we deserve punishment, it will be because we can hope for restoration.  Hell is a monstrous and insupportable fiction, and the idea of it is simply inconsistent with any belief in the goodness of God.  It is easy to quote texts to support it, but we must not allow any text, any record in the world, however sacred, to shatter our belief in the Love and Justice of God.  And I say as frankly and directly as I can that until we can get rid of this intolerable terror, we can make no advance at all.