We gain more than we lose by awaking to find that our Theology is human
invention and our eschatology an unhealthy dream. We are freed from the
incubus of base Hebrew mythology, and from doctrines of Divine
government which outrage morality and set cruelty and injustice in the
place of holiness. If we have to abandon cherished anthropomorphic
visions of future Blessedness, the details of which are either of
unseizable dimness or of questionable joy, we are at least delivered
from quibbling discussions of the meaning of [Greek: aionios], and our
eternal hope is unclouded by the doubt whether mankind is to be tortured
in hell for ever and a day, or for a day without the ever. At the end of
life there may be no definite vista of a Heaven glowing with the light
of apocalyptic imagination, but neither will there be the unutterable
horror of a Purgatory or a Hell lurid with flames for the helpless
victims of an unjust but omnipotent Creator. To entertain such libellous
representations at all as part of the contents of "Divine Revelation,"
it was necessary to assert that man was incompetent to judge of the ways
of the God of Revelation, and must not suppose him endowed with the
perfection of human conceptions of justice and mercy, but submit to call
wrong right and right wrong at the foot of an almighty Despot.
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