Those who so argue surely forget what their words involve if true. They involve a serious reflection on the Creator (a) who permits His children, made in His Image, to descend to such an abyss of degradation that only an endless hell can restrain them from sin; and Who, (b) knowing this, yet conceals, or permits to be concealed, from the vast majority of men this necessary antidote to sin; and Who, (c) in the Old Testament, gave a special revelation of Himself, and said nothing or almost nothing of it. And this cry of danger has been used against every improvement, moral, social, or scientific.

Can a single sin be named which it has banished from our midst?

Having premised this, I meet the objection frankly by saying – look at the verdict of history. Its answer is decisive. Never did lust and vice in every guise so rage and riot as when in the middle ages this dogma was most firmly held. Hellfire bred a veritable hell on earth. Those who talk of Universalism as Antinomian do not face the facts of history. Better were it if they did so, and then were to look at home, and remember the awful danger of teaching a creed whose fruits are so often those well described in the following striking words, in which a Roman Catholic Priest states twenty years’ experience in the Confessional : “The dogma of hell, except in the rarest cases, did no moral good. It never affected the right persons. It tortured innocent young women and virtuous boys. It appealed to the lowest motives and the lowest characters. It never, except in the rarest instances, deterred from the commission of sin. It caused unceasing mental and moral difficulties. *** It always influenced the wrong people, and in a wrong way. It caused infidelity to some, temptations to others, and misery without virtue to most.” – R. Suffield.

What, I ask, has the dogma of endless pain and sin really effected? Has it checked the growth of heathenism in our cities?