Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company...
Good Men in Hell
Written by: Frank S.C. Wicks (date unknown; probably early 20th Century)
Read by Kermit Lohr-Flanders as part of "Puritan and Liberal: The Dialogue" on January 26, 1997
Every good man wants to go to hell! Only a bad man would want to go to heaven. That is, to the traditional heaven and hell.
If this thought shocks you, at first hearing, I hope it will not be the electric shock that stuns, but that which gives light and illumination.
I believe you will agree with me when you consider the ideas of heaven and hell that have dominated Christendom for centuries.
Jonathan Edwards said: "The damned shall be tormented in the presence of the glorified saints. Hereby the saints will be made more sensible how great their salvation is. The view of the misery of the damned will double the ardor of the love and gratitude of the saints in heaven."
With these alternatives, which will the good man choose?
Fear might drive a man into the acceptance of such a heaven, but love drives a man to the very bottom of hell.
The only man fit to be damned is the man who would accept salvation on the old terms. Any man who would purchase a salvation that meant eternal bliss to hemself and eternal perdition to his neighbor, is so lost in selfishness that it would take considerable fire to purify his nature.
The Chinese do well to honor as their Madonna, Kwan-yin, who refused to enter paradise so long as a single soul was excluded. She exclaimed, "Never will I receive individual salvation!" And to this day she remains outside the gates of paradise.
Fear of hell never made a good man out of a bad man, never fitted anyone for a place of happiness.
Love only, makes good men. The man who loves does not need to have a heaven built for him. He has found it.
If a man wanted good company he would never go to the traditional heaven. As someone has said, "Heaven for climate, hell for company." In this Heaven are to be found the men and women who can be happy while others are in woe; here, the men who can enjoy doing nothing eternally, who can live useless lives contentedly. There is the man who ruined the maid whom he has sent to perdition. But, at the end of his life of infamy he has had breath left to say, "I believe." There is the man stained with human blood. His victim had no time to repent, but during the long trial, he has had time to secure salvation. Do you want to go to such a place?
On the other hand, see the men who have been sent to the other place! Their one sin has been unbelief. They may have been good and pure and self-sacrificing; they may have been loving husbands and good neighbors; they may have died trying to save the life on another. But they did not believe some dogma, and to hell they have been sent.
Think of the names! They are Gautama, Confucius and Zoroaster, Socrates, Plato and Marcus Aurelius; there are the great scientists, Newton, Huxley, Darwin and Spencer. Of course there is no chance for Unitarians; so you will find there William Ellery Channing, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell — all Unitarians. There you will find Sarah Flower Adams, author of "Nearer, My God, to Thee." Down there is Henry Bergh, whose sympathetic heart was always touched by suffering, whether of humankind or of animals; and a place is being prepared for Charles W. Eliot, and the members of this church. Would you not like to be in such company?
Father Taylor, the Methodist preacher, had the same idea when he was rebuked for associating with the Unitarian Emerson. A brother preacher said to him, "Do you not know that Emerson is going to hell?" "I suppose so," he repled, "but if Emerson goes to hell, it will change the climate of the place, and turn the tide of emigration that way."
You could not make a hell with the men and women I have named.
Of course, there is no such place as the traditional hell, or the traditional heaven.
Hell is the base spawn of Hate and Fear. Hate and Fear first made a god after their own likeness, and this god made a hell to their liking.
It was this ascription of divine qualities to a being who did such fiendish things that aroused the indignation of John Stuart Mill, and made him exclaim, "I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures. And if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go."
If we have left behind us the old ideas of heaven and hell, what have we left to our future life? Have we emptied it of all significance?
We do not know the conditions of a future life, but we believe those conditions will be the same as now. The same laws will hold. We see about us heavens and hells, but they are not made by a God who is angry at one moment, and pleased at another. We make them. Heaven and hell are not places but conditions of the human soul.
The moment the idea of a good and just God entered the mind, the idea of hell passed out. The two ideas could not live together. |
