the offender so far as may be possible, and the repression of evil; and never, never in the sense of a satisfaction to divine justice for outrages committed against it.
In every soul which has a just idea of the love, wisdom and power of God, there is an instinctive outcry and revolt against the existence of hell, and especially against its perpetuity. The traditional Church which imposes its incomprehensible dogmas upon men as sacred mysteries of faith, gives no satisfactory answer to the questioning soul. What has the New Church to say on the subject? It professes to have a thorough, scientific and philosophical basis, and to see truth by its own light. It is especially bound to give a reason for hell and its miseries, as it teaches a most miserable and fearful doom of the unregenerate; a hell of utterable darkness and horror, of excruciating bodily torments, of hideous shapes and fantasies, of painful alternations of heat and cold, of serpents swarming around the terrified spirits and biting them as the people were bitten by the serpents in the wilderness; and a thousand other fearful modes of suffering.
Why does God permit these things to exist?
The old theology does not question his power; it
