GETTING RED OF HELL.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19454, 9 October 1926, Page 1 (Supplement)

GETTING RED OF HELL.

Br MATANQA.

A DIFFICULT TASK,

Tq hell with hell!—that seems tho most appropriate way of putting Mr. Jerome K. Jerome's bravo admonition to tho churches. That it suggests a diffculty deeper than mere words adds to its appropriateness. When a man starts town-planning for tho universe he takes a big job in hand. Reconstructors of restricted localities may get rid of awkward and disliked elements by tho simple means of sending them over tho border, but ho has to find a place for everything. It is all very well to say " clear hell out of tho way! " Where aro you going to put it? Yonr urban renovator has the ready recourse of tho outer spaces. Send tho Mount Eden gaol to tho Waitakeres or to Kawau or to Taupo, say tho borough councillors bent on clearing the gaol out of tho way—anywhere, so long it is out of tho way. But Mr. Jerome cannot be so gaily unregardful of others' objections to give hospitality to an institution to which ho has taken a very natural dislike. He has tackled a problem on all fours with ono which that selfsame borough council tackled, when it set about choosing a site for its destructor: the destructor had to be within tho borough boundary. His boundary is tho farthest horizon of human thought, illimitable space—if indeed there be such a thing as illimitable space. Uses of Unpleasant Tilings. St. John the Divine was under less exacting logical necessity. Planning his Holy City, tho New Jerusalem all radiant and blessed, he kept conveniently an outer region to which all evil might be consigned: "for without aro dogs and sorcerers and whoremongers and murderers and idolators and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie." Tho man heading a crusado for tho removal of hell from the universe cannot very well send it " without," for hell itself, that " without," is very much within the grand scheme of things with which he has to deal. St. John, glancing at ultimate happenings, can do no better than send hell, with death, " into the lako of fire," and so, with tho death of death, sends hell to helL Thus we come back to Mi l . Jerome's difficulty in remaking the universe. He is in excellent company—better ever, than the Bishop of Liverpool—but that does not lessen his difficulty. Where St. John hesitates ho should walk with care. It is as if a municipal body, tired of managing a sanitary service, should resolve to send its whole equipment — brooms and shovels and refuse tins and rubbish carts—to the destructor. Mr. Jerome's policy about rubbish-tips would be, apparently, to send them all to the rubbish-tip; about destructors, to have them all destroyed; about gaols, to have them all put under lock and kev in one great limbo of things shut up for ever. It is magnificent, but it is neither sanitation nor law. Unpleasant things, rubbish-tips and gaols, but they have uses not outgrown as yet. Laundries, too, havo their drawbacks- as neighbouring industries, but we do not demand their abolition, and even Mondays are suffered gladly at home. No, Mr. Jerome, with all. duo respect to the name of ancient theological savour you doubly bear, it will not do. SomeIhing must be done with the evil in human life, and if it should provo incorrigible, or even temporarily obstinate, what then ? Shall it go its ugly way unchecked ? Must honesty have no redress against defiant villainy ? If heaven were bereft of puissant majesty it would be no heaven at all. You may fill it with pity for sin, but if you empty it of justice you will rob it of glory and make its very pity a hollow, flimsy, characterless sentiment. An Old, Reputable Institution. Hell is an old, reputable institution, the product of deeply-serious thought. Like all such products, it has had some fantastic ideas associated with it; but it cannot be blown out of human thinking with a whiff of scorn at these. Men havo variously viewed it according to their individual bent, and some of them have made overmuch of tho figured speech with which Oriental literature has vividly clothed it. In ages of intolerance this figurative trarb has been displayed terrifyingly. Threats of unending physical torment have been hurled at reprobate sinners. With a zeal worthy of a poorer cause, the unconvinced havo been dragged to the edge of this horrible pit and dangled over its nether fires until they were scorched into submission. In an agony of fear they have surrendered. Better by that way than by none at all they should be awakened to the solemn meaning of life. Stevenson would have the " Celestial Surgeon " use as a last resort a " killing sir. " run into his dead heart; the " pointed pleasure " is not the only poniard with which to stab the slumbrous spirit broad awake. But this sort of surgery is perilous work. Religion has been happier and more influential when it has lured to brighter worlds and led tho way than when it has sought to startle and affright. The loss of the medieval hell of physical agony multiplied eternally need cause few tears. It may make Dante and Milton and Shakespeare and Goethe strange and difficult reading. It may bring a pang to the weird souls with a special fondness for it, the folk who will be terribly disappointed with heaven if it be not "a grandstand from which to enjoy the writhings of the damned. But for most of us, along with Mr. Jerome and tho Bishop of Liverpool, the loss will be a real relief. A Real, Enduring Fact. The medieval hell, however, is not the only hell. That particular variety may he sent packing out of enlightened thought, but this is not to clear hell out of the way. Already a great host of devout people havo given up their belief in a place where the firo of torment is ever unquenchod and tho worm dies not, hut hell is still a very real fact—not a far-off torture or expiation, but a dire experience of conscience closer than breathing, nearer than hands and feet. This rebounding consequence of ill deeds men carry about with thorn. It is tragically near, and has an awkward knack of inflicting torture with a recurrent suddenness defiant of tho passage of time. This real, enduring hell is inseparable from the warp and woof of human life. A vote for its abolition would doubtless reveal an overwhelming majority in favour, but the opponent minority would be in the right. It is a spiritual necessity, justified in every serious mind. Bereft of such a scourging recompense of evil, men would be constrained to invent another of tho kind, as surely as the abolition of rubbish-tips and destructors and prisons to-day would bring an outcry for them to-morrow. And yet—and yet—there is a way to get rid even of this persistent hell. It is by spreading heaven. When every man industriously tends a private incinerator in his own heart, and makes a garden of his unkempt backyard, torment will go out of human life. There will bo no need for a general holocaust of undying firo of remorse and shame. It is aii invigorating prospect, and hope of it is strengthened in that very literature which has boen misused to terrify men into manufactured goodness. But, till it bo realised, hell will have a vocation.