Excessive Heat in Hell.

Rodney and Otamatea Times, Waitemata and Kaipara Gazette, 11 January 1933, Page 7

Excessive Heat in Hell.

Thermometer Registers

20,000 Degrees

At the Conference of Modern Church men at Bristol, Dr. G. G. Coulton, of Cambridge, put forward an explanation of the hellfire theory

The early Christians, he said were horribly persecuted, and it seemed perfectly natural that they should have fallen into the un-Christian idea that there would be a similar reward for their persecution in the next world. That was at at ime when there was little respect for human life and human suffering. It was natural that, in order to impress upon their people the gravity of their sins, preachers should put it much mure strongly than we could stand it nowadays. Finally, there was keen competition among preachers ; when one man said the thermometer would be at 10,000 deg., another would send up the thermometer to 20,000 deg. (Laughter). Dr. Coulton added that there had been a great deal of acepticism at the universities as to the existehce of Heaven or Hell. There was also a great deal of commonsense scepticism among the peasantry and arti-

sans. Claiming that the Reformation had brought into history the liberty to choose or reject—a freedom denied by the Koman Catholic Church—Dr. Coulton said that the strategical strength of the Protestant cause was that they had seized freedom to purge from their cause little by little all harmful accretions. Much which passed as history in the later Middle Ages had begun simply as pious fairy talk. There was scarcely any great monastery whose chartulary did not contain several forged documents, and the University of Cambridge won one of its greatest privileges in the fifteenth century by producing in Court a charter of the most impudent falsity in which Honorious the First confessed himself a grateful nursling of this alma mater, which, in fact, was not born until six centuries after his death! Oxford claimed Alfred as her founder : Cambridge m retaliation claimed Arthur or a still earlier mythical king, Cantaber. Thus the earliest of all inter-uni-versity contests was a lying match. (Laughter.)