Gold Hill Daily News

In all probability the year 1878 will witness the abolition of the word hell from our bible. If it does, it will be the most glorious new year which the world has ever seen since Christ came to cheer and comfort us with his divine words of hope. He came to bring life, not death, into this world. And yet for nearly nineteen hundred years the sinner whom he came to save, has been tortured by a prospect of everlasting damnation. His Father, the great God of the Universe, has been represented as a Being of infinite love, and yet we have been told that this Creator, who brought us into existence, has doomed us in advance to everlasting torments or everlasting bliss. For call it fatalism, or what you will, the fact remains that man's nature, for good or evil, is born with him. It is unalterable at his will. Parents transmit to their offspring evil inclinations as they transmit diseases, and we have been taught for nearly 1,900 years that these hereditary sins are to be atoned for by an eternity of penance.

In Westminster Abbey, London, a body of learned men are now engaged in re-translating the Bible. Canon Farrar presides over that church, and is one of the men who are now devoting themselves to this work. Whatever, therefore, he says in regard to doctrinal teachings may be considered as coming from high authority. Indeed, it may be looked upon as foretelling what will be the complexion of the new Bible. For the last few Sundays he has been delivering a series of discourses upon Hell, upon the everlasting damnation which we have been taught from our childhood up awaits the sinner when he passes from the earthly vale of sorrows. Our ministers seem to have forgotten the retribution which follows the sinner in this world. They take no account of bodily and mental ills which afflict him when he rebels against the laws of nature or society. Their argument has always been hell: hell! Create fear in the sinner and he is saved. No appeal to the mercy and love of God is ever made without a supplement appealing to the most contemptible passion in human nature, fear.

Now read what Canon Farrar says about the traditional hell:

On this subject of Hell, the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher has also made some pungent remarks. In a late sermon he spoke as follows:

'The human race had existed on the earth for thousands and thousands of years, and had gone on propagating and multiplying, until all the waves of the ocean which had rolled in upon the shore during those centuries did not contain drops enough, nor the sands of the sea particles enough, nor all the figures of the arithmetic numbers enough, to compute the preface, to say nothing of the body, of the great history of the human race. The numbers of the human race were actually beyond computation, and for thousands and thousands and thousands of years there had been born into the world, had lived, and struggled, and finally died, and gone -where? If you tell me that they have all gone to heaven, my answer will be that such a sweeping of mud into heaven would defile its purity, and I cannot accept that. If you tell me that they have gone to hell, then I swear by the Lord Jesus Christ, whom I have sworn to worship forever, that you will make an infidel of me. The doctrine that God has been for thousands of years peopling this earth with human beings, during a period three-fourths of which was not illuminated by an altar or a church, and in places where a vast population of those people are yet without that light, is to transform the Almighty into a monster more hideous than Satan himself, and I swear by all that is sacred that I will never worship Satan, though he should appear dressed in royal robes and seated on the throne of Jehovah. Men may say, 'You will not go to heaven.' A heaven presided over by such a demon as that, who has been peopling this world with millions of human beings, and then sweeping them off into hell, not like dead flies, but without taking the trouble even to kill them, and gloating and laughing over their eternal misery, is not such a heaven as I want to go to. The doctrine is too horrible. I cannot believe it, and I won't. They say the saints in heaven are so happy that they do not mind the torments of the damned in hell; but what sort of saints must they be who could be happy while looking down upon the horrors of the bottomless pit? They don't mind—they're safe—they're happy! What would the mother think of the sixteen-year-old daughter who, when her infant was lying dead in the house, should come dancing and singing into the parlor, and exclaim, 'Oh! I'm so happy, mother! I don't care for the dead baby in the coffin!' Would she not be shocked? And so with this doctrine: and by the blood of Christ I denounce it; by the wounds in his hands and his side, I abhor it; by his groans and agony, I abhor and denounce it as the most hideous nightmare of theology.'