" The influence of the Bible has sometimes
been an evil one through our own habit of reading a book of
Oriental poetry and treating it as literally as if it were
Occidental prose. When an Eastern describes a herd of a thousand
camels he talks of camels which are more numerous than the hairs
of your head or the stars in the sky. In this spirit of
allowance for Eastern expression, one must approach those lurid
and terrible descriptions which have darkened the lives of so
many imaginative children and sent so many earnest adults into
asylums. From all that we learn there are indeed places of outer
darkness, but dim as these uncomfortable waiting-rooms may be,
they all admit to heaven in the end. That is the final
destination of the human race, and it would indeed be a
reproach to the Almighty if it were not so. We cannot dogmatise
upon this subject of the penal spheres, and yet we have very
clear teaching that they are there and that the no-man's-land
which separates us from the normal heaven, that third heaven to
which St. Paul seems to have been wafted in one short strange
experience of his lifetime, is a place which corresponds with the
Astral plane of the mystics and with the "outer darkness" of the
Bible. Here linger those earth-bound spirits whose worldly
interests have clogged them and weighed them down, until every
spiritual impulse had vanished; the man whose life has been
centred on money, on worldly ambition, or on sensual indulgence.
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