days of Thomas Aquinas, wasted whole reams of parchment in defending the dogma of hell, because they knew nothing whatever of comparative jurisprudence and the evolution of moral ideas. To us the development of the doctrine is clear. In the Christian doctrine of hell we have a flagrant survival of the early barbaric theory of punishment. Modern divines—while continuing to describe the non-religious view of life as "superficial" and the Christian as "profound"—have actually yielded to the modern sentiment, and in a very large measure rejected one of the fundamental dogmas of the Christian tradition. In order to conceal the procedure as far as possible, some of them are now contending brazenly that Christ never taught the doctrine of eternal punishment, and are deluding their uncultivated congregations with sophistical manipulations of Greek words.
This does not mean that Christians have lower moral sentiments than non-Christians, but that the rigidity of their traditions, which they regard as sacred and unalterable, imposes restrictions on them. Hence the fact that, while Protestants have so very largely rejected the doctrine of hell, Roman Catholics, with their more rigid conservatism and claim of infallibility, still cling to it, and offer the amazing spectacle of a body claiming to possess the highest ideals in the world, yet actually cherishing an entirely barbaric theory. There is probably not a Catholic lawyer in the world who does not reject the old idea of punishment as barbaric, yet he placidly believes that God retains it. That is why we find a Catholic archbishop like Carr putting forth so revolting an idea of the war, while Protestant preachers as a rule shrink from mentioning God in connection with it. These things
