Rather we believe it is a human life there just as here, that we are
under the law of cause and effect, that salvation is not a magical
thing, that we are saved only in so far as we come into accord with the
divine law and the divine life. And, if anybody says we preach an easy
gospel because we eliminate an arbitrary hell, let him remember we
preach a harder gospel, a more difficult salvation, not a salvation
that can be purchased by a wave of emotion or by the touch of priestly
fingers, a salvation that must be wrought out through co-working with
God in the building of human character, a salvation that is being
right.
This is our gospel; but it is a gospel of eternal and universal hope,
because we believe that every single soul is under doom to be saved
sometime, somewhere. We preach the inevitable results of law-breaking,
are they to last one year, five, a hundred, a thousand, a million, ten
millions? There is no possibility of heaven except as people are in
perfect accord with the divine law and the divine life; for that is
what heaven means. You can no more get heaven out of a disordered
character than you can get music out of a disordered piano. This
salvation which we preach is the constituent element of life. You
cannot have a circle if you break the conditions of a circle. You
cannot have a river if you break the conditions the very existence of
which constitutes a river. So of anything in God's natural world. There
are certain essential things that go to make these what they are.
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