___ Canyon (Idaho-Oregon gorge)

Usage examples of hells.

And the same idea pervades the whole range of narratives relating to the repeated births and deaths of the innumerable Buddhist heroes and saints who, after so many residences on earth, in the hells, in the dewalokas, have at last reached emancipation.

Indra, from the meanest worm to the supreme Buddha, constitute one fraternal race, by the unavoidable effects of the law of retribution constantly interchanging their residences in a succession of rising and sinking existences, ranging through all the earths, heavens, and hells of the universe, bound by the terrible links of merit and demerit in the phantasmagoric dungeon of births and deaths.

They also depict, in the abyss underneath the earth, eight great hells, each containing sixteen smaller ones, the whole one hundred and thirty six composing one gigantic hell.

The fruit of that evil must be experienced, and also of that greater good, by appropriate births in the hells and heavens, or in the higher and lower grades of earthly existence.

The Swedenborgian doctrine concerning Christ and his mission is that he was the infinite God incarnate, not incarnate for the purpose of expiating human sin and purchasing a ransom for the lost by vicarious sufferings, but for the sake of suppressing the rampant power of the hells, weakening the influx of the infernal spirits, setting an example to men, and revealing many important truths.

We cannot but regret that the Swedenborgian view of the future life should be burdened and darkened with the terrible error of the dogma of eternal damnation, spreading over the state of all the subjects of the hells the pall of immitigable hopelessness, denying that they can ever make the slightest ameliorating progress.

But at the bottom of the infernal world is a vast ball of blackness, towards which all the hosts of demons, crowding down through the successive hells, forever turn their eager faces away from God.

It is well known that the Brahmans and Buddhists believed, centuries before the Christian era, in the contrasted fate of good men after death to enjoy the successive heavens above the clouds, and of bad men to suffer the successive hells beneath the earth.

One who is familiar with the imagery of the Buddhist hells will think the pencils of Dante and Pollok, of Jeremy Taylor and Jonathan Edwards, were dipped in water.

The popular hells have ever been built on hierarchic selfishness, dogmatic pride, and personal cruelty, and have been walled around with arbitrary and traditional rituals.

The consequence of this theory, rigidly carried out, created a descending congeries of hells, reaching from centre to nadir, in correspondence to an ascending congeries of heavens, reaching from centre to zenith.

Reasoning by sound analogy, the heavens and hells of the future state are not monotonous circles each filled with mutually reflecting personalities, but one fenceless spiritual world of distinctive, ever varying degrees, sympathetic and contrasted life, circulating freshness, variety of attractions and repulsions, divine advancement.

The Egyptian priests taught, and the people seemed to have implicitly trusted the tale, that there was a long series of hells awaiting the disembodied souls of all who had not scrupulously observed the ritual prescribed for them, and secured the pass words and magical formulas necessary for the safe completion of the post mortal journey.

The specifications and pictures of the terrors and distresses provided in the various hells are vivid in the extreme, including ingenious paraphrases of every sort of penalty and pang known in Egypt.

There are separate hells for thieves, for liars, for those who kill a cow, for those who drink wine, for those who insult a priest, and so on.