30 DECEMBER 1876, Page 3

An amusing misunderstanding filled Mr. Haweis's church, in Westmoreland Street,

Portland Place, to overflowing last Sunday evening. He had given out as the subject of his sermon "The Sanitary Aspects of Health,"—a somewhat paradoxical title, by the way, by which, we suppose, he meant the health-producing aspects of health, as distinguished from the pleasurable, or physio- logical, or other aspects of health,—but was understood to have given out "The Sanitary Aspects of Hell," a somewhat novel subject, to all who have assumed, as Protestants usually do, that there can be nothing sanitary at all about the state of punishment, —a function reserved for the " Purgatory " of "Catholic super- stition." Mr. Haweis, however, declaring that he knew nothing at all about Hell, proceeded to preach on the less sensational topic. Yet he might, we think, have connected to some extent his real with his presumed subject. If health is health-giving, then surely the state of moral retribution must be health-giving too, so far as it is itself healthy. And not all genuinely moral suffer- ing for sin a symptom of health, and not of disease?