IS HELL LOSS OF BEING ?
[To THE EDITOR or THE "SPECTATOR.") SIE,—IS it not sufficient to ask this question in order to realise its absurdity? If hell is merely loss of being, what possible deterrent would the prospect of it be to an abandoned sinner bent on a carnival of wickedness ? Surely it is the unconscious conviction that we cannot die, and must bear the burden of deliberately acquired evil to eternity, that is calcu- lated more than anything else to give us pause on the easy downward road. With regard to this question, a note of some importance is struck by Swedenborg. Men, says he in effect, are never specifically punished in the other life for evils that they have committed in this, but they carry with them as part of their essential character the lust of practising similar enormities, on the commission of which they are at once punished by the operation of an inexorable law of action and reaction, so that the result is really the same. Moreover, to allow annihilation on the attainment of a certain degree of wickedness would make it more desirable, from the point of view of consequences, to be excessively wicked than merely to be rather wicked.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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