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THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE.
analysed, would reduce the whole doctrine to a farce. In the first place, God would find it difficult to divide the entire humanity into two groups, - the one for heaven and the other for hell,-without causing heartburning and discontent somewhere. For human beings are not alike in respect of their temperaments, passions, feelings, virtues or sins. To reduce this motley humanity into two groups without distinction of degree in respect of the form and duration of reward, or punishment, would require an equalizing process which the human understanding refuses to recognise. And, if it be imagined that there would be distinctions and degrees of reward and punishment and of their duration in the other world, we would have a spectacle resembling our own world, and, therefore, misery would not be unknown in heaven. The least-favoured would have occasion to envy the less-favoured, and the latter, in his turn, the most-favoured even in the paradise. If this be the mode of distribution and adjustment of reward or punishment on the Judgment Day, our world has enough of heaven and hell already, and, as the materialist says, is not to be despised; for here the grave puts an end to the misery and wretchedness of an earthly existence, sooner or later.
In the second place, justice demands that there should be apportionment of punishment according to the degree of sin, so that those who have committed a fewer number of sins ought not to undergo the same punishment as those who have sinned all their lives through. But the orthodox belief ignores this point altogether, and indiscriminately dooms all sinners to an
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