An item is going the rounds of the papers, to illustrate how large the
sun is, and how hot it is, which asserts that if an icicle a million
miles long, and a hundred thousand miles through, should be thrust
into one of the burning cavities of the sun, it would be melted in
a hundredth part of a second, and that it would not cause as much
“sissing” as a drop of water on a hot griddle.
By this comparison we can realize that the sun is a big thing, and
we can form some idea of what kind of a place it would be to pass the
summer months. In contemplating the terrible heat of the sun, we are led
to wonder why those whose duty it is to preach a hell hereafter, have
not argued that the sun is the place where sinners will go to when they
die.
It is not our desire to inaugurate any reform in religious matters, but
we realize what a discouraging thing it must be for preachers to preach
hell and have nothing to show for it. As the business is now done, they
are compelled to draw upon their imagination for a place of endless
punishment, and a great many people, who would be frightened out of
their boots if the minister could show them hell as he sees it, look
upon his talk as a sort of dime novel romance.
They want something tangible on which they can base their belief, and
while the ministers do everything in their power to encourage sinners by
picturing to them the lake of fire and brimstone, where boat-riding is
out of the question unless you paddle around in a cauldron kettle, it
seems as though their labors would be lightened if they could point to
the sun, on a hot day in August, and say to the wicked man that unless
he gets down on his knees and says his now I lay me, and repents, and is
sprinkled, and chips in pretty flush towards the running expenses of
the church, and stands his assessments like a thoroughbred, that he
will wake up some morning, and find himself in the sun, blistered from
Genesis to Revelations, thirsty as a harvest hand and not a brewery
within a million miles, begging for a zinc ulster to cool his parched
hind legs.
Such an argument, with an illustration right on the blackboard of the
sky, in plain sight, would strike terror to the sinner, and he would
want to come into the fold _too_ quick. What the religion of this
country wants, to make it take the cake, is a hell that the wayfaring
man, though a democrat or a greenbacker, can see with the naked eye. The
way it is now, the sinner, if he wants to find out anything about the
hereafter, has to take it second handed, from some minister or deacon
who has not seen it himself, but has got his idea of it from some other
fellow who maybe dreamed it out.
Some deacon tells a sinner all about the orthodox hell, and the sinner
does not know whether to believe him or not. The deacon may have lied to
the sinner some time in a horse trade, or in selling him goods, and beat
him, and how does he know but the same deacon is playing a brace game on
him on the hereafter, or playing him for a sardine.
Now, if the people who advance these ideas of heaven or hell, had a
license to point to the moon, the nice, cool moon, as heaven, which
would be plausible, to say the least, and say that it was heaven, and
prove it, and could prove that the sun was the other place, which looks
reasonable, according to all we have heard about 'tother place, the moon
would be so full there would not be standing room, and they would
have to turn republicans away, while the sun would be playing to empty
benches, and there would only be a few editors there who got in on
passes.
Of course, during a cold winter, when the thermometer was forty or fifty
degrees below zero, and everybody was blocked in, and coal was up to
seventeen dollars a ton, the cause of religion would not prosper as much
as it would in summer, because when you talked to a sinner about leading
a different life or he would go to the sun, he would look at his coal
pile and say that he didn't care a continental how soon he got there,
but these discouragements would not be any greater than some that the
truly good people have to contend with now, and the average the year
round would be largely in favor of going to the moon.
The moon is very popular now, even, and if it is properly advertised as
a celestial paradise, where only good people could get their work in,
and where the wicked could not enter on any terms, there would be a
great desire to take the straight and narrow way to the moon, and the
path to the wicked sun would be grown over with sand burs, and scorched
with lava, and few would care to take passage by that route. Anyway,
this thing is worth looking into.