The secular view of Jesus is powerfully reinforced by the increase in
our day of the number of people who have had the means of educating and
training themselves to the point at which they are not afraid to look
facts in the face, even such terrifying facts as sin and death. The
result is greater sternness in modern thought. The conviction is
spreading that to encourage a man to believe that though his sins be
as scarlet he can be made whiter than snow by an easy exercise of
self-conceit, is to encourage him to be a rascal. It did not work so
badly when you could also conscientiously assure him that if he let
himself be caught napping in the matter of faith by death, a red-hot
hell would roast him alive to all eternity. In those days a sudden
death--the most enviable of all deaths--was regarded as the most
frightful calamity. It was classed with plague, pestilence, and famine,
battle and murder, in our prayers. But belief in that hell is fast
vanishing. All the leaders of thought have lost it; and even for the
rank and file it has fled to those parts of Ireland and Scotland which
are still in the XVII century. Even there, it is tacitly reserved for
the other fellow.