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 the 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.