Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: "HELL" —WHAT IT IS NOT. " For this cause was the Gospel preached also to them that are dead." —i Pet. iv., 6. WHEN I spoke from this place last Sunday on the question, " Is life worth living ?" when I preached three Sundays ago on Heaven, some of you may possibly have thought: This is all very well for true Christians ; all very well if in this world there were only saints; but the saints are few in number, and this world is full of sinners. See what a spectacle it presents! Look at the coarseness and foulness exhibited at every turn in the streets around us. Walk at night in squalid purlieus, not a stone's throw from this abbey, where glaring gin-palaces are busy, .and amid the reek of alcohol you may hear snatches of foul oaths and odious songs; where women sit shuddering in wretched garrets, to think of the brutal hands which will strike, at the brutal feet that will kick them, when the drunkard staggers home; where the young lads of the schools over which we spend so many millions of money are being daily ruined and depraved by being allured into low haunts of gambling and degradation. Or walk in the thronged haunts of commerce, where myriads are utterly and recklessly absorbed in that hasting to be rich which shall not be innocent; or judge from the vile phases of the stage and the opera, that vice in higher places is none the less dangerous from being gilded and perfumed; note all these facts — you may say — and then tell us, not in an ideal world, but in this world, which looks too often as though it were a world without souls—in this world where there is so much of cruel selfishness, of degraded purpose, of serpentine malice, of insane desire, — tell us, in such a world as this, how does all that you have said apply ? Alas! the vast majority of men and women whom ... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.