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November 21st, 1916
Received by James Padgett
Washington D.C.
I am here, St. Paul. I desire tonight to finish
my message on Hell - what it is and what its purpose is.
As I said before hell is a place as well as a condition, and, the
man who believes that it is nothing more than a condition of his
mind or soul will be wonderfully surprised as well as disappointed.
I know the condition of mind and soul to a very large extent creates
a man's hell and is the chief source of his suffering and the darkness
that surrounds and envelops him; yet this condition is not the only
source of that suffering or of darkness in which he finds himself.
Hell is a place, and a place that has all the appearances and ingredients
that are in exact agreement with his state as produced or caused
by the condition of his mind or soul, and is not a place of universal
character and fitted for the habitation of souls, irrespective of
conditions of degrees of defilement and sin and darkness. It is
not a single place forming a common home for all fallen souls, but
is composed of many and different places, and as has been said,
there are many hells having gradations of appearances and surroundings
that are suitable for causing additional sufferings which souls
may have to endure.
The expression, "the lowest depths of hell" is not a meaningless
one, but portrays a truth, a real existing fact that many spirits
are now experiencing the reality of. In its broadest sense, hell
is every place outside of heaven, and heaven is that place where
everything entering into it - its appearance and qualities and its
inhabitants - is in perfect harmony with the respective laws of
God and His will concerning the same. And this statement involves
the fact that there are several heavens, because the heaven of the
redeemed, or those who have received the Divine Essence in their
souls and become of the divine nature of the Father, is a distinct
heaven from that wherein live those who have been restored in their
natural love to the perfect condition that the first parent possessed
before the fall - the condition of the restitution to mankind of
that perfection which was lost by the disobedience of the first
man and woman.
Mortals usually believe that heaven is a condition, and the Bible,
in which so many believe, attempts to describe this heaven with
its streets of gold, and pearly gates, etc., and as a fact it is
a real, substantial place, having all the elements and appearances
of a home of bliss, which help to bring to its inhabitants happiness
and joy in addition to the happiness which their soul perfection
and development cause them to have.
Then, as heaven is a place, having real substance, perceptible
to the spirits that inhabit it, why should not hell be a place of
real substance also, with those qualities and appearances, exactly
suited to add to the unhappiness of those who are fitted for it?
The spirit world, both heaven and hell are places of substance,
having their planes and divisions and limitations of occupancy,
and not mythical, invisible conceptions of mind as you mortals ordinarily
conceive ghosts to be. The spirits of mortals are real and more
substantial than are the physical bodies of mortals, and these planes
and divisions, whether of heaven or hell, have a more real existence,
than have the mortals in their places of habitation or confinement
in the earth life.
The hells are places of darkness and sufferings but in them are
no fires or brimstone, etc., as have been so commonly represented
by the preachers and teachers of the orthodox churches, because
there is nothing therein that would feed fires or that fires could
affect, and there are no devils or Satan, though there are evil
spirits of men that are more wicked and vicious and horrifying than
have ever been pictured of the devil and his angels. In your communications
you have had some very realistic
descriptions of hell from those who are actually living therein
and are realizing its tortures and realities, and I will not take
the time here to attempt to describe it in detail, and will only
say that as it has not entered into the minds of men to conceive
the wonders and beauties of heaven, neither have they ever conceived
of the horrors and sufferings of hell.
But from all this men must not understand that the punishment and
darkness which the spirits of evil endure in the hells are specifically
inflicted by the Father because of any wrath that He may have towards
these spirits, or to gratify any feelings of revenge, or even to
satisfy any outraged justice, for it is not true. Man, when he becomes
a spirit, is his own judge and executioner, submitting to and receiving
the inexorable results of the law, that "whatsoever
a man sows that shall he also reap." This is a law
that is necessary to preserve or bring about the harmony of god's
universe, which, of course, is absolutely necessary, and while it
may appear to man, at first sight, to be a harsh and cruel law,
yet in its workings and results, even to the individual spirit who
may suffer in the reaping, it is a most benign and beneficial law,
for the darkness and sufferings of a few years, as you mortals say,
bring about an eternity of light and happiness.
The law must rule; and in all the apparent harshness and suffering
and want of mercy, the Great Divine Love of the Father overshadows
the sufferer and finally makes the defiled and wicked soul become
one of purity and goodness. Men may never have thought of the fact;
that if it were possible for these evil spirits to live in heaven,
their sufferings and unhappiness would be greater than what they
endure by living in the place that is more in agreement in its surroundings
and appearances, with their own distorted conditions of soul. So
even in their hells, the Father is Merciful and Good.
And regarding the second proposition of the preacher (Dr. Ratcliff)
in his sermon, namely, the duration of suffering or of the life
of the spirit in hell. His conclusion was, that this duration of
the spirit is eternal, everlasting and without end. How it must
have hurt and violated the teachings of his soul and his conception
of the loving Father, to come to such a conclusion! But, yet, being
bound by his creeds and the domination of his belief that the Bible
is the sole authority upon hell, as well as heaven, in the conviction
of his mind - and here I want to emphasize mind, for his heart was
not in agreement, he declared that the duration of the sufferings
and life of the hells is eternal, and the saying of Jesus proved
it to be, not only because it was in the Bible, but because the
true meaning of the original Greek word, can have no other translation;
not knowing, or if knowing, not recalling, that Jesus, even if he
used such expression, did not speak in Greek, and that back of the
Greek word, in order to obtain the true meaning of the word used
by Jesus, he, the preacher, must go to the word as it was uttered
by Jesus and its true meaning.
So many preachers and commentators on the Bible attempt to determine
a most vital truth by a shade of meaning that they conceive a particular
word in its original, may have, when they are not justified in concluding
that such word had at the time used, such shade of meaning, or that
the original as they conceive it to be, was the original word actually
spoken or written. They seem to lose sight of the fact that the
writings of the Bible, I mean the manuscripts to which they make
reference to prove the correctness of their conclusions, are far
removed from the original writings, and that by reason of the copying
and recopying of the word upon which they rely, and the shade of
meaning that they give it in their interpretations may not have
been the word originally used. Of course, they have no way of learning
this fact, and, consequently, they have to resort to the best authority
that they can have access to. But under such circumstances, it is
not a justifiable thing to have a vital question of man's future
and destiny determined by the shade of meaning that may be given
to one word or more words, without reference to other declarations
of the same Book, having relation to the subject matter of the inquiry.
The preacher said that in his conclusion as
to the question he must be governed by the Bible alone, and had
no right to indulge in speculation of the philosophies of other
men, and that in the Bible he could find nothing that would justify
him in coming to any other conclusion than that the duration of
punishment in hell is eternal. Well, he was not honest with himself,
for if he had searched a little
more deeply and have given as much credence to other parts of
the Bible as to the passage that he quoted, he would have found
a strong statement to the effect that the evil spirits in hell have
the possibility of leaving it, and not only that but that a part
of the great mission of Jesus, upon whose supposed declaration the
preacher based his conclusion, was to show the way and induce these
spirits of evil to leave their hells. This was the Master's first
work after he became a spirit, and he would not have attempted to
preach to these wicked spirits in hell, so wicked, according to
the Bible, that God because of their great sins when mortals, punished
them as He never punished any other of His children, for their disobedience,
utterly destroying them as a race and His only living human creatures
from the face of the earth, by one great catastrophe, leaving only
Noah and his family as a reminder of the great failure of God in
His creation - the most perfect and the "very good." So I say, if
the preacher had searched the Bible he would have found that the
hell that contained the spirits of all the human race that was living
at the time of the flood, except Noah and his family was not in
its duration eternal.
And again, had the preached searched further he
would have found that the Master Himself, declared by necessary
implication, that, at least, for some of the wicked who became inhabitants
of hell, there was possibility of release, and certainty upon conditions.
I refer to the declaration attributed to him where he said, "He
that sinneth against the son of man, it shall be forgiven him, but
he that sinneth against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven
him, neither in this world, nor in the world to come." (Matt.
Chapter 12--Verse 32)
Now, to any reasonable man there is only one interpretation of
this declaration and that is, that for any and all sins, except
that against the Holy Ghost there is forgiveness in the next world
as well as in the mortal world, and that being a fact, it is an
irresistible conclusion that the Father would not compel a spirit
to remain in hell after He had forgiven that spirit's sins.
No, the preacher had not searched the Scriptures, as he was in
duty bound to do, else his conclusion, could he have ridden his
mind of the beliefs that the creeds of his church had driven into
his intellect, and of the teachings of the ancient fathers, and
of the churches that had taught such false and damnable doctrines
for so many years, would have been very different. The preacher
repudiated the old teachings that there would be physical suffering
in hell, or fire or brimstone, etc., and expressed his commiseration
for those preachers and others who had taught such doctrine, and
for their awful responsibility and accounting, and his commiseration
was needed and appropriate. But l want to say here that he needs
as much, if not more, commiseration for the preaching of his false
doctrines, as did those preachers to whom he refers. He has more
light, or may have, and his accounting will be correspondingly greater.
I have written a long letter, and you are tired and I must stop,
but before doing so, let me declare the truth to be, that hell is
not a place of eternal punishment. That all the hells as well as
other parts of the spirit world are places of progression and the
privilege of probation is not taken from any spirit no matter how
wicked, for all are God's children and in His Plans for the perfecting
of the harmony of the universe, and man's salvation, all the hells
will be emptied and the hells themselves destroyed. But men must
not think from this that the duration of suffering in these hells
is necessarily short, for that is not true; some of the evil inhabitants
of these places have been in such darkness and suffering for centuries,
as mortals count time, and may be for centuries more, but the time
will come when they will have the awakening to the fact that they
may become children of light, and then when they make the effort
to progress, they will succeed. The sooner that mankind learns that
hell is not a place of punishment to satisfy the wrath of an angry
God, but merely the natural and necessary living place of the spirit,
whose condition of soul and mind demands, and that condition changes,
and it will change, the hell of its habitation will change until
finally for that spirit all the hells will disappear.
You are tired and I must stop. So thanking you, and leaving you
my love and blessings, I am your brother in Christ,
Paul
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