Disregard it or not as you please, but I shall have
done my duty in pointing out to you the sure and certain meaning of
my message."
"I, a sinner like the rest of you, live nevertheless in the fear of
hell fire. Hell fire has become, I think, to many of the present
generation a mockery and a derision. I come to tell you that it is
no mockery, that it as surely lies there, a blazing furnace, in
front of us as though we saw it with our own eyes . . ."
With his own eyes he had surely seen it. They were fixed now in a
frenzy of realisation upon some distant vision, and, with a shiver,
the Chapel followed his gaze. It is easy enough to laugh at bare and
conventional words stripped of the atmosphere and significance of
their original surroundings. The merest baby in this twentieth
century can laugh at the flames of hell and advance a string of easy
arguments against the probability of any such melodramatic
fulfilment of the commonplace and colourless lives that the majority
of us lead, but Maggie was in no mood to laugh that night.
Before five minutes had passed she found herself shivering where she
sat.
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