HELL

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 352, 12 May 1928, Page 8

HELL

THE QUIET CORNER

Written for The Sun by the Rev. Charles Chandler, Assistant City Missioner. What is Hell like? Having been there I can speak ivith some authority. No fire and brimstone retreat for the morally and spiritually damned, but a state of consciousness. As gold in a fire is tested, so everybody has to go through some sort of a. hell of his own making, before being eligible for the greater opportunities in life. If Francis Thompson had not lived on the Thames Embankment, and dossed in a den of thieves, and tasted the dregs , he would never have produced the “Hound of Heaven.” “Ah! Designer Infinite, Must Thou char the wood, Ere Thou canst limn with it?” This is the question that Thompson asks at the end of his poem , and the answer to that question is Yes. At the foot of Jacob's Ladder which Thompson saio reaching “from Heaven to Charing Cross ” were the flames of nethermost hell, for there is no abyss so deep but that Divine Love (which according to one creed “descended into hell”) can stoop and make provision for the escape of him who, taught “by the means of evil that good is best,” will avail himself of the opportunity . Yes, I have been in hell. Bleepless nights, and homeless nights beneath a London sky. I have known the companionless solitude of being alone and penniless within sight of plenty. I have risen for the third time in a sea of trouble, and then grasped the bottom rung of Jacob's Ladder which stretched, not “from Heaven to Charing Cross,” but from Heaven to an old tin shed in Western Queensland where, on torn sacks, I lay and watched the stars through the chinks in its corrugated roof. Next week: Breaking and Entering.