The belief in eternal punishment gave the world a thousand religious wars. It put a ban on investigation. It gagged honest thought. It made ignorance universal and progress impossible. It put the world beneath the feet of priests. For more than fifteen hundred years, the insane notion that a hell of flames awaits the souls of unbelievers in another world did more than any other single thing to transform this world into a kind of hell.
Thundered from millions of pulpits, over and over again, during all the centuries of Christianity, that heartless belief filled the lives of men and women and children with an awful fear— a fear frequently amounting to terror—a withering fear that only recently began to pass away