From Chapter 8: Hell
There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this, If it lay in my power. But it has the full support of Scripture and, specially of our Lord's own words; it has always been held by Christendom; and it has the support of reason. If a game is played, it must be possible to lose it. If the happiness of a creature lies in self-surrender, no one can make that surrender but himself (though many can help him to make it).
1. Retributive punishment is barbaric.
All punishment becomes unjust if the ideas of ill-desert and retribution were removed from it ...
Picture ... a man ... without a care in the world, unshakably confident to the very end that he alone has found the answer to the riddle of life, that God and man are fools who he has gotten the better of, that his way of life is utterly successful, satisfactory, unassailable. ... Supposing he will not be converted, what destiny in the eternal world can you regard as proper for him? Can you really desire that such a man, remaining what he is (and he must be able to do that if he has free will) should be confirmed forever in his present happiness ...? You are moved not by a desire for the wretched creature's pain as such, but by a truly ethical demand that, soon or late, the right should be asserted, the flag planted in this horribly rebellious soul, even if no fuller and better conquest is to follow. ...
... though Our Lord often speaks of hell as a sentence inflicted by a tribunal, He also says elsewhere that the judgement consists in the very fact that men prefer darkness to light ... We are therefore at liberty ... to think of this bad man's perdition not as a sentence imposed on him but as the mere fact of being what he is. ... Our imaginary egoist has tried to turn everything he meets into a province or appendage of the self. [In death] he has his wish - to live wholly in the self and to make the best of what he finds there. And what he finds there is hell.
2. The apparent disproportion between eternal damnation and transitory sin
(Death ought not to be final; there ought to be a second chance.)
If a million chances were likely to do good, they would be given. Finality must come some time, and it does not require a very robust faith to believe that omniscience knows when.
3. The frightful intensity of the pains of hell
Our Lord speaks of Hell under three symbols: ... punishment ... destruction ... banishment. The prevalent image of fire is significant because it combines the ideas of torment and destruction. ... If soul can be destroyed, must there not be a state of having been a human soul? ... To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being in earth; to enter hell is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not man: it is "remains".
4. How could we be blessed in heaven while we knew that even one human soul was still in hell? (Are we more merciful than God?)
At the back of this objection lies the mental picture of heaven and hell co-existing in unilinear time. ... But ... Our Lord, while stressing the terror of hell with unsparing severity, usually emphasises the idea not of duration but of finality. ... We know much more about heaven than hell, for heaven is the home of humanity and therefore contains all that is implied in a glorified human life; but hell was not made for men. It is no sense parallel to heaven; it is "the darkness outside"...
5. The ultimate loss of a single soul means the defeat of omnipotence.
And so it does. In creating beings with free will, omnipotence from the outset submits to the possibility of such defeat. ... I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside. [The damned] enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded, and are therefore self-enslaved: just as the blessed, forever submitting to obedience, become through all eternity more and more free.
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