Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/114

self can alone balance his power to save himself, and that the justice and mercy of God be alike infinite, it is necessary that hell and heaven should simultaneously exist, the one as the term of the former, the other of the latter. Heaven supposes hell, and in such a manner that it can neither be explained nor conceived without it. These two things are correlative in the same manner that a consequence supposes its principle and a principle its consequence; and, as he who affirms the consequence contained in its principle and the principle which contains the consequence, in reality asserts the same thing, and not two different things; so he who asserts the existence of hell implies that there is a heaven; and he who affirms that there is a heaven implies the existence of hell. He does not in reality affirm two different things, but one and the same thing. There is then a logical necessity to admit these two affirmations, or to deny them both, as absolute negations. But before denying these affirmations, let us examine what would be denied by their negation. It would involve the denial of any power in man either to lose or save himself, and likewise the denial of the infinite justice and mercy of God. To these personal negations, if we may so style them, may be added another real negation, namely, the denial of virtue and vice, of good and evil, of reward and punishment; and as these negations deny all the laws of the moral world, so the negation of hell logically involves a similar denial. Nor can it be said that man may save himself without going to heaven or lose himself without going to hell; because to go neither to heaven nor to hell is neither reward nor punishment, perdition nor salvation. God must either possess justice and mercy