Yet if I am to tell you my own conjectural imaginations—for who can help at times imagining what the infinite unknown may be, however loth he may be to insist or dogmatize about it, or even to bestow much attention on it, when the urgent present presses its superior claims?—I will say for myself that I cannot believe I shall have served all my apprenticeship to righteousness in my brief life upon this earth, or that I shall be fit immediately after death, for that closest communion with God which appears to me the Heaven of Heavens. Some cleansing retribution, some further purification, seems to me necessary and likely for myself—and, I must add, for the greater number of those human beings with whom I have had to do—before we attain to that blessed consummation.
“So you believe in a Purgatory then?” How do I know? Say rather, I conjecture there may be many heavens. In any case, I find it very easy to imagine a retribution and a purification that shall be purely spiritual, without having recourse to any material flames or physical horrors. Some people find a difficulty in this notion: they consider it, but deliberately put it aside; as if mere remorse, sorrow, and self-condemnation, could never be bitter enough to constitute a just Hell. I do not think they have ever realized—perhaps they have never tried to realize—the pain that may be felt by a spirit sitting alone, away from this familiar world and every well-known face, and quietly judging and condemning itself. A mere accident, a ludicrous accident, once gave me a moment’s experience of this feeling, and I have never been able to forget it, never been able to put aside the conviction that that feeling, intensified, might constitute Hell.
It happened in this way. Some years ago, before nitrous oxide had come into very general use among dentists, I went to have a tooth extracted, and determined to try the gas. Perhaps I had some misgivings that it was a little cowardly; perhaps I was a little nervous; in any case I remember at the last moment thinking that I should like to be conscious of the precise moment when unconsciousness came; I remember struggling to retain consciousness—even when a tell-tale throbbing in the temples shewed that something new was going on—protesting to myself that the gas had “no power,” “no power at all yet,” “I don’t believe it’s going to have any power”—till the portcullis came down. I suppose the consequence was that I inhaled rather more than was usual; and when I came to myself I heard the voices of the dentist and the physician—a long way off, as it seemed to me, but with perfect distinctness saying that “he was a long time coming to” and they did not “quite like the look of things,” and so on. Meantime I lay motionless and without power either to move or speak, but perfectly conscious. I took in the whole situation at once. I was dead. I had passed into another state of existence. I could think more clearly than before. I was a spirit. And then the thought came pressing in upon me, as I reviewed my whole life and the manner of my death, that to avoid a little pain I had done a wrong thing and had deserted those who needed me and would miss me. No fear possessed me, not the slightest fear, of any external punishment for the fault which I thought I had committed: but in a detached solitude I seemed to be quietly and coldly sitting in judgment upon myself, impartially hearing what I had to say in self-defence, rejecting it as inadequate, and passing against myself the verdict of Guilty. Painful, increasingly painful, the burden of this self-condemnation seemed to press and crush me down more and more past power of bearing, so that at last, when in one moment I recovered both power of motion and knowledge that I was alive again, I leapt up from the dentist’s arm-chair, and, without taking the least notice of the two operators, I gave vent to my feelings by shouting aloud the well-known words from Clarence’s dream