Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from On Descending Into Hell: A Letter, Addressed to the Right Hon. Henry Matthews, Q. C., Home Secretary, Concerning the Proposed Suppresion of Literature
The days are long past when even the Church, Roman and Catholic, had any real cause to be afraid of human ?ights of fancy, or any anxiety to suppress them more than one of her monks have chuckled over Pantagruel, and I know that certain of her priests have followed with feverish anxiety the temptations of a certain Abbe Mouret. Putting certain little fanciful dogmas aside, the Roman Church is far more tolerant to human necessities and human weaknesses than any of her offshoots - nay, than even her grim Arch Enemy, the Church of Science; and than this last Church she is in one respect infinitely wiser, that her last word is one of pity and comfort for human backsliding.
The pity of Science is the pity of Despair; the pity of the Church is the pity of Faith and Hope, and of regeneration.
True, you say as of old, Unless a man believes in my confession of faith, he shall surely perish but if he believes he shall be saved, an assumption which scientists amuse themselves with, to their own final consternation. For translated into the language of common sense, your dogma means that foul ness, sin, physical disease, hereditary taint, have no power to touch the Soul, -that he who believes in the Supreme Love and Pity shall, despite them all, save his Soul alive; whereas that other Church of Science teaches what I contend to be a foolish heresy, that the Soul can he saved only by the Body in which it dwells, that by the law of heredity the Body may destroy and eliminate even Man's immortal part.
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