Salvation, which is the highest of all external rewards, just as perdition is the severest of all external punishments, is not a path to be followed, but a state of happiness to be won and enjoyed.

It follows that the relation between education and salvation is, in the main, one of analogy, rather than of identity (as in Utopia), or even of vital connection.

Or shall we say that education is not so much the first act in the drama of salvation as the first rehearsal of the play?
There are, of course, two conceptions of salvation in the West, just as there are two worlds to be lived in,--the Supernatural world and the world of Nature.
In what are called religious circles, to be saved is to have gained admission to Heaven, and, in doing so, to have escaped the torment and misery of Hell.

There was a time when Hell was taken very seriously; but the idea of never-ending torment and misery is found, when steadily faced, to be so intolerable that popular thought, even in religious circles, is now turning away from it; and so loosely do men sit, in these "degenerate days," to the old doctrine of eternal punishment, that "to die" and "to go to heaven" are becoming interchangeable terms.

But if all men are to be admitted to Heaven (or to its ante-room, Purgatory) at the end of this, their one earth-life, it is clear that there can be no causal connection between conduct and salvation.