For though there may be degrees of happiness in Heaven to reward the varying degrees of virtue on earth, all these are dwarfed to nothing by the unimaginable abyss of difference which yawns between Heaven and Hell; and the practical upshot of the current eschatology is that all men--the self-sacrificing equally with the self-indulgent, the kind and compassionate equally with the hard-hearted, the spiritually-minded equally with the worldly, the aspiring equally with the indifferent--are to reap the same reward.

If a man is a notoriously evil liver, those who have suffered at his hands or been violently scandalised by his conduct may perhaps find a sombre pleasure in consigning him to Hell, which, indeed, might otherwise have to put up its shutters.

But though the doors of Heaven may be closed against a few exceptional scoundrels, they are nowadays thrown open to all the rest of Mankind; and the maxim, "Live anyhow, and you will be saved somehow," seems to sum up with tolerable accuracy the popular attitude towards the twofold problem of duty and destiny.
I do not for a moment suggest that this happy-go-lucky eschatology is formally countenanced by the Churches and Sects.

They would doubtless repudiate it with indignation; but the fact remains that their own teaching is largely responsible for it.

For not only is the idea of _natural_ retribution wholly foreign to the genius of supernaturalism, but also, in the two great schools of Western theology, there is, and always has been, a strong tendency to undervalue conduct (in the broad, human sense of the word), and to make the means of salvation mechanical rather than vital.