12 The Question of an Eternal Hell
on account of some distant ancestor's transgression. For me,
the tale's ultimate lesson would have had to be the one that
Macarius himself had uttered: ''.Alas that such a man was ever
born!" After all, I concluded in my juvenile way, if God knows
all things, and so knew from everlasting that the final fate of
the high priest would be to suffer everlasting torment, then the
very choice to create him had been an act of limitless cruelty.
I ignored the sermon in any event, as I tended to do with
most sermons in those days (and still tend to do today, to be
honest). As I say, I was not particularly devout. But, while the
story itself failed to leave a very deep impression on my think-
ing, the conclusion I had reached as a result of the sermon
that day remained with me, and I have never really wavered
from it since then. I still find myself unable to repudiate my
initial, callow response: a slight shiver of distaste at the nai:ve
religious mind at its most morally obtuse, and then boredom
at what I took to be an inept attempt to scare me. I had seen a
few badly made horror films on television, after all. Since then,
admittedly, I have encountered far subtler pictures of perdition
and, at tedious length, have mastered all of the more common
arguments for the moral intelligibility of the idea of a hell of
eternal torment, not to mention a good number of the un -
common ones. None of these, however, has ever persuaded
me of anything, except perhaps the lengths of specious reason-
ing to which even very intelligent persons can go when they
feel bound by faith to believe something inherently incredible.
And, to be honest, even if any versions of those arguments did
seem plausible to me, they would still fail to move me, since
no versions deal adequately with the actual question that to
me seems the most obvious and most crucial- at least, if one
truly believes that Christianity offers any kind of cogent pic-
ture of reality. The great majority of defenders of the idea of a