"Yes, true."

"I could have sent souls into the whirlwind. I am the embodiment of greed and cruelty. I devoured the mortals I've killed like so much food and drink. I cannot justify it."

"Do you think I want you to justify it?" Memnoch asked. "What violence have I justified so far? What makes you think I would like you if you justified or defended your actions? Have I ever defended anyone who made anyone else suffer?"

"No, you haven't."

"Well, then?"

"What is Hell, and how can you run it? You don't want people to suffer. You don't even seem to want me to suffer. You can't point to God and say He makes it all Good and Meaningful! You can't. You're His opposition. So what is Hell?"

"What do you think it is?" he asked me again. "What would you morally settle for ...

before rejecting me out of hand! Before fleeing from me. What sort of Hell could you believe in and would you—if you were in my place—create?"

"A place where people realize what they've done to others; where they face every detail of it, and realize every particle of it, so that they would never, never do the same thing again; a place where souls are reformed, literally, by knowledge of what they'd done wrong and how they could have avoided it, and what they should have done.

When they understand, as you said of the Elect of Sheol, when they can forgive not only God for this big mess, but themselves for their own failures, their own horrible angry reactions, their own spite and meanness, when they love everyone totally in complete forgiveness, then they would be worthy of Heaven. Hell would have to be where they see the consequences of their actions, but with a full merciful comprehension of how little they themselves knew."

"Precisely. To know what has hurt others, to realize that you didn't know, that nobody gave you the knowledge, yet still you had the power! And to forgive that, and forgive your victims, and forgive God and forgive yourself."

"Yes. That would be it. That would terminate my anger, my outrage. I couldn't shake my fist anymore, if only I could forgive God and others and myself."

He didn't say anything. He sat with his arms folded, eyes wide, his dark smooth brow barely touched with the moisture of the air.

"That's what it is, isn't it?" I asked fearfully. "It's ...it's a place where you learn to understand what you've done to another being... where you come to realize the suffering you've inflicted on others!"

"Yes, and it is terrible. I created it and I run it to make whole again the souls of the just and the unjust, those who had suffered and those who had done cruelty. And the only lesson of that Hell is Love."

I was frightened, as frightened as I had been when we went into Jerusalem.

"He loves my souls when they come to Him," said Memnoch.