Washington Gladden, the beginner of social gospel

The rest of mankind, had by the fall "lost communion with God" and was "under (God's) wrath and curse, and so made liable to all the miseries of this life, to death itself, and to the pains of hell forever." "Of the exact truth of this statement I had not the shadow of doubt," he says. "But I understood that there was a way by which I could escape from this curse and regain this lost communion. that was the one thing, above all others, that I wanted. I would gladly have exchanged for it not only every sinful pleasure, but all the pleasures that were not sinful."

Gladden had been persuaded by Bushnell "that there could be no such thing as judicial transfer of blame or penalty from a guilty to an innocent person; that the entire transaction was within the ethical rather than the forensic realm."

[According to Gladden] heaven and hell are not primarily places; they are states of character. They are figures of speech; they are present realities of human experience. Death works no miraculous change in the human heart. Probably, says Gladden, we shall go as the Scripture says, each to his sown place...

God "is doing all that infinite love can do to fill the world with righteousness and peace," he said in a sermon on Worlds in the Making. "The one thing that infinite love cannot do is to take away from men the chance to be men.... This world will be Paradise as soon as men want Paradise enough to pay the price of it in labor and patience. God is always doing his part, but he will never do ours."