CHAPTER XXXV. HELL. "And death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them."-Bible. "What Hell may be I know not; this I know I cannot lose the presence of the Lord; One arm, Humility, takes hold upon He goes, and better fire-walled Hell with him Than golden-gated Paradise without."-Tauler. Evangelical denominations originally preached the doctrine of literal hell-torments. Rev. Mr. Benson, Methodist commentator, says: * * "Infinite justice arrests their guilty souls, and confines them in the dark prison of hell, till they have satisfied all its demands by their personal sufferings, which, alas! they can never do. He will exert all his divine attributes to make them as wretched as the capacity of their nature will admit. * * Number the stars in the firmament, the drops of rain, sand on the seashore; and when thou hast finished the calculation, sit down and number up the ages of woe. Let every star, every drop, every grain of sand, represent one million of tormenting ages. And know that as many more millions still remain behind, and yet as many more behind these, and so on without end." The Rev. Mr. Ambrose, in a discourse entitled "Doomsday," pictures the torments of lost souls thus: "When the damned have drunken down whole draughts of brimstone one day, they must do the same another day. The eye shall be tormented with the sight of devils, the ears with the hideous yellings and outcries of the damned in flames, the nostrils shall be smothered, as it were, with brimstone; the tongue, the hand, the foot, and every part, shall fry in flames." Rev. Mr. Emmons wrote in his series of sermons: "The happiness of the elect in heaven will, in part, consist in witnessing the torments of the damned in hell. And among these it may be their own children, parents, husbands, wives, and friends on earth. One part of the business of the blessed is to celebrate the doctrine of reprobation. While the decree of reprobation is eternally executing on the vessels of wrath, the smoke of their torment will be eternally ascending in view of the vessels of mercy, who, instead of taking the part of those miserable objects, will say, 'Amen, hallelujah, praise the Lord!". Emmons's Sermons, xvi. "When they (the saints) shall see how great the misery is from which God hath saved them, and how great a difference he hath made between their state and the state of others who were by nature, and perhaps by practice, no more sinful and ill-deserving than they, it will give them more a sense of the wonderfulness of God's grace to them. Every time they look upon the damned, it will excite in them a lively and admiring sense of the grace of God in making them so to differ. The sight of hell torments will exalt the happiness of the saints forever."-Ib., Sermon xi. Rev. Mr. Edwards penned these sentiments in his "Practical Sermons: " "The saints in glory will be far more sensible how dreadful the wrath of God is, and will better understand how terrible the sufferings of the damned are, yet this will be no occasion of grief to them, but rejoicing. They will not be sorry for the damned; it will cause no uneasiness or dissatisfaction to them, but on the contrary, when they see this sight, it will occasion rejoicing, and excite them to joyful praises." Rev. Thomas Boston, in his "Four-fold State," informs us that "The godly wife shall applaud the justice of the judge in the condemnation of her ungodly husband. The godly husband shall say amen! to the damnation of her who lay in his bosom! The godly parent shall say halleluiah! at the passing of the sentence of their ungodly child. And the godly child shall from the heart approve the damnation of his wicked parents who begot him, and the mother who bore him."-p. 336. Rev. Thomas Vincent, a Calvinistic clergyman of the past, indulges in the following strain : "This will fill them (the saints) with astonishing admiration and wondering joy, when they see some of their near relatives going to hell; their fathers, their mothers, their children, their husbands, their wives, their intimate friends and companions, while they themselves are saved! * * * Those affections they now have for relatives out of Christ will cease; and they will not have the least trouble to see them sentenced to hell, and thrust into the fiery furnace!" Rev. James Smith, of the American Tract Society, Cincinnati, published the following: "The fire of hell is such that multitudes of tears will not quench it, and length of time will not burn it out. 'The wrath of God abideth; on the rejecter of Christ.-John iii: 36. "Oh, eternity! eternity! Who can fathom it? Mariners have their plummet to measure the depths of the sea; but what line or plummet shall we use to fathom the depth of eternity? The breath of the Lord kindles the flames of the pit, (Isa. xxx: 33,) and where shall we find waters to quench those flames? OH, ETERNITY! If all the body of the earth and the sea were turned to sand, and all the space up to the starry heaven were nothing but sand, and if a little bird should come once every thousand years and take away in her bill but a single grain from all that heap of sand, what numberless years and ages must be spent before the whole of that vast quantity would be carried away. Yet if even at the end of all that time the sinner might come out of hell, there would be some hope. But that word FOREVER breaks the heart. The smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever.'" The Rev. Mr. Walworth, son of the formerly distinguished Chancellor Walworth, of New York, in a discourse describing the locality and intensity of hell, said: "The Scriptures had invariably spoken of hell as beneath us, not above or far removed. As heaven was above, and the souls of the righteous were said to ascend to heaven, so the damned descended— went down into hell. "The rich man, tormented in hell, 'lifted up his eyes' and saw Lazarus in Abraham's bosom, and to his entreaties for succor and intercession, Abraham had replied, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed.' So, too, Christ, in the parable of the marriage feast, said, 'Take him and bind him hand and foot, and cast him into outer darkness.' "He cited many other texts from Scripture to fix this locality, and deduced, as a conclusion therefrom, that hell must necessarily be in the centre of this earth, as in no other way could our conceptions of its position beneath us, as defined in the Scriptures, be adequately realized; our ideas of what is above us might be infinite as space itself, but there could be but one 'beneath,' and that was subterranean. "He then inquired into the degree of intensity of this heat, which almost passed the bounds of human conception. As a means of approximating to a result, however, he referred to experiments which had been made with a thermometer in Artesian wells and deep mines. Here it had been observed that with every fifty feet of depth one degree of Fahrenheit had been gained; consequently, at this ratio of increase, it would only be necessary to penetrate the crust of the earth twenty-one miles, in order to reach a state of heat, in which the granite would be molten. Water boils at two hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit, but it requires two thousand and six hundred degrees to melt rocks. This, therefore, was the minimum of the heat of hell, whose frontiers, therefore, lie twenty-one miles below the surface of the earth. "What would be the duration of the punishment and of these terrible fires? Here there was no room left for doubt! The Church, in concurrence with the awful testimony of the Scriptures, had pronounced them eternal; Christ himself had said, 'It is better for thee to enter life maimed than, having two hands, to go into hell, into the fire that shall never be quenched.' It would be vain to attempt to conceive the duration of that eternity; the boldest intellects shrank appalled on the very threshold of their inquiry. To illustrate the futility of any such attempt, he begged his hearers to picture to themselves one of those infinitely small animals, of which millions dwell in a single drop of water, and which only the most powerful microscope can reveal to our gaze. "Let them suppose one of these infinitesimal creatures to consume the whole earth, to eat all the leaves of the trees, the fruits of the ground, and sand of the seashore, the mountains and the plains, to drink up the oceans, lakes and rivers, taking one mouthful in a thousand years, and then to devour in turn the sun and the planets and all the visible creatures of the universe, and, after the incalculable lapse of time, consider how much nearer they would be to the solution of this great mystery? Not one step; eternity would be as far beyond their contemplation as ever. "In these eternal fires every limb and member of our bodies, every nerve and muscle and tendon, every part of us, in fire, over which the sense of feeling predominated, would be forever racked and tortured and yet never consumed. And to these exquisite torments of the body would be added the pangs of remorse and stings of conscience." This is locating and preaching hell to some purpose. It is admirable! Such square sermonizing is in no way allied to this delectable, dodging indefiniteness that characterizes the evangelical discourses of the present. Perhaps the mitigation, softening and bridging over of that liquid stream of fire. form no exception to the general improvement of the age. These Orthodox clergy-"fat, oily men, with a roguish twinkle in their eyes "-if believing their creeds, certainly take the matter of endless hell torments very easy. They smile, enjoy good digestion, walk daily over this "twentyone miles" crust of hell, crack jokes, drive good bargains, loan money, and do other things quite human. The old is passing away. It is effete, barren, dead! Art, science, commerce, poetry, painting, music, telegraphic communications, in connection with the phenomena and philosophy of Spiritualism, have all exerted their liberalizing tendencies upon the theologies of the times. Spiritualists, though utterly rejecting the commonly received orthodox doctrines of hell, as a place of future endless punishment, firmly believe in hell believe in good and evil, heaven and hell, as subjective relations and conditions. There are four words in the Old and New Testaments translated hell: Sheol, Hades, Tartarus and Gehenna. The first two-the former Hebrew, and the latter, Greek-are synonymous. It is difficult to find English words that precisely correspond with them. The Orthodox commentator, Dr. Campbell, writes thus of Hades: "In my judgment, it ought never in the Scriptures to be rendered hell, at least in the sense wherein that word is now universally understood by Christians. In the Old Testament the corresponding word is Sheol, which signifies the state of the dead in general, without regard to the goodness or badness of the persons, their happiness or misery." Dr. Chapman, in his "Critical Notes," assures us that "Neither Sheol nor Hades, in themselves considered, have any connection with future punishment, as will be evident to any man who will examine the Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint translation." The late Professor Stuart left recorded these words: "There can be no reasonable doubt that Sheol does most generally mean the grave, sepulchre, the world of the dead, in the Old Testament scriptures." |