together? Would any man in his wits accept of a hundred pounds a year for forty years, if he were sure to be tormented in the fire for the next hundred years together without intermission? Think then what a thousand years signify; ten ages, the age of two empires. But this account, I must tell you, is infinitely short, though I thus discourse to you how great fools wicked men are, though this opinion should be true. A goodly comfort, surely, that for two or three years' sottish pleasure, a man shall be infinitely tormented but for a thousand years! But then when we cast up the minutes, and years, and ages of eternity, the consideration itself is a great hell to those persons, who by their evil lives are consigned to such sad and miserable portions. A thousand years is a long while to be in torment: we find a fever of one and twenty days to be like an age in length; but when the duration of an intolerable misery is for ever in the height, and for ever beginning, and ten thousand years have spent no part of its term, but it makes a perpetual efflux, and is like the centre of a circle, which ever transmits lines to the circumference: this is a consideration so sad, that the horror of it, and the reflection upon its abode and duration, make a great part of the hell: for hell could not be hell without the despair of accursed souls; for any hope were a refreshment, and a drop of water, which would help to allay those flames, which as they burn intolerably, so they must burn for ever. And I desire you to consider, that although the Scripture uses the word 'fire' to express the torments of accursed souls, yet fire can no more equal the pangs of hell than it can torment an immaterial substance; the pains of perishing souls being as much more afflictive than the smart of fire, as the smart of fire is troublesome beyond the softness of Persian carpets, or the sensuality of the Asian luxury. For the pains of hell, and the perishing or losing the soul, is, to suffer the wrath of God : καὶ γὰρ ὁ Θεὸς ἡμῶν πῦρ κατανάλισκον, our God is a consuming fire," that is, the fire of hell. When God takes away all comfort from us, nothing to support our spirit is left us; when sorrow is our food, and tears our drink; when it is eternal night, without sun, or star, or lamp, or sleep; when we burn with fire without light, that is, are laden with sadness, without remedy, or hope of ease; and that this wrath is to be expressed and to fall upon us in spiritual, immaterial, but most accursed, most pungent, and dolorous emanations; then we feel what it is to lose a soul. We may guess at it by the terrors of a guilty conscience, those 'verbera et laniatus,' those secret 'lashings and whips' of the exterminating angel, those thorns in the soul, when a man is haunted by an evil spirit; those butcheries,-which the soul of a tyrant, or a violent or a vicious person, when he falls into fear or any calamity, does feel, are the infinite arguments, that hell,-which is the consummation of the torment of conscience, just as manhood is the consummation of infancy, or as glory is the perfection of grace,—is an affliction greater than the bulk of heaven and earth; for there it is that God pours out the treasures of his wrath, and empties the whole magazine of thunderbolts, and all the armoury of God is employed, not in the chastising, but in the tormenting, of a perishing soul. Lucian brings in Radamanthus, telling the poor wandering souls upon the banks of Elysium, Οπόσα ἄν τις ὑμῶν πονηρὰ ἐργάσηται παρὰ τὸν βίον, καθ ̓ ἕκαστον αὐτῶν ἀφανῆ στίγματα ἐπὶ τῆς ψυχῆς περιφέρεια, "For every wickedness that any man commits in his life, when he comes to hell, he hath stamped upon his soul an invisible brand" and mark of torment, and this begins here, and is not cancelled by death, but there is enlarged by the greatness of infinite, and the abodes of eternity. How great these torments of conscience are here, let any man imagine that can but understand what despair means; despair upon just reason: let it be what it will, no misery can be greater than despair. And because I hope none here have felt those horrors of an evil conscience which are consignations to eternity, you may please to learn it by your own reason, or else by the sad instances of story. It is reported of Petrus Ilosuanus, a Polonian schoolmaster, that having read some ill-managed discourses of absolute decrees and Divine reprobation, began to be fantastic and melancholic, and apprehensive that he might be one of those many whom God had decreed for hell from all eternity. From possible to probable, from probable to certain, the * Καταπλούς, c. 24. temptation soon carried him: and when he once began to believe himself to be a person inevitably perishing, it is not possible to understand perfectly what infinite fears, and agonies, and despairs, what tremblings, what horrors, what confusion and amazement, the poor man felt within him, to consider that he was to be tormented extremely, without remedy, even to eternal ages. This, in a short continuance, grew insufferable, and prevailed upon him so far, that he hanged himself, and left an account of it to this purpose in writing in his study: I am gone from hence to the flames of hell, and have forced my way thither, being impatient to try what those great torments are, which here I have feared with an insupportable amazement.' This instance may suffice to show what it is to lose a soul. But I will take off from this sad discourse; only I shall crave your attention to a word of exhortation. That you take care, lest for the purchase of a little, trifling, inconsiderable portion of the world, you come into this place and state of torment. Although Homer was pleased to compliment the beauty of Helena to such a height, as to say, 'it was a sufficient price for all the evils which the Greeks and Trojans suffered in ten years :' Οὐ νέμεσις Τρῶας καὶ ἐϋκνήμιδας Αχαιοὺς Yet it was a more reasonable conjecture of Herodotus, that, during the ten years' siege of Troy, Helena, for whom the Greeks fought, was in Egypt, not in the city; because it was unimaginable but the Trojans would have thrown her over the walls, rather than, for the sake of such a trifle, have endured so great calamities. We are more sottish than the Trojans, if we retain our Helena, any one beloved lust, a painted devil, any sugared temptation, with (not the hazard, but) the certainty of having such horrid miseries, such invaluable losses. And certainly, it is a strange stupidity of spirit that can sleep in the midst of such thunder; when God speaks from heaven with his loudest voice, and draws aside his curtain, and shows his arsenal and his armoury, full of arrows steeled with wrath, headed and pointed, and Iliad. 2. 156. hardened with vengeance, still to snatch at those arrows, if they came but in the retinue of a rich fortune or a vain mistress, if they wait but upon pleasure or profit, or in the rear of an ambitious design. But let us not have such a hardiness against the threats and representments of the Divine vengeance, as to take the little imposts and revenues of the world, and stand in defiance against God and the fears of hell; unless we have a charm that we can be ἀόρατοι τῷ κριτῇ, ‘invisible to the Judge' of heaven and earth, and are impregnable against, or are sure we shall be insensible of, the miseries of a perishing soul. There is a sort of men, who, because they will be vicious and atheistical in their lives, have no way to go on with any plaisance and without huge disturbances, but by being also atheistical in their opinions; and to believe that the story of hell is but a bugbear to affright children and fools, easybelieving people, to make them soft and apt for government and designs of princes. And this is an opinion that befriends none but impure and vicious persons. Others there are, that believe God to be all mercy, that he forgets his justice; believing that none shall perish with so sad a ruin, if they do but at their death-bed ask God forgiveness, and say they are sorry, but yet continue their impiety till their house be ready to fall being like the Circassians, whose gentlemen enter not in the church till they be threescore years old, that is, in effect, till by their age they cannot any longer use rapine; till then they hear service at their windows, dividing unequally their life between sin and devotion, dedicating their youth to robbery, and their old age to a repentance without restitution. Our youth, and our manhood, and old age, are all of them due to God, and justice and mercy are to him equally essential; and as this life is a time of the possibilities of mercy, so to them that neglect it, the next world shall be a state of pure and unmingled justice. Remember the fatal and decretory sentence which God hath passed upon all mankind: "It is appointed to all men once to die, and after death comes judgment." And if any of us were certain to die next morning, with what earnestness should we pray! with what hatred should we re upon the member our sins! with what scorn should we look licentious pleasures of the world! Then nothing could be welcome unto us but a prayer-book, no company but a comforter and a guide of souls, no employment but repentance, no passions but in order to religion, no kindness for a lust that hath undone us. And if And if any of you have been arrested with alarms of death, or been in hearty fear of its approach, remember what thoughts and designs then possessed you, how precious a soul was then in your account, and what then you would give that you had despised the world, and done your duty to God and man, and lived a holy life. It will come to that again; and we shall be in that condition in which we shall perfectly understand, that all the things and pleasures of the world are vain, and unprofitable, and irksome, and that he only is a wise man who secures the interest of his soul, though it be with the loss of all this world, and his own life into the bargain. When we are to depart this life, to go to strange company and stranger places, and to an unknown condition, then a holy conscience will be the best security, the best possession; it will be a horror, that every friend we meet shall, with triumph, upbraid to us the sottishness of our folly: Lo, this is the goodly change you have made! you had your good things in your lifetime, and how like you the portion, that is reserved to you for ever?' The old rabbins, those poets of religion, report of Moses, that when the courtiers of Pharaoh were sporting with the child Moses, in the chamber of Pharaoh's daughter, they presented to his choice an ingot of gold in one hand and a coal of fire in the other; and that the child snatched at the coal, thrust it into his mouth, and so singed and parched his tongue, that he stammered ever after. And certainly it is infinitely more childish in us, for the glittering of the small glow-worms and the charcoal of worldly possessions, to swallow the flames of hell greedily in our choice: such a bit will produce a worse stammering than Moses had : for so the accursed and lost souls have their ugly and horrid dialect; they roar and blaspheme, blaspheme and roar, for ever. And suppose God should now, at this instant, send the great archangel with his trumpet, to summon all the world to judgment, would not all this seem a notorious visible truth, a truth which you will then wonder that every |
