There are two great points of controversy among writers, touching hell: the first, whether there be any local hell, any proper and specific place of torment by fire? the second, whether the torments of hell are to be eternal? I. The locality of hell, and the reality of the fire thereof, have been controverted from the time of Origen. That father, in his treatise Περι Αρχαν, interpreting the scripture account metaphorically, makes hell to consist not in eternal punishments, but in the conscience of sinners, the sense of their guilt, and the remembrance of their past pleasures. St. Augustine mentions several of the same opinion in his time; and Calvin, and many of his followers, have embraced it in ours. The retainers to the contrary opinion, who are much the greatest part of mankind, are divided as to situation, and other circumstances of this horrible scene. The Greeks, after Homer, Hesiod, &c. conceived hell, τοπον τινα ὐπο την γην μεγσν, &c. a large and dark place under the earth.—Lucian, _de Luctu_; and Eustathius, _on Homer_. Some of the Romans lodged in the subterranean regions directly under the lake Avernus, in Campania, which they were led to from the consideration of the poisonous vapours emitted by that lake. Through a dark cave, near this lake, Virgil makes Æneas descend to hell. Others placed hell under Tenarus, a promontory of Laconia; as being a dark frightful place, beset with thick woods, out of which there was no finding a passage. This way, Ovid says, Orpheus descended to hell. Others fancied the river or fountain of Styx, in Arcadia, the spring-head of hell, by reason the waters thereof were mortal. But these are all to be considered as only fables of poets; who, according to the genius of their art, allegorizing and personifying every thing, from the certain death met withal in those places, took occasion to represent them as so many gates, or entering-places into the other world. The primitive Christians conceiving the earth a large extended plain, and the heavens an arch drawn over the same, took hell to be a place in the earth, the farthest distant from the heavens; so that their hell was our antipodes. Tertullian, _De Anima_, represents the Christians of his time, as believing hell to be an abyss in the centre of the earth: which opinion was chiefly founded on the belief of Christ’s descent into _hades_, hell, Matt. xii. 40. Mr. Wiston has lately advanced a new opinion. According to him, the comets are to be conceived as so many hells, appointed in the course of their trajectories, or orbits, alternately to carry the damned into the confines of the sun, there to be scorched by his flames, and then to return them to starve in the cold, dreary, dark regions, beyond the orb of Saturn.