bones." Nay, even the poor little babies are not exempt from torture:
one is in a red hot oven, "hear how it screams to come out; see how it
turns and twists about in the fire.... You can see on the face of this
little child"--the fair pure innocent baby-face--"what you see on the
faces of all in hell--despair, desperate and horrible." Surely this
man realized what he taught, but then he was that half-human being--a
priest.
Dr. Pusey, too, has a word to say about hell: "Gather in mind all that
is most loathsome, most revolting--the most treacherous, malicious,
coarse, brutal, inventive, fiendish cruelty, unsoftened by any remains
of human feeling, such as thou couldst not endure for a single hour....
hear those yells of blaspheming, concentrated hate as they echo along
the lurid vault of hell."
Protestantism chimes in, and Spurgeon speaks of hell: "Wilt thou think
it is easy to lie down in hell, with the breath of the Eternal fanning
the flames? Wilt thou delight thyself to think that God will invent
torments for thee, sinner?" "When the damned jingle the burning irons of
their torment, they shall say, 'for ever;' when they howl, echo cries,
'for ever.'"
I may allude, to conclude my quotations, to a description of hell which
I myself heard from an eminent prelate of the English Church, one who is
a scholar and a gentleman, a man of moderate views in Church matters,
by no means a zealot in an ordinary way. In preaching to a country
congregation composed mainly of young men and girls, he warned them
specially against sins of the flesh, and threatened them with the
consequent punishment in hell. Then, in language which I cannot
reproduce, for I should not dare to sully my pages by repeating what
I then listened to in horrified amazement, there ensued a description
drawn out in careful particulars of the state of the suffering body in
hell, so sickening in its details that it must suffice to say of it that
it was a description founded on the condition of a corpse flung out on
a dungheap and left there to putrefy, with the additional horror of
creeping, slowly-burning flames; and this state of things was to go
on, as he impressed on them with terrible energy, for ever and ever,
"decaying but ever renewing."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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