We do not sufficiently consider and ponder the elements of anguish that are sleeping in the fact that in eternity a sinner _must_ know God's character, and therefore _must_ know his own. It is owing to their neglect of such subjects, that mankind so little understand what an awful power there is in the distinct perception of the Divine purity, and the allied consciousness of sin. Lord Bacon tells us that the knowledge acquired in the schools is power; but it is weakness itself, if compared with that form and species of cognition which is given to the mind of man by the workings of conscience in the light of the Divine countenance. If a transgressor knew clearly what disclosures of God's immaculateness and of his own character must be made to him in eternity, he would fear them, if unprepared, far more than physical sufferings. If he understood what capabilities for distress the rational spirit possesses in its own mysterious constitution, if when brought into contact with the Divine purity it has no sympathy with it, but on the contrary an intense hostility; if he knew how violent will be the antagonism between God's holiness and man's sin when, the two are finally brought together, the assertion that there is no external source of anguish in hell, even if it were true, would afford him no relief. Whoever goes into the presence of God with a corrupt heart carries thither a source of sorrow that is inexhaustible, simply because that corrupt heart must be _distinctly known_, and _perpetually understood_ by its possessor, in that Presence. The thoughtless man may never know while upon earth, even "in part," the depth and the bitterness of this fountain,--he may go through this life for the most part self-ignorant and undistressed,--but he must know in that other, final, world the immense fulness of its woe, as it unceasingly wells up into everlasting death. One theory of future punishment is, that our globe will become a penal orb of fire, and the wicked with material bodies, miraculously preserved by Omnipotence, will burn forever in it. But what is this compared with the suffering soul? The spirit itself, thus alienated from God's purity and _conscious_ that it is, wicked, and _knowing_ that it is wicked, becomes an "orb of fire." "It is,"--says John Howe, who was no fanatic, but one of the most thoughtful and philosophic of Christians,--"it is a throwing hell into hell, when a wicked man comes to hell; for he was his own hell before."[3]