Lactantius, in his Divine Institutes, bk. vi., chap. 3, contrasts the immortality promised to the righteous with "everlasting punishment threatened to the unrighteous." In bk. vii. chap. 21, he says, "because they have committed sins in their bodies, they will again be clothed with flesh that they may make atonement in their bodies; and yet it will not be that flesh with which God clothed man, like this our earthly body, but indestructible and abiding for ever, that it may be able to hold out against tortures and everlasting fire." St. Chrysostom represents the torments of the damned in a variety of horrid pictures. He says: "But if you are speaking against luxury, and introduce discourse by the way concerning hell, the thing will cheer you and beget much pleasure. Let us not then avoid discourses concerning hell, that we may avoid hell. Let us not banish the remembrance of punishment, that we may escape punishment. If the rich man had reflected upon that fire, he would not have sinned; but because he never was mindful of it, therefore he fell into it."* * Homily on 2 Thess. i., 1-2. In Homily on 2 Thess. i., 9-10, "It is not only not milder, but much more terrible than is threatened." Hear the golden-mouthed Father (Homily on Heb. i., 1-2): "Let us then consider how great a misery it must be to be for ever burning, and to be in darkness, and to utter unnumbered groanings, and to gnash the teeth and not even to be heard.... Think what it is when we are burning with all the murderers of the whole world neither seeing, nor being seen.... Wherefore I entreat you," continues the saint, "to be _ever_ revolving these things with yourselves, and to submit to the pain of the words, that we may not have the things to undergo as our punishment." Again he says (Hom. Heb. xi. 37-38), "Why, what are ten thousand years to ages boundless and without end? Not so much as one drop to the boundless ocean.... Were it not well to be cut [by scourging] times out of number, to be slain, to be burned, to undergo ten thousand deaths, to endure everything whatsoever that is dreadful both in word and deed?"* Origen, for considering that the punishment of the wicked consisted in separation from God, was condemned as heretical by the Council of Carthage, A.D. 398, and afterwards by other Councils. St. Augustine (_City of God_, bk, xxi. chap. 17) censures Origen for his merciful view, and says "the Church, not without reason, condemned him for this and other errors." In the same book (chap. 23) this great father declares that everlasting is used by Jesus (Matt. xxv. 41) as meaning "for ever" and nothing else than "endless duration." He argues, with ingenious varieties of reasoning, to show how the material bodies of the damned may withstand annihilation in everlasting fire. He held that hell was in the centre of the earth, and that God supplied the central fire with earth by a miracle. Jerome and the other orthodox Fathers no less held to a material hell.