Were it permitted to a living man to pass the portals of the dark prison-house of disembodied spirits, and witness the punishments of the condemned,—the unceasing gnawing of the undying worm, the unremitting burning of the unquenched fire;—what words could express the joy and thankfulness of that man, on returning to the land of the living and the place of hope! Would he lose a moment in fleeing to the cross of Christ, for deliverance from sin, and refuge from the wrath to come? Would he still defer seeking for “repentance towards God, and faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ?” {30} The terrible realities he had witnessed of that state of untried being on which the soul enters at death, would doubtless haunt his waking and his sleeping hours, and he would find no rest till God, by his Spirit, had spoken peace to his affrighted soul. And then, long as life lasted, it would be his daily subject of grateful thanksgiving to his gracious long-suffering Lord, that he had borne with his iniquities, and had not cut him off in the midst of his sins: but through the Divine mercy he was allowed on earth “to praise the Lord with joyful lips,” instead of “in hell, lifting up his eyes, being in torments.” {31} But such a visit to the place of condemned spirits is not necessary to learn all that in our present state of being it concerns us to know. The volume of inspiration has revealed the awful truth, that an eternity of torments awaits the condemned in a future world. Will not, then, this suffice to rouse thoughtless and sinful men to a sense of danger? The judgments of the Almighty now upon the land; death approaching many under a fearful form; the presumption and sinfulness of trusting to a late repentance; the danger of the infliction of judicial blindness; the horrors of a guilty death-bed; the torments of the damned, have all been urged as so many calls to repentance, and may God accompany them with his grace, that they may not be urged in vain; but all of these equal not the awfulness and terribleness of AN ETERNITY OF TORMENT. There is something overpowering in the idea of unmitigated unmitigable woe; it is so terrific, that it astounds, it is so vast, that it overwhelms the mind: for the finite faculties of man cannot grasp eternity: they are lost in the maze of millions of years rolling on in endless succession. But if there be any who have tost, for one night, on a bed of suffering; any who have experienced, for one hour, the racking torture of intolerable pain; let them ask themselves how they would endure, in the immensity of endless time, “the worm which dieth not, and the fire which is not quenched.”