This was the scene to which Christ pointed his hearers to represent the doom that awaits the wicked; that, as they gazed upon the work of complete destruction going on in the valley of Hinnom, the worms devouring what the flames spared, they might learn that in the future Gehenna which awaited them, no part of their being would be exempt from utter and complete destruction, one agent of death completing what another failed to accomplish. As the definition of the word _ge-enna_ throws great light on the meaning of this text, so the definition of another term used is equally to the point. The words for unquenchable fire are _pur_ (long u) _asbeston_, and this word _asbeston_, primarily means simply unquenched, that is, not caused to cease by any external means: the idea of eternal is a theological definition which has been attached to it. Ancient writers used it in this sense. Homer, in the Illiad, xvi., 123, 294, speaks of the Trojans’ hurling “unquenchable fire” upon the Grecian ships, though but one of them was burnt by it. And Eusebius, who was a learned Greek, employs the same expression in two instances in recounting the martyrdom of Christians. Cronion and Julian, after being tortured in various ways, were consumed in an “unquenchable fire,” _puri asbesto_. The same is also said of Epimachus and Alexander. “The _pur asbeston_,” says Wetstein, “denotes such a fire as cannot be extinguished before it has consumed and destroyed all.” Such is the evident meaning of this passage, and the sense in which it must have been understood at that time. Yet commentators, eighteen hundred years this side of that time, presume to turn this whole representation upside down, and give to the terms a meaning exactly opposite from that which they were intended to convey. That sense alone can be the correct one in which they were first spoken; and concerning that there can be no question. There is another text often urged to prove the eternal conscious misery of the wicked. It is one in which fire is mentioned as the instrument used for the punishment of the wicked; and this fire being called eternal, is understood in the same sense as the unquenchable fire of Mark 9:43. It may therefore properly be examined in this connection. Jude 7: “Even as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.”