Revivalists are much indebted for their evanescent successes to hell and the Devil. Thomas English, a fair specimen of those very noisy and active preachers who do so much in promoting revivals, spoke of “dwelling with devouring fire, bearing everlasting burning, roasting on the Devil’s spit, broiling on his gridiron, being pitched about with his fork, drinking the liquid fire, breathing the brimstone fumes, drowning in a red-hot sea, lying on fiery beds.”¹⁶ The vulgar tirades of Reginald Radcliffe, Richard Weaver, and C. H. Spurgeon, will serve to evidence that the above quotation is no exaggeration. In London, before crowded audiences, Mr. Weaver, without originality, and with only the merit of copied coarseness, has called upon the Lord to “shake the ungodly for five minutes over the mouth of hell.” Mr. Spurgeon has drawn pictures of hell which, if true and revealed to him by God, would be most disgustingly frightful, and which being but the creation of his own morbid fancies, induce a feeling of contempt as well as disgust for the teacher, who uses such horrible descriptions to affright his weaker hearers. ¹⁶ Sharpe’s “History of Egypt,” p. 196. Calmet says that “By collecting all the passages where Satan (or the Devil) is mentioned, it may be observed, that he fell from Heaven, with all his company; that God cast him down from thence for the punishment of his pride; and by his envy and malice, death, and all other evils came into the world; that by the permission of God he exercises a sort of government in the world over his subordinates, over apostate angels like himself; that God makes use of him to prove good men, and to chastise bad ones; that he is a lying spirit in the mouth of false prophets, seducers, and heretics; that it is he, or some of his, that torment, obsess, or possess men, that inspire them with evil designs, as did _David_, when he suggested to him to number his people, and to _Judas_ to betray _Jesus Christ_, and to Ananias and Sapphira to conceal the price of their field. That he roves about full of rage, like a roaring lion, to tempt, to betray, to destroy, and to involve us in guilt and wickedness. “That his power and malice are restricted within certain limits, and controlled by the will of God; that he sometimes appears to men to seduce them; that he can transform himself into an angel of light; that he sometimes assumes the form of a spectre, as he appeared to the Egyptians while they were involved in darkness in the days of Moses; that he creates several diseases to men; that he chiefly presides over death, and bears aways the souls of the wicked to hell; that at present he is confined to Hell, as in a prison, but that he will be unbound and set at liberty in the year of _Anti-Christ_; that hell-fire is prepared for him and his; that he is to be judged at the last day. But I cannot perceive very clearly from scripture, that he torments the souls of the wicked in hell, as we generally believe.”