IT is unnecessary to say, what all have so frequently heard, that hell is a lake of literal fire and brimstone; or, if it is not that, then something of which that is only a figure, and, of course, still worse. In modern times, as we shall see, it is by some doubted, and by others denied, that the fire of hell is material, or such as that with which we are acquainted in this world. But it is the constant faith of the Catholic Church, which is the great patron and support of the doctrine of endless punishment, that the fire of hell is real, and not metaphorical. Vicar-General Preston, of New York, in the North American Review of March—April, 1868, says: “Although there is no solemn definition of the Church determining the fire of hell to be real and material, nevertheless such is the common opinion, from which no Catholic can safely depart.
“Thus Suarez says: The certain and Catholic opinion is that the fire of hell, which is prepared for the devil and his angels, is a true and proper corporeal fire. And Estius uses these words: It is sufficiently evident that the doctrine which teaches that the fire is corporeal, by which the demons and the damned, either before the judgment without their bodies, or afterward with them, are punished, is so common and universal in the Church that it cannot be denied without temerity. That the fire of hell, says Petavius, is corporeal and material, all theologians, yea, all Christians believe, though this be not as yet defined by any decree of the Church.” That “the fire of hell is real and not metaphorical,” is earnestly maintained in a treatise now before me, by the learned Jesuit, Rev. Carolus Passaglia, Professor in the Roman College of Theology.
But this is no less the doctrine of the Protestant churches than it is of the Catholic. Whatever may be the opinion of some of our orthodox divines of the present day, it cannot be denied that the great mass of Protestants have hitherto believed, and do still believe, that the fire of hell is real, as Passaglia says, and not metaphorical. The Presbyterian Church, as learned as any in the country, in its catechism, says expressly: “The punishments of sin, in the world to come, are everlasting separation from the comfortable presence of God, and most grievous torments in soul and body, without intermission, in hell-fire, for ever.” If it be said that “hell-fire” is a term we have in our English New Testament, and that therefore the Presbyterian Church only affirms what the New Testament teaches without attempting to define it, it may be replied that those who framed that catechism very well knew, and the church now enjoining it as well knows, how that term is in fact generally understood, and hence would neither use nor recommend its use if it wholly misrepresented the church’s belief.
But it is not the Presbyterian Church alone that teaches thus. It is the common faith of the orthodox world to-day as it has been in the past, as will appear in what follows. “Amongst all the torments which human justice hath invented for the punishment of crimes,” says Jeremy Taylor, “there is none held more rigorous than that of fire, by reason of the great activity of that element. What shall the heat of that fire be, which shall be the executioner of the justice of the God of vengeance! whose zeal shall be inflamed against the wicked, and shall kindle the fire which shall eternally burn to the extremities of hell.” “We can conceive little of the matter,” says President Edwards; “but, to help your conception, imagine yourself to be cast into a fiery oven, or a great furnace, where your pain would be as much greater than that occasioned by accidentally touching a coal of fire, as the heat is greater. Imagine, also, that your body were to lie there for a quarter of an hour, full of fire, and all the while full of quick sense.
“What horror would you feel at the entrance of such a furnace! how long would that quarter of an hour seem to you! and after you had endured it for one minute, how overbearing would it be to you to think that you had to endure it the other fourteen! But what would be the effect on your soul if you knew that you must lie there enduring that torment to the full of twenty-four hours! And how much greater would be the effect if you knew that you must endure it for a whole year; and how vastly greater still, if you knew that you must endure it for a thousand years! But your torment in hell will be immensely greater than this illustration represents. How, then, will the heart of a poor sinner sink under it! How utterly inexpressible and inconceivable must the sinking of the heart be in such a case.” Again he says: “The misery of the damned in hell can be better represented by nothing than by a deluge of fire, a mighty deluge of wrath, which will be ten thousand times worse than a deluge of waters, for it will be a deluge of liquid fire, as in the Scriptures it is called a lake of fire and brimstone.
“After the resurrection the wicked shall be swallowed up by a vast deluge of fire, which shall be great as Noah’s deluge. After that the wicked will have mighty billows of fire and brimstone eternally rolling over their poor souls and their miserable, tormented bodies. These billows may be called vast mountains of fire and brimstone. And when one billow has gone over their heads, another will follow without intermission, giving them no rest day nor night to all eternity.”
But our orthodox poets have perhaps excelled our preachers in their descriptions of hell-fire. Milton says:—
- A dungeon horrible on all sides round,
- As one great furnace flamed.
Pollock describes it thus:—
- Wide was the place,
- And deep as wide, and ruinous as deep.
- Beneath I saw a lake of burning fire
- With tempest tossed perpetually, and still
- The waves of fiery darkness ‘gainst the rocks
- Of dark damnation broke.
But of all descriptions, the following from Rev. Dr. Trapp, at once preacher and poet, may perhaps be thought the best:—
- Fire, too, must make the sensible of hell.
- With everlasting burnings who can dwell?
- Tormenting Tophet is ordained long since,
- Ev’n for the king, the potentate, and prince,
- It is prepared; ‘t is roomy, large, and wide,
- With store of fuel plenteously supplied;
- The breath of God makes the full furnace boil,
- And, like a stream of brimstone, fires the pile.
- Doomed to live death, and never to expire,
- In floods, and whirlwinds of tempestuous fire,
- The damned shall groan: fire of all kinds and forms
- In rain and hail, in hurricanes and storms,
- Liquid and solid, livid, red, and pale;
- A flaming mountain here, and there a flaming vale.
- The liquid fire makes seas; the solid shores;
- Arched o’er with flam es the h orrid concave roars.
- All hell is fire—above, beside, below,
- Fires or in hard metallic substance glow
- Or spout in cataracts or in rivers flow,
- In bubbling eddies rolls the fiery tide,
- And sulphurous surges on each other ride.
- The hollow w inding vaults, and dens and caves,
- Bellow like furnaces with flaming waves.
- Pillars of flam e in spiral volum es rise
- Like fiery snakes, and lick the infernal skies.
- Sulphur, the eternal fuel, unconsumed,
- Vomits rebounding smoke, thick, unillumed.