BESIDES all these torments and miseries, the damned in hell are represented as being the victims of every kind of evil passion, fitted to increase their wretchedness, such as envy, malice, hatred, and indeed whatever can in any way augment the horrors of their situation, or add to their own or each other’s vexation. These malignant passions, it is said, “will be exceedingly powerful in the future world,” and some represent them as increasing in violence throughout eternity. There will be nothing in hell, it is said, to restrain these passions, but everything to inflame them. “Who,” says Jeremy Taylor, “can express the strange and horrible confusion, which shall inhabit the appetite of these wretched creatures? If all the disorders of man’s life spring from his passions, what disorder must these miserable souls needs feel in that part, what convulsions, what rage, what fury! Alas, that noble passion, love, the queen of all the rest, the sun of life, that passion which might have made them happy forever, if they had turned it towards God; that amiable object being razed out of them, the perpetual aversion they have to love shall eternally afflict them; the passion of hatred shall be outrageous in the damned, whence shall proceed their continual blasphemies against God, and the perpetual curses and imprecations which they shall make against the creatures; and if they have any desires, they shall be to see all the world partakers of their pains; their aversion from all good shall be as much tormenting, as it is in itself execrable.
“Of joy there must no mention be made in that place of dolor; but contrariwise of incredible sadness, which shall oppress them without any consolation. The heat of anger shall redouble the heat of their pains.” In hell, it is said, the damned will be filled with the greatest envy. “The sight of the saint’s glory,” says Matthew Henry, “will be a great aggravation of the sinner’s misery.” So Jeremy Taylor says: “The envy also which they bear towards those who have gained heaven by as small matters as they have lost it shall much add to their grief.” “What a mass of woe,” says Dr. Dwight, “must exist in the pangs of immortal envy!”
But it is not envy alone that is to torment the damned; they will also be filled with the deepest hatred and malice. These malignant passions will become “permanent,” as Rev. Joseph Cook would say, and form the controlling spirit in the life of hell. The damned will hate universally; they will hate God, and hate Christ, and hate the blessed in heaven, and hate the damned in hell, and hence they will become, as Dr. Dwight says, “the means of extreme suffering to each other. None will have favors to bestow, nor a native amiableness of character to invite esteem and love. Nor will any restraint operate so as to prevent the heart from emptying out all its wickedness in the open day. Contempt, therefore, deceit and hatred, will occupy the whole soul. The rage which here persecutes an enemy to the grave and laments that it cannot follow him into the invisible world, may there pursue him through eternity.” “The will,” says Jeremy Taylor, “shall be tormented with an eternal abhorring and rage against itself, against all creatures, and against the Creator of all, and shall with an intolerable sadness, anger, grief and disorder of all the affections violently desire things impossible.”
“There will be found among the damned,” says Dr. Watts, “a constant enmity, and malice, and hatred, against the blessed God, which can never satisfy or ease itself by revenge. It seems very strange indeed that a creature should design revenge against his Maker, but thus it is in these dismal regions of hell. Every wicked man is by nature at enmity with God, and in a state of rebellion; and when this enmity is wrought up to malice, under a sense of his punishing hand, then arises that cursed and detestable desire of revenging itself against its Maker.” The damned in hell will be filled, as Matthew Henry says, “with an incurable indignation against God, themselves, and one another.” “They will gnash their teeth,” says Christopher Love, “out of indignation against Jesus Christ.” In a word, they are not only to indulge all malignant passions, but their mouths will be filled with curses and blasphemies. Says Dr. Trapp:—
- They fling
- Tartarean rage towards heaven, against heaven’s king;
- Against the Highest fiercely they blaspheme.
So also Pollock:—
- And as I listene d, I heard those beings curse
- Almighty G od, and curse the Lamb, and curse
- The earth, the resurrection morn.
It is a little remarkable (since we have, as our orthodox neighbors insist, one clear instance of a damned soul in hell,—I mean the rich man) that, instead of turning to him for an example of the tempers and conduct of this class of human beings, they uniformly appeal to their imaginations, and follow any fancies that may chance to occur to them. Now this rich man in hell, and tormented, too, in that flame, indulges in no blasphemies, curses neither God nor the Lamb, and exhibits neither envy nor malice towards poor Lazarus, in Abraham’s bosom. And so far from having lost all humanity, and being filled with hatred towards all mankind, and desiring nothing so much as to have them all partakers of his misery, this man in hell was full of interest for the welfare of his five brethren, and anxious to have them warned not to fall into the same calamity. Assuming, as the orthodox always do, that this is a veritable account of a soul in hell, I would earnestly recommend its careful study.
But writers, preachers, and poets are not always in harmony with each other on this subject, and, what is worse, not always self-consistent. They who at one moment represent the damned in hell as little better than devils, hating and tormenting each other, at other times find them loving, and though suffering agonies in their own persons, are made to suffer immeasurably more by witnessing the torments of their families and friends! Thus, Jeremy Taylor, after relating the horrible cruelty of Hyrcanus, as already mentioned, in crucifying eight hundred persons, and while they were yet alive causing their wives and children to be murdered before their eyes, “so that they might die, not once, but many deaths,” says: “This rigor shall not be wanting in hell, where fathers shall see their sons, and brothers their brothers tormented.” Now if the damned are as full of hatred and malice as is represented above, this view of the torments of others, though their nearest friends, would be a pleasure rather than a source of pain to them.
At other times, the wicked in the world of woe are represented as engaged in strife and perpetual contentions. “Who knows,” asks Dr. Watts, “what the damned in hell will endure from the endless brawls and bitter quarrels among themselves? What new contentions will arise perpetually in such a country, where it is perhaps the practice and custom of the place, and the nature of the inhabitants, for the most part to make everyone of their fellows as uneasy and as miserable as they can? Oh, what mad and furious pride, and malice, and every hellish passion will be raging almost in every bosom against all those who are near them, and this in that dark prison, where all are intensely tormented!” And what Dr. Watts suggested, Mr. Pollock clearly saw:—
- And some in full encounter fiercely m et,
- With curses loud and blasphemies that made
- The cheek of darkness pale; and as they fought,
- And cursed and gnashed their teeth, and wished to die,
- Their hollow eyes did utter streams of woe.