THE damned not only suffer dreadful torments, but are always in fear of still greater. “The imagination,” says Jeremy Taylor, “shall afflict those miserable offenders, increasing the pains of the senses by the liveliness of its apprehension. If in this life the imagination is sometimes so vehement that it hurts more than real evils, in the other the torment which it causes shall be excessive. Baptista Fulgosus recounts, as an eye-witness, that being a Judge in a duel, one of the competitors made the other fly, but instantly fell down dead himself, without any other cause than his imagination, for he received neither wound nor blow, neither was any found upon his dead body. If in this life the imagination is so powerful in men who are in health as to cause a sense of pain where none hurts, grief where none molests, and death where none kills, what shall it be in hell, where so many devils afflict with torments, preserving only life, that the pain of death may live eternally?
“And if we see some timorous people with an imaginary fear tremble and remain half dead, there is no doubt but the imagination of those miserable persons, joined with the horror of the place where they are, will cause a thousand pains and torments.” Closely connected with this consideration, and making a part of it, is the fact that there are
Two Hells.
One of these is for the disembodied soul, and precedes the resurrection, while the other does not exist till after the resurrection of the body and the consequent union of soul and body, as in the present life. The Presbyterian Catechism teaches that “the souls of the wicked are at their death cast into hell, where they remain in torments and utter darkness, and their bodies kept in their graves, as in their prisons, until the resurrection and judgment of the great day. . . . At the day of judgment the wicked shall be set on Christ’s left hand, and, upon clear evidence and full conviction of their own consciences, shall have the fearful but just sentence of condemnation pronounced against them, and thereupon shall be cast out from the favorable presence of God, and the glorious fellowship with Christ, his saints, and all the holy angels, into hell, to be punished with unspeakable torments, both of body and soul, with the devil and his angels forever.”
President Edwards has drawn this doctrine out at length in one of his sermons. “When a good man dies,” he says, “his soul is conducted by angels to heaven. So we may well suppose that when a wicked man dies, his soul is seized by wicked angels; that they are round his bed ready to seize the miserable soul as soon as it is parted from the body. And with what fierceness and fury do those cruel spirits fly upon their prey; and the soul shall be left in their hands. There shall be no good angels to guard and defend it. God will take no merciful care of it; there is nothing to help it against those cruel spirits that shall lay hold of it to carry it to hell, there to torment it forever.”
President Edwards does not attempt to locate hell, as many do, under the earth, or in its centre, but says: “Departed spirits of wicked men are doubtless carried to some particular place in the universe, which God has prepared to be the receptacle of his wicked, rebellious, and miserable subjects; a place where God’s avenging justice shall be glorified; a place built to be the prison, where devils and wicked men are reserved till the day of judgment. Here the souls of wicked men shall suffer extreme and amazing misery, in a separate state, until the resurrection. This misery is not indeed their full punishment: nor is the happiness of the saints before the day of judgment their full happiness. It is with the souls of wicked men as it is with devils. Though the devils suffer extreme torment now, yet they do not suffer their complete punishment, and therefore it is said that they are cast down to hell and bound in chains. . . . They are reserved in the state they are in; and for what are they reserved but for a greater degree of punishment. . . . But yet they are in extreme and inconceivable misery; they are deprived of all good; they have no rest nor comfort, and they are subject to the wrath of God; God there executes wrath on them without mercy, and they are swallowed up in wrath. . . .
“Those who go to hell never can escape thence; there they remain imprisoned till the day of judgment, and their torments remain continually. Those wicked men who died many years ago, their souls went to hell, and there they are still; those that went to hell in former ages of the world have been in hell ever since, all the while suffering torment. They have nothing else to spend their time in there but to suffer torment; they are kept in being for no other purpose. The separate souls of the wicked, besides the present misery they suffer, shall be in amazing fear of their more full punishment at the day of judgment. Though their punishment in their separate state be exceedingly dreadful, and far more than they can bear, though it be so great as to sink and crush them, yet this is not all; they are reserved for a much greater and more dreadful punishment at the day of judgment: their torment will be vastly augmented, and continue in that augmentation. Their punishment will be so much greater there that their misery in this separate state is but as an imprisonment before execution. . . . And if the imprisonment be so dreadful, how dreadful indeed will be the execution! When we are under any great pain of body at any time, how do we dread the least addition to it! its continuance is greatly dreaded, much more its increase.
“How much more will those separate spirits that suffer the torments of hell dread that augmentation and completing of their torment which there will be at the day of judgment, when what they feel already is vastly more than they can support themselves; when they shall be, as it were, begging for one drop of water to cool their tongues, when they would give ten thousand worlds for the least abatement of their misery! How sinking will it be to think that, instead of that, the day is coming when God shall come forth out of heaven to sentence them to a far more dreadful degree of misery, and to continue them under it forever! What experience they have of the dreadfulness of God’s wrath convinces them fully how terrible a thing his wrath is; they will therefore be exceedingly afraid of that full wrath which he will execute at the day of judgment; they will have no hope of escaping it; they will know assuredly that it will come.
“The fear of this makes the devils, those mighty, proud, and stubborn spirits, to tremble: they believe what is threatened, and therefore tremble. If this fear overcomes them, how much more will it overwhelm the souls of wicked men! All hell trembles at the thoughts of the day of judgment.
“When the day of judgment comes, they shall rise to the resurrection of damnation. When that day comes, all mankind that have died from off the face of the earth shall arise, not only the righteous but also the wicked. . . . The damned in hell know not the time when the day of judgment will be; but when the time comes, it will be made known, and it will be the most dreadful news that ever was told in that world of misery. It is always a doleful time in hell; the world of darkness is always full of shrieks and doleful cries; but when the news is heard that the day appointed for the judgment is come, hell will be filled with louder shrieks and more doleful cries than ever before. When Christ comes in the clouds of heaven to judgment, the news of it will fill both earth and hell with mourning and bitter crying.
“We read that all the kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him, and so shall all the inhabitants of hell, and then must the souls of the wicked come up to be united to their bodies, and stand before the Judge. They shall not come willingly, but they shall be dragged forth as a malefactor is dragged out of his dungeon to execution. They were unwilling when they died to leave the earth to go to hell; but now they will be much more unwilling to come out of hell to go to the last judgment. It will be no deliverance to them; it will be only a coming forth to their execution. They will hang back, but must come; the devils and damned spirits must come up together. The last trumpet will then be heard; this will be the most terrible sound to wicked men and devils that ever was heard.”
President Edwards then gives a very circumstantial account of the last judgment, and of the final sentence pronounced upon the wicked: “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.” This sentence, he says, “will be pronounced with awful majesty; and there shall be great indignation, and dreadful wrath shall then appear in the Judge and in his voice, with which he shall pronounce the sentence; and what a horror and amazement will these words strike into the hearts of the wicked, on whom they shall be pronounced! Every word and syllable shall be like the most amazing thunder to them, and shall pierce their souls like the fiercest lightning. The Judge shall bid them depart from him; he will drive them from his presence, as exceedingly abominable to him, and he shall give them the epithet accursed; they shall be an accursed company; and he will not only bid them depart from his presence, but into everlasting fire, to dwell there as their only fit habitation.
“And what shows the dreadfulness of the fire is, that it is prepared for the devil and his angels; they shall lie forever in the same fire in which the devils, those grand enemies of God, shall be tormented. When this sentence shall be pronounced, there shall be in the vast company at the left hand, tremblings, and mourning, and crying and gnashing of teeth, in a new manner, beyond all that ever was before. . . . Then the sentence shall be executed. . . .
Immediately upon the finishing of the judgment and the pronouncing of the sentence will come the end of the world. The frame of this world shall be dissolved. The pronouncing of that sentence will probably be followed with amazing thunders, that shall rend the heavens and shake the earth out of its place. Then shall the sea roar, the rocks shall be thrown down, and the mountains shall rend asunder, and there shall be one universal wreck of this great world. Then shall the heavens be dissolved, and then the earth shall be set on fire. As God in wrath once destroyed the world by a flood of water, so now shall he cause it to be all drowned in a deluge of fire; and the heavens being on fire, shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, and that great company of devils and wicked men must enter into those everlasting burnings to which they are sentenced.
In this condition they shall remain throughout the never-ending ages of eternity. Their punishment shall then be complete, and it shall remain in this completion forever. Now shall all that come upon them, which they so long trembled for fear of, while their souls were in a separate state. They will dwell in a fire that never shall be quenched, and here they must wear out eternity.”
This doctrine is beautifully set forth by Rev. Mr. Spurgeon, the great Baptist preacher of London: “When thou diest,” says he, “thy soul will be tormented alone; but at the day of judgment, thy body will join thy soul, and then thou wilt have twin hells; thy soul sweating drops of blood, and thy body suffused with agony. In fire exactly like that we have on earth thy body will lie, asbestos like, forever unconsumed; all thy veins roads for the feet of pain to travel on; every nerve a string on which the devil shall forever play his diabolical tune of ‘Hell’s Unutterable Lament’”