THE preceding descriptions, full and astonishing as they are, give after all a very imperfect conception of the fire of hell. It is further represented as possessing several very remarkable characteristics. In the first place it emits no light. The pious Matthew Henry, as he is always called, when speaking of hell, says, “There is fire but no light: it is utter darkness: darkness in extremity; the highest degree of darkness without any remainder, or mixture, or hope of light, nor the least gleam of it.” So Prosper speaks of seeing “no light in that fire, but to feel that it burneth.” Milton naturally seizes upon a fact so singular, and employs it thus:—
- Yet from those flames
- No light, but rather darkness visible
- Served only to discover sights of woe,
- Regions of sorrow.
Dr. Trapp, with Milton obviously in mind, has attempted to improve upon him, thus:—
- For all that m ass of fire projects no light,
- But darkness visible, and glaring night;
- Which to the eye serves only to reveal
- Sad scen es of woe, and add affright to hell.
St. Theresa, who had often been in hell, also says: “There was not the least light there, but only the thickest, blackest darkness.”
But what deserves more special notice is the inconceivable intensity and power of the fire of hell. All orthodox writers speak of this. President Edwards always speaks of it as fierce and terrible, and, as we have seen, represents it as inconceivably more penetrating and causing vastly greater pain than we should experience if cast into a great blazing furnace. “The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in a storm of fire and brimstone,” he says, “was but a shadow of the destruction of ungodly men in hell, and is no more to it than a shadow or picture is to the reality, or than painted fire is to real fire.” Jeremy Taylor speaks in the same way or to the same purpose. “Such are the torments and miseries of hell,” he says, “that if all the trees in the world were put in one heap, and set on fire, I would rather burn there till the day of judgment, than suffer only for the space of one hour that fire of hell.” This doctrine of the intense burning quality of the fire of hell is old. The Catholic Church has enjoyed and inculcated it for ages. She practised burning heretics to such an extent, and many of them bore the suffering so heroically, that our common fires lost their power of excessively frightening people.
But the fire of hell was a very different sort of thing. Many of the Catholic saints enjoyed the privilege of going to hell and seeing it and making themselves acquainted with its torments. Among these, as I have said above, was St. Theresa, who tells us, as the result of her own observation, that the fire of earth is but a picture of the fire in hell. I am glad that I am able to give her own words on this subject. “All I have read or heard about hell,” she says, “is as different from the real pains of hell as a picture is different from the thing painted. To be burnt in the fire of this world is a mere nothing, a trifle, compared with being burnt in hell. It is now six years since I saw hell. Yet even now I cannot write about it without feeling my blood frozen with horror. When I think about the pains of hell, all the pains of this world seem to me not worth thinking about.”
Painted fire may have an imposing look, but it does not burn. I have before me a very interesting little book by Rev. Michael Muller, published, with the approbation of the Bishop, by Patrick Donahoe, Boston, 1872, which throws great light upon this point. The work is entitled “Charity to Souls in Purgatory.” In this book Rev. Mr. Muller says: “The souls in Purgatory are poor souls, because they suffer the greatest pain of the senses, which is that of fire. Who can be in a poorer or more pitiful condition than those who are buried in fire? Now this is the condition of these poor souls. They are buried under waves of fire. It is from the smallest spark of this purgatorial fire that they suffer more intense pains than all the fires in the world put together could produce. In this fire they suffer more than all the pains of distempers and the most violent diseases; they suffer more than all the most cruel torments undergone by malefactors or invented by the most barbarous tyrants; they suffer more than all the tortures of the martyrs summed up together.
“Could these poor souls leave the fire of Purgatory for the most frightful earthly fire, they would, as it were, take it for a pleasuregarden; they would find a fifty years’ stay in the hottest earthly fire more endurable than an hour’s stay in the fire of Purgatory. Our terrestrial fire was not created by God to torment men, but rather to benefit them; but the fire in Purgatory was created for no other purpose than to be the instrument of God’s justice, and for this reason it is possessed of a burning quality so intense and penetrating that it is impossible for us to conceive of it even the faintest idea!”
And this, the reader will observe, is only the fire of Purgatory, which is the place in which God’s saints expiate, by suffering, such sins as chance to cling to them at the moment of death. What, then, should we reasonably suppose the fire of hell itself to be,—hell, where God vindicates his infinite justice against rebels and enemies? What but something “inexpressible and inconceivable,” as President Edwards would say? I am so fortunate as to have in our Historical Library a little Catholic tract, prepared by Father Furniss, of Ireland, for the instruction of children, and published permissu superiorum (by permission of his superiors) and consequently with their approbation. It bears the rather startling title of “Sight of Hell,” with the imprint of both Dublin and London.
And I beg to say that, after reading a great many orthodox tracts and books on the subject of hell and its torments, some of which seemed bad enough, I can conscientiously aver that this is the worst, and for thorough-going devilishness, in conception and execution, surpasses anything I could imagine. For grossness of representation, it would do honor to a Modoc Indian. Besides, it is a tissue of lies from beginning to end, and lies so enormous, so transcendent, and withal so abominable, that it is amazing that any man, and least of all a professed minister of the gospel, could write them out; and more amazing still that any church could publish them, or permit them to be published, for the education of children.
In this little tract Father Furniss, to show the terrible intensity of the fire of hell, says:
“Take a spark out of the kitchen fire, throw it into the sea, and it will go out. Take a little spark out of hell, less than a pin-head, throw it into the sea, and it will not go out. In one moment it would dry up the waters of the ocean, and set the whole world on a blaze.” Such amazing intensity in the fire of hell naturally suggests some difficulties. If a spark of it, less than a pin-head, would thus dry up the ocean in a moment and set the whole world on a blaze, as Father Furniss affirms, and as Jeremy Taylor leaves us to infer, how is a human body to withstand its fury for a single hour, to say nothing of eternity? To solve this mystery, two dissimilar theories have been adopted. The first and the oldest attempts to explain the difficulty by assuming that hell-fire possesses the remarkable property of burning without destroying, or rather of repairing as fast as it burns.
This is an old doctrine of the Church; and it would be interesting to trace it back through the ages, and see whence it came and how it has been employed. There was a notion among the ancients, we know, that there are two distinct kinds of fire,—one, that we are familiar with, and the other, of which we see the effects, but know little or nothing of its nature. Thus it was supposed that volcanic fire differed from common fire, because, as they said, volcanic mountains were always burning, and yet were never consumed. So lightning was supposed to possess some singular properties, as Tertullian informs us: “As the philosophers know the difference between the secret fire and common fire, so that fire is of one kind which we make use of, and that of another that serveth the judgment of God, whether it pierce or strike through the clouds of heaven in thunder, or break out of the earth through the tops of the mountains.
“For this doth not consume what it burneth, but repaireth what it preys upon; so that the mountains which always burn remain, and he that is struck with fire from heaven is not to be reduced to ashes by any other fire. And this may be a testimony of the eternal fire; this one example of that fire which continually nourisheth and preserveth those that are punished by it. The mountains burn and endure, and why not the guilty and enemies of God?”
Minucius Felix entertained the same opinion, then thought to be wise, but now known to be false and foolish. He calls the fire of hell sapiens ignis, a wise or discriminating fire, and tells us that “it burns and yet restores, gnaws away and still sustains.” Lactantius in like manner assures us, that “the same divine fire by one and the same force and potency both burns the wicked and re-creates them, and as much as it consumes of their bodies so much it restores, and supplies the eternal food for itself: which the poets transferred to the vulture of Tityus; thus it only burns, without any loss to the bodies always growing again, and affects with a sense of pain.” And our eminently orthodox poet, Robert Pollock, seems to have adopted the same opinion:—
- Through all that dungeon of unfading fire
- I saw most miserable beings walk,
- Burning continually, yet unconsumed;
- Forever wasting, yet enduring still;
- Dying perpetually, yet never dead.
Lactantius proceeds to tell us how this “knowing fire,” while it torments the wicked, has no power to touch the righteous. “So great is the efficacy of innocence,” he says, “that fire flies harmless from it.” It not only distinguishes, as he and many others teach, between the good and the evil, but it is also able to adjust its severity to the peculiar moral status of every individual. Those who are remarkable for the greatness or the number of their sins are in a corresponding degree touched and burned by this discriminating fire. This is still the doctrine of the Catholic Church. Vicar-General Preston, quoted above, speaks of power being given it “to burn and not consume.”
The other method of preserving bodies in this intense fire through all eternity is not less remarkable. In one case God gives a most wonderful power to fire; in the other, as we shall see, he confers quite as wonderful a nature upon human bodies. Augustine discussed this subject in his De Civitate Dei, and came to this conclusion: “I have before disputed,” he says, “that animals may live in fire, burning without being consumed, in pain without dissolution, by the miraculous appointment of our almighty Creator. And he who denieth that this is possible with him knoweth not who it is that doeth everything that is wonderful in all natures.”
The learned Jesuit, Drexelius, who had evidently been reading Augustine, caught his idea, and applied it in a similar way. He first referred to asbestos, which, he says, “being once set on fire, burneth continually;” and there is no difficulty in God’s converting the bodies of the damned into asbestos, or something analogous to it. But he found an illustration more apposite to his purpose in the salamander, to which Augustine had directed his attention. “This creature,” says the good-natured Jesuit, “is generated of showers, and consequently of a very cold nature; the sun or drought immediately kills it. According to Pliny, it lives in the fire like ice. Of its skin can be made lights for perpetual lamps, which are always burning. The good God who created the salamander out of earth and clay, from the very same matter gave being unto man, but he endowed him with a nobler nature. But man, by his wickedness, has made himself such a salamander, who must always live and always die in flam es eternal.”
Our Protestant friend, Rev. John Whittaker, in his work on “the four last things,” Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell, tells us that when the damned are cast into hell, “they find their bodies now fitted for the first time to resist all the consuming powers of fire, but are as much alive as ever to all the painful violences of it. Their bodies are now, as our Savior declared they should be, ‘all salted with fire;’ all so tempered and prepared as to burn the more fiercely, and yet never consume.” The pious Dr. Goodwin assures us that “in hell their bodies shall be nealed [annealed], as we speak of glass, that they may endure this fire.” In one or the other of these ways, then, either by miraculously fitting the bodies of the damned so as to render them indestructible, or by miraculously fitting the fire so that it shall restore as fast as it consumes, orthodoxy considerately prepares for an endless existence and endless tortures in hell-fire.