BESIDES the torments already mentioned there are others which may properly be considered as accessory, and of course more or less aggravate the miseries of the damned. As it has been the constant object of the advocates of endless punishment to make its torments as frightful as possible, so their ingenuity has been employed in inventing whatever could in any way add to the wretchedness of “the finally impenitent.” To those on the left hand the Savior said, “Depart, ye cursed, into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”
From this it has been inferred, perhaps somewhat hastily, that the damned of the human race are to be associated in punishment with the devil and his angels; that they are to occupy the same hell, and suffer the same miseries. This circumstance, I need not say, has led to many speculations and conceits about this society, and the relations the devils will hold to the wicked in hell, and the offices they may have to perform. Although the wicked are called children of the devil, the common opinion is that the devil is an unnatural father, and that he finds his only delight in seducing mortals into sin here, and in the world to come will gratify his malignant nature by tormenting those whom he has first ruined. This being assumed, it is naturally inferred that the wicked are not only to suffer the pains of everlasting fire with the devil and his angels, but will be left to suffer many, and perhaps inconceivable, torments inflicted directly by the presence and enmity of the devils themselves.
On this point most writers speak, and some dwell, with more or less earnestness and effect. Rev. Christopher Love says: “The society with whom you are tormented, that makes hell-torments to be most grievous and dreadful. But all the company you have in hell are only devils and damned spirits. The consideration of the cruelty of those whom God hath ordained to be your tormentors in hell will make hell torments to be grievous. And who are they? Why, the devils are called your tormentors: they torment wicked men; the devils are the greater tormentors of souls.” “If the damned had no other punishment,” says Jeremy Taylor, “than to see themselves banished amongst devils, into a place not far from heaven, sad as night, without the sight or comfort of sun or moon, for all eternity, it were a torment insufferable. The tyrants of Japonica invented a strange torment for those who confessed Christ: they hung them with their heads downwards, half their bodies into a hole digged in the earth, which they filled with snakes, lizards, and other poisonous vermin; but even those were better companions than those infernal dragons of the pit of hell, where unto not half but the whole body of the miserable sinner shall be plunged.
“The Romans, when they punished any parricide, to express the heinousness of the fact, shut him up in a sack with a serpent, an ape, and a cock; what a horror shall it be in hell when a damned person shall be shut up with so many millions of devils.” “Evil angels, wicked and unclean spirits,” says Dr. Watts, “with all their furious dispositions and active powers, will increase the misery of the damned. They paved the way to hell for man by the first temptation of our parents in Paradise, and they have been ever since busy in tempting the children of men to sin, and they will be hereafter busy in giving them torment.”
Father Furniss, in his little tract on “The Sight of Hell,” tells us, on the authority of St. Theresa, that there are two kinds of devils,—one the striking devils, and the other the mocking devils. The striking devils torment their victims by cruel beatings and continual whippings, as Jeremy Taylor says. Father Furniss says: “The devil gave Job one stroke, and it was so terrible that his whole body was instantly covered with sores and ulcers. Little child,” he adds, “if you go to hell, there will be a devil at your side to strike you. He will go on striking you every moment forever and ever, without ever stopping. The first stroke will make your body as bad as the body of Job covered from head to foot with sores and ulcers.
“The second stroke will make your body twice as bad as the body of Job. The third stroke will make your body three times as bad as the body of Job. The fourth stroke will make your body four times as bad as the body of Job. How, then, will your body be after the devil has been striking it every moment for a hundred million of years without stopping?” The mocking devil, on the other side, simply amused himself and comforted his friend, as many good people do here in this world, by perpetually saying, I told you so. “Remember where you are, and where you will be forever; how short the sin was, how long the punishment. It is your own fault.”
Our theological poets have not failed to avail themselves of a fact so important as this. Dr. Trapp exhibits it in the following vivid manner:—
Meanwhile, as if but light were all these pains,
Legions of devils, bound themselves in chains,
Tormented and tormentors, o’er them shake
Thongs, and forked iron, in the burning lake,
Belching infernal flames, and wreathed with spires
Of curling serpents rouse the brimstone fires;
With whips of fiery scorpions scourge their slaves,
And in their faces dash the livid waves.
Another aggravation in the torments of the damned, upon which many insist, is the rigid confinement to which they are subjected. The Apostle speaks of the angels that kept not their station as being bound in chains of darkness. It is a common circumstance with all the guilty awaiting trial or punishment, to be bound or in some form restrained of their liberty. But the damned are represented as suffering intolerable pains from this confinement. Jeremy Taylor says: “The bodies of the damned, after the judgment past, shall be so straitened and crowded together in that infernal dungeon that the Holy Scripture compares them to grapes in a wine-press, which press one another till they burst.” And so says President Edwards: “They shall be cast into the wine-press of the wrath of God, where they shall be pressed down with wrath as grapes are pressed in a wine-press. God will then make appear in their misery how terrible his wrath is, that men and angels may know how much more dreadful the wrath of God is than the wrath of kings or any other creatures.
“They shall know what God can do towards his enemies, and how fearful a thing it is to provoke him to anger.” The Rev. Isaac Ambrose, who was a famous preacher in his day, has a sermon, as I remember, on the words of our Savior respecting the tares, “Bind them in bundles to burn them,” which he made very instructive. In the first place they were to be bound “in bundles,” each class of sinners by itself. As Matthew Henry says: “Sinners of the same sort will be bundled together in the great day; a bundle of atheists, a bundle of epicures, and a great bundle of hypocrites. Those who have been associated in sin will be associated in shame and sorrow, and it will be an aggravation of their misery.” This is an old doctrine, and can be traced back many ages.
Jeremy Taylor always finds an illustration of some barbarous character, and unfortunately always concludes that the torments of hell must be vastly worse than the most cruel of mortals ever conceived or had the power to execute. “Most barbarous,” he says, “was that torment inflicted upon some unfortunate persons: they put certain rings of iron, stuck full of sharp points of needles, about their arms and feet, in such manner as they could not move without pricking and wounding themselves: then they compassed them about with fire, to the end that standing still they might be burnt alive; and if they stirred, the sharp points pierced their flesh with more intolerable pains than fire. What then shall be the torment of the damned, when they shall lie eternally without dying and without possibility of removing from the place designed them?” Rev. Mr. Ambrose imagined they would be so closely bound that they could not move a limb, nor a muscle, not even of the eyelid; and that they would not only be bound in bundles, but packed together like bricks in a kiln; and while in this helpless and immovable position the breath of God should blow the fires of hell through and through them, as the fire penetrates every part of the kiln and finally every particle of matter in it.
It is not easy for us to conceive the horrors of such a situation. “If an angel,” says Jeremy Taylor, “should promise thee to be made an emperor, so you would lie in your bed one night in the same posture, looking upwards towards heaven, how comes it to pass that thou canst not rest one single night; it being such a torture to be still, without turning thyself? What would it be if thou wert to remain in one position three or four nights? Thou hast little patience, since a thing so small doth grieve thee. Far greater evils than these are prepared for thee in hell, whither thou postest by running into so many sins. Consider what a couch is prepared for thee in that abyss of misery; what feather-bed; what Holland sheets! Thou shalt be cast upon burning coals, flames and sulphur shall be thy coverlets. Mark well, whether this bed be for one night only. Yea, nights, days, months, and years, for ages and eternities, thou art to remain on that side thou fallest on, without having the least relief to turn thyself to the other.”
The learned Jesuit, Cornelius à Lapide, entertains the same opinion and has expressed it in his commentary very clearly. “The wicked,” he says, “compingentur sicut halices et pisces in vase (are packed like pickles and fish in a cask).” And this seems to have suggested to this learned writer to inquire into the magnitude of hell, which he fortunately found means of determining in the Revelation of St. John 14:20, and soberly informs us that it is a cube in form and just two hundred Italian miles on a side; and hence concludes with reason, that, packed as he supposes, it has capacity sufficient to hold “multa milena millia millionum damnatorum (many thousand thousands of millions of the damned)!” And there is evident need of such dimensions in the world of woe, for if the teachings of orthodoxy prove true, it is to be the final abode of far the larger part of the human family.
It hardly need be observed that since the torments of hell are of so many kinds, we should not expect any great uniformity of representation, or indeed any strict consistency of statement. One author takes one view of the subject, and another another. To one mind this particular, form of punishment commends itself as most proper or most effective, and to another that; and not unfrequently does the same person at different times, or perhaps under different moods of feeling, use terms that are quite inconsistent with each other. While one writer, for instance, represents the damned as bound hand and foot, another speaks of them as being relatively free within the limits of hell. Thus Pollock says,—
- Some wandered lonely in the desert flames,
- And some in fierce encounter fiercely met.
Father Furniss, following St. Theresa, has hell filled with narrow cells where many of the damned suffer some special torment alone. One girl is standing barefooted forever upon a red-hot floor: a little child is in a red-hot oven: a boy’s blood in his veins, his brain, and the very marrow of his bones, is boiling and hissing like a boiling teakettle: the rich man of the Parable is smothering in a close coffin of solid fire, while others are tortured in various other ways. Father Furniss possesses an active and vigorous imagination which seems admirably fitted for his work, and if the horrors of hell have any moral virtue all Ireland should presently be redeemed and regenerated.
It cannot be necessary to pursue this branch of our subject further. I have spoken only of what might be called the physical sufferings of hell, and have only glanced at some of the more prominent of these, and have necessarily omitted much said in ancient and modern times that would aid in filling out the terrible picture; but, lest the description become tedious, I will only add, in the words of President Edwards, that “every part of the body shall be filled with fire. After the resurrection the body shall be cast into that great furnace, which shall be so great as to burn up the whole world. These lower heavens, this air and this earth, shall become one great furnace; a furnace that shall burn the earth, even to its very centre.
“In this furnace shall the bodies of the wicked lie to all eternity, and yet live, and have their sense of pain and torment not at all diminished. Oh, how full will the heart, the vitals, the brain, the eyes, the tongue, the hands, the feet, be of fire; of this fire of such inconceivable fierceness! How full will every member and every vein and every sinew be of this fire!” In the realm of the physical, I do not see how one can go beyond this. Father Furniss may be more specific; but for comprehensiveness and a great sweeping horror, let me commend our able American metaphysician and theologian.