THUS far, as the reader will remark, I have exhibited only those torments which may be said to belong to our sensitive and animal nature, and most of which could be suffered by a brute as well as a man. Fire will burn, and sights and sounds of horror will frighten an ox or a horse as really, though perhaps not in precisely the same way or to the same extent, as they would a human being. These animals can see and feel, taste and smell and hear, and hence could suffer in hell or elsewhere somewhat as we should.
But man possesses another class of faculties that belong to him alone,—faculties of a higher order, which are connected with his spiritual nature; such as reason, conscience, religious and social affections, memory, hope, and fear. In these he can be hurt as truly and perhaps as deeply as through his bodily senses. The pain is different of course, but hardly less distressing. Men sometimes experience such calamities—loss of friends, reputation, wealth —as to occasion so much pain as to rob life of its ordinary satisfactions, make existence here a burden, and death a welcome guest.
Of these various miseries of which our spiritual nature is susceptible, the advocates of endless punishment have not been wholly unmindful, though it must be confessed, I think, that they have been urged with less frequency and power than those of a merely sensuous character. This may be accounted for, no doubt, by two or three rather obvious considerations. In the first place, the terms in which the doctrine of endless punishment is supposed to be inculcated in the Holy Scriptures are uniformly, or almost uniformly, of this outward and sensible kind, such as fire, furnace of fire, Gehenna of fire, lake of fire and brimstone, darkness, chains of darkness, and the like. This would naturally suggest material punishments to the thoughts and speech of men. Then, in the second place, there can be no doubt, I presume, that these outward and material images, suggesting pains and sufferings with which all are more or less familiar, are fitted to make a more immediate and deeper impression upon the masses of men, whether lay or clerical, than those which belong more properly to the higher part of our nature.
One who has experienced the pain occasioned by burning the hand or even a finger needs nothing more to aid him in conceiving something of the torment of being cast alive into a furnace filled with raging fire, such as President Edwards and others have so eloquently enforced. This makes the preaching of these physical pains so easy and sometimes perhaps so effective. Coarse uncultivated men can without difficulty proclaim such punishments, and people of the same class understand them. It is, however, a problem how President Edwards, Jeremy Taylor, and some others that might be named, who were neither coarse nor uncultivated, should have dwelt so much upon these merely physical tortures, and insisted little in comparison, it seems, upon those that belong to man as an intellectual and moral being. Not, indeed, that either of these eminent preachers has wholly overlooked or neglected what addresses itself to the better side of our nature, but that the physical is made, or appears, so much more prominent and striking that it seems almost to overshadow everything else.
If souls may be conceived as entering that “world of woe,” bearing with them their reason, their conscience, their memory, and their better affections, of which no one in this world is wholly destitute,—in one word, if they are to enter there as they leave here,—the consciousness that they “have missed the end of their existence,” as Rev. Mr. Oxenham expresses it, that all their hopes are blasted, that even reformation is impossible, and that nothing now lies before them but a dreary waste of being, without object or interest or joy,—would not that alone, were there no material fires, no bodily torments, none of hell’s horrors, soon make a hell sufficient to satisfy our loftiest conceptions of the demands of justice, and erelong render existence itself an intolerable burden? But let us glance at some of these more refined and spiritual sources of misery.