The following quotes are from Christian leaders who used the pagan concept of Hell to keep the masses in subjection to power-hungry and often evil political and religious men and women. The Church has often been a more effective means of enslaving the masses than military might. There are multitudes of other Church leaders throughout the centuries who could be quoted expressing similar thoughts to the ones below.
Compare these words to Jesus’ words to the poor of this world and it should become very obvious from which spirit these men were speaking. Satan has controlled the Church for a long time. It’s time for a great change. The English word Hell is of Germanic/Teutonic mythological origin. Any decent dictionary will make that evident. What is not so evident is that this myth injected into the thousands of denominations of Christianity and many Bible translations has grossly misrepresented the nature and character of our heavenly Father and his plan of the redemption of all mankind. ——Gary Amirault.
We will begin with a few choice quotes followed by a whole army of God defamers. There are some Christian spokespersons who have taught that God created Hell for the mere enjoyment of those who would view the scene from heaven. They reason that their joy will be more full seeing others no more or less deserving being tortured in the most cruel manners possible.
Here are some examples of the reasoning of these church leaders:
“Therefore the elect shall go forth…to see the torments of the impious, seeing which they will not be grieved, but will be satiated with joy at the sight of the unutterable calamity of the impious.” ——Peter Lombard, the Master of Sentences (AD 1096–1160)
“Not in the least.” ——Martin Luther (1483–1546), when questioned whether the Blessed will not be saddened by seeing their nearest and dearest tortured
“…the Blessed will see their friends and relations among the damned as often as they like but without the least of compassion.” ——Gerhard (Johann Gerhard, 1582–1637)
Andrew Welwood speaks of the saints as being “overjoyed in beholding the vengeance of God,” and their beholding of the smoke of the torment of the wicked as “a passing delectation.” ——Andrew Welwood (1635–1679)
“This display of the divine character will be most entertaining to all who love God, will give them the highest and most ineffable pleasure. Should the fire of this eternal punishment cease, it would in a great measure obscure the light of heaven, and put an end to a great part of the happiness and glory of the blessed.” ——Samuel Hopkins (1721–1803)
“The door of mercy will be shut and all bowels of compassion denied, by God, who will laugh at their destruction; by angels and saints, who will rejoice when they see the vengeance; by their fellow-sufferers the devil and the damned rejoicing over their misery.” ——Bishop Newcomb, Catechetical Sermons
“At that greatest of all spectacles, that last and eternal judgment how shall I admire, how laugh, how rejoice, how exult, when I behold so many proud monarchs groaning in the lowest abyss of darkness; so many magistrates liquefying in fiercer flames than they ever kindled against the Christians; so many sages philosophers blushing in red-hot fires with their deluded pupils; so many tragedians more tuneful in the expression of their own sufferings; so many dancers tripping more nimbly from anguish than ever before from applause.” ——Tertullian (AD 155–220), De Spectaculis, Chapter XXX
“They who shall enter into [the] joy [of the Lord] shall know what is going on outside in the outer darkness…The saints’…knowledge, which shall be great, shall keep them acquainted…with the eternal sufferings of the lost.” ——Augustine of Hippo (AD 354–430), The City of God
“In order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them and that they may render more copious thanks to God for it, they are allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned…So that they may be urged the more to praise God…The saints in heaven know distinctly all that happens…to the damned.” ——Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), Summa Theologica, Third Part, Supplement, Question XCIV
“The same fire torments the damned in hell and the just in purgatory…The least pain in purgatory exceeds the greatest in this life.” ——Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), Summa Theologica, Supplement, Question 100
“The view of the misery of the damned will double the ardour of the love and gratitude of the saints of heaven.” ——Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), The Eternity of Hell Torments, April 1739
“The sight of hell torments will exalt the happiness of the saints forever…Can the believing father in Heaven be happy with his unbelieving children in Hell…I tell you, yea! Such will be his sense of justice that it will increase rather than diminish his bliss.” ——Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), Discourses on Various Important Subjects, 1738
“God shall not pity them but laugh at their calamity. The righteous company in heaven shall rejoice in the execution of God’s judgment, and shall sing while the smoke riseth up for ever.” ——Thomas Boston (1676–1732), Scottish preacher
“What bliss will fill the ransomed souls,
When they in glory dwell,
To see the sinner as he rolls,
In quenchless flames of hell.” ——Isaac Watts (1674–1748), hymn written during America’s Great Awakening
“Once [a soul] is condemned by God, then God’s friends agree in God’s judgment and condemnation. For all eternity they will not have a kind thought for this wretch. Rather they will be satisfied to see him in the flames as a victim of God’s justice…They will abhor him. A mother will look from paradise upon her own condemned son without being moved, as though she had never known him.” ——St. Anthony Mary Claret (1807–1870), The Pains of Hell, Ignatian Spiritual Exercises
“What will it be like for a mother in heaven who sees her son burning in hell? She will glorify the justice of God.” ——Catholic Truth Society pamphlet, late 1960s
“…love and pity for hell’s occupants will not enter our hearts.” ——J. I. Packer (1926–2020), Hell’s Final Enigma, Christianity Today Magazine, April 22, 2002
“Non-Christians often ask the Christian, ‘But how can the God of love allow any of his creatures to suffer unending misery?’ The question is, how can he not? The fact that God is love makes hell necessary. ‘Hell,’ as E. L. Mascall once said, ‘is not compatible with God’s love; it is a direct consequence of it.'” ——Christian Theology in Plain Language (author unknown)
God’s Wrath in Inflicting Punishment on the Wicked
“It is not a terrible thing to a wretched soul, when it shall lie roaring perpetually in the flames of hell, and the God of mercy himself shall laugh at them; when…God shall mock them instead of relieving them; when none in heaven or earth can help them but God, and he shall rejoice over them in their calamity.” ——Richard Baxter (1615–1691), The Saint’s Everlasting Rest, 1846
“Do we think that God can find torments in nature sufficient to satisfy His provoked vengeance? No, no; He creates new instruments more violent, pains utterly inconceivable to us. A soul for one venial sin shall suffer more than all the pains of distemper, the most violent colics, gout, and stone joined in complication,–more than all the most cruel torments undergone by malefactors, or invented by the most barbarous tyrants,–more than all the tortures of the martyrs summed up together.” ——Alban Butler (1710–1773), Lives of the Saints
“God will hold sinners with one hand over the pit of hell, while He torments them with the other.” ——Thomas Boston (1676–1732), Fourfold State
“Reprobate infants are vipers of vengeance, which Jehovah will hold over hell, in the tongs of his wrath, till they turn and spit venom in his face!” ——Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758)
“Here all judges have a mixture of mercy, but the wrath of God will be poured out upon the wicked without mixture. Imagine yourself to be cast into a fiery oven…and imagine also that your body were to lie there for a quarter of an hour, full of fire, as full within and without as a bright coal fire, all the while full of quick sense; what horror would you feel at the entrance of such a furnace? Oh! Then how would your heart sink if you knew that after millions and millions of ages your torment would be no nearer to an end than ever it was.” ——Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), Works, vol. III, 1785
“The pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive the wicked: the flames do now rage and glow. The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much in the same way as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect, abhors you and is dreadfully provoked…He will trample them beneath His feet with inexpressible fierceness; He will crush their blood out, and will make it fly, so that it will sprinkle His garment and stain all His raiment.” ——Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Works, vol. VII
“When the omnipotent and angry God, who has access to all the avenues of distress in the corporeal frame, and all the inlets to agony in the intellectual constitution, undertakes to punish, He will convince the universe that He does not gird Himself for the work of retribution in vain.” ——Dr. Gardiner Spring (1785–1873)
“Forever harrassed with a dreadful tempest, they shall feel themselves torn asunder by an angry God, and transfixed and penetrated by mortal stings, terrified by the thunderbolts of God, and broken by the weight of his hand, so that to sink into any gulf would be more tolerable than to stand for a moment in these terrors.” ——John Calvin (1509–1564)
“There is the cup of trembling and of wrath. Your hands must take it, your mouth must drink it. But you can never drain it. There is no last drop. Infinite vengeance ever fills it to the brim. Eternal wrath is ever bringing more. What is the curse? It is the endless accumulation of all the miseries which God’s resources can command and God’s power can inflict. It is the fiery torrent from the lake of fire. It is the pain which cannot be keener, despair which cannot be blacker, and anguish which cannot be more bitter. It is eternity in the oneness of all torment.” ——Dean of Gloucester, Christ in All
“It would be difficult to measure the waters of the sea; but it is impossible to reckon the ages of a boundless eternity. After millions of years it will only have begun. God’s wrath in hell will be always ‘wrath to come.’ Few are so tossed in this world but they have some rest. There are few tempests without some lull between the storm. But there is no pause in that storm which falls upon the inhabitants of hell.” ——Bishop Oxenden, Late Metropolitan of Canada, Great Truths
“Sin in thee and the Injury of it to God is an eternal Stain, which Hell Fire cannot eat out, or satisfy God, but in an Eternity of time.” ——Thomas Goodwin (1600–1680), A Discourse of the Punishment of Sin in Hell, 1680
Description of the Pains of Hell
“There will the condemned in cruel rage and despair turn their fury against God and themselves, gnawing their flesh with their mouth, breaking their teeth with gnashing, furiously tearing themselves with their nails, and everlastingly blaspheming against the judge…Oh wretched tongues that will speak no word save blasphemy! Oh miserable ears that will hear no sound but groans! Oh unhappy eyes that will see nothing but agonies! Oh tortured bodies that will have no refreshment but flames…We are terrified when we hear of executioners—scourging men, disjointing them, dismembering, tearing them in pieces, burning them with plates of red-hot metal. But these things are but a jest, a shadow compared with the torments of the next life.” ——Fray Luis De Granada (1504–1588), Sermons
“If it will be an intolerable thing to suffer the heat of fire for a year or a day, or an hour, what will it be to suffer ten thousand times more for ever? What if thou wert to suffer Lawrence’s death, to be roasted upon a gridiron; or to be scraped or pricked to death as other martyrs were; or if thou wert to feed upon toads for a year together? If thou couldst not endure such things as these, how wilt thou endure the eternal flames?” ——Richard Baxter (1615–1691), The Saint’s Everlasting Rest, 1846
“We have heard…of some who have endured breaking on the Wheel, ripping up of their Bowels, fleaing alive, racking of the joints, burning of Flesh, pounding in a mortar, tearing in pieces with Flesh-hooks, boyling in Oyl, roasting on hot fiery Gridirons, etc. And yet all these…would all come short…of that Wrath, that Horror, that unconceivable Anguish, which the Damned must inevitably suffer every Moment, without any Intermission of their pains, in Hellish Flames.” ——John Shower (1657–1715), Heaven and Hell
“Set case you should take a man, and tie him to a stake, and with red hot Pincers pinch off his flesh by little pieces for two or three years together, and at last, when the poor man cryes out for ease and help, the tormenters answer, Nay but besides all this you must be handled worse. We will serve you thus these 20 years together, and after that we will fill your mangled body full of scalding lead, and run you through with a red hot spit, would this not be lamentable?…But he that goes to hell shall suffer ten thousand times worse torments than these, and yet shall never be quite dead under them.” ——John Bunyan (1628–1688), A Few Sighs From Hell, 1658
“Your dainty delicate persons that now cannot brook the least savory smell, shall lie down in a stinking dungeon, in a loathsome lake, that burns with fire and brimstone for ever.” ——William Gearing (fl. 1660–1690), A Prospect of Heaven, 1673
“Little child, if you go to hell there will be a devil at your side to strike you. He will go on striking you every minute for ever and ever without 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…How, then, will your body be after the devil has been striking it every moment for a hundred million of years without stopping? Perhaps at this moment, seven o’clock in the evening, a child is just going into hell. To morrow evening, at seven o’clock, go and knock at the gates of hell and ask what the child is doing. The devils will go and look. They will come back again and say, the child is burning. Go in a week and ask what the child is doing; you will get the same answer, it is burning. Go in a year and ask the same question, the answer is just the same–it is burning. So, if you go for ever and ever, you will always get the same answer–it is burning in the fire.” ——Reverend J. Furniss (1809–1865), The Sight of Hell, a Catholic book for children
“The fifth dungeon is the red hot oven. The little child is in the red hot oven. Hear how it screams to come out; see how it turns and twists itself about in the fire. It beats its head against the roof of the oven. It stamps its little feet on the floor.” ——Reverend J. Furniss (1809–1865), The Sight of Hell
“There are babies a span long in hell.” ——John Calvin (1509–1564)
“Let us fancy we see hell, and imagine what is worst to behold—a horrible cavern full of black flames. Sulphur, devils, dragons, fire, swords, arrows, and innumerable damned who roar in despair. Imagine the worst you can, and then say, ‘All this is nothing compared to hell.’…In that voracious subterranean cavern all the filth of the world is collected and inclosed, without exhalation or air, which must produce a most foetid pestilence…The sight is tormented by frightful devils; a holy religious saw at death two so monstrous and ugly devils, that he cried out that rather than see them again he would walk till the day of judgment on fire of sulphur and melted metal.” ——Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556), Spiritual Exercises, 1548
“That we may be altogether of the same mind and in conformity with the Church herself, if she shall have defined anything to be black which to our eyes appears to be white, we ought in like manner to pronounce it to be black. For we must undoubtedly believe, that the Spirit of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Spirit of the Orthodox Church His Spouse, by which Spirit we are governed and directed to Salvation, is the same.” ——Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556), Rules for Thinking with the Church, Spiritual Exercises
“The world will probably be converted into a great lake or liquid globe of fire, in which the wicked shall be overwhelmed, which will always be in tempest, in which they shall be tossed to and fro, having no rest day and night, vast waves and billows of fire continually rolling over their heads, of which they shall forever be full of a quick sense within and without; their heads, their eyes, their tongues, their hands, their feet, their loins and their vitals, shall forever be full of a flowing, melting fire, fierce enough to melt the very rocks and elements; and also, they shall eternally be full of the most quick and lively sense to feel the torments; not for one minute, not for one day, not for one age, not for two ages, not for a hundred ages, nor for ten thousand millions of ages, one after another, but forever and ever, without any end at all, and never to be delivered.” ——Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758)
“The bodies of the damned shall be crowded together in hell, like grapes in a wine-press, which press one another till they burst; every distinct sense and organ shall be assailed with its own appropriate and most exquisite sufferings.” ——Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667), Church of England
“Husbands shall see their wives, parents shall see their children tormented before their eyes…the bodies of the damned shall be crowded together in hell like grapes in a wine-press, which press one another till they burst…This temporal fire is but a painted fire in respect of that penetrating and real fire in hell.” ——Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667)
“We are amazed at the inhumanity of Phalaris, who roasted men in his brazen bull; this was joy in respect of the fire of hell, which penetrates the very entrails without consuming them.” ——Nieremberg (Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, 1595–1658), Pains of Hell
“Represent to yourself a dark city all burning and stinking with fire and brimstone. The damned are in the depth of hell within this woful city, where they suffer unspeakable torments in all their senses and members. Consider above all the eternity of their pains, which above all things makes hell intolerable.” ——Francis De Sales (1567–1622), Garden of the Soul
“Their bodies will be raised from the dead as vessels for the soul—vessels of wrath. The soul will breathe hell-fire, and smoke and coal will seem to hang upon its burning lips, yea the face, eyes, and ears will seem to be chimneys and vents for the flame, and the smoke of the burning, which God, by His breath, hath kindled therein, and upon them, which will be held one in another, to the great torment and distress of each other.” ——John Bunyan (1628–1688), Works, vol. II
“Is it an intolerable thing to burn part of thy body by holding it in the fire? What then will it be to suffer ten thousand times more for ever in hell?” ——Richard Baxter (1615–1691), Saints Rest, 1691
“Every lash which God then gives the sinner shall be with a scorpion, every pain which He inflicts shall be more eager than appetite, more cruel than revenge; every faculty both of soul and body shall have its distinct property, and peculiar torment applied to it, and be directly struck there where it has the quickest, the sharpest, and the tenderest sense of any painful impression…the punishment which an infinite justice inflicts by the hands of an implacable malice must needs be intolerable.” ——South (Robert South, 1634–1716), Sermons, vol. VII
“The bodies of the damned will all be salted with fire, so tempered and prepared as to burn the more fiercely, and yet never consume.” ——John Whitaker (1735–1808), Sermon on Death, Judgment, and Eternity, 1783
“If it were but for a time, even ten thousand years, if then it might have an end, there would be ground for comfort, and hopes of deliverance; but here is thy misery, this is thy state for ever, here thou must be for ever…When thou hast been in hell for as many thousand years as there are stars in the firmament or drops in the sea, or sands on the sea shore, yet thou hast to lie there for ever. O this one word, ever, how will it torment thy soul!” ——Sharrock, The Miscellaneous Works
“Is it not common to say to a child, ‘Put your finger in that candle, can you bear it even for one minute?’ How then will you bear Hell-fire? Surely it would be torment enough to have the flesh burnt off from only one finger; what then will it be to have the whole body plunged into a lake of fire, burning with brimstone?” ——John Wesley (1703–1791), Sermon 73
“The wicked will gnaw their tongues for anguish and pain; they will curse God and look upwards. There the dogs of hell, pride, malice, revenge, rage, horror, despair, continually devour them.” ——John Wesley (1703–1791), Sermon 15
“Consider that all these torments of body and soul are without intermission. Be their suffering ever so extreme, be their pain ever so intense, there is no possibility of their fainting away, no, not for one moment…They are all eye, all ear, all sense. Every instant of their duration it may be said of their whole frame that they are ‘Trembling alive all o’er, and smart and agonize at every pore.’ And of this duration there is no end…Neither the pain of the body nor of soul is any nearer an end than it was millions of ages ago.” ——John Wesley (1703–1791), Sermon 73
“When thou diest, thy soul will be tormented alone; that will be a hell for it, 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 which 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.'” ——Charles Spurgeon (1834–1892), Sermon on the Resurrection of the Dead
“These unhappy children of wrath not only suffer during eternity, but they suffer eternity during each moment of their existence. Eternity is engraven on the flames which torment them…O tormenting thought! O miserable condition! To burn for ever! To weep for ever! To rage for ever!” ——Bonhour, Meditations
“It is infinitely beyond the highest archangel’s faculty to apprehend a thousandth part of the horror of the doom to eternal damnation.” ——John Foster (1770–1843)
“Gather in one, in your mind, an assembly of all those men and women, from whom, whether in history or in fiction, your memory most shrinks, gather in mind all that is loathsome, most revolting…conceive the fierce, fiery eyes of hate, spite, frenzied rage, ever fixed on thee, looking thee through and through with hate…hear those yells of blaspheming concentrated hate, as they echo along the lurid vault of hell; everyone hating everyone…Yet a fixedness in that state in which the hardened malignant sinner dies, involves, without any further retribution of God, this endless misery.” ——Reverend E. B. Pusey (1800–1882)
“The poena damni, or pain of loss, consists in the loss of the beatific vision and in so complete a separation of all the powers of the soul from God that it cannot find in Him even the least peace and rest…The pain of loss is not the mere absence of superior bliss, but it is also a most intense positive pain. The utter void of the soul made for the enjoyment of infinite truth and infinite goodness causes the reprobate immeasurable anguish. Their consciousness that God, on Whom they entirely depend, is their enemy forever is overwhelming.” ——Catholic Encyclopedia, Poena Damni
“A person may say I am not much concerned how long I stay in purgatory, provided I may come to eternal life. Let no one reason thus. Purgatory fire will be more dreadful than whatever torments can be seen, imagined, or endured in this world. He who is afraid now to put his finger into the fire, does he not fear lest he be then all buried in torments for a long time?” ——Caesarius of Arles (AD 470–543), Homily I
“If ye pity the blind, there is none so blind as we, which are here in the dark save for sights unpleasant and loathsome. If ye pity the lame, there is none so lame as we, that can neither creep one foot out of the fire, nor have one hand at liberty to defend our face from the flame. Finally, if ye pity any man in pain, never knew ye pain comparable to ours, whose fire as far passeth in heat all other fires that ever burned on earth as the hottest of all that passed a feigned fire painted on a wall…Your keepers do you great ease; our keepers are such as God keep you from—cruel, doomed spirits, odious, envious, and hateful, despiteous enemies and despiteful tormentors, and their company more terrible and grievous to be in than is the pain itself.” ——Thomas More (1478–1535), Supplication of Souls
“Nor to these torments will there be any measure or termination. There the sentient fire burns limbs and renews them, feeds on them and nourishes them.” ——Minucius Felix (fl. AD 200–240), Octavius
“The wretched bodies of the condemned shall simmer and blaze in those living fires.” ——Cyprian of Carthage (AD 200–258)
“Fire is evidently the only word in human language which can suggest the anguish of perdition. It is the only word in the parable of the wheat and the tares which our Lord did not interpret (Matt. 13:36-43)…The only reasonable explanation is that fire is not a symbol. It perfectly describes the reality of the eternal burnings. As we paid nothing for God’s eternal love and nothing for the Son of His love, and nothing for His Spirit and our grace and faith, and nothing for our eternal rest…What an astonishing thought it will be to think of the unmeasurable difference between our deservings and our receivings. O, how free was all this love, and how free is this enjoyed glory…So then let ‘Deserved’ be written on the floor of hell but on the door of heaven and life, ‘The Free Gift.'” ——Richard Baxter (1615–1691)
“How will you spend eternity — Smoking or Nonsmoking?” ——Sign in front of a church
“Turn or Burn!” ——Sign in front of a church