ness! Who can express that bitterness, which the damned shall suffer, greater than that of alloes and wormwood? The Scripture tells us, the gall of dragons shall be their wine; and they shall taste the poison of asps for all eternity, unto which shall be joined an intolerable thirst, and dog-like hunger. .. Famine is the most pressing of all necessities, and most deformed of all evils: plagues and wars are happiness in respect to it. If hunger be so terrible a mischief in this life, how will it afflict the damned in the other! Without all doubt, the damned would rather tear themselves in pieces than suffer it; all the most horrible famines that Scripture histories propose unto us, are but weak pictures

to that which the damned suffer in this unfortunate residence of eternal miseries; neither shall thirst torment them the less."

Drexelius takes the same view of the subject. Speaking of the Rich Man in hell, he says, "How strangely is his condition altered! Instead of a lofty bed of down, on which he was wont to repose himself, he now lies frying in the flames: his sparkling wine and delicious dainties are taken from him; he is burnt up with thirst, and has nothing for his food but smoke and sulphur!" Thus all the bodily senses are to be perpetually tormented in that

"Universe of death which God by curse Created evil, for evil only good."

7. Accessory pains and aggravations.

But this is not all. Hell has a great variety of corporeal pains besides those now mentioned.For instance the damned in hell are to be most horribly whipped. "As the slaves of the earth," says my great authority, Bp. Jeremy Taylor, "are whipped and punished by their masters, so the slaves of hell are tormented by the devils who have power and dominion over them: and who lay upon them a thousand afflictions, griefs, and miseries. Every member of their bodies shall suffer greater pain and torment than if it were torn from the body. If one cannot tell how to suffer a tooth-ache, head-ache, or the pain of the colic, what will it be, when there shall not be any joint or the least part of the body, which shall not cause him an intolerable pain: Not only the head, or teeth, but also the breasts, sides, shoulders, the back, the heart and all parts of the body even to the very bones and marrow." The pious Isaac Ambrose tells us that under the hands of the devil, "no part shall escape in such a fray" and he represents those executioners of God's judgments as using whips of stinging serpents and scorpions! This notion is expressed in verse by Dr. Trapp, to whom I have been so often indebted before.

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."

Pollock carries the matter a little further, and represents the damned themselves as engaged in tormenting each other.

Some wandered lonely in the desert flames,
And some in full encounter fiercely met

With curses loud, and blasphemies that made
The cheek of darkness pale: and as they fought
And cursed and gnashed their teeth, and wished to die
Their hollow eyes did utter streams of wo.”

But this is not the worst of the case. The wicked are to be bound in bundles to burn them. Bp. 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. Most barbarous 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 the 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?" Mr. Ambrose tells us that the damned shall be packed like brick in a kiln, and be so bound that they cannot move a limb, nor even the eye-lid and while thus fixed the Almighty shall blow the fires of hell through and through them, forever! On this beautiful thought both Jeremy Taylor and Mr. Ambrose expatiate at considerable length. And it cannot be doubted that this fixedness of the body would of itself prove an intolerable punishment. To stand in the pillory for a single hour occasions horrible pain. What then must it be to lie thus immovably fixed in hell forever and ever? Besides, Matthew Henry tells us that "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 so in shame and sorrow, and it will be an agravation of their misery.”

Before leaving this part of the subject, I must call the attention of my readers to a very great improvement in hell's horrors, too little known and too seldom insisted upon among the multitude, but exhibited very clearly by some of the learned. I allude to the sudden and frequent transitions in hell, from extreme heat to extreme cold, which as may well be imagined, must

add immeasurably to the torments of the damned. This beautiful thought may seem to have been drawn from the gnashing, or as Dr. Adam Clark says chatteriag of the teeth, mentioned in the Gospels; though Jeremy Taylor evidently takes it from a passage of the Vulgate of Job, which he translates: "They shall pass from extremity of cold to intolerable heats." The Hindoos, though not remarkable for their refinement, believe, as appears from the Institutes of Menu, that the wicked shall "suffer alternate afflictions from extremeties of cold and heat." Milton has

not failed to exhibit this trait of hell's horrors.

66

'Beyond this flood, a frozen continent

Lies dark and wild, beat with perpetual storms
Of whirlwind and dire hail, which on firm land
Thaws not, but gathers heap, and ruin seems
Of ancient pile; all else deep snow and ice,
A gulf profound.

The parching air

Burns froze, and cold perfoms the effect of fire.
Thither by harpy-footed furies haled,

At certain revolutions all the damned

Are brought; and feel by turns the bitter change
Of fierce extremes-extremes by change more fierce-
From beds of raging fire, to starve in ice

Their soft etherial warmth and then to pine
Immoveable infixed, and frozen round
Periods of time, thence hurried back to fire."

But not to dwell longer on these varied torments, let it be remembered that they are inconceiveably more severe than any it is possible to suffer, or even to imagine, in the present life. On