good, which is God; and must certainly, therefore, cause more grief and resentment in the damned than all the punishments and torments of the damned besides; and in regard there is in hell eternal privation of God, who is the chief good; the pains of loss, whereby one is deprived forever of the greatest of all goods, this privation will cause the greatest pain and torment." So Mr. Swinden reckons among the punishments of hell, "an eternal separation from God." "The sinner's memory," says Dr. Whitby, "reflecting on this punishment of loss, will create fresh and never-ceasing torments. It will torment him to remember what an inestimable blessing he hath lost in losing the enjoyment of that God who is the chiefest good." So Dr. Adam Clarke tells us that a part of everlasting destruction consists "in being banished from the presence of the Lord, excluded from his approbation forever.. Never to see the face of God throughout eternity is a heart-rending, soul-appalling thought."— The wicked in hell, says the pious Christopher Love," they are deprived of and banished from the favorable presence of God." "And here," says Chrysostom, "if there were a thousand worlds, the loss of the favor of one God is more than a thousand worlds; it is the greatest torment of a damned man that he is without God.— The presence of God makes heaven to be heaven. The absence of God makes hell more hell than it

is. Depart from me ye cursed; this is the great torment of the damned that they must depart from God and Jesus Christ forever. . . . The loss of God is the greatest loss that may be, and this is your loss that are cast into hell."

...

9. The pains consequent upon the loss of Heaven.

Though the wicked are not sensible in this life what it is to fall short of heaven," says the Rev. Mr. Swinden, "yet at their death, after the separation of soul and body, the eye of the understanding shall be opened; and they shall then clearly discern what it is to be shut out of the kingdom of heaven, to be deprived of the beatific vision, and to lose the fruition of all the glory, splendor and blessedness of it. They shall then, to no purpose, incessantly cry, Lord, Lord, open unto us." It needs no illustration, I hope, to make it appear that the loss of heaven with all its glories and felicity, must greatly aggravate the miseries of hell. This circumstance is, therefore, always insisted upon by those who attempt any general description of the world of wo. The damned in hell will see heaven, we are told, but will see it afar off, as the Rich Man saw Lazarus. They will also be sensible that it was once within their reach, and that they might have shared its bliss, but they would not. And now, alas! it is too late. "And if Tully did so bewail his banishment, in being banished from Italy," says Christo

pher Love, "that every time he looked toward Italy he fell a weeping; and if Demosthenes took his banishment from Athens so heavily, that every time he looked that way, he fell a weeping; if this did grieve them so much, how will the thoughts of this, that you are banished from heaven grieve you, if ever it should be your dismal lot to be cast into hell?" To this add what Jeremy Taylor says, "What a grief it will be to see themselves deprived of the palaces of heaven, the society of saints,and that happy country of the living, where all is peace, charity and joy; where all shines, all pleases, and all parts resound with hallelujahs! If the damned had no other punishment than to see themselves banished amongst devils, into a place not far distant from heaven, dark as night, without the sight or comfort of sun or moon for all eternity, it were a torment insufferable."

10. The pains arising from a guilty con

science.

"There is another hell," says Mr. Swinden, "in the midst of hell... There the wicked shall be exposed to the intolerable anguish of an enraged conscience, the remorse of which shall contin ually prey upon them for what they have done in their lives-time." "Wherefore, miserable consciences," says Calvin, "find no repose, but are harrassed and agitated with a dreadful tempest, feel themselvs torn asunder by an angry God, and

transfixed and penetrated by mortal stings; are terrified by the thunderbolts of God, and broken by the weight of his hand, so that to sink into any gulfs and abysses would be more tolerable than to stand for a moment in these terrors." Dr. Dwight maintains that "sin, in the world of misery, will be viewed as it is"; so that the damned themselves shall both see and acknowledge the heinousness of their guilt, and the infinite rectitude of the divine procedure. He says, also, that the "impenitent in the future world will be subjects of extreme remorse of conscience. The character of every such man, being seen by himself as it is, will of course be loathed, abhorred and despised"; while the view he takes of his own conduct, in connexion with the divine goodness and government, "will overwhelm him with self-condemnation, and pierce his soul with the anguish of selfreproach." "Besides these miseries and calamities," says Jeremy Taylor, "in this power of the soul [the understanding] is engendered the worm of conscience; which is so often proposed unto us in the holy Scripture, as a most terrible torment, and greater than that of fire. Only in one sermon, Christ, our Redeemer, three times menaces us with the worm which gnaws the consciences,and tears in pieces the hearts of the damned, admonishing us that their worm shall never die, and their fire be quenched! For as the worm which breeds in dead flesh, or that which breeds in

woods, eats and gnaws that substance of which they are engendered; so the worm which is bred from sin is in perpetual enmity with it, gnawing and devouring the heart of the sinner with raging and desperate grief. . . . It is a hell in hell worse than a thousand hells!!"

But of all authors, Pollock has, perhaps, best succeeded in describing the horrors of a guilty conscience.

"I paused and looked;

And saw, where'er I looked upon that mound,
Sad figures traced in fire; not motionless,
But imitating life. One I remarked
Attentively; but how shall I describe

What nought resembles else my eye hath seen?
Of worm or serpent kind it something looked,
But monstrous with a thousand snaky heads,
Eyed each with double orbs of glaring wrath;
And with as many tails, that twisted out
In horrid convolution. tipped with stings;
And all its mouths, that wide and darkly gaped,
And breathed most poisonous breath, had each a
sting,

Forked, and long, and venomous, and sharp.
And in its writhings infinite it grasped,

Malignantly what seemed a heart, swollen, black,
And quivering with torture most intense.
And still the heart with anguish throbbing high,
Made effort to escape, but could not, for
However it turned, and oft it vainly turned,
These complicated foldings held it fast.
And still the monstrous beast, with sting of head
Or tail transfixed it, bleeding evermore.
What this could image, much I searched to know,
And while I strove, and gazed, and wondered long,
A voice, from whence I knew not, for no one