that no space should be left; who can tell this vast number; and yet all this would express no assignable part of eternity.

"Think of the dread amounts of misery," says the Rev. Austin Dickinson, "that must be endur ed by an incorrigible enemy of God, increasing forever in guilt and remorse! Think of the extent of eternity! Oh! send an angel forward on the awful deep, with the speed of lightning, for millions on millions of centuries, and the dread waves of perdition are still rising and rolling beyond!" "Let imagination stretch its wings again," says the late Dr. Griffin, “ and follow the excruciated soul through ages of unutterable endurance-through fire intense enough to melt down all the planets. One period after another passes by it as it flies-until it looks back on the first million of years as on a speck in the horizon, and still it hears the tormented soul exclaim, My agony is just begun !”

"How dismal it will be when you are under these racking torments," says Dr. Edwards, “ to know assuredly that you never, never shall be delivered from them; to have no hope. When you shall wish that you might be turned into nothing, but shall have no hope of it; when you would rejoice, if you might have any relief after you had endured these torments millions of ages, but shall have no hope of it; when after you have worn out ages of the sun, moon and stars, in your do

the

lorous groans and lamentations, without rest, day or night, or one minute's ease, yet you shall have no hope of ever being delivered; when after you have worn out a thousand more such ages, yet you shall have no hope, but shall know that you are not one whit nearer the end of your torments; but that still there are the same groans, the same shrieks, the same doleful cries incessantly to be made by you, and that the smoke of your torment shall still ascend forever and ever; and that your souls, which have been agitated by the wrath of God all this while, will yet exist to bear more wrath ; that your bodies, which have been burning and roasting all this while in these glowing flames, yet shall not have been consumed, but will remain to roast through an eternity yet, which shall not have been at all shortened by what shall have been past."

Let this suffice on this head. Sinners in hell are to suffer the torments above described through all eternity! This we are told is "all they are fit for; this is the only use to which God can put them!" Is it to be thought remarkable if the poor sufferers in hell should at length grow weary of thus serving and glorifying God? This leads

me,

Fourth. To say that the damned are often represented as seeking, and most ardently praying, to be annihilated.

"Sad cure! for who would lose

Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night,
Devoid of sense and motion ?"

66

All agree in representing the torments of hell as death; a death without death, an end without end," as Jeremy Taylor calls it, "for death shall ever live, and their end never begin." It is "the second death," "eternal death," which Pollock describes in connexion with the undying worm, in the following manner.

"Fast by the side of this unsightly thing,
Another was portrayed, more hideous still;
Who sees it once shall wish to see't no more.
Forever undescribed let it remain!

Only this much I may or can unfold-
Far out it thrust a dart that might have made
The knees of terror quake, and on it hung
Within the triple barb, a being pierced,
Through soul and body both; of heavenly make
Original the being seemed, but fallen,
And worn, and wasted with enormous wo.
And still around the everlasting lance

It writhed, convulsed and uttered mimick groans
And tried and wished, and ever tried and wished
To die; but could not die. Oh horrid sight

I trembling gazed, and listened, and heard this voice Approach my ear, This is clernal death!"

No, even the God of infinite love and mercy will not after uncountable millions and millions of years withdraw his hand and allow his poor miserable creature in hell-fire to die and “be no

more.

"God will always punish them, and he' cannot torment them enough," says Drexélius, "though their torments will endure to all Eternity!" Dr. Young in his "Last Day" represents of the damned saying:

"Oh grant, great God, at least
This one, this slender, almost no request;
When I have wept a thousand lives away,
When torment is grown weary of its prey,
When I have raved ten thousand years in fire,
Ten thousand thousands, let me then expire!
Deep anguish! but too late: the hopeless soul,
Bound to the bottom of the burning pool,
Though loth, and even loud blasphening, owns
He's justly doomed to pour eternal groans;
Inclosed with horrors, and transfixed with pain,
Rolling in vengeance, struggling with his chain;
To talk to fiery tempests, to implore

The raging flame to give its burnings o'er;
To toss, to writhe, to pant beneath his load,
And bear the weight of an offended GOD!"

mous.

Enough; enough! I can pursue the horrible, the sickening subject no further. I can only pray the Father of mercies and God of all grace, to forgive the ravings of his creatures above quoted. They seem to me not merely horrid but blaspheWhat is the whole tone and teaching of these quotations-and I could give volumes of the like from accredited orthodox writers-but that God can be and will be worse, more revengeful, more cruel, more implacable, than all the tyrants and monsters in human form, who have made earth a hell, and filled it with lamentation

and misery. Imagine the worst punishment you can, surround it with all the circumstances of horror you can conceive, heighten it by every possible aggravation, and yet, if orthodoxy be true, you have hardly made an approximation to what God is actually doing, and will continue to do through all eternity! You cannot conceive of any thing so horrible that God will not infinitely surpass it.

Perhaps I may be told that this is orthodoxy of "the olden time;" that Christians do not believe in all these horrors now; that they have milder views of God's dealings. I wish it were so, altogether. But there are many circumstances to show that this is only partial. Dr. Edwards is not yet obsolete, and he tells us plainly that "there is no reason to suspect that possibly ministers set forth this matter beyond what it really is, that possibly it is not so dreadful and terrible as is pretended, and that ministers strain the description of it beyond just bounds. Some may be ready to think so, because it seems to them incredible that there should be so dreadful a misery to any creature; but there is no reason for any such thoughts as these. . . There is no reason to think that ministers describe the misery of the wicked beyond what it is, because the Scripture teaches us that this is one end of ungodly men, to show the dreadfulness and power of God. The Scriptures teach that the wrath of