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good natured divine," is generated of showers and consequently of a very cold nature; the sun or drought immediately kills it: according to Pliny it lives in the fire like ice; of its skin can be made lights for perpetual lamps, which are always burning. The good God who created the salamander, out of earth and clay, from the very same matter gave being unto man, but he en

dued him with a nobler nature.

But man

by his wickedness has made himself such a salamander, who must always live or always die in flames eternal." Augustine seems to think this rather miraculous; "1 have before disputed," says he, "that animals may live even in fire, in burning without being consumed, in pain without dissolution, by the miraculous appointment of our Almighty Creator. And he who denieth that this is possible with him, knoweth not who it is that doeth every thing that is wonderful in all natures." Nothing can be more obvious than the fact that to preserve men in the torments of hell must require the immediate power of God.

Rev. John Whitaker, in his work on Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell, tells us that when the damned are cast into hell" they find their bodies now fitted for the first time to resist all the consuming powers of fire,but are as much alive as ever to all the painful violences of it. Their bodies are now, as our Saviour declared they

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should be, all salted with fire;' all so tempered and prepared, as to burn the more fiercely and yet never consume." The pious Dr. Goodwin "in hell their bodies shall be nealed (as we speak of glass) that they may endure this fire."

says,

Most men will be inclined to hope that I have now exhausted my subject, and exhibited Hell's Horrors in so many different lights, and in so bold relief, as to beget in every candid mind the suspi cion of their reality. And it must be confessed, I believe, that these torments wear the aspect of fictions as truly as any ever described by pagans, whether of ancient or modern times. Nay, it may well be doubted whether they are not to be traced to purely heathen sources.

But let not my readers suppose that I have yet done. The various torments to which I have now called attention, make but the lightest part of endless punishment. For hitherto I have confined myself to the poena sensus, the punishment of sense, or the merely outward and physical pains to be inflicted upon the bodies of the damned.Nor have I by any means mentioned all of these, for as that pious and faithful man of God, Christopher Love, says, "there is a variety of these torments; there is not one way, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand to torment you." Without stopping, then, to describe so vast a number of tortures, let us pass to the consideration of the second class of punishments, viz. the poena damní,

the punishments of loss, including all the pains and torments of both mind and conscience, and all the varied miseries of a more spiritual kind which the damned are represented as suffering in the world of wo.

This class of miseries, it must be confessed, do not strike the vulgar mind so forcibly as those called punishments of sense, and hence have not been so carefully traced out and fully exhibited. Most men have better conceptions of the wants and pains of the body than they have of what belongs more peculiarly to the soul itself. Hence descriptions of mere physical suffering are generally much more intelligible and impressive than any that pertain exclusively to our intellectual and moral nature. Still certain orthodox writers have mentioned, if they have not so fully described, these inward torments, and I shall follow them as well as I can, in exhibiting the more refined and spiritual horrors of hell.

8. The pains consequent upon the loss of God. "In hell," says Bp. Jeremy Taylor, "is the pain of loss, and that so rigorous, that in depriving the damned soul of only one thing, they take from it all good things; for they deprive him of GOD in whom they are all comprised. . . . . God is the greatest good, and it is, therefore, the greatest evil to be deprived of him, because evil is the privation of good; and that is to be esteemed the greatest evil which is the privation of the greatest

cause

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 So the greatest pain and torment.' 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.

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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 Christa,

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