Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/781

Rh a bright coal. Here is a little image of what you will be in hell, except you repent and fly to Christ.—

Do but consider what it is to suffer extreme torment for ever and ever; to suffer it night and day, from one day to another, from one year to another, from one age to another; in pain, in wailing and lamenting, groaning and shrieking and gnashing your teeth; with your bodies and every member full of racking torture; without any possibility of getting ease; without any possibility of moving God to pity by your cries (sic). How dismal will it be under these racking torments to know that you never, never shall be delivered from them; to have no hope; when after you have worn out the age of the sun, moon, and stars, without any rest day or night, or one minute's ease, yet you shall have no hope of ever being delivered; you shall know you are not one whit nearer the end of your torments; but the same groans, the same shrieks, the same doleful cries are incessantly to be made by you, and the smoke of your torment shall ascend up for ever and ever; your bodies, which have been burning and roasting all the while in glowing furnaces, yet shall not have been consumed, but will remain to roast through an eternity yet.—

I shall mention several good and important ends which will be obtained by the eternal punishment of the wicked. . ..

III. The saints will be made more sensible how great their salvation is. When they shall see how great the misery is from which God has saved them, and how great the difference he hath made between their state and the state of others who were by nature, and perhaps by practice, no more sinful and ill-deserving than they, it will give them a sense of the wonderfulness of God's grace. . . . The view of the misery of the damned will double the ardor of the love and gratitude of the saints in heaven.

IV. The sight of hell-torments will excite the happiness of the saints for ever; it will make them more sensible of their own happiness; it will give them a more lively relish of it! Oh, it will make them sensible how happy they are!—

When they shall see how miserable others of their fellow creatures are—when they shall see the smoke of their torment and the raging flames of their burning, and shall hear their shrieks and cries, and consider that they in the mean time are in the most blissful state, and shall surely be in it to all eternity, how they will rejoice!. . . How joyfully they will sing to God and the Lamb when they behold this!—

So long as this remains the orthodox view of the fate reserved for a majority of the human race, so long as to doubt the reality of such a Deity is to incur the suspicion of atheism, it will be difficult for men to yield the intellectual figment of "free-will" for the logic of necessity. True, the doctrine of predestination, which teaches that "by the decree of God, and for the manifestation of his glory, some men and angels are predestined unto everlasting life, and others foreordained to everlasting death," still stands in many a creed; but most men do not suspect its existence; it is rarely if ever preached at the present day. Otherwise unable to reconcile eternal torture with an ideal of divine justice, probably the faith of ninety-nine out of every hundred persons is that each human being possesses a perfect liberty of choice, and undetermined volition.