Page:Thinkwellonit.pdf/43

 worldly pride: this is the end of all carnal pleasure. ''Oh! how horrid a thing it is to fall into the hands of the living God!'' Heb. x. 31.

ONSIDER, that as it is said in holy writ, that neither eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man what God has prepared for those that serve him, 1 Cor. ii. 9. So we may truly say with regard to hell's torments, that no mortal tongue can express them, nor heart conceive them. Beatitude, according to divines, is a perfect and never-ending state, comprising at once all that is good, without any mixture of evil. If, then, damnation be opposite to beatitude, it must needs be an everlasting deluge of all that is evil, without the least mixture of good, without the least alloy of ease, without the least glimpse of comfort; a total privation of all happiness and a chaos of all misery.

2. Consider, more in particular, what damnation is, and how many and how great the miseries it involves. A dying life, or rather a living death; a darksome prison; a loathsome dungeon; a binding hand and foot in eternal chains, and a land of horror and misery; a lake of fire and brimstone; a bottomless pit; devouring flames; a serpent ever gnawing; a worm that never dies; a body always burning and never consumed; a feeling always fresh for suffering; a thirst never extinguished; perpetual weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth. No other company but devils and damned wretches, all hating and cursing one another; all hating and cursing God; spirits always in an agony, and sick to death, yet never meeting with this death, which they so much