HELL,
A place of punishment, where, we are told in Scripture, the wicked are to receive the reward of their evil deeds, after this life. In this sense, hell is the antithesis of HEAVEN.
Among the ancients hell was called by various names, Ταρταρος, Ταρταρᾶ, Tartarus, Tartara; Ἁδης, Hades, Infernus, Inferna, Inferi, &c.—The Jews, wanting a proper name for it, called it Gehenna, or Gehinnon, from a valley near Jerusalem, wherein was Tophet, or place where a fire was perpetually kept.
Divines reduce the torments of hell to two kinds, pœna damni, the loss and privation of the beatific vision; and pœna sensus, the horrors of darkness, with the continual pains of fire inextinguishable.
Most nations and religions have a notion of a hell. The hell of the poets is terrible enough: witness the punishment of Tityus, Prometheus, the Danæids, Lapithæ, Phlegyas, &c. described by Ovid, in his Metamorphosis. Virgil, after a survey of Hell, Æneid, lib. vi. declares, that if he had a hundred mouths and tongues, they would not suffice to recount all the plagues of the tortured. The New Testament represents hell as a lake of fire and brimstone; and a worm which dies not, &c. Rev. xx. 10, 14, &c. Mark ix. 43, &c. Luke xvi. 23, &c.
The Caffres are said to admit thirteen hells, and twenty-seven paradises; where every person finds a place suited to the degree of good or evil he has done.
There are two great points of controversy among writers, touching hell: the first, whether there be any local hell, any proper and specific place of torment by fire? the second, whether the torments of hell are to be eternal?
I. The locality of hell, and the reality of the fire thereof, have been controverted from the time of Origen. That father, in his treatise Περι Αρχαν, interpreting the scripture account metaphorically, makes hell to consist not in eternal punishments, but in the conscience of sinners, the sense of their guilt, and the remembrance of their past pleasures. St. Augustine mentions several of the same opinion in his time; and Calvin, and many of his followers, have embraced it in ours.
The retainers to the contrary opinion, who are much the greatest part of mankind, are divided as to situation, and other circumstances of this horrible scene. The Greeks, after Homer, Hesiod, &c. conceived hell, τοπον τινα ὐπο την γην μεγσν, &c. a large and dark place under the earth.—Lucian, de Luctu; and Eustathius, on Homer.
Some of the Romans lodged in the subterranean regions directly under the lake Avernus, in Campania, which they were led to from the consideration of the poisonous vapours emitted by that lake. Through a dark cave, near this lake, Virgil makes Æneas descend to hell.
Others placed hell under Tenarus, a promontory of Laconia; as being a dark frightful place, beset with thick woods, out of which there was no finding a passage. This way, Ovid says, Orpheus descended to hell. Others fancied the river or fountain of Styx, in Arcadia, the spring-head of hell, by reason the waters thereof were mortal.
But these are all to be considered as only fables of poets; who, according to the genius of their art, allegorizing and personifying every thing, from the certain death met withal in those places, took occasion to represent them as so many gates, or entering-places into the other world.
The primitive Christians conceiving the earth a large extended plain, and the heavens an arch drawn over the same, took hell to be a place in the earth, the farthest distant from the heavens; so that their hell was our antipodes.
Tertullian, De Anima, represents the Christians of his time, as believing hell to be an abyss in the centre of the earth: which opinion was chiefly founded on the belief of Christ’s descent into hades, hell, Matt. xii. 40.
Mr. Wiston has lately advanced a new opinion. According to him, the comets are to be conceived as so many hells, appointed in the course of their trajectories, or orbits, alternately to carry the damned into the confines of the sun, there to be scorched by his flames, and then to return them to starve in the cold, dreary, dark regions, beyond the orb of Saturn.
The reverend and orthodox Mr. T. Surnden, in an express Inquiry into the nature and place of Hell, not contented with any of the places hitherto assigned, contends for a new one. According to him, the sun itself is the local hell.
This does not seem to be his own discovery: it is probable he was led into it by that passage in Rev. xvi. 8, 9. Though it must be added, that Pythagoras seems to have the like view, in that he places hell in the sphere of fire; and that sphere in the middle of the universe. Add, that Aristotle mentions some of the Italic or Pythagoric school, who placed the sphere of fire in the sun, and even called it Jupiter’s Prison.—De Cælo, lib. ii.
To make way for his own system, Mr. Swinden undertakes to remove hell out of the centre of the earth, from these two considerations:—1. That a fund of fuel or sulphur, sufficient to maintain so furious and constant a fire, cannot be there supposed; and, 2. That it must want the nitrous particles in the air, to sustain and keep it alive. And how, says he, can such fire be eternal, when by degrees the whole substance of the earth must be consumed thereby?
It must not be forgot, however, that Tertullian had long ago obviated the former of these difficulties, by making a difference between arcanus and publicus ignis, secret and open fire: the nature of the first, according to him, is such, as that it not only consumes, but repairs what it preys upon. The latter difficulty is solved by St. Augustine, who alleges, that God supplies the central fire with air, by a miracle.
Mr. Swinden, however, proceeds to shew, that the central parts of the earth are possessed by water rather than fire; which he confirms by what Moses says of water under the earth, Exod. xx. from Psalm xxiv. 2, &c.
As a further proof, he alleges, that there would want room in the centre of the earth, for such an infinite host of inhabitants as the fallen angels and wicked men.
Drexelius, we know, has fixed the dimensions of hell to a German cubic mile, and the number of the damned to an hundred thousand millions: De Damnator, Carcer, &c. Rogo. But Mr. Swinden thinks he need not to have been so sparing in his number, for that there might be found an hundred times as many; and that they must be insufferably crowded in any space he could allow them on our earth. It is impossible, he concludes, to stow such a multitude of spirits in such a scanty apartment, without a penetration of dimensions, which, he doubts, in good philosophy, even in respect of spirits: “If it be (he adds,) why God should prepare, i. e. make, a prison for them, when they might all have been crowded together into a baker’s oven.” p. 206.
His arguments for the sun’s being the local hell are: 1. Its capacity. Nobody will deny the sun spacious enough to receive all the damned conveniently; so that there will be no want of room. Nor will fire be wanting, if we admit of Mr. Swinden’s argument against Aristotle, whereby he demonstrates, that the sun is hot, p. 208, et seq. The good man is “filled with amazement to think what Pyrenian mountains of sulphur, how many Atlantic oceans of scalding bitumen, must go to maintain such mighty flames as those of the sun; to which our Ætna and Vesuvius are mere glow-worms.” p. 137.
2. Its distance and opposition to the empyreum, which has usually been looked upon as the local heaven: such opposition is perfectly answerable to that opposition in the nature and office of a place of angels and devils, of elect and reprobate, of glory and horror, of hallelujahs and cursings; and the distance quadrates well with Dives seeing Abraham afar off, and the great gulph between them; which this author takes to be the solar vortex.
3. That the empyreum is the highest, and the sun the lowest place of the creation; considering it as the centre of our system; and that the sun was the first part of the visible world created; which agrees with the notion of its being primarily intended or prepared to receive the angels, whose fall he supposes to have immediately preceded the creation.
4. The early and almost universal idolatry paid to the sun; which suits well with the great subtilty of that spirit, to entice mankind to worship his throne.
II. As to the eternity of hell torments, we have Origen again at the head of those who deny it; it being the doctrine of that writer, that not only men, but devils themselves, after a suitable course of punishment, answerable to their respective crimes, shall be pardoned and restored to heaven.—De civit. Dei. l. xxi. c. 17. The chief principle Origen went upon was this, that all punishments was emendatory; applied only to painful medicines, for the recovery of the patient’s health. And other objections, insisted on by modern authors, are the disproportion between temporary crimes and eternal punishments, &c.
The scripture phrases for eternity, as is observed by Archbishop Tillotson, do not always import an infinite duration: thus, in the Old Testament, for ever often signifies only for a long time; particularly till the end of the Jewish dispensation: thus in the epistle of Jude, ver. 7, the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are said to be set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire; that is, of a fire that was not extinguished till those cities were utterly consumed. So one generation is said to come, &c. but the earth endureth for ever.
In effect, Mr. Le Clerc notes, that there is no Hebrew word which properly expresses eternity: עולם gnolam, only imports a time whose beginning or end is not known; and is accordingly used in a more or less extensive sense, according to the thing treated of.
Thus when God says, concerning the Jewish laws, that they must be observed לעולם legnolam, for ever, we are to understand as long a space as we should think fit; or a space whose end was unknown to the Jews before the coming of the Messiah. All general laws, and such as do not regard particular occasions, are made for ever, whether it be expressed in those laws, or not; which yet is to be understood in such a manner, as if the sovereign power could no way change them.
Archbishop Tillotson, however, argues very strenuously, that where hell torments are spoken of, the words are to be understood in the strict sense of infinite duration; and what he esteems a peremptory decision of the point is, that the duration of the punishment of the wicked is in the very same sentence expressed by the very same word which is used for the duration of the happiness of the righteous, which all agree to be eternal. “These, speaking of the wicked, shall go away εις ηολασιν ονεωνιον, into eternal punishment; but the righteous, εις ζωην αιωνι, into life eternal.”
Oldham, in his “Satires upon the Jesuits,” alludes to their “lying legends,” and the numerous impositions they practised on the credulous. The following lines are quoted from these legendary miracles, noticed under the article Legend, and the amours of the Virgin Mary are narrated in vol. ii. under the article Religious Nouvellete:—
Tell, how blessed Virgin to come down was seen,
Like playhouse punk descending in machine,
How she writ billet-doux and love discourse,
Made assignations, visits, and amours;
How hosts distrest, her smock for banner wore,
Which vanquished foes!
——How fish in conventicles met,
And mackerel were the bait of doctrine caught;
How cattle have judicious hearers been!
How consecrated hives with bells were hung,
And bees kept mass, and holy anthems sung!
How pigs to the rosary kneel’d, and sheep were taught
To bleat Te Deum and Magnificat;
How fly-flap, of church-censure houses rid
Of insects, which at curse of fryar died.
How ferrying cowls religious pilgrims bore
O’er waves, without the help of sail or oar;
How zealous crab the sacred image bore,
And swam a catholic to the distant shore.
With shams like these the giddy rout mislead,
Their folly and their superstition feed.
These are all extravagant fictions in the “Golden legend.” Among other gross and equally absurd impositions to deceive the mob, Oldham also attacks them for certain publications on topics not less singular. The tales he has recounted, says Oldham, are only baits for children like toys at a fair; but they have their profounder and higher matters for the learned and the inquisitive.
One undertakes by scales of miles to tell
The bounds, dimensions, and extent of hell;
How many German leagues that realm contains!
How many hell each year expends
In coals, for roasting Hugonots and friends!
Another frights the rout with useful stories
Of wild chimeras, limbos, Purgatories!
Where bloated souls in smoky durance hung
Like a Westphalia gammon or neat’s tongue,
To be redeemed with masses and a song.
Topographical descriptions of Hell, Purgatory, and even Heaven, were once favourite researches among certain orthodox and zealous defenders of the papish church, who exhausted their materials in fabricating a hell to their own ideas, or for their particular purpose. There is a treatise of Cardinal Bellarmin, a jesuit, on Purgatory, wherein he appears to possess all the knowledge of a land-measurer among the secret tracts and formidable divisions of “the bottomless pit.” This jesuit informs us that there are beneath the earth four different places, or a place divided into four parts; the deepest of which is hell: it contains all the souls of the damned, where will be also their bodies after the resurrection, and likewise all the demons. The place nearest hell is purgatory, where souls are purged, or rather where they appease the anger of God by their sufferings. The same fires and the same torments, he says, are alike in both places, the only difference between hell and purgatory consisting in their duration. Next to purgatory is the limbo of those infants who die without having received the sacrament; and the fourth place is the limbo of the Fathers; that is to say, of those just men who died before the death of Christ. But since the days of the Redeemer this last division is empty, like an apartment to let. A later Catholic theologist, the famous Tillemont, condemns all the illustrious pagans to the eternal torments of hell! because they lived before the time of Jesus, and, therefore, could not be benefited by the redemption! Speaking of young Tiberius, who was compelled to fall on his own sword, Tillemont adds, “Thus by his own hand he ended his miserable life, to begin another, the misery of which will never end!” Yet history records nothing bad of this prince. Jortin observes, that he added this reflection in his later edition, so that the good man as he grew older grew more uncharitable in his religious notions. It is in this matter too that the Benedictine editor of Justin Martyr speaks of the illustrious pagans. This father, after highly applauding Socrates, and a few more who resembled him, inclines to think that they are not fixed in hell. But the Benedictine editor takes infinite pains to clear the good father from the shameful imputation of supposing that a virtuous pagan might be saved as well as a Benedictine monk[[52]]!
The adverse party, who were either philosophers or reformers, received all such information with great suspicion. Anthony Cornelius, a lawyer in the 16th century, wrote a small tract, which was so effectually suppressed, as a monster of atheism, that a copy is now only to be found in the hands of the curious. This author ridiculed the absurd and horrid doctrine of infant damnation, and was instantly decried as an atheist, and the printer prosecuted to his ruin! Cœlius Secundus Curio, a noble Italian, published a treatise De Amplitudine beati regno Dei, to prove that heaven has more inhabitants than hell, or in his own phrase, that the elect are more numerous than the reprobate. However we may incline to smile at these works, their design was benevolent. They were the first streaks of the morning-light of the Reformation. Even such works assisted mankind to examine more closely, and hold in greater contempt, the extravagant and pernicious doctrines of the domineering papistical church.