'Give us a millstone,' say the damned, 'as large as the whole earth, and so wide in circumference as to touch the sky all around and let a little bird come once in a hundred thousand years and pick off a small particle of the stone, not larger than the tenth part of a grain of millet, and after another hundred thousand years let him come again, so that in ten hundred thousand years he would pick off as much as a grain of millet, we wretched sinners would desire nothing but that the stone might have an end, and thus our pains also; yet even that cannot be.'**
* Summæ Suppl. qu 97.
** Quoted in Hagenbach's History of Doctrines, 210, vol.
ii., p. 152
The work of Father Pinamonti, entitled Hell Opened to Christians, has been for over two hundred years one of the most popular among Catholic Christians. It has also circulated among Protestants. An English version, with horrible pictures of the torments of the damned, has gone through many editions. We recommend its purchase to those who complain of the illustrations in the Freethinker, or who desire to see how savage the Christian religion is at bottom. The Christian Father of course accepts the literal meaning of hell fire. He says (p. 28): "Every one that is damned will be like a lighted furnace, which has its own flames in itself; all the filthy blood will boil in the veins, the brains in the skull, the heart in the breast, the bowels within the unfortunate body, surrounded with an abyss of' fire out of which it cannot escape."
The Sight of Hell, by the Rev. J. Fumiss, C.S.S.R., is another popular work issued "permissu superiorum" among "Books for Children and Young Persons." A more atrocious composition it is difficult to conceive. The agony is piled on as though the imagination of the writer revelled in the description of torture. One specimen, a mild one, will suffice:—
Perhaps at this moment, seven o'clock in the evening, a child is just going into Hell. To-morrow evening at seven o'clock, go and knock at the gates of Hell and ask what the child is doing. The devils will go and look. Then they will come back again and say, the child is burning! Go in a week and ask what the child is doing; you will get the same answer—it is burning! Go in a year and ask, the same answer comes—it is burning! Go in a million of years and ask the same question; the answer is just the same—it is burning! So if you go for ever and ever, you will always get the same answer—it is burning in the fire!
I declare I would rather put into the hands of any young child Boccaccio's Decameron, or any of the works put on the Roman Index Librorum Prohibitorum, with which I am acquainted, than this pious work by a Christian Father.
Protestantism did nothing to lighten the realm of outer darkness. Rather, by its repudiation of the priest-serving doctrine of purgatory, it rendered more glaring the contrast between the condition of the saved and that of the non-elect. Calvin asks: "How is it that the fall of Adam involves so many nations, with their infant children, to eternal death without remedy, unless that it so seemed meet to God?" The same holy Christian says of the damned: "For ever harassed with a dreadful tempest, they shall feel themselves torn asunder by an angry God, and transfixed and penetrated by mortal stings, terrified by the thunderbolts of God, and broken by the weight of his hand, so that to sink into any gulf would be more tolerable than to stand for a moment in these terrors."
According to the Westminster Confession, ch. xxxiii.: "The wicked who know not God and obey not the gospel of Jesus Christ, shall be cast into eternal torments." And the Larger Catechism, A. 29, declares: "The punishments of sin in the world to come are everlasting separation from the comfortable presence of God, and most grievous torments in soul and body, without intermission, in hell fire forever." "They that have done good shall go into life everlasting; and they that have done evil into everlasting fire," is the doctrine of the Book of Common Prayer.
Bishop Jeremy Taylor, the prose poet of the Church of England, says in his discourse on the Pains of Hell*: "We are amazed at the inhumanity of Phalaris, who roasted men in his brazen bull: this was joy in respect of that fire of hell which penetrates the very entrails without consuming them." "Husbands shall see their wives, parents shall see their children, tormented before their eyes." Picture it, think of it, Christian, and then give praises to your demon God. The good, really good, bishop tells us the bodies of the damned shall be crowded together in hell like grapes in a wine press, which press one another till they burst. "Every distinct sense and organ shall be assailed with its own appropriate and most exquisite sufferings." Surely the creed is accursed which led so worthy a man as Taylor to paint with unction this description of the Pains of Hell.
* Contemplation of the State of Man, ch. 68.