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]]!