1. How great would be our horror, if the shrieks of the damned—if their groans and blasphemies could reach us! They roar like wild beasts; they accuse themselves of their sins; they bewail—they detest them. But it is too late; their tears but add new strength to the fire that torments them. O repentance of the damned! how rigorous art thou! but ah! how fruitless!
2. Never to see God! to be burning in flames for ever! the blood boiling in our veins, the marrow in our bones! to be trampled on by the devils! to have all that is hideous for ever before our eyes! to have rage, anguish, and despair eternally rooted in our heart, without comfort or mitigation! O what a life!
3. These wretches are outrageous at having had so many opportunities of saving themselves, and for having neglected them. The recollection of their past pleasure is one of their most sensible torments. But nothing more keenly gnaws them, than the impossibility of forgetting that God whom by their fault, they have miserably forfeited.
Go down in spirit into hell, and inquire of the damned what is it that has made them fall into it. Question them upon their present state, and learn of them to fear God and your own danger.
"Which of you can dwell with devouring flames."
Isaiah, xxxiii.
"The impious pass from one punishment to another—from the burnings of concupiscence to the flames of hell."
St. Augustine.
Seventh Day.—On the Eternal Torments of the Damned.
1. Can the wrath of God go farther than punishing pleasures which are so soon over, by tortures which will never have an end? To be miserable while ever God is God!—can any misery be like it? Is it not enough that the evils of the damned are extreme? Must they still, besides this, be eternal? To be hurt by the point of a pin, is trifling in itself; yet were this pain to last always, it would become insupportable: What shall it be then, &c.
2. O eternity! when a damned soul shall have shed tears enough to make up all the rivers and seas in the world, did he shed but one tear in every hundred years, he shall not be more advanced, after so many millions of ages, than if he had only just began to suffer. He must begin again, as if he had yet suffered nothing; and when he shall have begun as often as there are grains of sand on the seashore, or atoms in the air, or leaves on the trees, he shall still be as far off from the end of his sufferings as ever.