intense cold when heat from heaven flows in, and then the infernal inhabitants shiver like those who are seized with a cold fever." The hells are everywhere—under mountains, rocks, plains, and valleys. In the milder hells there appear to be cities of rude huts; in the huts are infernal spirits, engaged in continual quarrels, enmities, blows, and fightings; in the streets and lanes robberies and depredations are committed. In other hells there are forests, or deserts, or ragged rocks, or ruins as of burned cities.
Christian preachers and writers of the present time do not agree as to the nature of hell's torments. Many of them are coming to attach a figurative meaning to the biblical descriptions of hell, and seem as loath as their predecessors were eager to dwell upon the subject. In the Fortnightly Review for January, 1876, Lionel A. Tollemache says, "The wiser among us are seeking to drop hell out of the Bible as quietly, and about as logically, as we already contrive to disregard the plain texts forbidding Christians to go to law, and Christian women to plait their hair." Canon Farrar, in a series of sermons, has emphatically declared his disbelief in a hell of material and everlasting fire.
That widely known book Letters from Hell describes the place of torment as a country where the wicked are impelled to continually follow the same pursuits as in life; whatever they wish for is at once provided, amusements of all sorts are indulged in, but everything is empty and unreal, they are possessed by a constant hunger for pleasure which is never satisfied, tormented by memories of their lives on earth, driven from one thing to another to escape threatened misery, always on the verge of despair, and never by their feverish activity achieving even forgetfulness.
The Roman Catholic Church now, as always, holds that there are material torments in hell. The idea of hell which prevailed in Europe in the middle ages was that taught by the Catholic Church, which was practically the only form of Christianity at that time. An extremely realistic picture of hell is drawn in a Catholic tract, by the Rev. J. Furniss, C. S. S. R., published not long ago, with high ecclesiastical indorsement, "for children and young persons" in England and America. It is entitled The Sight of Hell, and describes little children turning and twisting in red-hot ovens, and screaming to come out.
The following statement of Catholic doctrine concerning hell is abridged from A Catholic Dictionary, by Addis and Arnold. Hell may be defined as the place and state in which the devils and such human beings as die in enmity with God suffer eternal torments. Theologians divide the punishments of the damned into that of loss and that of sense. The former is the deprivation of the vision of God. The devils and disembodied spirits of the damned suffer from material fire. The lost are afflicted also by
