Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/516

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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

"the worm which never dies"—i. e., by the anguish of remorse; they are doomed to endure the society of others reprobate like themselves, and they know that all hope is over. After the resurrection the body also is subject to torment. It is certain that hell is a definite place, but uncertain where. Many of the fathers and theologians have held that it is in the center of the earth. Origen and some who followed him have thought that the punishment of the wicked would not be eternal, but a council has defined that the punishment of hell lasts forever.

Mr. C. H. Spurgeon, the celebrated English Baptist, says, in a sermon on The Resurrection of the Dead:

There is a real fire in hell—a fire exactly like that which we have on earth, except that it will torture without consuming. When thou diest thy soul will be tormented alone in hell; but at the day of judgment thy body shall join thy soul, and then thou wilt have twin hells, body and soul together, each brimful of pain; thy soul sweating in its inmost pores drops of blood, and thy body, from head to foot, suffused with agony; not only conscience, judgment, memory, all tormented, but thy head tormented with racking pain, thine eyes starting from their sockets with sights of blood and woe; thine ears tormented with horrid noises; thy heart beating high with fever; thy pulse rattling at an enormous rate in agony; thy limbs cracking in the fire, and yet unburned; thyself put in a vessel of hot oil, pained, yet undestroyed.

Heine's Reisebilder contains a witty caricature of the orthodox hell, in which his satirical genius has free play.

The Presbyterian Confession of Faith teaches that the punishment of sin shall be separation from God, "and most grievous torments of soul and body, without intermission, in hell-fire forever."

That Unknown Country, a large octavo volume published in 1889, contains fifty chapters, each contributed by a living theologian as his views concerning punishment after death. These statements contain little description of the torments of hell; they are devoted mainly to discussing whether or no any of the condemned can shorten their term of punishment by repentance after death, and whether hell may not end with either the final salvation or annihilation of all the wicked. In this book Bishop Fowler, of the Methodist Episcopal Church, says that the popular conception of hell should be freed from the physical flames to be correct. Rev. Chauncey Giles (Swedenborgian) compares hell to an asylum for the incurably insane. Rev. Edward Everett Hale says, "No Unitarian supposes that life after death is limited in any way, so that one place in the universe can be mapped off as heaven, and another place mapped off as hell." Dr. A. A. Miner (Universalist) maintains that "punishment after death for the sins of this life is not taught in the Word of God." C. W. Pritchard, minister in the Friends' Church, Chicago, says, "Heaven is