the judgment of the far greater part of Christians, who pretend to believe a hell, yet live on with so little apprehension and concern, for years together, in the guilt of mortal sin; in danger every moment of falling into this dreadful and everlasting fire, having no more than a hair's breadth, that is, the thin thread of an uncertain life, between their souls and a miserable eternity! Good God! deliver us from this unfortunate blindness; from this desperate folly and madness.
THE FIFTEENTH DAY.
On the interior pains of hell.
CONSIDER, that the fire of hell and all the rest of the exterior torments which are endured there, are terrible indeed; but no ways comparable to the interior pains of the soul: that Poena Damni, or eternal loss of God, and of all that is good: that extremity of anguish which follows from this loss; that rueful remorse of a bitter but fruitless repentance attended with everlasting despair and rage: that complication of all those racking tortures in the inward powers and faculties of the soul, are torments incomparably greater than any thing that can be suffered in the body.
2. Consider, in particular, that pain of loss, which, in the judgment of divines, is the greatest of all the torments of hell; though worldlings here have difficulties of conceiving how this can be. Alas! poor sinners, so weak is their notion of eternal goods, and so deeply are they immersed in the things of this world, amusing themselves with a variety of created objects, which divert their thoughts from God's sovereign goodness, that they cannot imagine, that the loss of God can be so great and dismal a torment, as the saints and servants of God, who are guided by better lights, all agree it is. But the case will be quite altered
