Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/513

"A dungeon horrible, on all sides round,
As one great furnace flamed; yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible" (i, 61-63).

It is swept by "a fiery deluge, fed with ever-burning sulphur unconsumed." Besides a burning lake, it contains land or "firm brimstone"—that is, "if it were land that ever burned with solid, as the lake with liquid fire." From a hill on this land is dug ore of gold and other metals, which furnish the building materials for the magnificent palace Pandemonium, the high capital of Satan and his peers. In the second book are mentioned "four infernal rivers, that disgorge into the burning lake their baleful streams." Far away was Lethe, the river of oblivion, and "beyond this flood a frozen continent lies dark and wild, beat with perpetual storms of whirlwind and dire hail." Thither at intervals all the damned are brought to be tormented by extremes of heat and cold (ii, 597-601). When Satan, starting out to discover the earth, reaches the bounds of hell, he finds "thrice threefold the gates—three folds were brass, three iron, three of adamantine rock; impenetrable, impaled with circling fire, yet unconsumed." The teaching of the Church of England in Milton's time did not differ much from that of the Dissenters. Jeremy Taylor devotes two chapters to deliberately recounting the most atrocious cruelties recorded in history, and asserts that they will be surpassed by the tortures in store for the wicked. A few instances will suffice:

Alexander, the son of Hyrcanus, caused eight hundred to be crucified, and while they were yet alive caused their wives and children to be murdered before their eyes, that so they might not die once, but many deaths. This rigor shall not be wanting in hell. . . . Mezentius tied a living body to the dead until the putrefied exhalations of the dead had killed the living. . . . What is this in respect of hell, when each body of the damned is more loathsome and unsavory than a million of dead dogs? . . . We are amazed to think of the inhumanity of Phalaris, who roasted men alive in his brazen bull. That was a joy in respect of that fire of hell. . . . The torment . . . comprises as many torments as the body of man has joints, sinews, arteries, etc., being caused by that penetrating and real fire of which this temporal fire is but a painted fire.^[1]

The Puritans in America were no less emphatic in their depictions of hell than the parent stock in England. Many are the passages in the sermons of that stanch New England divine, Jonathan Edwards, devoted to setting forth the agonies of eternal punishment. The following extract is typical not only of Edwards, but also of his contemporaries:

Imagine yourself to be cast into a fiery oven, or a great furnace, where your pain would be as much greater than that occasioned by accidentally touching a

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1. Contemplations on the State of Man, Book II, chapters vi, vii.