amid the tumult of passion and sinful pleasure utters these awful words : " You fool, you miserable wretch, if the lessons you were taught in the bright days of youth should be true, if there were in very deed a God, a hell, an eternity, what then, oh, what then!"
Voltaire, the notorious infidel, once received a letter from a friend, in which the latter asserted that he had succeeded in completely banishing from his mind all thought of hell, and all belief in the existence of such a place. Voltaire warmly congratulated him, but went on to say that he himself had not been equally fortunate. Nor did he ever succeed in banishing the fear of hell. When he lay upon his death-bed the thought of hell seized upon him with terrible force, and drove him to wild despair.
3. Verily there is a hell; but what is hell? Our poor human understanding can never grasp its full signification, much less can words describe it. The words of St. Paul: "Eye hath not seen," can be applied to hell in an inverted sense, and we can say: " Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man, what things God hath prepared for those who hate Him, and depart out of this life not in His love and grace, but in the state of mortal sin."
This only can we say, that hell is the place of the greatest and never-ending torture, of the greatest torture; all the expressions employed in Holy Scripture in reference to hell bear out this assertion, as for example: Hell is "a land of misery and darkness, where the shadow of death and no order, but everlasting horror dwelleth" (Job x. 22); or "He hath reserved (them) under darkness in everlasting chains"
