gnashing of teeth, heard by those approaching from a distance; all these things have no analogies upon earth except what may be found in some vast insane asylum, where men bereft of reason are congregated in every stage of madness—from the raving maniac to the drivelling imbecile.
Wisdom is light; its absence is darkness. Heaven is a world of light; hell, a world of darkness. Think of a kingdom of darkness! a world without the silvery or golden rays of a sun, but lit by flames as from burning coals or sulphureous vapors, or by the wandering ignes fatui and ghastly blue lights of swamps and wildernesses. Such is hell. Some evil spirits are at times plunged in total darkness. Even comparatively good spirits, undergoing vastation or judgment in the world of spirits or intermediate state, are sometimes kept for a long time in utter darkness.
Is not the fear of the dark, which children and even grown persons instinctively feel, a correspondence?—an involuntary shrinking of the soul from what represents the evil and the false?
These poor souls in hell cannot be visited by the light of heaven. Its accompanying heat would torture them by being turned into intense cold, and its light would not be seen by them at all, but
