for ever, as long as God shall be God, without the least hope of ever seeing an end of them: oh! this it is, that is the greatest rack of the damned. Oh! Eternity! Eternity! How little do worldlings apprehend thee now! How terrible wilt thou be to them one day, when they shall find themselves ingulfed in thy bottomless abyss, there to be for ever the butt and mark of all the arrows of God's avenging justice!
2. Consider, if one short night seems so long and tedious to a poor sick man in a burning fever; if he tosses and turns, and no where finds rest; if he counts every hour, and with so much impatience longs for the morning, which yet will bring him but little relief or comfort: what must this dreadful night of eternity be, accompanied with all the interior and exterior torments of hell! No man in his senses would purchase a kingdom, at the rate of lying for ten years on a soft bed without coming off. Ah! what misery then must it be to be chained down to a bed of fire and brimstone, not for ten years only, nor yet for ten thousand times ten, but for as many hundred thousand millions of ages, as there are drops of water in the ocean, or atoms in the air: in a word, for an immense eternity.
3. Consider, and in order to conceive still better what this eternity is, imagine with thyself, that if any one of the damned were to shed but one single tear at the end of every thousand years, till he had shed tears enough to fill the sea; what an immense space of time would this require! The world has not yet lasted six thousand years; so that the first of all the damned would not have shed six tears. And yet, O dreadful eternity! the time will certainly come, when any one of those wretches that are now in hell, may be able with truth to say, that at the rate
