One theory of future punishment is, that our globe will become a penal orb of fire, and the wicked with material bodies, miraculously preserved by Omnipotence, will burn forever in it.  But what is this compared with the suffering soul?  The spirit itself, thus alienated from God’s purity and conscious that it is, wicked, and knowing that it is wicked, becomes an “orb of fire.”  “It is,”—­says John Howe, who was no fanatic, but one of the most thoughtful and philosophic of Christians,—­“it is a throwing hell into hell, when a wicked man comes to hell; for he was his own hell before."[3]

It must ever be borne in mind, that the principal source and seat of future torment will be the sinner’s sin.  We must never harbor the thought, or fall into the notion, that the retributions of eternity are a wanton and arbitrary infliction upon the part of God.  Some men seem to suppose, or at any rate they represent, that the woes of hell are a species of undeserved suffering; that God, having certain helpless and innocent creatures in His power, visits them with wrath, in the exercise of an arbitrary sovereignty.  But this is not Christ’s doctrine of endless punishment.  There is no suffering inflicted, here or hereafter, upon any thing but sin,—­unrepented, incorrigible sin,—­and if you will show me a sinless creature, I will show you one who will never feel the least twinge or pang through all eternity.  Death is the wages of sin.  The substance of the wretchedness of the lost will issue right out of their own character.  They will see their own wickedness steadily and clearly, and this will make them miserable.  It will be the carrying out of the same principle that operates here in time, and in our own daily experience.  Suppose that by some method, all the sin of my heart, and all the sins of my outward conduct, were made clear to my own view; suppose that for four-and-twenty hours continuously I were compelled to look at my wickedness intently, just as I would look intently into a burning furnace of fire; suppose that for this length of time I should see nothing, and hear nothing, and experience nothing of the world, about me, but should be absorbed in the vision of my own disobedience of God’s good law, think you that (setting aside the work of Christ) I should be happy?  On the contrary, should I not be the most wretched of mortals?  Would not this self-knowledge be pure living torment?  And yet the misery springs entirely out of the sin.  There is nothing arbitrary or wanton in the suffering.  It is not brought in upon me from the outside.  It comes out of myself.  And, while I was writhing under the sense and power of my transgressions, would you mock me, by telling me that I was a poor innocent struggling in the hands of omnipotent malice; that the suffering was unjust, and that if there were any justice in the universe, I should be delivered from it?  No, we shall suffer in the future world only