The reader of Dante’s Inferno is always struck with the sincerity and realism of that poem.  Under the delineation of that luminous, and that intense understanding, hell has a topographic reality.  We wind along down those nine circles as down a volcanic crater, black, jagged, precipitous, and impinging upon the senses at every step.  The sighs and shrieks jar our own tympanum; and the convulsions of the lost excite tremors in our own nerves.  No wonder that the children in the streets of Florence, as they saw the sad and earnest man pass along, his face lined with passion and his brow scarred with thought, pointed at him and said:  “There goes the man who has been in hell.”  But how infinitely more solemn is the impression that is made by these thirteen short verses, of the sixteenth chapter of Luke’s gospel, from the lips of such a Being as Jesus Christ!  We have here the terse and pregnant teachings of one who, in the phrase of the early Creed, not only “descended into hell,” but who “hath the keys of death and hell.”  We have here not the utterances of the most truthful, and the most earnest of all human poets,—­a man who, we may believe, felt deeply the power of the Hebrew Bible, though living in a dark age, and a superstitious Church,—­we have here the utterances of the Son of God, very God, of very God, and we may be certain that He intended to convey no impression that will not be made good in the world to come.  And when every eye shall see Him, and all the sinful kindreds of the earth shall wail because of Him, there will not be any eye that can look into His and say:  “Thy description, O Son of God, was overdrawn; the impression was greater than the reality.”  On the contrary, every human soul will say in the day of judgment:  “We were forewarned; the statements were exact; even according to Thy fear, so is Thy wrath” (Ps. xc. 11).

But what is the lesson which we are to read by this clear and solemn light?  What would our merciful Redeemer have us learn from this passage which He has caused to be recorded for our instruction?  Let us listen with a candid and a feeling heart, because it comes to us not from an enemy of the human soul, not from a Being who delights to cast it into hell, but from a friend of the soul; because it comes to us from One who, in His own person and in His own flesh, suffered an anguish superior in dignity and equal in cancelling power to the pains of all the hells, in order that we, through repentance and faith, might be spared their infliction.

The lesson is this:  The man who seeks enjoyment in this life, as his chief end, must suffer in the next life; and he who endures suffering in this life, for righteousness’ sake, shall be happy in the next. “Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things; but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented.”