‘The sorrows of death compassed me,’ sings the Psalmist, and ’the pains of hell gat hold upon me; I found trouble and sorrow.’  What, you may well ask, were those pains of hell that gat such hold of David while yet he was a living and unreprobated man?  Was it not too strong language to use about any earthly experience, however terrible, to call it the pains of hell?  Ask that man whose sin has found him out what he thinks the pains of hell were in David’s case, and he will tell you that remorse—­unsoftened, unsweetened, unquenchable remorse—­is hell; at any rate, it is hell upon earth; and till he confessed his sin it was David’s hell.  Sin taken up and laid by God’s hand on the sinner’s conscience, that makes that sinner’s conscience hell.  And, then, do we not read that Jehovah laid on our Surety the sin of us all till He was three hours in hell for us, and came out of it, as Rutherford says, with the keys of hell at His proud girdle?  And it is with those captured keys that He now unlocks the true hell-gate in every guilty sinner’s conscience.

   ’He comes the prisoners to relieve
      In Satan’s bondage held;
   The gates of brass before Him burst,
      The iron fetters yield.

. . . . . .

   We may not know, we cannot tell
      What pains He had to bear,
   But we believe it was for us
      He hung and suffered there.

   There was no other good enough
      To pay the price of sin;
   He only could unlock the gate
      Of heaven, and let us in.’

‘Myself am hell,’ cried out Satan, in his agony of pride and rage and remorse.

   ’Divines and dying men may talk of hell,
   But in my heart her several torments dwell.’

So you say of yourself, as you well may, after such a life as yours has been.  The Judge of all the earth would not be a just judge unless hell were already kindled in your heart.  But He who is a just God is also a Saviour, and He has with His own hand hung the key of hell and of your self-made bed in it at the girdle of Jesus Christ.  Go to Him to-night, and tell Him that you are in hell.  Tell Him that, like David, and very much, so far as you can understand, for David’s sins, you, too, are in the pains of very hell.  Cast yourself, like John in the Revelation, at His feet, and see if He does not say to you what He said through Nathan to David, and what He said Himself to John, and what He said to Lady Robertland, and what He said to Samuel Rutherford.  Cast yourself at His feet, and see if you do not get at His hands as rare an outgate and as wonderfully waled a cross as the very best of them got.