—­And then the voice of God was heard in that garden, calling His creature man to account:  and Michael, prince of the heavenly host, with a sword of flame in his hand, appeared before the guilty pair and drove them forth from Eden into the world, the world of sickness and striving, of cruelty and disappointment, of labour and hardship, to earn their bread in the sweat of their brow.  But even then how merciful was God!  He took pity on our poor degraded parents and promised that in the fullness of time He would send down from heaven One who would redeem them, make them once more children of God and heirs to the kingdom of heaven:  and that One, that Redeemer of fallen man, was to be God’s only begotten Son, the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, the Eternal Word.

—­He came.  He was born of a virgin pure, Mary the virgin mother.  He was born in a poor cowhouse in Judea and lived as a humble carpenter for thirty years until the hour of His mission had come.  And then, filled with love for men, He went forth and called to men to hear the new gospel.

—­Did they listen?  Yes, they listened but would not hear.  He was seized and bound like a common criminal, mocked at as a fool, set aside to give place to a public robber, scourged with five thousand lashes, crowned with a crown of thorns, hustled through the streets by the jewish rabble and the Roman soldiery, stripped of his garments and hanged upon a gibbet and His side was pierced with a lance and from the wounded body of our Lord water and blood issued continually.

—­Yet even then, in that hour of supreme agony, Our Merciful Redeemer had pity for mankind.  Yet even there, on the hill of Calvary, He founded the holy catholic church against which, it is promised, the gates of hell shall not prevail.  He founded it upon the rock of ages, and endowed it with His grace, with sacraments and sacrifice, and promised that if men would obey the word of His church they would still enter into eternal life; but if, after all that had been done for them, they still persisted in their wickedness, there remained for them an eternity of torment:  hell.

The preacher’s voice sank.  He paused, joined his palms for an instant, parted them.  Then he resumed: 

—­Now let us try for a moment to realize, as far as we can, the nature of that abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has called into existence for the eternal punishment of sinners.  Hell is a strait and dark and foul-smelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke.  The straitness of this prison house is expressly designed by God to punish those who refused to be bound by His laws.  In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in the gloomy yard of his prison.  Not so in hell.  There, by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles thick:  and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, saint Anselm, writes in his book on similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it.