—­Our earthly fire again, no matter how fierce or widespread it may be, is always of a limited extent; but the lake of fire in hell is boundless, shoreless and bottomless.  It is on record that the devil himself, when asked the question by a certain soldier, was obliged to confess that if a whole mountain were thrown into the burning ocean of hell it would be burned up In an instant like a piece of wax.  And this terrible fire will not afflict the bodies of the damned only from without, but each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals.  O, how terrible is the lot of those wretched beings!  The blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast glowing and bursting, the bowels a red-hot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls.

—­And yet what I have said as to the strength and quality and boundlessness of this fire is as nothing when compared to its intensity, an intensity which it has as being the instrument chosen by divine design for the punishment of soul and body alike.  It is a fire which proceeds directly from the ire of God, working not of its own activity but as an instrument of Divine vengeance.  As the waters of baptism cleanse the soul with the body, so do the fires of punishment torture the spirit with the flesh.  Every sense of the flesh is tortured and every faculty of the soul therewith:  the eyes with impenetrable utter darkness, the nose with noisome odours, the ears with yells and howls and execrations, the taste with foul matter, leprous corruption, nameless suffocating filth, the touch with redhot goads and spikes, with cruel tongues of flame.  And through the several torments of the senses the immortal soul is tortured eternally in its very essence amid the leagues upon leagues of glowing fires kindled in the abyss by the offended majesty of the Omnipotent God and fanned into everlasting and ever-increasing fury by the breath of the anger of the God-head.

—­Consider finally that the torment of this infernal prison is increased by the company of the damned themselves.  Evil company on earth is so noxious that the plants, as if by instinct, withdraw from the company of whatsoever is deadly or hurtful to them.  In hell all laws are overturned—­there is no thought of family or country, of ties, of relationships.  The damned howl and scream at one another, their torture and rage intensified by the presence of beings tortured and raging like themselves.  All sense of humanity is forgotten.  The yells of the suffering sinners fill the remotest corners of the vast abyss.  The mouths of the damned are full of blasphemies against God and of hatred for their fellow sufferers and of curses against those souls which were their accomplices in sin.  In olden times it was the custom to punish the parricide, the man who had raised his murderous hand against his father, by casting him into the depths of the sea in a sack in which were placed a cock,