XXVIII.  HELL.

Hell is a place and state utterly unknown to any in this visible world, excepting the souls of men; nor shall any for ever be capable of understanding the miseries thereof, save souls and fallen angels.

Now I think as the joys of heaven stand not only in speculation or in beholding of glory, but in a sensible enjoyment and unspeakable pleasure which these glories will yield to the soul; so the torments of hell will not stand in the present lashes and strokes which by the flames of eternal fire God will scourge the ungodly with; but the torments of hell stand much, if not in the greatest part of them, in those deep thoughts and apprehensions which souls in the next world will have of the nature and occasion of sin, of God, and of separation from him—­of the eternity of those miseries, and of the utter impossibility of their help, ease, or deliverance for ever.  Oh, damned souls will have thoughts that will clash with glory, clash with justice, clash with law, clash with themselves, clash with hell, and with the everlastingness of misery.

Miseries as well as mercies sharpen and make quick the apprehensions of the soul.  Behold Spira in his book, Cain in his guilt, and Saul with the witch of Endor, and you shall see men ripened, men enlarged and greatened in their fancies, imaginations, and apprehensions, though not about God and heaven and glory, yet about their loss, their misery, their woe, and their hell.

A man may endure to touch the fire with a short touch, and away; but to dwell with everlasting burnings, that is fearful.  Oh then, what is dwelling with them and in them for ever and ever?  We use to say, “Light burdens carried far are heavy:”  what then will it be to bear that burden, that guilt, that the law and the justice and the wrath of God will lay upon the lost soul for ever?  Now tell the stars, now tell the drops of the sea, and now tell the blades of grass that are spread upon the face of all the earth, if thou canst; and yet sooner mayest thou do this than count the thousands of millions of thousands of years that a damned soul shall lie in hell!  Suppose every star that is now in the firmament was to burn by himself one by one, a thousand years apiece, would it not be a long while before the last of them was burnt out? and yet sooner might that be done than the damned soul be at the end of punishment.

He that has lost his soul has lost himself.  He is, as I may say, now out of his own hands; he has lost himself, his soul self, his own self, his whole self, by sin and wrath; and hell hath found him.  He is now no more at his own dispose, but at the dispose of justice, of wrath and hell.  He is committed to prison, to hell prison, there to abide, not at pleasure, not as long and as little time as he will, but the term appointed by his Judge; nor may he there choose his own affliction, neither for manner, measure, or continuance.  It is God that will spread the fire and brimstone under him, and it is God himself that will blow the fire.  Isa. 30:33.