r men and women gnawing their
tongues and having flaming fire in their mouths. These were false
witnesses.

And in a certain other place there were pebbles sharper than swords
or any needle, red hot, and women and men in tattered and filthy
raiment, rolled about on them in punishment. These were the rich who
trusted in their riches and had no pity for orphans and widows and
despised the commandment of God.

And in another great lake full of boiling pitch and blood and mire
stood men and women up to their knees. These were the usurers and
those who take compound interest.

The noted preacher, scholar and president of Princeton College, Jonathan
Edwards, in his famous sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,"
put in forcible and picturesque language the religious and legal view of
punishment as vengeance:

They [sinners] deserve to be cast into hell; so that divine justice
never stands in the way, it makes no objection against God's using
His power at any moment to destroy them. Yea, on the contrary,
justice calls aloud for an infinite punishment on their sins. Divine
justice says of the tree that brings forth such grapes of Sodom,
"Cut it down, why cumbereth it the ground?" Luke xiii. 7. The sword
of divine justice is every moment brandished over their heads, and
it is nothing but the hand of arbitrary mercy, and God's mere will,
that holds it back.

They are now the objects of that very same anger and wrath of God,
that is expressed in the torments of hell: and the reason why they
do not go down to hell at each moment, is not because God, in whose
power they are, is not then very angry with them; as angry as He is
with many of those miserable creatures that He is now tormenting in
hell, and do there feel and bear the fierceness of His wrath. Yea,
God is a great deal more angry with great numbers that are now on
earth; yea, doubtless, with many that are now in this congregation,
that, it may be, are at ease and quiet, than He is with many of
those that are now in the flames of hell.

So that it is not because God is unmindful of their wickedness and
does not resent it, that He does not let loose His hand and cut them
off. God is not altogether such a one as themselves, though they
imagine Him to be so. The wrath of God burns against them; their
damnation does not slumber; th