loosening of their joints."
Others were gnawed by worms or dragged with hooks, or hung on gallows,
or "soaked in baths of pitch and brimstone with a horrible stench,"
and, if they tried to escape, "the devils that met with them beat them
sorely with scourges and forks and other kinds of torments." But we
need not go back beyond our own days for instances of these torturing
imaginations. Many who are now living have had the night-fears of
their childhood made monstrous with stories of devils with red-hot
pincers to tear one's flesh and with red-hot nails to lacerate one's
back. I have a friend who loves to tell of the regular Sunday summons
of an ancient clergyman to his congregation to flee from the doom of
the condemned sinner whom he invariably pictured as "seated upon a
projecting crag over a lurid, hissing, moaning, raging sea of an
undone Eternity, calling out, 'The harvest is past and I am not
saved.'"

Why the human imagination did not revolt against such a painful orgy
of sensationalism long before it did, it is difficult to understand.
Lecky tells us that the only prominent theologian to dispute the
material fire of Hell throughout the Middle Ages was the Irishman
Johannes Scotus Erigena. All the others accepted it either in terror
or with delight. For who can question that men can obtain as fiercely
sensual a pleasure from inflicting the pains of Hell on their enemies
as from flogging children and slaves? One of the best known instances
of this--shall I say, hellish?--sensualism, is the appeal of
Tertullian to his fellow Christians not to attend public spectacles on
the ground that they would one day behold the far more glorious
spectacle of the heathen rolling in the flames of the Pit.

"What," he wrote, "shall be the magnitude of that scene? How
shall I wonder? How shall I laugh? How shall I rejoice? How
shall I triumph when I behold so many and such illustrious
kings, who were said to be mounted into heaven groaning with
Jupiter their god in the lowest darkness of Hell! Then shall
the soldiers who persecuted the name of Christ burn in more
cruel fire than any they had kindled for the saints....
Compared with such spectacles, with such subjects of triumph
as these, what can praetor or consul, quaestor or pontiff,
afford? And even now faith can bring them near, imagination
can depict them as present."

Thus, Hell became the poor man's consolation, the