any sage
philosophers blushing in red hot fires with their deluded pupils;
so many tragedians more tuneful in the expression of their own
sufferings; so many dancers tripping more nimbly from anguish than
ever before from applause."2 Hundreds of the most accredited
Christian writers have shown the same fiendish spirit. Drexel the
Jesuit, preaching of Dives, exclaims, "Instead of a lofty bed of
down on which he was wont to repose himself, he now lies frying in
the flames; his sparkling wine and delicious dainties are taken
from him; he is burnt up with thirst, and has nothing for his food
but smoke and sulphur." Jeremy Taylor3 says, in that discourse on
the "Pains of Hell" where he has lavished all the stores of his
matchless learning and all the wealth of his gorgeous imagination
in multiplying and adorning the paraphernalia of torture with
infinite accompaniments of unendurable pangs and insufferable
abominations, "We are amazed at the inhumanity of Phalaris, who
roasted men in his brazen bull: this was joy in respect of that
fire of hell which penetrates the very entrails without consuming
them;" "husbands shall see their wives, parents shall see their
children, tormented before their eyes;" "the bodies of the damned
shall be crowded together in hell like grapes in a wine press,
which press one another till they burst;" "every distinct sense
and organ shall be assailed with its own appropriate and most
exquisite sufferings." Christopher Love belying his name says of
the damned, "Their cursings are their hymns, howlings their tunes,
and blasphemies their ditties." Calvin writes, "Forever harassed
with a dreadful tempest, they shall feel themselves torn asunder
by an angry God, and transfixed and penetrated by mortal stings,
terrified by the thunderbolts of God, and broken by the weight of
his hand, so that to sink into any gulfs would be more tolerable
than to stand for a moment in these terrors." A living divine, Dr.
Gardiner Spring, declares, "When the omnipotent and angry God, who
has access to all the avenues of distress in the corporeal frame
and all the inlets to agony in the intellectual constitution,
undertakes to punish, he will convince the universe that he does
not gird himself for the work of retribution in vain;" "it will be
a glorious deed when He who hung on Calvary shall cast those who
have trodden his blood under their feet, into the furnace of fire,
where there shall be weeping and wailing and gnashi