ANCIENT AND MODERN IDEAS OF HELL. 497 



" A dungeon horrible, on all sides round, 

 As one great furnace flamed ; yet from those flames 

 No light, but rather darkness visible " (i, 61-63). 



It is swept by " a fiery deluge, fed with ever-burning sulphur nil- 

 consumed." Besides a burning lake, it contains land or "firm 

 brimstone " — that is, " if it were land that ever burned with solid, 

 as the lake with liquid fire." From a hill on this land is dug ore 

 of gold and other metals, which furnish the building materials 

 for the magnificent palace Pandemonium, the high capital of 

 Satan and his peers. In the second book are mentioned " four 

 infernal rivers, that disgorge into the burning lake their baleful 

 streams." Far away was Lethe, the river of oblivion, and " beyond 

 this flood a frozen continent lies dark and wild, beat with per- 

 petual storms of whirlwind and dire hail." Thither at intervals 

 all the damned are brought to be tormented by extremes of heat 

 and cold (ii, 597-601). When Satan, starting out to discover the 

 earth, reaches the bounds of hell, he finds " thrice threefold the 

 gates — three folds were brass, three iron, three of adamantine 

 rock ; impenetrable, impaled with circling fire, yet unconsumed." 

 The teaching of the Church of England in Milton's time did 

 not differ much from that of the Dissenters. Jeremy Taylor 

 devotes two chapters to deliberately recounting the most atrocious 

 cruelties recorded in history, and asserts that they will be sur- 

 passed by the tortures in store for the wicked. A few instances 

 will suffice : 



Alexander, the son of Hyrcanus, caused eight hundred to be crucified, and 

 while they were yet alive caused their wives and children to be murdered before 

 their eyes, that so they might not die once, but many deaths. This rigor shall 

 not be wanting in hell. . . . Mezentius tied a living body to the dead until the 

 putrefied exhalations of the dead had killed the living. . . . What is this in respect 

 of hell, when each body of the damned is more loathsome and unsavory than a 

 million of dead dogs ? . , . We are amazed to think of the inhumanity of Phalaris, 

 who roasted men alive in his brazen bull. That was a joy in respect of that fire 

 of hell. . . . The torment . . . comprises as many torments as the body of man 

 has joints, sinews, arteries, etc., being caused by that penetrating and real fire of 

 which this temporal fire is but a painted fire.* 



The Puritans in America were no less emphatic in their depic- 

 tions of hell than the parent stock in England. Many are the 

 passages in the sermons of that stanch New England divine, 

 Jonathan Edwards, devoted to setting forth the agonies of eternal 

 punishment. The following extract is typical not only of Ed- 

 wards, but also of his contemporaries : 



Imagine yourself to be cast into a fiery oven, or a great furnace, where your 

 pain would be as much greater than that occasioned by accidentally touching a 



* Contemplations on the State of Man, Book II, chapters vi, vii. 

 vol. xxxvii. — 36 



