It would be well for the damned if the body and soul in that sense should be destroyed so as to be annihilated. And the reason why both body and soul are mentioned is because the body has been partner with the soul in sin and, therefore, it shall share with it in punishment.

If men knew that they who live and die unrepenting, who lie burning in their lusts, shall one day burn in fire. If they but knew that they who can swallow kegs of wine and drink to excess shall one day drink drafts of brimstone in hell. If men knew that they who grind their teeth through hatred and indignation against the godly here shall one day gnash their teeth in hell hereafter. If men knew that they who oppress the people of God by persecution and haul them into prison now shall one day be dragged into an everlasting prison and hauled by devils into hell.

Therefore it is clear to every eye that the gospel is more backed with terror, and with the doctrines of hell and damnation, than the law ever was.

Now, it is God’s will that you should more fear sin than hell. As Anselm well said, “If hell were on one side, and sin on the other, you should more fear going into sin than into hell.” If man should find this place and hear the shrieking of the damned, and see the torments prepared for sinners, they would be more fearful of the place than sin that leads there. Therefore God, to prevent this also, conceals it.

This use Chrysostom makes of this point: if a man’s house were on fire, he would not inquire how it started, but how to quench it.

First, the wicked in hell have this loss. They are deprived of and banished from the favorable presence of God. And here Chrysostom said, “If there were a thousand worlds, the loss of the favor of one God is more than a thousand worlds.” It is the greatest torment of a damned man that he is without God. The presence of God makes heaven to be heaven. The absence of God makes hell more hell than it is. “Depart from me, you cursed.” This is the great torment of the damned, that they must depart from God and Jesus Christ forever.

“Let us go down to hell while we are alive that we may not go down to hell when we are dead.”

Second, wicked men will sin to all eternity; therefore their torments must be eternal. As long as there is sin in a man, the Lord will torment that man; for sin and punishment cannot be severed. Sin is like oil and God’s wrath like fire. As long as you cast oil on the fire, the fire cannot cease burning. As long as sin is in a man’s nature, a man cannot be free from suffering.

I have read in Virgil, a heathen poet, that he speaks of one Tytius who had a vulture every day gnawing in his liver; and in the night it was repaired and made up again that the vulture might feed on the liver next day. And this they made a resemblance of hell and the gnawing of conscience there. This vulture, your conscience, shall eat out your peace and torment you with the thoughts of terror, and this you shall have until time is no more. Now, put all these together: the God, the prison, the fire, and the worm eternal.

You know when friends part, though it is but for awhile, their very parting provokes tears; but if they part never to see each other on earth, what floods of sorrow does their parting cause? When you are dying, you are departing not for a time but forever. You bid them farewell, never to see them anymore, never

You know in the same act, the punishment is greatened or lessened according to the person against whom the act is done. If you give a blow to an ordinary man, this may only amount to some petty suit and some small fine to be paid; but if you give a blow to a prince, you may endure the rack or imprisonment for life, because the person is eminent against whom you offend.

3. Should man live forever, he would sin forever. And therefore, God seeing this disposition in man. He may justly damn man forever, though he sins but for a time.

Last, wicked men by sinning have lost an infinite good and opposed an infinite good. Therefore they must endure an infinite evil. Because the wicked despise the infinite grace and infinite mercy of a God, and the infinite merits of Christ, and the infinite tenders of grace from God, therefore they are justly involved into infinite punishment.

When you see a man drawn on a hurdle to the gallows, you imagine that man no ordinary thief or murderer, but some abominable traitor to the state. By the greatness of the punishment, you may guess the greatness of the fault.

Pliny, in one of his writings, said that nothing in the world will so soon quench fire as salt and blood, and therefore, in many countries, where they can get plenty of blood they will use salt and blood rather than water to quench their fire. If you cast blood on it, it will dampen it in a moment. Beloved, I only mention this for this end, that though there is fire in hell, yet get Christ’s blood, and I can assure you that it shall never consume you!

I have read a story of a young virgin who, being tempted by a lustful young man to the act of uncleanness (he being very earnest with her to commit that foul act), she gave him this answer, “If you will grant me one thing I desire, I will then satisfy your demand.” He told her he would. “Then,” said she, “I desire you would put your finger for a whole hour to burn in this candle.” “O” said the man, “that is unreasonable what you ask of me!” “It is true,” said she, “it is; but you ask me a request more unreasonable, to satisfy you in a thing for which I shall not only burn an hour, but burn forever in the unquenchable fire of hell.”

Let the fire of hell consume the fire of sin, and let the fire of hell make you avoid the fire of sin, for (to end this with the speech of Bernard) fiery sins will bring you into fiery torments.

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Richard Younge was a Calvinist well known for his view that this world was the hell of the godly, the next that of the ungodly. Like Shower and Vincent, he maintained that the pains of hell would be worse than the pangs of death and childbirth, scalding lead, drinks of gall and wormwood, griping of chest worms, fits of the stone, gout, and strangury: “Are these, and all other pains that can be named put together, but shadows, and flea-bitings to it?”

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Still, there was at least one mitigating factor in all this, namely, that the torments of the damned would be proportionate to their sins. While it was not much discussed, it was generally unquestioned.

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The body was, to the Calvinist Daniel Burgess, no mere adjunct to the soul but an essential part of the identity of the person. Thus punishment had to be meted out to the body as well as to the soul.

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in the contrasting symmetries of heaven and hell, just as the sufferings of the damned were increased by the vision of the joys of the blessed, so also the joys of the torments of the wicked.

Forward
The subject before us is one that needs stressing in these days. The great majority of our pulpits are silent upon it, and the fact that it has so little place in modern preaching is one of the signs of the times, one of the many evidences that the Apostasy must be near at hand.

Foreword
It is the deepening conviction of the writer that what is most needed today is a wide proclamation of those truths which are the least acceptable to the flesh. What is needed today is a scriptural setting forth of the character of God—His absolute sovereignty, His ineffable holiness, His inflexible justice, His unchanging veracity. What is needed today is a scriptural setting forth of the condition of the natural man—his total depravity, his spiritual insensibility, his inveterate hostility to God, the fact that he is “condemned already” and that the wrath of a sin-hating God is even now abiding upon him.

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Not only will the lost be tormented in flames, but their anguish will be immeasurably increased by a sight of the redeemed being “comforted.” Then shall they see the happy portion of the blest which they despised, preferring as they did the pleasures of sin for a season. And how the retention of “memory” will further augment their sufferings!

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That God shall punish every rebel against Himself is required by the very perfections of His high sovereignty. It is but meet that He should display His governmental supremacy. The creature has dared to assert its independency: the subject has risen up in arms against his King; therefore, the right of God’s throne must be vindicated—“I know that the Lord is greater than all gods: for in the thing wherein they dealt proudly He is above them” (Ex. 18:11). When Pharaoh dared to pit himself against Jehovah, God manifested His authority by destroying him at the Red Sea. Another king He turned into a beast*, to make him know that the Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men. So, when the history of this world is wound up, God will make a full and final manifestation of His sovereign majesty.

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Think it not strange that God should deal so severely with you, or that the wrath you shall suffer shall be so great. For great as it is, it is no greater than the mercy which you now despise. The love of God, His marvellous grace in sending His own Son to die for sinners, is every whit as great and wonderful as this inexpressible wrath. You have refused to accept Christ as the Saviour from the wrath to come, you have despised God’s dying love, why then should you not suffer wrath as great as that grace and love which you have rejected? Does it still seem incredible that God should so harden His heart against a poor sinner as to bear down upon him with infinite power and merciless wrath?

If indeed the law is not immutable, if it were capable of being intermitted or relaxed, then it follows that there was no legal necessity demanding the atonement of Jesus Christ; and if there existed not an absolute necessity for such a sacrifice, then both justice and mercy were outraged on Calvary. We may rest assured that if atonement could have been made without such a sacrifice, it would so have been made. Nothing so demonstrates the absolute immutability of the law, as the atonement of our Lord.

If there is no force in the universe except what we call law, where is God? Does not this thought banish him from his own universe? and if God is simply law personified, then is he not imprisoned within it, and reduced to blind force? But if God is the power behind the law, if law is simply his mode of action, and his method of procedure, as science demonstrates, then sin cannot be “its own punishment,” nor law its own “executor.” The truth is, laws do not “reign,” neither do they “govern”; they only show us how a “Somewhat” or a “Some One” behind them rules and governs the world. “The universe,” says Dr. Carpenter, “is not governed by Law, but according to Law.”

If we suppose that God is indifferent as to the sanctions of his law, that he will relax the penalty, or remit it altogether; that he will overlook the sins of the transgressor, the guilt and demerit of the wrongdoer, and allow his law to be violated with impunity, we take correspondingly low and derogatory views of his character.

Every moral act of man, good or bad, has infinite bearings, and in this sense it is infinite. It becomes a factor of endless causation, and therefore infinite in the same sense that endless punishment is infinite, and for the same reason.

Such strange phenomena, such seemingly infinite resources of power, welling up from the nether depths and unexplored chambers of soul-being, are the unmistakable signs and evidences of the startling fact that far down beneath the zone of human consciousness, are armories of hidden weapons; regiments of untold potentialities; slumbering engines and dynamos of unmeasured energies; smouldering fires of the most vehement intensities; and pent-up forces, more minacious than thunderbolts, all unknown to conscious life and being. The illimitable capacities and possibilities of human nature have never yet been calculated; nor is there a datum from which such calculation can be made. The old adage, “That a man may become an angel in moral beauty, or a devil in moral baseness,” is as literally true as it is hoary with age.