wherewithal a man sinneth, by the same also shall he be punished." (Wisd. xi. 16.) " How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her." (Rev. xviii. 7.) The sight will be tormented with darkness. "The land of darkness, and the shadow of death." (Job x. 21.) What compassion should we feel for a poor man who remained shut up in a dark pit for the remainder of his life, for forty or fifty years! Hell is a pit, shut in on every side, in which no ray of the sun or any other light will ever enter. "Man .... shall never see light." (Ps. xlix. 20.) The fire which enlightens on earth, in hell will be altogether dark. "The voice of the Lord divideth the flames of fire." (Ps. xxix. 7.) Which expression S. Basil explains, of the Lord dividing the fire from the light, so that it will suffice to burn only, and not to illuminate; or as Albert the Great expresses it, " He will divide the glowing from the heat." The very smoke which leaves this fire will form that " blackness of darkness," which S. Jude says is reserved for ever for the wicked. (S. Jude 13.) S. Thomas Aquinas says, that there will be reserved for the wicked, light, " as much as suffices for men to see those things which torment them." They will see in that glimmer of light the ugliness of the other reprobates, and of the demons, who, to frighten them the more, will assume horrible forms.
The sense of smell will be tormented. What torment would it be, to be shut up in a room with a putrid corpse? " Their stink shall come up out of their carcases." (Isa. xxxiv. 3.) The lost will have to remain in the midst of so many millions of other lost ones, alive as to pain, but corpses from the odour which they emit.
But some foolish one may say, " If I go to hell, I shall not be alone." Wretched one I By how many the more there are in hell, by so much the more will they suffer. As S. Thomas Aquinas says, " There the society of the wretched will not lessen, but increase the misery;" they will suffer all the more, I say, from the smell, the cry, the confinement; since in hell they will be upon each other like sheep are penned up together in the winter time. "They live in hell like sheep." (Ps. xlix. 14.)
