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it were, a vast cesspool into which all the impurities of the world, like the contents of so many teeming sewers, are poured. Since the bodies of the damned are in a state of never-ending decay, a fetid stench will arise from them as from the bodies of a mighty host slaughtered and abandoned on the field of battle. Packed in like sheep in a pen, unable to move a muscle to alleviate their pain, handcuffed to the decaying body of a fellow-sufferer and saturated through and through with a living flame that devours but does not consume, tortures but does not kill! Oh, let me look at a burning building, and ask myself if this fire, which God created for man's use and comfort, is so awful in its nature and so destructive in its effects, what must that fire be which God created expressly to be the instrument of man's punishment! The sufferings of St. John cast into a caldron of boiling oil; of St. Lawrence slowly roasted on a gridiron; of the blessed martyrs cast into fiery furnaces and vats of molten metal; of the early Christians covered with pitch and tar and set fire to by Nero to light the streets of Rome; the sufferings of all these were as nothing beside the burning of a soul in hell. Ah! well they knew it, for did they not suffer so in order to avoid the greater pains of hell? For the fire of hell is a spiritual living thing that feeds alike on soul and body. But this is the least part of the anguish of my soul — its worst pain is the pain of the loss of God — the one being in all the world for whom my soul craves. God who lifted me out of the dirt of my nothingness and adopted me as