on which the body was stretched oat, the gallows and wheels on which it was torn limb from limb, the rods and scourges that rent the flesh from the bones; the hooks to tear the body, the knives to flay it alive, after which it was covered with salt; the sharp nails and splinters that were thrust between the nails of hands and feet; the glowing coals; the pans in which living beings were roasted and baked slowly; the boiling lead and sulphur that was thrust down their mouths; the pitch and resin with which their bodies were covered and then set fire to, so that they looked like living torches. Imagine you witness the cruelty practised by the Huguenots in France against the Catholics; how they slowly disembowelled their victims, cut off their heads with blunt or even wooden saws, dragged them astride up and down a tightly-drawn rope until they were cut in two. Imagine their barbarity in binding a living man to a dead body, until the stench of the latter caused the man to die. Bring together these and all other horrible torments you can imagine, and heap them all together with every conceivable kind of sickness, wounds, martyrdom, and torments, and let one individual suffer them all at the same time. What is the result? Oh, truly you have then the most miserable wretch you can imagine, and he could not bear such torments for a moment without a miracle; for according to philosophers and naturalists, and experience confirms their words, every pain, when it reaches its greatest intensity, “must either finish or be finished;”[1] it must either cease or put an end to the patient.
Yet his misery is not to be compared to that of the lost soul, who must suffer far worse torments at one and the same time. But suppose one were enabled by a miracle to endure such an accumulation of torments for twenty, fifty, or a hundred years, and remain alive during the time; would you not then, I ask, have a sketch of the state of the damned soul in hell? Not by any means; it would be a mere play or comedy in comparison, The reprobate would, so to speak, laugh at the idea of comparing those torments with what they have to endure in hell. “The worst sufferings one can have in this life,” says St. Augustine, “are not only small, but actually nothing when contrasted with the torments of the damned.”[2] Why? Because all the pains and torments in the world are but instruments, as we have seen already, set in motion by weak creatures; but in hell it is the almighty and angry, avenging God who measures out chastise-
