picture of the unhappy household I have been describing: with this difference, however, that the murderer soon loses his life along with his companions, while the others have to drag along a painful existence in mutual hatred, quarreling, cursing, and fighting. For my part I should prefer to die rather than to live constantly in such a house and witness those disorderly scenes, not to speak of taking part in them. It is an old saying that there is hell in the house of two married people who hate each other.
Far greater shall be the torment caused in hell by the society of the damned. But, my dear brethren, is it really a hell after all? Oh, no! quite different is the society that £he divine justice has, as it were, sewed up in a sack in order to punish His enemies for eternity. According to the testimony of God Himself by the Prophet Job, it is a land “where…no order, but everlasting horror dwelleth.”[1] Just as in heaven the blessed, united by an eternal and perfect love of God, rejoice in each other’s happiness, and thus receive an accidental and continual joy from the happy company in which they are, so on the contrary in hell, the dwelling of disorder and confusion, the damned shall regard each other with hatred and aversion, and thus add to the torments they have to suffer. “As a bundle of thorns they shall be burnt with fire;”[2] such are the words of the Prophet Isaias. Mark this: like sharp thorns they shall pierce each other, and rend each other like mad dogs: “Everyone shall eat the flesh of his own arm:” (that is, as commentators say, children, brethren, and near friends) “Manasses, Ephraim, and Ephraim Manasses.”[3] Now if it is reckoned as a hell for two married people to live together in strife and hatred, what must that hell be where there are millions of damned together, who regard each other with the utmost rage and hatred, where the presence of the one is intolerable to the other, and yet they have no hope of being separated for all eternity, but must live together, packed like herrings in a barrel, amidst incessant cursing and imprecations, tearing, biting, and rending each other in their fury?
Even those who are on the best terms here shall then hate each But, we might ask, shall not those boon companions, those Even those jovial souls who spent the time so pleasantly together on earth, shall not they find some alleviation of their misery in being together in hell? And they who were inflamed during life with
