Dr. Pusey, too, has a word to say about hell: "Gather in mind all that is most loathsome, most revolting--the most treacherous, malicious, coarse, brutal, inventive, fiendish cruelty, unsoftened by any remains of human feeling, such as thou couldst not endure for a single hour.... hear those yells of blaspheming, concentrated hate as they echo along the lurid vault of hell."
Protestantism chimes in, and Spurgeon speaks of hell: "Wilt thou think it is easy to lie down in hell, with the breath of the Eternal fanning the flames? Wilt thou delight thyself to think that God will invent torments for thee, sinner?" "When the damned jingle the burning irons of their torment, they shall say, 'for ever;' when they howl, echo cries, 'for ever.'"
I may allude, to conclude my quotations, to a description of hell which I myself heard from an eminent prelate of the English Church, one who is a scholar and a gentleman, a man of moderate views in Church matters, by no means a zealot in an ordinary way. In preaching to a country congregation composed mainly of young men and girls, he warned them specially against sins of the flesh, and threatened them with the consequent punishment in hell. Then, in language which I cannot reproduce, for I should not dare to sully my pages by repeating what I then listened to in horrified amazement, there ensued a description drawn out in careful particulars of the state of the suffering body in hell, so sickening in its details that it must suffice to say of it that it was a description founded on the condition of a corpse flung out on a dungheap and left there to putrefy, with the additional horror of creeping, slowly-burning flames; and this state of things was to go on, as he impressed on them with terrible energy, for ever and ever, "decaying but ever renewing."
I should almost ask pardon of tender-hearted men and women for laying before them language so abominable; but I urge on all who are offended by it that this is the teaching given to our sons and daughters in the present day. Father Furniss, Dr. Pusey, Mr. Spurgeon, an English Bishop, surely these are honoured names, and in quoting them I quote from the teaching of Christendom. Nor mine the fault if the language be unfit for printing. I _quote_, because if we only assert, Christians are quick to say, "you are misrepresenting our beliefs," and I quote from writers of the present day only, that none may accuse me of hurling at Christians reproaches for a doctrine they have outgrown or softened down. Still, I own that it seems scarcely credible that a man should believe this and remain sane; nay, should preach this, and walk calmly home from his Church with God's sunshine smiling on the beautiful world, and after preaching it should sit down to a comfortable dinner and very likely a quiet pipe, as though hell did not exist, and its awful misery and fierce despair.