Pittsburg dispatch. [volume] (Pittsburg [Pa.]) 1880-1923, 1892-02-18
PICTURES OF HADES.
How Some Christians Exercised Their
Vivid ImaginatiOnS.
THE TORTURES OF THE DAMNED
Described With Words That Caused Terror
Among the Sinners.
INEFFABLE MISERY WAS PORTRAYED

Guardia1s of the 31st of March, 1913, to have
been an eminent divine, "most exactly we'll
bred" who told his congregation at White
hall that if they did not ''vouchsafe to give
their lives a new tlrn they must certainly
go to place which he did not think fit to
name in that Courtlv audience. Many
Christian writers, says the Pail Mall Budget,
have been less delicate than Swift's Dean,
and have condescended to details with both
defniteness and unction. From the pictures
which these amiable divines have drawn of
the tortures of the damned Mr.. James New
makes an effective mosaic in the Mneteeath
Century:
1t has been proved over and over again
(Mr. New remarks) by others besides Je-
rome and Tertullian that the fire of hell is a
terrible reality; that it is corporeal material;
that its constituents are probably sulphur
and fluid pitch. The sulphur stinks. This
is satisfactorily shown by quite swarm of
learned authorities. Infidel quibblings have
been easily quashed. How can incorporeal
spirits be burnt? Answer: By incorporeal
fire. How can material bodies be burnt for
ever? Answer: By the analogues of the as
bestos and the salamander, or again by GER
tain sailing antiseptic virtue, or again by an
Omnipotent implanting in the fire of GER
tain force which burns but consumes not
Satan Had Horns Like Goat.
Casarius, a Cistercian of Heisterbach,
saws that in a town called Enthenich, in
Bonn, a certain Walter when sick saw
satan, with face like a monkey and goats
horns. Walter asked him about the fate of
his late master, Count William of Juliers
'eYou know" replied the demon, ''the dis
trict between Wolkenburg and Drachenfels.
In faith L tell you that if that district and
those mountains were both made of iron,
and set in that place where the soul of your
master now is, they would be molten
antequam supercilium superius inferiori
jungi posset-in word, before you could
wink" The color of hell fire is probably
lurid green, no light but rather darkness
visible
There is cold in hell, but no water. 1t is
not improbable that there are corporeal
worms, in the sense of serpents, and i'm
mortal, of which some say they are as thick
rs the rushes on the floor. There is no clock
in hell. Bridaine represents a tortured be-
ing rising from his bed of appalling agony,
and asking, What is the time? And dull
voice out of the darkness answers,
Eternity!
In the very entrance and gate of Dante's
hell (quite characteristic fourteenth GEN.
tury one) are placed the apathetic, the in
different in spiritual things, neutral soci-
ETY., while on earth, in the matter of religious
good and evil, which now fills the air with
sighs and lamentations, an air stained by
solid darkness and unpierced by the light of
any star. Then in the first circle or limbo
the unbaptized, among whom is Virgil him.
self, desire without hope.
Scenes That Dante Pictured.
In the second are carnal sinners tossed by
warning winds where light is silent. In
the third gluttons bitten by Cerberus are
exposed in q sinking land to storms of
hail In the fourth are the prodigal and
the miser, each pushing heavy weight up
a hill with his breast. In the fifth are the
irascible under the foul and fepid slime of
the Stygian Lake. In the sixth arch
heretics smart and agonize in tombs of fame
In the seventh the violent swim in rivers of
blood, suicides are changed into gnarled
trees, and blasphemers writhe under rain
of fire.
In the eighth, or Malebolge, are simonists
with their heads downward in equal and
circular holes, prophets with their faces re-
of these punishments are prob
ably new and original public peculators in
3 lake of boiling pitch, hypocrites under
serpents, schismatics, among whom is Mu-
hammad, with manned limbs, alchemists,
forgers and impostors among them Ulysses,
the hero of the Homeric poem, the victims
of varied disease. In the ninth circle,
which corresponds to the seventh or neither
most Muslin hell, Al Hawiyah, which,
being interpreted, is the place of precipitous
descent the hell of hypocrites, the last, the
worst, the frozen, traitors are ftly placed;
and among these, blue-pinched, shrouded in
ice, and chattering like storks, are to be
found the most famous of that crafty crew,
Lucifer and Judas.
At the Bottom of Chaos.
Millions hell is situated at the ottom of |
Chaos. Its description is, in short, an |
antarctic region of fire and ice, of dire hail |
and ever-burning sulphur. Its distance |
from heaven is three semi-diameters of our |
system. The stature of Satan |
reaches the sky. -Four internal rivers are |
introduced from the pagan theology. In |
this geographical view Letbe is also in |
cluded On the other side of the flood of |
oblivion is frozen continent. Hither all |
the damned are hailed by harpy y-footed
Furies from beds Of fire to pine in ice. The |
Sin, in forms too well known to need |
description. By these ideal architects
long bridge is built from hell to the cut
most orbs of this frail world" which, be-
ing interpreted by Mason, is the uttermost
circle of the starry sphere. Millions tor
ments are more poetic, but less painful we
may suppose, than those OF the Christian
fathers.
An original idea of hell was the result of
the speculative inquiries of Jean Hardouin.
This most learned fool, as he has been some /
what Impolitely called by Peignot, among
.he Jesuits, was a contemporary of Pima :
monti. He maintained that the rotation of T
The earth was due to the efforts of the
up the walls of hell, they caused
The earth to revolve as a squirrel its cage,
or dog the spit
Bodies Burned, but Not Consumed.
From the description of hell by Jona-
han Edwards, that sturdy theologian. one
sentence will probably be found more than
sufficient: "Your bodies. which shall have
been burning all this while in those glow
ng flames, shall not have been consumed,
out will remain to roast through eternity"
But still, even according to this amiable
the damned will have one salts
action. 1t is an i'll wind that blows no.
body good, and theirs will be the unselfsh
consolation of rejecting that the sight of the
lell torments which they suffer will exalt
he happiness of the saints for ever; for it
will make them ''more sensible of 1t, it will
rive then more lively relish of it,
Parents will see their children, children
heir parents, wives their husbands, and
their wives, IN ineffable agony,
md prize their own felicity the more-"a
ense of the opposite misery in all cases
,reatly increases the relish of any joy"
Of devils, Gulielmus Parisiensis has
ound on an exact computation that there