a greater work than the creation; He was fain to contract divinity to a span, to send a Person to die for us who of Himself could not die, and was constrained to use rare and mysterious arts to make Him capable of dying; He prepared a Person instrumental to His purpose, by sending His Son from His own bosom, a Person both God and man, an enigma to all nations and to all sciences; one that ruled over all the angels, that walked upon the pavements of heaven, whose feet were clothed with stars, whose eyes were brighter than the sun, whose voice is louder than thunder, whose understanding is larger than that infinite space which we imagine in the uncircumscribed distance beyond the first orb of heaven; a Person to whom felicity was as essential as life to God: this was the only Person that was designed in the eternal decrees of the divine predestination to pay the price of a soul, to ransom us from death. Less than this Person could not do it; for although a soul in its essence is finite, yet there were many infinites which were incident and annexed to the condition of lost souls; for all which because provision was to be made, nothing less than an infinite excellence could satisfy for a soul who was lost to infinite and eternal ages, who was to be afflicted with insupportable and indetermined, that is, next to infinite, pains; who was to bear the load of an infinite anger from the provocation of an eternal God. And yet if it be possible that infinite can receive degrees, this is but one half of the abyss, and I think the lesser. For that this Person, who was God eternal, should be lessened in all His appearances to a span', to the little dimensions of a man; and that He should really become very contemptibly little, although at the same time He was infinitely and unalterably great; that is, essential, natural, and necessary felicity, should turn into an intolerable, violent, and immense calamity to His person; that this great God should not be admitted to pay the price of our redemption unless He would suffer that horrid misery which that lost soul should suffer; as it represents the glories of His goodness who used such rare and admirable instruments in actuating the designs of His mercy, so it shews our condition to have been very desperate, and our loss invaluable.

A soul in God's account is valued at the price of the blood, and shame, and tortures of the Son of God; and yet we throw it away for the exchange of sins that a man naturally is ashamed to own; we lose it for the pleasure, the sottish beastly pleasure of a night. I need not say, we lose our soul to save our lives; for though that was our blessed Saviour's instance of the great unreasonableness of men, who by saving their lives, lose them,' that is, in the great account of doomsday; though this, I say, be extremely unreasonable, yet there is something to be pretended in the bargain; nothing to excuse him with God, but something in the accounts of timorous men; but to lose our souls with swearing, that unprofitable, dis[Cf. Hymn on the Annunciation, vol. vii. p. 659.] [Matt. xvi. 25.].

honourable, and unpleasant vice; to lose our souls with disobedience or rebellion, a vice that brings a curse and danger all the way in this life; to lose our souls with drunkenness, a vice which is painful and sickly in the very acting it, which hastens our damnation by shortening our lives; are instances fit to be put in the stories of fools and madmen. And all vice is a degree of the same unreasonableness; the most splendid temptation being nothing but a pretty well-weaved fallacy, a mere trick, a sophism, and a cheating and abusing the understanding. But that which I consider here is, that it is an affront and contradiction to the wisdom of God, that we should so slight and undervalue a soul, in which our interest is so concerned; a soul, which He who made it, and who delighted not to see it lost, did account a fit purchase to be made by the exchange of His Son, the eternal Son of God. To which also I add this additional account, that a soul is so greatly valued by God that we are not to venture the loss of it to save all the world. For therefore whosoever should commit a sin, to save kingdoms from perishing; or if the case should be put that all the good men and good causes and good things in this world were to be destroyed by tyranny, and it were in our power by perjury to save all these; that doing this sin would be so far from hallowing the crime, that it were to offer to God a sacrifice of what He most hates, and to serve Him with swine's blood'; and the rescuing all these from a tyrant, or a hangman, could not be pleasing to God upon those terms, because a soul is lost by it, which is in itself a greater loss and misery than all the evils in the world put together can outbalance, and a loss of that thing for which Christ gave His blood a price. Persecutions and temporal death in holy men and in a just cause, are but seeming evils, and therefore not to be bought off with the loss of a soul, which is a real but an intolerable calamity. And if God for His own sake would not have all the world saved by sin, that is, by the hazarding of a soul, we should do well for our own sakes not to lose a soul for trifles, for things that make us here to be miserable, and even here also to be ashamed.

3. But it may be some natures or some understandings care not for all this; therefore I proceed to the third and most material consideration as to us, and I consider what it is to lose a soul. Which Hierocles m thus explicates, Ως οἷόν τε ἀθανάτῳ οὐσίᾳ θανάτου μοίρας μεταλαχεῖν, οὐ τῇ εἰς τὸ μὴ εἶναι ἐκβάσει, ἀλλὰ τῇ τοῦ εὖ εἶναι άлолтάσει, 'an immortal substance can die, not by ceasing to be, but by losing all being well,' by becoming miserable. And it is remarkable, when our blessed Saviour gave us caution that we should 'not fear them that can kill the body' only, but fear Him,' He says not, that can kill the soul, but τὸν δυνάμενον καὶ ψυχὴν καὶ σῶμα ἀπολέσαι ἐν γεέννη, Him that is able to destroy the body and soul in hell";' which word signifieth not 'death,' but 'tortures.' For some [In Pythag. p. 16.] n [Matt. x. 28.]

[Is. lxvi. 3.]

have chosen death for sanctuary, and fled to it to avoid intolerable shame, to give a period to the sense of a sharp grief, or to cure the earthquakes of fear; and the damned perishing souls shall wish for death with a desire impatient as their calamity; but this shall be denied them, because death were a deliverance, a mercy, and a pleasure, of which these miserable persons must despair for ever.

I shall not need to represent to your considerations those expressions of scripture which the Holy Ghost hath set down to represent to our capacities the greatness of this perishing, choosing such circumstances of character as were then usual in the world, and which are dreadful to our understanding as any thing; 'hellfire,' is the common expression; for the eastern nations accounted burnings the greatest of their miserable punishments, and burning malefactors was frequent. Brimstone and fire,' so St. John calls the state of punishment, 'prepared for the devil and all his servants":" he added the circumstance of brimstone, for by this time the devil had taught the world more ingenious pains, and himself was newly escaped out of boiling oil and brimstone, and such bituminous matter; and the Spirit of God knew right well the worst expression was not bad enough. Σκότος ἐξώτερον, so our blessed Saviour calls it, 'the outer darkness;' that is, not only an abjection from the beatific regions where God and His angels and His saints dwell for ever; but then there is a positive state of misery expressed by darkness, Cópov σкóтovs, as two apostles, St. Peters and St. Jude, call it, the blackness of darkness for ever. In which although it is certain that God, whose justice there rules, will inflict but just so much as our sins deserve, and not superadd degrees of undeserved misery, as He does to the saints of glory, (for God gives to blessed souls in heaven more, infinitely more, than all their good works could possibly deserve; and therefore their glory is infinitely bigger glory than the pains of hell are great pains ;) yet because God's justice in hell rules alone, without the allays and sweeter abatements of mercy, they shall have pure and unmingled misery; no pleasant thought to refresh their weariness, no comfort in another accident to alleviate their pressures, no waters to cool their flames. But because when there is a great calamity upon a man, every such man thinks himself the most miserable; and though there are great degrees of pain in hell, yet there are none perceived by him that thinks he suffers the greatest; it follows that every man that loses his soul in this darkness is miserable beyond all those expressions which the tortures of this world could furnish to the writers of holy scripture.

But I shall choose to represent this consideration in that expression of our blessed Saviour, Mark ix. 44, which Himself took out [Rev. xiv. 10.]

P Vid. Matt. xxv. 41.]

[Tert. de præscr. hær., cap. xxxvi.

p. 215.]

[Matt. xxv. 30.]

t [Ver. 13.]

s [2 Pet. ii. 17.]

of the prophet Esay, lxvi. 24, "where the worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched." This is the ovvreλeías èpýμwσis spoken of by Daniel" the prophet: for although this expression was a prediction of that horrid calamity and abscission of the Jewish nation when God poured out a full phial of His wrath upon the crucifiers of His Son, and that this, which was the greatest calamity which ever did or ever shall happen to a nation, Christ with great reason took to describe the calamity of accursed souls, as being the greatest instance to signify the greatest torment: yet we must observe that the difference of each state makes the same words in the several cases to be of infinite distinction. The worm stuck close to the Jewish nation, and the fire of God's wrath flamed out till they were consumed with a great and unheard-of destruction, till many millions did die accursedly, and the small remnant became vagabonds, and were reserved, like broken pieces after a storm, to shew the greatness of the storm and misery of the shipwreck: but then this being translated to signify the state of accursed souls, whose dying is a continual perishing, who cannot cease to be, it must mean an eternity of duration in a proper and natural signification.

And that we may understand it fully, observe the place in Esay, xxxiv. 8, &c. The prophet prophesies of the great destruction of Jerusalem for all her great iniquities: "It is the day of the Lord's vengeance, and the year of recompenses for the controversy of Sion: and the streams thereof shall be turned into pitch, and the dust thereof into brimstone, and the land thereof shall become burning pitch; it shall not be quenched night nor day, the smoke thereof shall go up for ever; from generation to generation it shall lie waste, none shall pass through it for ever and ever." This is the final destruction of the nation; but this destruction shall have an end, because the nation shall end, and the anger also shall end in its own period, even then when God shall call the Jews into the common inheritance with the gentiles, and all become the sons of God.' And this also was the period of their 'worm,' as it is of their 'fire,' the fire of the divine vengeance upon the nation; which was not to he extinguished till they were destroyed, as we see it come to pass. And thus also in St. Jude", "the angels who kept not their first state," are said to be "reserved" by God in everlasting chains under darkness:" which word, 'everlasting,' signifies not absolutely to eternity, but to the utmost end of that period; for so it follows, "unto the judg ment of the great day;" that everlasting' lasts no longer. And in ver. 7, the word 'eternal' is just so used: the men of "Sodom and Gomorrah are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire;" that is, of a fire which burned till they were quite destroyed, and the cities and the country with an irreparable ruin,

u

[Συντέλεια . ἐπὶ τὴν ἐρήμωσιν.

Dan. ix. 27.]

...

['become' not in first ed.]

never to be rebuilt and reinhabited as long as this world continues. The effect of which observation is this ;

That these words, for ever,' 'everlasting,' 'eternal,' 'the never dying worm,' the 'fire unquenchable,' being words borrowed by our blessed Saviour and His apostles from the style of the Old testament, must have a signification just proportionable to the state in which they signify; so that as this worm, when it signifies a temporal infliction, means a worm that never ceases giving torment till the body is consumed, so when it is translated to an immortal state, it must signify as much in that proportion; that 'eternal,' that 'everlasting,' hath no end at all, because the soul cannot be killed in the natural sense, but is made miserable and perishing for ever; that is, the worm shall not die' so long as the soul shall be unconsumed; the fire shall not be quenched' till the period of an immortal nature comes. And that this shall be absolutely for ever, without any restriction, appears unanswerably in this, because the same 'for ever' that is for the blessed souls, the same 'for ever' is for the accursed souls: but the blessed' souls that die in the Lord,' 'henceforth' shall 'die no more, death hath no power over them;' for 'death is destroyed,' it is 'swallowed up in victory,' saith St. Paul; and "there shall be no more death," saith St. John". So that because 'for ever' hath no end till the thing or the duration itself have end, in the same sense in which the saints and angels 'give glory to God for ever,' in the same sense the lost souls shall suffer the evils of their sad inheritance: and since after this death of nature which is a separation of soul and body, there remains no more death, but this second death, this eternal perishing of miserable accursed souls whose duration must be eternal; it follows that the 'worm of conscience,' and the unquenchable fire' of hell, have no period at all, but shall last as long as God lasts, or the measures of a proper eternity; that they who provoke God to wrath by their base, unreasonable, and sottish practices, may know what their portion shall be in the everlasting habitations. And yet suppose that Origen's opinion had been true, and that accursed souls should have ease and a period to their tortures after a thousand years; I pray let it be considered whether it be not a great madness to choose the pleasures or the wealth of a few years here, with trouble, with danger, with uncertainty, with labour, with intervals of sickness; and for this to endure the flames of hell for a thousand years together. The pleasures of the world no man can have for a hundred years; and no man hath pleasure a hundred days together, but he hath some trouble intervening, or at least a weariness and a loathing of the pleasure; and therefore to endure insufferable calamities, suppose it be for a hundred years, without any interruption, without

2

[1 Cor. xv. 54.]

b

• [Rev. xxi. 4.]

[Vid. Huet. Origeniana, lib. ii. qu. 11. § 26 fin.]