^ Man, saith one, in his creation is angelic; in his corruption diabolical ; in his reno- vation theological ; in his translation majcstical; an angel in Eden, a devil in the world, a saint in tiie church, a king in heaven.
' = irreversible. — G.
^ Sheol is often put for the grave, Ps. xvi. 10, but not always.
116 THAT THERE IS MOST CERTAINLY A HELL.
divine justice detains all those in hold that have all their days rebelled against him, scorned his Son, despised the means of grace, and died in open rebellion against him.i The psalmist, saith my author, [MoUerus,] declares the miserable condition of all those who live and die in their sins: 'jEtemis punientur pmiis,' They shall be everlast- ingly punished. And Musculus reads the place thus: 'Animi im- piorum cruciatihus debitis apud inferos piinientur,' The souls of the ungodly shall be punished in hell with deserved torments. Certainly, the very place in which the wicked shall lodge and be tormented to all eternity — viz., hell, the bottomless pit, a dungeon of darkness, a lake of fire and brimstone, a fiery furnace, — will extremely aggravate the dolefulness of their condition. 2 0 sirs, were all the water in the sea ink, and every pile of grass a pen, and every l^air on all the men's heads in the world the hand of a ready writer, all would be too short graphically to delineate the nature of this dungeon, where all lost souls must lodge for ever. Where is the man who, to gain a world, would lodge one night in a room that is haunted with devils ; and is it nothing to dwell in hell with them for ever ? So Solomon, Prov, v. 5, saith of the harlot, ' that her feet go down to death, her steps take hol3 on hell.' Here Sheol is translated hell, and in the judgment of Lavater is well translated too : Foveam vel infernum passus ejus tenebunt; which, saith he, is spoken not so much of natural death as of spiritual, and that eternal destruction which followeth thereupon ; and he gives this for a reason why we should understand the place so, because whoredom being an abominable sin, defiling the members of the body of Christ, dissolving and making void the covenant between God and man, must needs be accompanied with an equivalent judg- ment, even excluding those that are guilty thereof, without repent- ance, the kingdom of heaven, into which pure and undefiled place no unclean thing can enter.3 And mark those words of the apostle, ' Whoremongers and adulterers God will judge.' If men will not judge them, God himself will, and give them a portion of misery an- swerable to their transgression. * Though the magistrate be negligent in punishing them, yet God will judge them. Sometimes he judges them in this life, by pouring forth of his wrath upon their bodies, , souls, consciences, names, and estates ; but if he do not thus judge 1 them in this life, yet he will be sure to judge them in the life to come ; which Bishop Latimer well understood when he presented to Henry the Eighth, for a New-year's gift, a New Testament, with a napkin, having this posie about it, ' Whoremongers and adulterers God will judge; '5 yea, he has already adjudged them 'to the lake that burn- eth with fire and brimstone, which is the second death,' Eev. xxi. 8. ' Nothing,' saith one, ' hath so much enriched hell as beautiful faces.' The Germans have a proverb that ' the pavement of hell is made of the skulls of shaved priests and the glorious crests of gallants.'
^ In tenebras ex tenebris; infeliciter exclusi, irifelicius excludendi.— -4w£rMs<me.
* Vide Bellarmine de Eter. Fselic.
" By death and hell is in this place meant not only temporal death and the visible grave, but also eternal death and hell itself, even the place of the damned.— T'/ic Dutch Annotations.
♦ 1 Cor. vi. 9, 10 ; Gal. v. 19-21; T^ev. xxi. 27; Heb. xiii. 4. » [Foxe] .\ct. and Mon., 1594.
THAT THERE IS MOST CERTAINLY A HELL. 117