Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

Hell

One could not devise a more proper hell for an impure spirit than that which Plato has touched upon.

While he continues in life this dusky scene of horror, this melancholy prospect of final perdition, will frequently occur to his fancy.

The heart of man is the place the devil dwells in: I feel sometimes a hell within myself: Lucifer keeps his court in my breast, Legion is revived in me. There are as many hells as Anaxarchus conceited worlds: there was more than one hell in Magdalene, when there were seven devils, for every devil is an hell unto himself; he holds enough of torture in his own ubi, and needs not the misery of circumference to afflict him; and thus a distracted conscience here is a shadow or introduction unto hell hereafter.

The fear of hell may indeed in some desperate cases, like the moxa, give the first rouse from a moral lethargy, or, like the green venom of copper, by evacuating poison or a dead load from the inner man, prepare it for nobler ministrations and medicines from the realm of light and life, that nourish while they stimulate.

If shame superadded to loss, and both met together, as the sinner’s portion here, perfectly prefiguring the two saddest ingredients in hell,—deprivation of the blissful vision, and confusion of face,—cannot prove efficacious to the mortifying of vice, the church doth give over the patient.

Many might go to heaven with half the labour they go to hell, if they would venture their industry the right way.

For a man to doubt whether there be any hell, and thereupon to live as if absolutely there were none, but when he dies to find himself confuted in the flames, this must be the height of woe and disappointment, and a bitter conviction of an irrational venture and absurd choice.