“We can conceive but little of the matter. To help your conception, imagine yourself to be cast into a fiery oven or a great furnace, where your pain would be as much greater than that occasioned by accidentally touching a coal of fire, as the heat is greater. Imagine also that your body were to lie there for a quarter of an hour (15mins), full of fire, and all the while full of vivid sense. What horror would you feel at the entrance of such a furnace! How long would that quarter of an hour seem to you. And after you had endured it for one minute, how overbearing would it be to you to think that you had it to endure the other fourteen! But what would be the effect on your soul if you knew you must lie there enduring that torment to the full for 24 hours! How much greater would be the effect if you knew you must endure it for a whole year! And how vastly greater still if you knew you must endure it for a thousand years! O then, how your hearts would sink if you knew that you must bear it forever and ever! That there would be no end! Then after millions of millions of ages, your torment would be no nearer to an end and that you never ever should be delivered! … This is the death threatened in the Word of God. This is dying in the highest sense of the word. This is to die sensibly, to die and know it, to be sensible of the gloom of death. This is to be undone. This is worthy of the name of destruction. This sinking of the soul under an infinite weight that it cannot bear is the horror of hell. We read in Scripture of the blackness of darkness—this is it! This is the very thing. We read in Scripture of sinners being lost and of their losing their souls -- this is the thing intended. This is to lose the soul. They that are the subjects of this are utterly and eternally lost."
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