August 1 — On the Pain of Loss in Hell

Consider, first, that, though the fire of hell, with all the rest of the exterior torments, which the damned must for ever endure in that woful place, be terrible beyond all that can be expressed or conceived; yet is it no ways comparable, in the judgment of divines, to the interior pangs and agonies of the soul, caused by the peena damni or the eternal loss of God, and of all that is good, and the perpetual sense they shall ever have of the greatness of this their loss, and of all its dreadful consequences. Alas! they have lost their God for ever; they are divorced eternally from him; they are stripped of all his gifts and all his graces; no light is left them in their soul, no glimpse of hope, no sense of good, no power of love either for God or their neighbours. Ah, unhappy wretches, that cannot love! They are excommunicated from God; they are sent into an eternal banishment, far from him, far from his glorious kingdom and the happy society of his children, far from their true country, and all its blissful joys, which were once purchased for them by the blood of the Son of God. I'liey are eternally separated from the ocean of all good.

Consider, secondly, how much the damned shall resent this most dreadful of all evils, this eternal separation from God. Alas! poor sinners, here, while they lie groveling in the mire of the earth, diverted from the thought of God, by a thousand impertinencies, and yet continually partaking, many ways, of his sweetness and goodness, in some or other of his creatures, have little or no idea of what it is absolutely to lose God for evermore. But the damned, by their own woful experience, shall be fully convinced, now it is too late, that none of all the rest of the torments of hell can be compared to this loss. God is an infinite Good in himself; and he is the inexhausted Source of all our good, and of every thing that is any ways good in his creatures. he is our univers(d Good. In losing him, then, the damned have lost an infinite Good, their first Beginning and their last End, by whom and for whom they were created; they have lost their sovereign Good, their universal Good, their immense, eternal Good; the overflowing Fountain, the very ocean of all good, their true and only happiness. They have lost him totally; they have lost him irrecoverably; they have lost him eternally; they have lost him in himself; they have lost him in themselves; they have lost him in all his creatures. There is an immense gulf b tween them and him, never, never to be passed.

Consider, thirdly, still further, how dreadfully the damned shall be tormented with the perpetual thinking on this most rueful of all losses. Ah! their lively sense of this most dismal and irreparable loss, and of all the sad consequences of it, shall continually rack their despairing souls; they shall not be able so much as to turn away their thoughts one moment from it. For, whichever way they shall turn, to seek any one drop of ease or comfort, in him or from him, they shall meet with none; all things shall seem to conspire against them; all things shall tell them they have lost their God. They shall always find themselves bound down fast in eternal chains, which shall keep them in a state of violence, far away from him; and all the efforts of their vehement longings after him, shall only serve to redouble their misery. Hence there flow a thousand other evils, that make their whole soul a hell to itself. Hence black despair, sadness, rage, hatred, and blasphemy.

Conclude never to turn away from God in this life, nor to lose him by wilful sin, and then thou shaft effectually prevent this last and worst of all evils, of being eternally separated from him.

voi.. II. 5