MI THE NATURE OF THE YUNJST?MENT9 11 HELL. [nose. x22. God continue to punish creatures when their reason is lost ? What can such punishments avail ? I answer, surely God will not continue to punish madmen ; therefore none of these torments shall extin- guish our reason, or destroy out intellectual powers ; for it is as creatures of reason and free-will that sinners are thus punished, and therefore these powers must remain in their proper exercise ; besides the very operations of these powers. in self condemnation, and self-upbraiding, are part of their punishment. But whether God will so fortify the natures of the damned, which probably shall not be made of flesh and blood,_ and enable them to bear such intense pain without distraction, or whether the highest extremes of their torment shall only be inflicted. t some certain periods or intervals, so that they shall- soon return to their reasoning powers again, with bitter remembrance of what passed, this matter is hard to de termine ; and because it is unwritten and unrevealed, I am silent. But it still remains that punishment shall be. so intense and severe, as becomes a God of holiness and justice to inflict on rebellious-and obstinate creatures. SECTION III. Reflexions on the nature of these punishments. It is time now that we should . proceed to form some special reflexions on the nature of the punishments of hell, such as they have been described in the foregoing discourse. The first is this, Reflexion I. " What dreadful and unknown evil is. contained in the nature of sin which grows up into such misery, which, breeds this stinging worm in the consci- ence, which prepares the creature for such fiery torments, and which provokes a God to inflict them ? The vessels of wrath have prepared themselves for it, as the apostle intimates, by their own sins ; Rom. ix. 22. " they are fitted for destruction :" Nor does all the intense and infinite anguishof this punishment exceed the desert of bur sins. The great God in a way of bounty, may often bestow upon us vastly beyond what our little services can ever pretend to have deserved, but he never punishes beyond our deserts. What.adangerous and pernicious mistake is it in the children of men to sport with sin, as with a harmless thing? It is much safer sporting with a poisonous ser-
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTcyMjk=