DISCOURSE XII. Q$I pointed and deserved vengeance ? If the blessed God has with much long-suffering borne with these vessels of wrath, under their repeated oppositions to his law and gospel, and they still go on in their vice, obstinacy and impenitence, and have fitted themselves for destruction, surely he will make his wrath and power known in their punishment, as St. Paul expresses it; Rom. ix. 22. and when the power and wrath of a God unite to punish a creature, how miserable must that creature he ? It is certain, that God has been pleased in his word fre- quently to make use of fire, brimstone, burning, smoke, dark- ness and chains, and every thing that is painful and noisome to nature on earth, in order to represent the miseries that he has prepared for sinners in hell : And we must suppose that all these metaphors, if they are but mere metaphors, carry with them a sense of most intense pain and anguish with which God will afflict the bodies, as well as the spirits of those guilty creatures, who have rebelled against his majesty, rejected his mercy, and exposed themselves to his indignation. But what particular in- struments and methods of punishment, what other elements or means of torture the great God will make use of to execute his sentence in this tremendous work, is more than we can now de- clare, because God has not fully declared it : And I pray God none of us may be ever doomed to learn it by terrible experience. But if there be nothing but fire, the anguish will be intolerable, as one of our poets expresses it, " In liquid burnings, or on dry, to dwell, " Is all the sad variety of hell." Or what if the Almighty, who has all nature, with all its powers, at his command, should employ other material instru- ments for the execution of his deserved wrath ? What if he should chuse the alternate extremes of fire and frost, as some have imagined, to torment those impenitent criminals ? Or what if the creatures which they have abused to their impious and brutish purposes, should be made instruments and mediums of their punishment ? Wine may be rendered a frequent means of sickness, agony and pain to the drunkard, and meat and other dainties to the glutton, and gold to the covetous wretches who made gold their god, that they may all remember their crimes in their sufferings. The wisdom of God will execute the sentence of his justice in the most honourable manner. And after all, if we call away our thoughts from fire, and every material instrument of pain, which the great God may employ in punishing obstinate rebels, and survey only those acute and dreadful impressions of horror and anguish, which a just and holy God may make on sinful spirits in an immediate manner in hell, this would overwhelm our souls with unsupportable agonies : Who knows the power of thy anger ? For according to x3
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