you ever once--were it but for five minutes--
utterly ashamed of yourself? If you were, did you ever feel any
torment like _that_? In all other misery and torment one feels
hope; one says, 'Still life is worth having, and when the sorrow
wears away I shall be cheerful and enjoy myself again:' but when one
has come to shame, when one is not only disgraced in the eyes of
other people, but disgraced (which is a thousand times worse) in
one's own eyes; when one feels that people have real reason to
despise one, then one feels for the time as if life was _not_ worth
having; as if one did not care whether one died or not, or what
became of one: and yet as if dying would do one no good, change of
place would do one no good, time's running on would do one no good;
as if what was done could not be undone, and the shame would be with
one still, and torment one still, wherever one was, and if one was
to live a million years: ay, that it would be everlasting: one
feels, in a word, that real shame and deserved disgrace is verily
and indeed an everlasting torment. And it is this, and the feeling
of this, which explains why poor wretches will kill themselves, as
Judas Iscariot did, and rush into hell itself, under the horror and
pain of shame and disgrace. They feel a hell within them so hot,
that they actually fancy that they can be no worse off beyond the
grave than they are on this side of it. They are mistaken: but
that is the reason; the misery of disgrace is so intolerable, that
they are willing, like that wretched Judas, to try any mad and
desperate chance to escape it.

So much for shame's being a dreadful and horrible thing. But again,
it is a spiritual thing: it grows and works not in our fleshly
bodies, but in our spirits, our consciences, our immortal souls.
You may see this by thinking of people who are not afraid of shame.
You do not respect them, or think them the better for that. Not at
all. If a man is not afraid of shame; if a man, when he is found
out, and exposed, and comes to shame, does not care for it, but
'brazens out his own shame,' as we say, we do not call him brave; we
call him what he is, a base impudent person, lost to all good
feeling. Why, what harder name can we call any man or woman, than
to say that they are 'shameless,' dead to shame? We know that it is
the very sign of their being dead in sin, the very sign of God's
Spirit having left them; that till they are made to feel shame ther