e was an eruption it was thought that hell was boiling
over. Classic mythology, before the time of Christ, had its entrances to
hell at Acherusia, in Bithynia; at Avernus, in Campania, where Ulysses
began his journey to the grisly abodes; the Sibyl's cave at Cumae,
in Argolis; at Taenarus, in the southern Peloponnesus, where Hercules
descended, and dragged Cerberus up to the daylight; and the cave of
Trophonius, in Lebadea, not to mention a dozen less noted places.

The Bible always speaks of hell as "down," and the Apostles' Creed tells
us that Christ "descended" into hell. Exercising his imagination on this
basis, the learned Faber discovered that after the Second Advent the
saints would dwell on the crust of the earth, a thousand miles thick,
and the damned in a sea of liquid fire inside. Thus the saints would
tread over the heads of sinners, and flowers would bloom over the lake
of damnation.

Sir John Maundeville, a most engaging old liar, says he found a descent
into hell "in a perilous vale" in Abyssinia. According to the Celtic
legend of "St. Brandon's Voyage," hell was not "down below," but in
the moon, where the saint found Judas Iscariot suffering incredible
tortures, but let off every Sunday to enjoy himself and prepare for a
fresh week's agony. That master of bathos, Martin Tupper, finds this
idea very suitable. He apostrophises the moon as "the wakeful eye of
hell." Bailey, the author of _Festus_, is somewhat vaguer. Hell,
he says, is in a world which rolls thief-like round the universe,
imperceptible to human eyes:

A blind world, yet unlit by God,
Boiling around the extremest edge of light,
Where all things are disaster and decay.

Imaginations, of course, will differ. While Martin Tupper and other
gentlemen look for hell in the direction of the moon, the Platonists,
according to Macrobus, reckoned as the infernal regions the whole space
between the moon and the earth. Whiston thought the comet which appeared
in his day was hell. An English clergyman, referred to by Alger,
maintained that hell was in the sun, whose spots were gatherings of the
damned.

The reader may take his choice, and it is a liberal one. He may regard
hell as under the earth, or in the moon, or in the sun, or in a comet,
or in some concealed body careering through infinite space. And if the
choice does not satisfy him, he is perfectly free to set up a theory of
his own.

Father Pinamonti is the author of a litt