at of the Genevan theologian's "Institutes of the Christian
Religion." There is a horrid fiction, widely believed once by the
Jewish Rabbins and by the Mohammedans, that two gigantic fiends
called the Searchers, as soon as a deceased person is buried, make
him sit up in the grave, examine the moral condition of his soul,
and, if he is very guilty, beat in his temples with heavy iron
maces. It is obvious to observe that such conceptions are purely
arbitrary, the work of fancy, not based on any intrinsic fitness
or probability; but they are received because unthinking ignorance
and hungry superstition will greedily believe any thing they hear.
Joseph Trapp, an English clergyman, in a long poem thus sets forth
the scene of damnation: "Doom'd to live death and never to expire,
In floods and whirlwinds of tempestuous fire The damn'd shall
groan, fire of all kinds and forms, In rain and hail, in
hurricanes and storms, Liquid and solid, livid, red, and pale, A
flaming mountain here, and there a flaming vale; The liquid fire
makes seas, the solid, shores; Arch'd o'er with flames, the horrid
concave roars. In bubbling eddies rolls the fiery tide, And
sulphurous surges on each other ride. The hollow winding vaults,
and dens, and caves, Bellow like furnaces with flaming waves.
Pillars of flame in spiral volumes rise, Like fiery snakes, and
lick the infernal skies. Sulphur, the eternal fuel, unconsumed,
Vomits redounding smoke, thick, unillumed."

But all other paintings of the fear and anguish of hell are vapid
and pale before the preternatural frightfulness of those given at
unmerciful length and in sickening specialty in some of the Hindu
and Persian sacred books.1 Here worlds of nauseating disgusts, of
loathsome agonies, of intolerable terrors, pass before us. Some
are hung up by their tongues, or by their eyes, and slowly
devoured by fiery vermin; some scourged with whips of serpents
whose poisonous fangs lacerate their flesh at every blow; some
forced to swallow bowls of gore, hair, and corruption, freshly
filled as fast as drained; some packed immovably in red hot iron
chests and laid in raging furnaces for unutterable millions of
ages. One who is familiar with the imagery of the Buddhist hells
will think the pencils of Dante and Pollok, of Jeremy Taylor and
Jonathan Edwards, were dipped in water. There is just as much
ground for believing the accounts of the former to be true as
there is for crediting those of the latter: