s the finite
and the infinite. John Foster says, "It is infinitely beyond the
highest archangel's faculty to apprehend a thousandth part of the
horror of the doom to eternal damnation." The Buddhists, who
believe that the severest sentence passed on the worst sinner will
be brought to an end and his redemption be attained, use the
following illustration of the staggering periods that will first
elapse. A small yoke is thrown into the ocean and borne about in
every direction by the various winds. Once in a hundred thousand
years a blind tortoise rises to the surface of the water. Will the
time ever come when that tortoise shall so rise up that its neck
shall enter the hole of the yoke? It may, but the time required
cannot be told; and it is equally difficult for the unwise man,
who has entered one of the great hells, to obtain deliverance.
There is a remarkable specimen of the attempt to set forth the
idea of endless misery, by Suso, a mystic preacher who flourished
several centuries ago. It runs thus. "O eternity, what art thou?
Oh, end without end! O father, and mother, and all whom we love!
May God be merciful unto you for evermore! for we shall see you no
more to love you; we must be separated forever! O separation,
everlasting separation, how painful art thou! Oh, the wringing of
hands! Oh, sighing, weeping, and sobbing, unceasing howling and
lamenting, and yet never to be pardoned! Give us a millstone, says
the damned, as large as the whole earth, and so wide in
circumference as to touch the sky all around, and let a little
bird come in a hundred thousand years, and pick off a small
particle of the stone, not larger than the tenth part of a grain
of millet, and after another hundred thousand years let him come
again, so that in ten hundred thousand years he would pick off as
much as a grain of millet, we wretched sinners would desire
nothing but that thus the stone might have an end, and thus our
pains also; yet even that cannot be."23 But, after all the
struggles of reason and all the illustrations of laboring
imagination, the meaning of the phrase "eternal suffering in hell"
remains remote, dim, unrealized, an abstraction in words. If we
could adequately apprehend it, if its full significance should
burst upon us, as sometimes in fearful dreams the spaceless,
timeless, phantasmal, reeling sense of

23 Hagenbach, Dogmengeschichte, sect. 210.

the infinite seems to be threatening to break into the brain, an