and all possible modes of
pain, should think of the application of fire there. But happily,
we are not left to this possible conjecture.

Few influences sank more deeply into the Hebrew mind then the
legend how the earth opened her mouth and swallowed into Sheol,
Korah and Dathan and Abiram, the rebels against the authority of
Moses, at the same time that fire fell from Jehovah and consumed
two hundred and fifty of their confederates. In this story,
rebellion against a prophet of God, fire and submersion in Sheol,
are fused into one thought as a type of the future punishment of
the wicked.

But another narrative has been of far greater importance in this
direction, namely, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The
Cities of the Plain were situated on a sulphur freighted and
volcanic soil. They were inhabited by a people specially abandoned
to vices, and specially odious to the chosen people of God. When a
terrible eruption took place, overwhelming those cities with all
their people, and swallowing them under a flood of bituminous
flame, ashes and gas, it was natural that the Hebrews in after
time should say that Jehovah had rained fire and brimstone from
heaven on his enemies, and then that the history should take form
in their proud and pious imaginations as a fixed type of the doom
of the wicked. So it did.

At a later period the scenes and events in Gehenna, or the Valley
of Hinnom in the outskirts of Jerusalem, confirmed this tendency
and completed the Jewish picture of hell. In this detested vale
the worship of Moloch was once celebrated by roasting children
alive in the brazen arms of the god, in whose hollow form a fierce
fire was kept up, and around whose shrine gongs were beaten and
hymns howled to drown the shrieks of the victims. Here all the
refuse and offal of the city was carried and consumed, in a
conflagration whose fire was never quenched, and amidst an
uncleanness whose worms never died. This imagery, too, was cast
over into the future state as a representation of the fate
awaiting the wicked.

Still further, it was the custom of some Oriental kings to have
criminals of an especially revolting character, or the objects of
their own particular hatred, flung into a furnace of fire, and
there burned alive before the eyes of their judges. The example of
this given in the Book of Daniel, where Nebuchadnezzar had the
furnace heated seven times hotter than was wont, and ordered
Shadrach, Meshach and