would stoop to any such artifice as
this? that He who called Himself The Truth would employ a lie, either
directly or indirectly, even to promote the spiritual welfare of men? He
never spake for mere sensation. The fact, then, that in this solemn
passage of Scripture we find the Redeemer calmly describing and minutely
picturing the condition of two persons in the future world, distinctly
specifying the points of difference between them, putting words into
their mouths that indicate a sad and hopeless experience in one of them,
and a glad and happy one in the other of them,--the fact that in this
treatment of the awful theme our Lord, beyond all controversy, _conveys
the impression_ that these scenes and experiences are real and true,--is
one of the strongest of all proofs that they are so.

The reader of Dante's Inferno is always struck with the sincerity and
realism of that poem. Under the delineation of that luminous, and that
intense understanding, hell has a topographic reality. We wind along down
those nine circles as down a volcanic crater, black, jagged, precipitous,
and impinging upon the senses at every step. The sighs and shrieks jar
our own tympanum; and the convulsions of the lost excite tremors in our
own nerves. No wonder that the children in the streets of Florence, as
they saw the sad and earnest man pass along, his face lined with passion
and his brow scarred with thought, pointed at him and said: "There goes
the man who has been in hell." But how infinitely more solemn is the
impression that is made by these thirteen short verses, of the sixteenth
chapter of Luke's gospel, from the lips of such a Being as Jesus Christ!
We have here the terse and pregnant teachings of one who, in the phrase
of the early Creed, not only "descended into hell," but who "hath the
keys of death and hell." We have here not the utterances of the most
truthful, and the most earnest of all human poets,--a man who, we may
believe, felt deeply the power of the Hebrew Bible, though living in a
dark age, and a superstitious Church,--we have here the utterances of the
Son of God, very God, of very God, and we may be certain that He intended
to convey no impression that will not be made good in the world to come.
And when every eye shall see Him, and all the sinful kindreds of the
earth shall wail because of Him, there will not be any eye that can look
into His and say: "Thy description, O Son of God, was overdrawn; the
impression was