ffgfilf&BTsSjl;;: YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY TRADITIONAL ASPECTS OF HELL (ANCIENT AND MODERN) JAMES MEW WITH SEVENTY-NINE ILLUSTRATIONS FROM ORIGINAL SOURCES Xonfton SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO., LiM. PATERNOSTER SQUARE i9°3 " Si aut Bvangelio prsecipitur aut . . . observetur divina bsec et sancta Traditio." — S. Cyprian, Ep. 74. " ifiiv Se, ti ka/nrpla, xpijtrBtu Tt} \o7^ Trapearai % J3otir.eu0e. PLUTABCH, 945, F. " There is an awful beauty about the kingdom of eternal chastisement, and who can doubt that Hell is a pure mercy 1 . . . The false delicacy of modern times in keeping back the scaring images of Hell, while ia the case of children it has often marred a whole education, is a formidable danger to the sanctity as well as to the faith of men." — Father Faber, Wonders of Divine Love, p. 335. " Qui ritus suos qualescunque tanti et tam morose sestimant, ut cuique mortaliuin eos pariter amplexandos, larvatis atque monstrificis argu- mentis, gravioribus plane ac rationi consonis indigentes, inculcare non vereantur." — SELDEN, De Jure Nat'urali, lib. 3, cap. 13. " Is not Hell a part of our Heaven 1 " — Andrew Wellwood, Glimpse of Glory. " Sancti de pcenis impiorum gaudebunt." — Thom. Aquinas, Sum-. Th. iii. in Suppl. 94, 3. "Hoc errore decepti, beatam sibi ut bonis et perpetem vitam mortuis poUicentur, cseteris ut injustis pcenam sempiternam." — Minucius Felix, Octavius, cap. 11. " Multorum ingeniis certatum est ad augendam ejus infamiam." — Seneca, Epist. 82. " Iterum quEero, unde factum est ut tot gentes una cum liberis eorum infantibus Eeternaa morti involveret lapsus Adse absque remedio, nisi quia Deo ita visum est 1 Decretum quidem horribile fateor ; inficiari tamen nemo poterit," etc. — Calvin, Instit., lib. 3, cap. 23, sect. 7. " Quaa finxere timent." — Lucan, Pharsalia, lib. 1, 486. "L'enfer est un lieuou Ton n'aime pas." — Sainte Therese. " Primus in orbe Deos fecit timor." — Statius, Tlteb. 3. 661. " Pauvre esprit humain, quels sont tes egarements et quelle est leur efficace ! "— Bayle, Diet. [1820] 7. 422. " Qu'est il besoin d'aller chercher l'enfer dans l'autre vie?"— J. J. ^Rousseau. " iroKKovs 5'6dvpfioifs Kai yoobs avtoipeXefe $0{y%ri, Aids yap ova-KapaWtp-oi ippfres." iEscHYLUS, Prometheus, 34. "Eligat quisque quod placet, aut ignem tribuere corpori, animo vermem ; hoc proprie, illud tropice ; aut utrumqne proprie corpori." — Augustin, Civ. Dei. 21. 9. " Hodie, nescio quo pacto, Theologis quibusdam feroculis placent admodum sternse et infinitae poense . . . Nobis difficile est omnem .exuere humanitatem : Deo difficilius omnem; misericordiam ... Si .decern viri cordati et liberalis ingenii de rebus vitse futuras, sive novissimis ut dici solent, simul conscriberent ; vix credo e decern duos .quoslibet in eandem sententiam per singula capita coituros." — Burnet, J)e statu morttioriim. " Ancor se'tu degli altri sciocchi 1 Qui vive la pieta quando e beh morta. Chi e piu scellerato che colui Che al giudicio divin passion comporta? " Dante, Inf. 20. 27. "En ieder die de brug passeerde, betaalde'n cent aan den man die't brugje gemaakt had ; ' om de gleuf ' zeide hij. Maar er waren'r die fluis- terden : Hij heeft de gleuf gemaakt om't brugje." — Multatuli, Ideen. PREFACE The following pages are intended to offer an intro duction or primer — brief indeed, considering the nature of the subject (a monograph on the Assyrian hell is shortly to be published by a learned Assyrio- logist in two octavo volumes), and certainly very far from approaching completeness — of the leading and most interesting feattires of the most prominent ancient and modern hells. They present an evolu tionary study of the Pit commonly called bottomless ; a sort of comparative eschatology, or international "De Novissimis," which may prove geoerally inter esting. The curious reader will discover many similarities and discrepancies in hell's history other than those incorporated or declared in the text. As far back as the early — possibly the earliest — hell of Egypt are to be found traces of the leading constituents of the infernal world : of the dog, the ferryman, the devil, the bridge, the fire, the balance, the trumpet, and the worm. Of these but a poor three are now familiar in the highways of Christianity ; but in its byways are to be discovered not a few other con formities to alien creeds. For example, the Christian despoiling and denudation by "William Staunton of the proud, that substitution of a rent for a girdle, of sackcloth for a stomacher, of baldness for well-set hair, and of burning for beauty, has its harbinger PKEFACE in the treatment of Istar by Ninkigal or Allat in the hell of Assyria. The bovine monsters shown in the Harrowing have their van couriers in the bull- headed, horse-faced devils of the Divine Panorama of Buddha. The'Brahmanic Asipatravana bourgeons in the vision of the Christian monk, Alberico. The bolt of metal in the eye of the Egyptian and the ear of the Hebrew sinner occupies the mouth of the Christian culprit miller of Ordericus Vitalis. The delivery of Owen from infernal assault by means of a sacred formula has its counterpart in the escape, through his five-lettered charm, of the Bishi Sananda. Just as , the Palace of the Assyrian underworld is excited by the advent of Istar, just as the Soman ghosts crowd around .ZEneas to learn the reason of his coming, just as the Darvands in the hell of Zoroaster are disturbed by a new arrival, so is the Hebrew and Christian hell moved from beneath — with all its kings of the nations and he-goats of the earth — to meet at his setting Lucifer, the fallen star of the morning. The Muslim Swat, the Zoroastrian Chinavad, the bridge in Yalkut Meubeni, has its adumbration in the linea delgada y debil of Calderon. The Cocytus of Paradise Lost is but another form of the Sanskrit Asrumati, the Scandinavian VaSgelmir. The soul- bubbles seen by Thespesius in Plutarch are also seen by Dricthelm in the vision of the Venerable Bede. Similarities of this sort between the Christian and other hells of importance abound. Curious affinities of treatment also exist among Christian writers them selves. The Angelic Doctor is more than occasionally an analogue of Jonathan Edwards ; Caesarius and PREFACE vii Meyfart are far from wholly disparate ; St. Amandus may be matched with Drexel, Chrysostom with Bail, and there is much in common between Meremberg and Olmedo. Many Christian exponents of internal torments besides Tertullian have anticipated with satisfaction the ultimate and eternal suffering of their social, political, or religious antagonists ; many besides Dante and Grilbert Bauer have borrowed their infernal comparisons from the kitchen ; many besides Bunyan have placed their particular " brutes " in hell ; and many besides Quevedo their too importunate trades men. Discrepancies of treatment are equally numerous. "Whiston, not content with holding the "sacred accounts of hell agreeable to profane tradition," must needs also " suit them to the true system of the world." He therefore located in a comet the hell, which Tupper, following the Sylla of Plutarch, set in the moon, and Swinden in the sun. William Martin, however, in his Archangel, after explaining that " people must not, through extreme ignorance, like Sir Isaac Newton, think the sun a great body of fire," shows to his own satisfaction that the hell of Swinden is not a hot planet, but comfortable and, indeed, heaven itself. " Abide these in hell for ever," says the Bible of Islam, " unless as God shall will— verily, thy Lord is wise." This sentiment agrees precisely with the words of Justin Martyr in his Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, when he says the souls of the wicked KoKatpVTM, etrr av ai>Ta<; Kai ehai, Kai KoKa^ecrdai 6 060? deXy. It is none the less widely divergent from the view of these numerous holy men, of whom the viii PREFACE " punishment is , partly," according to Festus, " to beheve hell's pain perpetual." The hell of Origen— followed apparently in his- heresy by both the Gregories, of Nyssa and of Nazian- zum, of whom the latter says, treating of Hell in his Oration concerning Baptism, ii firf Ttp (plXov Kavravda voeiv tovto tXav8pcoTr6repov, Kai tov KoXd^ovrot eira^Loos — is hardly the hell of Cyprian and Chrysostom. The mild and neutral-tinted ^pictiires of Thisted and Chateaubriand and Swedenborg offer a contrast as remarkable as those of Raoul de Houdaing and Rabe lais to the lurid limnings of S. Anthony of Padua and Richard Hampole, of Damiano and Hilde brand. There is a great gulf fixed between Bailey and Diisterdieck, and "Aut Gehenna est, aut Deus non est," albeit the oriflamme of Rusca and S. Justin is far different from the labarum of Fenelon and Canon Farrar. The secrets lying hid under the dark clouds which cover the ocean on the other side of the rock of adamant were left by Addison's judgment in his Vision of Mirza undisplayed. They are displayed with sufficient prominence and profusion by many of the sacred writers cited in this book ; and the reader has an undoubted right to complain of a super abundance of infernal horror, of too much " boil and bubble," of a surfeit of infinitely aggravated sensa tions of agony. But he may find— if it be worth his quest— that only a few basketfuls have been taken from the Augean stables— only a few samples given of the tortures accumulated by some of the authors here quoted, and not least by him whom Boccaccio has called the " singular splendour of the Italian race." It seems a melancholy fact that the human fancy PREFACE paints more easily, if not with more delight, with greater energy, if not with greater satisfaction, the sorrows than the felicities of its future life. Such samples serve at least to show a mournful dearth in the ancient and modern history of hell of that tolerance which, but now rising above the theological horizon, heralds possibly the meridian of a full and glorious effulgence in the future. The ministering angels, it is written in Sanhedrin, sought to sing before the Holy One, blessed be He I in the hour of the destruction of the hosts of Pharaoh. He said to them, " The work of my hands is sunk in the sea, and will you sing before Me ? " Polemics have, it is hoped, been carefully eschewed, and everyphase of religious doctrine treated — without any pretence to a galeatus prologus, with due respect to that respectable section of society whose faith in hell has been asserted to be dearer to them than their faith in heaven. The author acknowledges his indebtedness to Mr. James Knowles, the editor of The Nineteenth Century, in which periodical many of the following pages originally appeared, for his kind permission to reproduce them; to Mr. John Ashton, to whose patient and untiring industry all the pictures in the book are due, for portions of the Buddhist and Christian hells ; to Messrs. Chamuel et Cie, of Paris, for some illustrations of the Japanese hell by Japanese artists, one of which is set on the book's cover ; to Messrs. Murray for three copies taken from Dennis' Etruria; to Mr. Naphtali Herz, Mr. David Beveridge, and Mr. Alexander Black for ever-ready and liberal assistance in its composition ; and to the printers, Messrs. Hazell, "Watson & Viney, through PREFACE whose accurate scholarship, constant solicitude and alert circumspection, he has been enabled in many instances to correct errors of oversight and of ignor ance — errors the value of whose correction the learned critic will best know how fully to appreciate who knows best how difficult it is to avoid them. CONTENTS PAOB Egyptian Hell . . 1 Assyrian Hell . . 11 Brahman Hell . . . .... 16 Buddhist Hell . . . ... 26 Zoroastrian Hell . 103 Classic Hell . 110 Scandinavian Hell . 153 Hebrew Hell 164 Christian Hell . . 204 Muslim Hell .... 368 Baebaeian Hell . 423 LIST OE ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE CHRISTIAN HELL Frontispiece. Hell Mouth . . . see 344 EGYPTIAN HELL Soul weighed before Osiris . . . . 6 Great Snake Kheti . . 7 ASSYRIAN HELL Devils . . 12 Passage of Allat . 14 BUDDHIST HELL Sinner boiled in Pot . 30 Sinner injured by Jackal . 31 Sinner vexed by Crows . 31 Sinner worried by Wild Boar . . 31 SINHALESE HELL First Great, or Sanga-waya ... 34 Second Great, or Kale-soottbaya . 34 Third Great, or Sanga-hattaya . 36 Fourth Great, or Raubawaya . . 37 Fifth Great, or Maha-bavbawaya . . 38 Sixth Great, or Taw-pay a . . . 39 Seventh Great, or Pvttaw-paya . . 40 Eighth Great, or Awe-oseya .41 xiv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS JAPANESE HELL fage Pounding of a Sinner . . .42 Haling of Sinners into Hell . 43 Vivisection of Sinners . 415 CHINESE HELL Judgment Seat of Ch'in Kuang ¦ 61 Sinner on Tree of Sword Points . 65 _ Sinner bound with Cords and in Cangues . . 67 Sinner's Eyes put out .... .70 Sinner ripped open and Heart removed . 74 Sinner chopped in two at Waist . 77 Sinner disembowelled .... .79 Sinner seethed in a Roomy Saucepan . 83 Sinners sawn between Planks . 86 The Mother Meng and Wheel of Fate . 89 Scene from the Dabk Pagoda 100 Visvakarman, the Buddhist Vulcan . 101 ETRUSCAN HELL Charun (from Dennis' Etbubia) 120 Manalis lapis 121 Fury with Columella, Necklace, and Armlets . . 122 Fury with Wings on Head . 123 Fury with Scraper . . 124 Ancharia, Queen of Furies . 125 Furina with Poleaxe . 126 Chimera, or Tinmovil, "the Avenger" . 127 Gryps, bursting prom Acheron 127 Volta, springing from a Crypt . 128 Capra . .129 Dragon destroying a Youth . . 130 Entry into Orcus .... . _ 131 TUQHULCHA, THREATENING THESEUS (FROM DENNIS' EtBUBIA) 132 CLASSIC HELL Pluto, Proserpine, and Geryon (from Dennis' Etrvbia) . 133 Hercules and Cerberus .... 134 Danaids . . . li2 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS SCANDINAVIAN HELL Helheim PAGE 157 ANGLO-SAXON HELL HellewIte . lt;i CHRISTIAN HELL Die verdambt Seel 225 Harrowing of Hell 241 Delivery of Adam . . . 243 Sinner tied to a Devil's Tail . 245 Picture from Pelerinage de l-ame 253 The Punishment of Hypocrites . . . 254 Devil turning Wheel of Torment . . . 25& Picture of Hell from Biblia Pavpebvm . . . 257 The Resurrection of the Dead . . . 259 Female Sinner seized by Devils . . 260' Picture of Hell Mouth from Kalendbieb des Bergiebs 261 The Proud whirled round on Wheels . 262 The Envious engaged in Ice . 263 The Choleric pierced with Spits . . 264r The Slothful assailed by Serpents 265 The Covetous boiled in Caldrons . . 266 The Gluttonous fed on venomous Beasts . 207 The Lecherous in Pits of Fire and Brimstone 268 Eisebnes Bad . . 292 Torment of Sight 30O Torment of Hearing 301 Torment of Smell . 302 Torment of Taste 303 Torment of Touch . 305 Picture from Dr. Watts . 311 Picture from Juan de Olmedo .... . 315 Devils haling Sinners into Hell (From a Miserere Seat) 343 Fat Devils from Fra Angelico . . . . 345 Hell Mouth from Lincoln Cathedral 34 & TRADITIONAL ASPECTS OF HELL Egyptian Hell No people, it has been affirmed, had so many Gods as the ancient Egyptians, and yet, like all other primi tive nations, probably without exception, they knew in their earlier years no such notions as are con notated by what is commonly considered to be the Christian hell. Like other animists, they had their Sheol or Hades, generally understood to be the realm of shadows, or the unknown region traversed by the sun during the dozen hours of night. Gods and no devils, however much they may have resembled them, were there, abnormal beings bearing resemblance to the ibis and the monkey, the crocodile and the ram. Plutarch's Isis and Osiris gives a circumstantial account of the early faith of the Egyptians. It has the advantage of having been written by one initiated into its mysteries. He explains the yellow or red-skinned Typhon, the assassin of Osiris, as the dry fiery prin ciple opposed to the black generative moisture of the judge of hell. "With the former Plutarch compares Ahriman, and with the latter Ormuzd or Bacchus. Typhon is also represented with red hair, and with EGYPTIAN HELL a face like an ass; and some say his skin is bluey- green, and that he hales the souls out of mortal bodies with a noose. Typhon, however, is con spicuous by his absence in the early Amenti of the old Egyptian faith — the " taker and giver," as it is interpreted by Plutarch, the " darkness," as by Jablonsky, corresponding with hades rather than hell. Here reposed, according to one account, the souls for a more or less long period of years — so long as the Kha, dead fish, or mummified body remained undestroyed. The later Egyptian hell resembles in many and important particulars the Brahmanic. The later Osiris of Egypt has been compared with a certain so- called Wassreuseum of India. His palace of one-and- twenty portals is described as guarded by demons with fiery brands, and recalls the twenty-one Narakas. There are, we are told, gradations of pain and torture in both faiths alike. In both the punishment is only temporary. After a more or less lengthy sojourn in Amenti, the purified souls pass into the bodies of beasts, afterwards again to animate those of men. The Per-m-hru or Book of the Dead, consisting of some eight-score chapters, probably the oldest book in the world, is our chief authority for the later Egyptian hell. From this perhaps all the more important hells originated, being subsequently modified by painters, poets, priests, and politicians. Per-m-hru, literally "the coming forth from— or of — day," the religious book of early Egypt, is, like the bibles and scriptures of other creeds, inspired. The famous 125th chapter is declared to have been written by the god Thoth, better spelt Tehuti. Some, indeed, ascribe the whole Book of the Dead to this demon. Thoth, a sort of Egyptian Hermes, is commonly represented with the EGYPTIAN HELL head of an ibis, as Anubis boasts that of a jackal, and Horus that of a hawk. All these are to be found in the world below, together with a Cerberus, who is equally good at receiving and bad at letting go with his Greek representative. The Egyptian soul, it is said, was a ka or double, or a ba or crane, or a khu or shining one. Such was post humous humanity for the theologians of later Egypt. And their hells were more than one. The hell of Sokaris bore little resemblance to that of Osiris. The latter was an archipelago of green islands, lying hid in reeds, and lost in the eastern lagunes of the Delta, The former consisted of caverns or long corridors, as those in mines, dug in the Libyan chain on the western fringe of the Necropolis of Memphis. Sokaris was the prince of the Libyan desert of the Memphite dead. The Nuter-Kher, Tuaou, or Hades of the Abydenians was in no settled locality, but constituted a division of the universe. The Book of the Dead shows us a shining one, or Khu, going on a pilgrimage: a figure in white, supported on a staff, ascending the sandy slope of the Libyan hills in search of Sokaris. The dangers for the Ba or soul on its way to Amenti were numerous. And this journey formed no small portion of the Egyptian hell. For it was not easy. The errant ghost was exposed like an ordinary wayfarer to the ordinary risks of the desert, to the incursions of bad demons, of snakes, of poison ous beetles, of scorpions and other reptiles, to fatigue, and thirst and hunger, before it reached that land of heavy darkness and of sleep, the place where those who settle slumber in their forms, and wake no more to greet their brethren, or look on father or mother, and their heart leaves hold of wives and children. EGYPTIAN HELL Foul for these is the living water of earth, where none says, " Let thy jug never be drained," and none will bring them to the north wind, by the brink of the stream, that it may fan them and cool their heart of its pain. The 149th chapter pf the Book of the Dead enumerates the leading horrors of the journey. Snakes are mentioned by name : Sati Temui, of the two knives, seventy cubits long, and Rerek with a backbone of seven cubits, who live on the spectral food produced by the slaughtering of shades and the dead in the nether world. Terrific ghosts are to be found, with thighs of seven cubits in extent, who feast on the spirits of the motionless ones. There is also the great " Overthrower of fishes," against whom especially the dead pray to ba protected. Streams and torrents of fire abound. Maat, the Goddess of truth, is the Sun's daughter. The 125th chapter of the Book of the Dead is called the chapter of entering into the Hall of Judgment of right and wrong (the twofold Maat). The picture shows forty-two Gods in line above the scales. These correspond with the forty-two commandments. They live by the punishment of the bad, and devour their blood on that day of weighing the words, in the presence of Unnefer the triumphant. Under the bad are comprised the fraudulent and unjust, the crooked ones who force the labourer to do more than his daily labour, who calum niate servants, who cause hunger and tears, who murder, who tamper with the tongue of the scales, and withhold milk from the mouth of the suckling. The sins are clearly not catalogued under any scientific order. The hell of Osiris appears less unpleasant. A EGYPTIAN HELL ferryman like Charon carried the souls hither, and there was a psychostasy, or judgment of the dead. The heart was weighed by Horus and Anubis, and the soul dealt with as it proved heavy or light. Thoth, the scribe, having written down the sen tence, the soul, if impure, was ruthlessly hunted, and suffered much evil before annihilation. Specific accounts of this evil are, however, rare. The negative confession of the good soul is to be found in the Book of the Dead. Other hieroglyphs present the deceased conducted to Amenti by Horus or his wife. In the graves, sarcophagi and papyrus literature, we learn what little the Egyptians held concerning future punishments. Drawings and inscriptions are mutually corroborative. The tortures are of varied kinds, but fire plays the leading role, as in most other faiths. In one part of the Egyptian Bible the damned are addressed, apparently to little purpose, as follows : " You are decapitated, you exist no longer, your soul is annihilated : it cannot live because of what you have done to my father Osiris." "It is your function," says Horus, addressing the infernal spirits, " to guard in hell the places where the wicked are tortured in the fire, according to the commands of the God Ha." And the drawings show us the damned swimming in a Stygian lake, where their bodies burn without being consumed. In another picture the infernal spirits spew forth glowing venom into this fiery pool. The journey of the sun through hell, and through its dozen gates guarded by as many snakes, is represented on the alabaster sarcophagus of Oimene- pthah L, known as Seti I., king of Egypt, drawn by Joseph Bonomi, and now in the Soane Museum, EGYPTIAN HELL Lincoln's Inn. On the left hand of the sun are the damned, set, according to Egyptian perspective, below him. "We have a picture here reproduced (fig. 1) of a soul being weighed before the judge Osiris, who sits on a chair supported by what we are told are the legs of lions. A pair of scales depends' from a man's shoulders. Herein, are set all the Fig. 1. * <* * * actions of men. Commonly truth, in the shape of a feather, is weighed in the balance against some thing in the shape of a heart. Here, however, we find in one pan the soul in the form of a bird, and in the opposite pan, nothing. Above is Anubis, an analogue of the classic Mercury, who conducts the souls to be judged. Below are members of the human race expecting judgment. In front of the judge is a boat, in which an ape, one of the keepers EGYPTIAN HELL of the fiery pit, is carrying off a wicked one who has been condemned to reappear upon earth in the body of a pig. Beneath Osiris' throne are four of the iniquitous, who seem to be working with axes, upon their knees, as if condemned to the mines. Sometimes a single figure is seen hewing away the earth with an axe, behind the boat conveying off the soul, as if to show the impossibility of its further communication with the country it abandons. The fiery lake, wherein the souls suffer sore annoy, and bathe, float, swim, and dive, illumed with ruddy flame, foreshows the mysteries of the Buddhist and prepares the way of the Christian faith. But these souls are fed, Fig. 2. by birds with human heads, on bread and vegetables, and cry aloud to Ra : " Glory to thee, the greatest of masters ! Praise to thee, Greatness ! Hades is thine ; at thy will thou hast made it, secret for those who are in caverns, mysterious for those who are in it." In connection with this hades and the fiery lake is depicted Horus, leaning on a staff, with a dozen men, the burned enemies of Osiris, having their arms tied in different ways, and in groups of four. Opposite the first, throwing fire into his face, is the great snake Kheti, or fire, of which the body forms seven folds, and supports a mummified God between every fold (fig. 2). This snake has been supposed by EGYPTIAN HELL antiquarians— but what will not antiquarians suppose? —a near relation of the crooked serpent of Job. Horus, says the text, is here haranguing the foes of his father Osiris: "Be deprived of powerl from your arms 'to your heads— powerless ! You are bound behind, wicked ones! Ra will sacrifice you,, you shall be no longer in existence, your souls shall' be destroyed. They shall five no longer, on account* of what you have done against my father Osiris: you have despised the mysteries, you have torn the image from the sanctuary. Powerful is the word of my father Osiris against you; powerful is my word against you. You have rejected the mysteries for the repose of the Great One who has begotten me in Hades: Oh, be no longer in existence, destroyed!" Horus says: "My Kheti, great fire, of which this flame which is in my. eye is the emission, fire, of which my children guard the folds, open thy mouth, draw wide thy jaws, launch thy flame against the enemies of my father; burn their bodies, consume their souls, by this fire from thy mouth, by this flame from thy belly. My children are against them, they destroy their souls, those who have issued from me are against them, they exist no longer. The fire in Kheti bursts forth, a scourge against his foes, when Horus summons him." Charles Lenormant, in his Musee des Antiquites Egyptiennes, gives, with more circumstance of detail, a picture from the tomb of Rhamses V. of the infliction of punishment on the guilty in one of the many mansions of Amenti. The impure spirits are represented sometimes as cranes, sometimes as hawks with men's heads. Here they are in human shape, on their knees, with their hands bound behind their EGYPTIAN HELL backs. Out of the head of one blood gushes, while another, who has recently suffered decapitation, is suspended with his legs stretched apart in air. Here is one cast into a caldron of some boiling liquid, and there another drags his heart, which has been torn from his breast, about the dust. Other unfortunates endure analogous evils. They are to be made perfect through sufferings which are not lacking in severity. The executioners are portrayed with falchions. The faulty ones are painted black. The mind of man solicitous to discover reasons in other matters than the roasting of eggs, has sought a reason for such sable hue. It is, say some, to express still better the perversity of the erring souls. But there are degrees of perversity, and the blackness is uniform. It is perhaps more probably intended to show that shadow of thick darkness which surrounds them. The God passing through the seventy-five zones with their armed presidents, and ill-starred prisoners in the inferior hemisphere, is also, though not depraved, invariably painted in black. In the second tale of Khamuas, translated by F. L. Griffith, a visit to Hades is described. Si Osiri leads his father to the mystic entrance of Te. They discover the dead desirous of the bread and water hung over them ; hastening to take it down, but other dead are digging pits at their feet to pre vent them. It is singular how often the kindness of . the dead is but a copy of the kindness of the living. In the fifth hall is seen one in whose right eye the bolt of the door of the fifth hall has been fixed, and, says the chronicler, he is uttering loud lamentation. There is a curious correspondence between this punishment and that 10 EGYPTIAN HELL of Mary, mentioned in the Jerusalem Talmud. In the seventh hall Osiris is seated, with Anubis on his left and Thoth on his right, and the Gods of the council of Amenti are standing round them, Amt, or Amam, or Ammit, the mistress of Amenti, is a monster with the head of a crocodile, the bodyj of a lion, and the hind parts of a hippopotamusj There is a variant which presents her in the shape; of a pig. He whose evil deeds outweigh his good— alas for poor humanity ! — is delivered over to this monster, the Eater of the dead, and his soul and body destroyed for ever. Others affirm that it is only the worst of the wicked, the unrepentant, who' are finally condemned and annihilated. It is— and must, it is to be feared, remain — a matter of painful uncertainty. Assyrian Hell Quand on ria pas ce qu'on aime, il faut aimer ce qu'on a, says an old French proverb ; and in default of a genuine legitimate hell of early Assyria, the reader must be content with representations of demons in various departments. Many of these figures have been found in Chaldea and Assyria, in bas-reliefs, bronzes and terra cotta ; -human bodies, with heads of lions and dogs' ears, and horses' manes, and birds' feet, with daggers or other instruments of dole in their hands. The demons here presented (fig. 3) are derived from the palace of Assurbanipal at Kouyundjik. It may be doubted whether they be demons troubling bodies in this world or souls in another ; but, despite the industry or the judgment of the antiquarian, they hardly represent any salient features of a tormenting hell. The Assyrian seems originally to have believed in a sort of immortality of the body, and considerately provided for its refreshment in the grave. After he had grown out of this belief he imagined an indefinite something— an imago, a soul which flitted out of the body after death. After that came, if indeed it came, the idea of retribution. Other religions show similar features. In the terra-cotta tablets from the library of Assurbanipal, preserved in the British Museum, George Smith discovered an account of the descent of 12 ASSYEIAN HELL Istar to hell in search of her lover Tammuz. To the translation of these tablets and their explanation Schrader has devoted a volume of some 100 pages. Die Hbllenfahrt der Istar : Giessen, 1894. The soul in Assyrian is ekimmou. This hell of Assyria, situate! at the foot of the " Northern Mountain," has been Fig. 3. compared with the Egyptian Amenti and the Greeks Hades. From the narrative of Istar it seems to have been an immense mansion in the earth's centre, bounded by seven strong walls and a great river. It is called mat la namari, "the land where one sees nothing," or mat la tayarti, "the land whence one returns not." It is governed by Nergal, the Assyrian Mars, and his wife Allat, the sister of Astarte, Herd ASSYRIAN HELL 13 the spirits of the dead flit about like bats in the darkness, and eat dust only. Seven gates, with dust covering their bolts and bars, and seven porters, prevent the dead from breaking forth from their mansion, and, according to Sayce, from devouring, under the form of vampires, the living. Through these seven gates — a conception derived apparently from an early astronomy — the goddess Istar or Ishtar, in the famous Babylonian poem, passed on her search for Tammuz. This Assyrian hades was called Bit-Edi, or house of solitude, because every one there is chiefly concerned — as indeed sometimes happens in this upper world — with his own affairs, and takes no thought for anybody else. Istar was therefore not annoyed by any indiscretion of curiosity, which troubles royalty of later time, but had to submit to a curious rule of Assyrian eschatology. She was bound to divest herself of all ornament, and, indeed, her upper garment. At the first gate the crown is removed from her head, at the second the earrings from her ears, at the third the necklace from her neck, at the fourth the forehead jewels from her forehead, at the fifth the girdle from her waist, at the sixth the rings from her fingers, and at the seventh the cloak from her body. On her arrival at the mansion of Nin-ki-gal, or lady of the great land or Allat, her attendant Namtar, the separator or judge, proceeds to punish her. Every part once adorned with gems is now smitten by disease. Her punishment is accompanied by nipping taunts. Let her mourn, says Nin-ki-gal, for the hus bands who have left their wives, and let her mourn for the wives who have left their husbands. Mardak or Merodach or Silik-mulu-khi alone may release from 14 ASSYRIAN HELL Fig. 4. hell. Like Mithra, the friend or mediator between God and man, is this Messiah of the Chaldees. "With the single poor exception of the ill-starred Istar, in none of the texts translated is there any evidence ASSYRIAN HELL 15 of a penal hell. There is, however, a bronze plate acquired by Peretie at Hama, in N. Syria, showing four compartments, supposed to represent respectively heaven, air, earth, and hell (fig. 4). The greatest space is given to the last of these, our sole present concern. In the lower part are five fishes swimming in the same direction, a conventional symbol representing a river. On the right are two shrubs surmounted by funeral offerings — vases, bottles, a tooth-comb, a box, and the foot of a horse. At the other end a hideous monster is advancing. Its head is flat, its nose simious, its mouth elongated ; the upper part is a hairy man, its feet are those of a bird, it is winged, and possesses a tail. On the river glides a small boat, its poop the head of a quadruped, its prow that of a bird. A horse in profile is seen in this boat, crushed down by a gigantic and formidable divinity. She — the two lion cubs springing to her breast for nourish ment have determined her sex — is like the other person on the tablet, save that she has the head of a lioness. In each of her hands is a long snake, and underneath it is, as it were, the figure of a scorpion. She, it is said, is the Goddess Allat, passing, in a somewhat exceptional boat, through her infernal empire. Brahman Hell Chaeles Darwin,, in his Descent of Man, says that there is ample evidence, derived, not from hasty travellers, but from men who have long resided with savages, that numerous races have existed, and still exist, who have no idea of God, and, therefore, no word in their language to express such idea. But the case is wholly different in the matter of ghosts or devils, for a belief in these seems in uncivilised;' races universal. The disbelief in any future retribu tion is by no means confined to barbaric peoples. The Egyptian Amenti, the Assyrian Bit-Edi, the Hebrew Sheol, and the Greek Hades, meant originally no more than the home of the dead, of ghosts, un- associated with any conception of punishment or of pain. The penal hell of the Hindus is one of the oldest known. The Hindu considers the soul a free being, fighting, during its conjunction with the body, against evil. If it succumbs, it passes through other animal forms, and if it fails also under these conditions, hell is its ultimate portion. Yama, the tamer, surrounded i by crocodiles, presides there as judge. His sister Yami, — for decency dominates hell, — is concerned with female sinners. Yama Pura, Yama's abode, is nine times circled— novies interfuea — by Vaitarani, a stream difficult of navigation, where a boatman is BRAHMAN HELL 17 stationed to ferry souls into Yama's regions. A fare is demanded. Another river is called Asrumati, or " the tearful." The Hindu Pluto, or Satan, has curly hair and red eyes. Black and yellow, he shines in a scarlet robe, holding a cord of a thumb's breadth, with which he binds the souls. The wicked alone see him ; he has large teeth, and a monstrous body. The punishments of the Hindu hells are not deficient in horror, and a pretty fancy is exhibited in many — as, for example, in the idea of that luckless soul of the damned which is ground between millstones, and after sufficient attenuation, is twisted into a wick for a lamp, and so gradually therein consumed. Cashmala, — possibly the Casmala of the Samothracian Cabiri, — Yama's servant, drags the wicked, with ropes round their necks, over rugged paths, and throws them finally headlong into hell. Yama is the dread divinity of darkness, death, and hell. He rides a buffalo, and holds a scimitar, with a savage frown. Sacrifices are offered to him, and men are advised by Manu to reflect on the sinful deeds causing transmigration, hell, and torment in Yama's world. In the ninth and tenth books of the Rig-Veda there is reference to Yama, though not until a later religion is he concerned with the punishment of ' the damned. In the Rig-Veda references to future punishment are confessedly vague and indistinct. In that Upanishad of the Atharva-Veda, which it has pleased Anquetil du Perron to call Oupnek'hat Riouni, consisting of several juz1 or parts, Tajkita is sent by his father to King Almout (Death) from whom none returns. King Almout is not at home, and Tajkita waits three days. In this early Atharva- 18 BRAHMAN HELL Veda is perhaps the earliest notice of Oareme. Tajkita neither eats nor drinks for three days and three nights. Almout, pleased by this pious conduct, offers to grant him three requests. The Brahman obtains two of these, and the conversation continues thus : " Here is my third wish. There is a contrariety among talkers. Some say whatever is, is body ; when this is dissolved nothing survives. Others recognise* a soul (atma), separated from the body, which passes after death into a world convenient unto it. I wish," says Tajkita, " to have this dispute decided by him who is most likely to know the truth." Quoth| Almout : " This, 0 Tajkita, is a very subtle matter, and about it the angels are in doubt. Ask me something else." Then Almout, in a long speech, ; offers him a large family, and opulence in elephants and gold, and houris and horses, and singing and dancing ladies, and a long life. But Tajkita will have none of them. " "What," he asks, " is length of life, when it is appointed all men once to die ? "What are riches, when the more a man has the more he wants ? " and so on. After which Almout explains that the soul exists in the middle of the heart of all creaturesj and gives a discourse, in many juz\ concerning its immortality. But with regard to the punishment of this atma, the information given by Almout is exceeding meagre. In a rhyme of the Atharva-Veda, concerned with prayers in the Brahmanic interest, we learn that the sterile cow fulfils all wishes in the kingdom of Yama for him that gives her. But they say that hell falls to the lot of him that withholds her when she has been begged for. We can almost imagine we are reading the psalms attributed to David, when a BRAHMAN HELL 19 few pages further we find, " Do Thou, 0 God Surya (the sun), when thou risest, beat down my enemies, beat them down with a stone ! They shall go to the nethermost darkness." The various hells are elaborately described in the Puranas. There are, it is said, a lakh of hells suited to different vices. But offences against religion are more numerous, if not more severely punished, than offences against ethics. He who injures a man of superior caste is rent by swine, he who despises a religious mendicant will stick in the mud with his head downwards, and he who slays a Brahman will be reborn as a dog, or an ass, a bear, or a bull. According to Sonnerat, who attributes to Brahma a scene with his daughter which puts Zeus into the shade, the Indian hell, at the sight of which everybody trembles, is situated beneath the earth towards the south. Here are gathered together fire, monsters, snakes, insects, and other infernal machinery. Giants (or as Sonnerat calls them Emaguinguilliers), servants of Yama, drag the wicked before that monarch, after having ill-used them by scourging and trampling and burning and other inflictions. It is curious that this punishment occurs before judgment of Yama, who condemns those who have insulted Brahmans to be cut in bits, those who have robbed them to be sawn through the middle, those who have despised religion to be hurled upon knife-blades, for as many years as they have hairs on their body ; and those who have abandoned their family to be torn by crows. After they have suffered these woes for the allotted period, their bodies reuniting like quicksilver, they are born 20 BRAHMAN HELL again to suffer the same, or worse ills, unless they see the error of their ways. The union of soul and body is productive, in the" case of human souls, of misery, and the evil soul must be removed to a place of punishment which is neither full, effectual, nor final. For the twenty-one Hindu hells or Narakas are merely temporary purgatories, Temporary ! but the unhappy soul must pass through eighty-four lakhs of births, and a lakh is one hundred thousand. The hells are enumerated in Manu. One is a pit of red-hot charcoal, another a forest whose leaves are swords; one is paved with iron spikes, and another is " replete " (to borrow a flower from trade advertisements) with stinking mud. These are not to be confounded with the seven Patalas, the abode of Nagas, or snakes ; by some considered a Hindu Hades under the earth, but above the Narakas. He who accepts presents from an avaricious king (according to the translation of G. Biihler), who acts contrary to the Institutes of the sacred law, will go to all the one-and-twenty hells in succession. The foolish man, who after having eaten a Sraddka (funeral feast) gives the remnant meat to a Sudm (low-caste person), falls headlong into the Kalasvtim hell— he who explains the sacred law to a Sudra will sink together with him into the Asamvrita hell. A twice-born man (or Aryan born for the sake of the Veda) who has merely threatened a Brahman with corporal injury will wander about for a century in the Tamisra hell. Those Brahmans who act like herons (with extremest circumspection), and those, who display the characteristics of cats, fall, in conse quence of their wicked actions, into the Andhatamisra BRAHMAN HELL -2\ hell. A stronger body (one able to withstand super natural torments), formed of the five elements, and destined to suffer in hell, is produced, in the case of wicked men, after death, when the wicked have thus in their original body suffered the tortures of Yama. Those who have committed mortal sins (mahdpataka) having passed, during large numbers of years, through dreadful hells, obtain, after the expiration of that term of punishment, the following births : The slayer of a Brahman enters the womb of a bitch, or a swine. A Brahman who drinks Sura (alcohol) shall enter bodies of insects. A Brahman who steals another Brahman's money shall pass a thousand times through the bodies of snakes and spiders. Men who delight in doing hurt become carnivora ; who are eaters of forbidden food, worms ; who steal grain, rats ; who steal hone}", stinging insects ; who steal condiments, dogs ; who steal ghi (clarified butter), ichneumons. And so thieves of meat, fat, salt, linen, molasses, cooked food, uncooked food, women, and water, will be changed respectively into vultures, cormorants, crickets, frogs, flying foxes, porcupines, hedgehogs, bears, and black-white cuckoos. The tortures in the hells are varied, such as tossing about, binding, mangling, being devoured by owls and ravens, burning in scorching sand and boiling in jars, " which," says the author, " is hard to bear." In "W. Taylor's report of the Mackenzie MS. written in Tamil on palm-leaves, the Sananda Cheritra is mentioned. Herein the birth of Sananda is described : how he became a Rishi or devotee according to the Jangama system, and visited certain other devotees in a wilderness, and then went to Yama-pur, and there saw all the various tortures suffered by 22 BRAHMAN HELL Papdtmalu or wicked souls, and was greatly affected thereby. Moved by fear and compassion, he uttered aloud everywhere in that doleful region the Saiva five-lettered formula Nama Sivayi, the hearing of which led to its repetition by the whole of the sufferers in chorus : and the potency of the charm was such that they were all taken up into Siva's paradise, or Kaildsa. Yama, much disgusted at losing his subjects, complained to Siva against Sananda : but Siva replied that Sananda was born under a special influence frorn himself, was a faithful votary; and recommended Yama to return whence he came. Such visits to Hell, and releases, are common to other creeds : Ormuzd has his five days in the Zoro- astrian, tHe Hebrew has its Zerubbabel, the Christian its Hell-harrowing, and the Classic its Hercules. In the Vishnu Purana, Parasara gives the Muni Maitreya an account of the hells which are situated beneath the earth and beneath the waters, and into which sinners are finally sent. The Bhagavata, by the way, places these hells or Narakas above the waters. He then gives their names, Raurava, Sukaray etc., and he makes them in all twenty-eight. The Bhagavata also gives twenty-eight, but the names are frequently different. The usual computation is twenty-one. But the number is yet undetermined. As Parasara goes on to say, " these and many other fearful hells are the awful provinces of the kingdom of Yama, terrible with instruments of torture and with fire, into which are hurled all those who were addicted, when alive, to sinful practices." A notable and excellent beginning, deserving in deed the notice of "Western theologians, is this : The BRAHMAN HELL 23 man who utters any falsehood, or bears false witness through partiality, is condemned to the Raurava, or dreadful shrieking hell. He, says Parasara, who kills a cow, or causes abortion, or robs a town, or strangles a man, goes to the Rodha hell, or the hell of obstruction. The Sitkara, or swine hell, is the portion of the drinker of wine, or the stealer of gold, or the murderer of a Brahman ; and of all who asso ciate with these nefarious ones. The "Western mind is frequently at a loss to understand the rationale of these punishments for such different actions as the drinking of wine and the murder of a Brahman ; but many equally remarkable records appear on the following pages, and in all cases the deeds of the wicked are noted down by Chitragupta, the infernal registrar, and Yama, who is the judge of the dead as well as the sovereign of the damned, determines, after inspecting the records, into what regions of Naraka or Tartarus they shall descend. The Tola, or padlock hell, is the portion of him who murders a man of the second or third caste, or who has too great an affection for the wife of his Guru. One who holds such an affection for his sister, or murders an ambassador, falls into Taptakumbha, or the hell of heated kettles. The seller of his wife, a gaoler, a horse-dealer, and one who deserts his adherents, is punished in the Taptaloha, or the hell of red-hot iron. The Mahd- jwala hell, or hell of great flame but it is idle, perhaps, to mention the particular hell destined for each particular crime or criminal. Suffice it to say, that there is a particular hell, Vedhaka (piercing), destined for bowmen, and another, Visasana (mur derous) for armourers. Magicians, astrologers, and those who abuse their betters have their destined 24 iSKAHMAN HELL places of torment, as have those who teach the Vedas for hire, who spoil precious gems, who say no grace at meals, who are given to stag-hunting, who hate the Gods, who rear cats, cocks, dogs, or hogsj and who eat by themselves— that is, to the exclusion! of their wives and children— sweetmeats mixed with their rice. Such wicked-doers expiate their enormi ties in the hell of inverted heads, or that of bewilder ment ; in the hell of insects, or pincers, or trees with leaves like swords; in the hell of pus, or that of wells of blood ; or in the hells Lavana, Lalabhaksha, ; Swabhojana, Krimibhaksha, where salt, or spittle, or dogs, or worms, shall be their only food. These hells, says Parasara, and hundreds and thousands of others, are the places in which sinners pay the penalty of their crimes. As numerous as are the offences that men commit, so many are the hells in which they are punished ; and all who deviate from the duties imposed on them by their caste and condi tion, whether in thought, word, or deed, are sentenced to punishment in the regions of the damned. The Gods in heaven are beheld by the denizens of hell as they move with their heads inverted. This would seem to apply particularly to the Adhomukha hell, or the hell of inverted heads, appropriated to those who take unlawful gifts and who offer sacrifices to improper objects. The Gods, as they cast their eyes downwards, behold the sufferings of the damned. The commentator observes on this passage, that the sight of heavenly bliss is given to the wicked in order to exacerbate their torments, a reflection to be met with in more than one supporter of our Christian theology, whilst the inflictions of the hells are exhibited to the Gods, to teach them disregard of even heavenly BRAHMAN HELL joys, as they are but of temporary duration. After punishment in hell proportioned to the sin of the individual has been received, he must be born again as a stone or inanimate thing, a fish, a bird, a beast, a man, a holy man, a god and a liberated spirit, each in succession a thousand degrees superior to that which precedes it ; and through these stages of evolution the damned in hell is destined to proceed until he is emancipated and reaches Moksha the longed for liberation of eternal rest. Although by suitable acts of expiation a sinner may be released from hell : although the man who thinks on Vishnu day and night goes not to Naraka after death, since that is sufficient atonement for all his sins, yet has he no sempiternal happiness nor any lasting knowledge of such Houris as are created by the Muslim creed. Though God's mercy may lighten upon him, he is merged at length in the impersonal unconscious Kosmos. Strange that annihilation, that misprised mercy which most men live to crave, the punishment in the more pitiful section of the "Western creed of the wicked, should form in the Eastern the sole positive reward for the good ! Buddhist Hell Buddhism is the name of a religion which sprang from the philosophical teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, or Godama, or the most victorious on earth, eldest son of the Raja Suddhodana, of Kapilavastu, on the banks of the Kohana, about a hundred miles north of Benares and fifty miles south of the Himalayan mountains. He lived some time in the fifth century (b.c), but the dates of his birth and death are indefinite. His teachings, commenced in Upper India, have spread into Nepal, Tibet, China, and Japan, forming Northern Buddhism, and into Ceylon, Siam, and Burma, forming Southern Buddhism. This type of religion is deeply printed in those countries, and the late Max Mulier, in his Chips from a German Workshop, estimates the number of its followers as, probably, about 450,000,000. Buddhism, with Confucianism and Taoism, consti tute the Three Systems. Taoism borders closely on Buddhism. But Confucius was a complete agnostic. "If," said he, "we know so little about life, what can we know about death ? " The Southern Buddhism is considered the purer, and in Ceylon it is nearest perfection, because it was there introduced soon after the death of Gautama, and the insular position of Ceylon has kept it more undefiled than elsewhere. BUDDHIST HELL 27 Gautama taught that the souls of men and other animals are immortal ; both are of the same sub stance, and differ only according to the different objects they occupy. The souls of men after their departure from their bodies are rewarded in a place of happiness, or misery, according to their behaviour in this life. But the Buddhist hell, the Pali Niraya — the Japanese Jigokou, the Chinese Teyo or earth-prison — lacks the refinement of the Christian eternity. The punishment therein is not hopeless, not eternal, but it is rather a purgatory of penance, or corrective of the soul, scouring the spirit by varied torture. Even demons may attain the felicity of Nirvana. Kampfer, who visited Japan in 1690-92, as physician to the embassy which the Dutch East India Company sent there every year, after dis posing of the Sintos of Japan, who admit no hell, and believe their one devil animates a fox ; says of the Being he calls Buds, " All persons, secular or ecclesiastic, who by their sinful life and vicious actions have rendered themselves unworthy of the pleasures prepared for the virtuous, are sent, after their death, to a place of misery called Dsigokf, ( ? Jigokou), there to be confined and tormented ; not, indeed, for ever, but only for a certain undetermined time. As the pleasures of the Elysian Fields differ in degrees, so do likewise the torments in the sombre Dsigokf. Justice requires that every one should be punished, according to the nature and number of his crimes, the number of years he has lived in the world, the station he lived in, and the opportunities he had to be virtuous and good. Jemma — ' or, with a more majestuous character, 28 BUDDHIST HELL Emma 0,'— is the severe judge and sovereign commander of this den of darkness. All the vicious' actions of mankind appear to him, in all their horror and heinousness, by means of a large looking-glass placed before him, and called Ssofarino Kagami, or the looking-glass of knowledge. The miseries of the souls confined in the murky Japanese Gehenna are not so considerable and lasting, but that great relief may be expected from the virtuous life and good actions of their family, friends and relations,. whom they leave behind. Nothing is so conducive to this desirable end as the prayers and offerings of the priests to the great and good Amida, who, by his powerful intercession can prevail so far upon the almost inexorable judge of this home of dis comfort, as to oblige him to remit from the severity of his sentence, to treat the souls with kindness, at least, so far as it is not inconsistent with his justice and the punishment their crimes deserve; and, last of all, to send them abroad into the world again as soon as possible to animate the bodies of creatures whose nature and properties are nearly related to their former sinful inclinations, such as serpents, toads, insects, birds, beasts and fishes. From the vilest of these, transmigrating by degrees into others, and nobler, they are at last suffered again to enter human bodies; by which means it is put in their power, either by a good and virtuous life to render themselves worthy of a future un interrupted state of happiness, or, by a new course of vices, to expose themselves once more to undergo all the miseries of hell, succeeded by a new, unhappy transmigration." The Buddhist sacred books have been overlaid BUDDHIST HELL 29 by commentaries, as the Jewish scriptures by the Talmud ; and some are interesting. In the Sutta-Nipata, a collection of discourses form ing a canonical Buddhist book, translated from the Pali by V. Fausboll, we find that he who blames an ariya goes to hell, because he employs his speech and mind badly; he who speaks falsely, and he who is continually caught in sinful deeds, hell awaits them both. Those who are ever bent upon evil, when dead go to darkness, and fall, with their heads down wards, into hell. Those who have let the right moment pass will grieve when they have been con signed to hell. A certain Bhikkhu, (mendicant) called Kokaliya, on account of his evil-speaking against two Theras — the Christian Bishops, the Pali Rahans, the Burmese Talapoins, and the Lamas of Tibet — was struck with boils, passing from the size of mustard-seeds to that of a billi fruit, and then the Bhikkhu Kokaliya died, and departed to the Paduma hell. " "What," asked one of the Bhikkhus, of Buddha, "is the punishment of the backbiters in hell, and how long is the rate of life in this hell ? " To which the Venerable One answered " It is not easy to calcu late." "But," asked the Bhikkhu, "is it not possible to make a comparison ? " And the Venerable One replied, " It is even as a load of twenty kharis of sesamum seed, and a man once only in a century taking one seed only from such a load, yet that whole load would sooner dwindle into nothing than one Abbada hell; and, even as are twenty Abbuda hells, so is one Nirabbuda; and, even as twenty Nwabbuda hells, so is one Ababa ; and, as twenty Ababa, one Ahaha; and, as twenty Ahaha, one Atata,"— and so on through half a dozen more. hells; and then 30 BUDDHIST HELL " even as are twenty Pundarika hells, 0 Bhikkhu, so is one Paduma hell, and to the Paduma hell, 0 Bhikkhu, is your brother Bhikkhu Kokaliya gone, for backbiting Buddha's Bishops with a hostile mind." And then Buddha breaks forth into the following lengthy harangue : "0 thou foul-mouthed, false, ignoble, blasting, wicked, evil-doing, low, sinful, base-born man, do not be garrulous in this world, else thou wilt be an inhabitant of hell. Thou spreadest pollution, and revilest the just ; thou wilt go to the pool of hell for a long time. The fool who commits sin will feel pain in the place where one is struck with iron rods; to the iron stake with sharp edges he goes ; then there is food appropriate for him, resembling a red-hot ¦ ball of iron. Those that have aught to say there, say not fine things ; they lie on spread embers ; they enter a blazing pyre ; covering them with a net, they kill them there with iron hammers ; they go to dense darkness spread out like the body of the earth. They enter an iron pot ; there they are boiled a long time (fig. 5), jumping up and down in the pot. There, he who commits sin is surely boiled in bloody matter ; there he becomes rotten ; there he is surely boiled in water, the dwelling-place of worms. They cannot reach the shore, for the jars are even all round. Then they enter the sharp Asipattavana^ with mangled limbs ; having their tongues seized with : a hook, they are killed by the watchmen of hell. Then they enter Vaitarani, difficult to cross, with Fig. 5. BUDDHIST HELL 31 Fig. 6. streams of razors having sharp edges. There, black mot tled flocks of ravens eat them who are weeping, and dogs, jackals, wild boars, falcons, and crows tear them (figs. 6, 7, 8). Miserable indeed is the life in hell." There is much more about hell and its punish ments in the Sutta-Nipata ; and the Dhammapada, which forms part of the Pali Buddhist canon, tells also of punishment for sin. "He who inflicts pain on innocent and harmless persons will soon come to one of these ten states. He will have cruel suffer- in g, loss, Fig. 7. injury of the body, heavy affliction, or absence of mind, or a misfortune coming from the king, or a fearful accusation, or departure of relations, or destruction of treasures ; or light ning-fire will burn his houses, and when his body is destroyed the fool will go to hell." But prayer, as in the majority of religions, is frequently insisted on as very effective in mitigating the punishments of hell ; as is also confession of sin, accompanied of course with suit able offerings to the Gods, es- pecially the Buddhas who fig. a 32 BUDDHIST HELL preceded Sakyamuni — as Gautama is called in Chinese works— at least, this is the belief in Tibet; where, however, Buddhism is somewhat corrupt. Dr, Schlagintweit (Buddhism in Tibet) gives a translation of an address to the Buddhas of Confession, of which one portion is: "I adore the victorious, the Tath£- gata, the vanquisher of the enemy, the very pure, the perfect Buddha, Rinchhenzlcwdskyabsgnasdainpad- (jralasmamyarrgyalba. Once to utter this name "— and, indeed, it seems a matter of no mean merit— " takes away the sins which would cause the sufferings in the hell in Nar-med " — which is the name of one of the most dreadful divisions of hell. The Sinhalese, whose Buddhism is presumably the purest, believe that, immediately after death, those souls whose life has been a mixture of good and evil are judged by Yama, but the throughly wicked go to hell unheard. Before the gate of each great hell sit the judges, who condemn the guilty according to the gravity of their iniquities ; but they need not inquire into very atrocious crimes, the weight of which sinks the impure soul direct to hell. The location of the Buddhist hell is peculiar. It is concealed under the abyss of earth, and under the hellish water. A prototype of Dante's lessening cone, it rises in tiers one above another like a pyramid or a heap of grain, and has a depth of 40,000 miles, and winds blow there worse than any hurricane. There are four states of misery : — 1. That of brutes, whether they live in the water or on the earth or in the air ; the state of all these is a state of misery. 2. That of the beings called Pretas, ghosts with a mighty appetite, and a mouth narrow as the eye of a .BUDDHIST HELL 33 needle, who, wandering in woods and deserts, are wasted by hunger and nakedness, and pass the whole duration of a world in howling and groaning. The human beings who qualify for this state are those who give no daily provisions to the priests (who live on alms), who do not provide them with clothing, corrupt their manners^ or offer violence to their persons, or give abusive language to the observers of the laws, and rail generally at dignities. 3. That of the Asuras, giants and demons -a dozen miles high, who reside in woods and on the desert coasts of the sea. They are those who, in their quarrels, strike with sticks or destructive weapons. The duration of these states is not definitely fixed, but depends upon the gravity of the sin committed. 4. The fourth state, called by the Burmese Niria, is, properly, the infernal region, placed beneath the depths of the earth in the midst of the great rock. It is rectangular and equilateral, enclosed ' in iron, and every side is thirty-six miles thick — some say a hundred miles thick. In either case, these walls put to shame those triple walls of Milton, and of Virgil, from whom he took them. There are eight Sinhalese great hells, every one of which, towards the four cardinal points, has four gates, leading to as many smaller hells ; so that every great hell communicates with sixteen smaller ones, making one hundred and twenty-eight lesser hells, or, all' together, one hundred and thirty-six. This is a great improvement on the Brahman twenty- one. Some say there are frontier and solitary hells in the sea and wilderness and moor and mountain. The Burmese believe that there are forty thousand D 34 BUDDHIST HELL, and forty other small hells. "But Allah," as the Muslims say, "is all-knowing." The accompanying illustrations (figs. 9-16), which suggest a sad absence of discrimination in the artist, are from Sinhalese sources ; and this one thing should not be forgotten, that one day of these hells is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. Fig. 9. — Illustration of First Great Hell. None of them are without fire. All the souls of all the damned are confined in sulphurous and tormenting flames, and, like the ghost in Hamlet, fast in fires till the foul crimes done in their days of nature are burnt and purged away. The first hell is called Sanga-iuaya, the Sanskrit Samjiva, or revival. Here drunkards, the cruel and the dishonest are cut in pieces, by several sorts of weapons, and brought to life again. They are then BUDDHIST HELL 35 dissected by glowing hot irons, and exposed to intense cold. Then their limbs again unite, and are again torn asunder and exposed to the cold ; and this alternation of misery endures for five hundred infernal years. The second is Kale-soottraya, the Sanskrit Kdlasutra, le ¦ Soothrayt*. dMflj|§| \AM"i\ <^j^Hj^ a^f°(a^5w JlmM K \ \ i n 1 yy f //T^ w ^^Wmm Fig. 10. — Illustration of Second Great Hell. or black lines, which are drawn by the infernal lictors with red-hot rods on the bodies of those who entrap fish or animals with nets and snares. Here the sinners, like so many trunks of trees, will be cut in eight or ten pieces, with burning iron saws and hooks, for one thousand infernal years. The third, Sangd-hattaya, the Sanskrit Samghata, or united, is for hunters by profession, or governors 36 BUDDHIST HELL who oppress the people. Here they are squeezed between red-hot iron rocks, a sort of infernal Symplegades, which roll from the four sides of the hell. They will be thus ground for two thousand years. The fourth hell, Raurawaya, the Sanskrit Raurava, or shrieking, is for those who do not mutually assist Fig. 11.— Illustration of Third Great Hell. their neighbours, but, on the contrary, deceive and vex them; those who kill animals by immersing them in boiling oil or water; ignorant physicians, and busybodies. They are tormented by the flame having entered into their bodies by the nine openings of the body; and they will have their hearts consumed by fire entering their mouths, for four thousand infernal years. BUDDHIST HELL 37 The fifth hell, Maha-raurawaya, the Sanskrit Mahd- raurava, or great Raurava, is for those magistrates who receive gifts, and, in consequence, decide causes un justly ; those officers who, having possessed themselves of an enemy's country, destroy the inhabitants ; those who deceive in scales, weights, or measures, or who jlocJ&Vx Fig. 12. — Illustration of Fourth Great Hell. by any other unjust means, appropriate to themselves the goods of others; and those who injure the property of the Rahans. They will undergo great misery, tears red as blood and hot as fire proceeding from their eyes. Fire and smoke will enter their bodies by the eyes, mouth, and other openings, and waste them away for eight thousand years. The sixth hell, Taw-paya, the Sanskrit Tapana, or 38 BUDDHIST HELL heat, is for those who have roasted animals for food, those who sell hog's flesh, or fowls, or wine, or poison; those who burn towns, villages, or woods, those who kill men by poison, arms, or incantations, or other animals by nets or gins. Here they will be tormented by being fixed on red-hot iron pins, which are fastened to the red-hot iron floor, without allowing them to stir. They will be tumbled down headlong Fig. 13. — Illustration of Fifth Great Hell. from a lofty burning mountain ; then, being transfixed on an iron spit, they will be cut and torn by demons with swords and spears for sixteen thousand years. The seventh, Puttaw-paya, the Sanskrit Pratapana, or extreme heat, is for infidels ; impious persons, who have discredited the evidences of Gautama or of some former God ; who, contrary to the express doctrine of all Gods, deny the transmigration of men into other animals, or into superior beings, according to the BUDDHIST HELL 39 merit of their actions, and who teach that there is no merit in bestowing alms, or in performing the good works commanded by God. They are tor mented by being placed on red-hot iron rocks, and, being unable to stand on them, they fall down headlong on the red-hot iron floor, from which pro trude red-hot iron spikes as large as palmeira logs. Fig. 14. — Illustration of Sixth Great Hell. They will be first fixed with their heads downwards, and then transfixed with red-hot iron spits as large as palm trees. The eighth, Awe-cheya, the Sanskrit Avichi, or no escape, is the worst of all. Here are punished matricides, parricides, slayers of a Rahan, those who have stricken a God, and those who excite dissensions among the Rahans. They are burnt constantly by the fire, which proceeds in a vast 40 BUDDHIST HELL volume from every side. Here they will remain for the duration of a whole world, treading on a pavement of red-hot iron, which emits the most horrible smoke and the most piercing flame. The Burmese believe in a vast number of smalle| hells, in which the torment is also less, or is con sidered less, by Burmese theology. In the Excre- Fig. 15.— Illustration of Seventh Great Hell. mentitious Hell, for instance, there are worms as large as elephants, which bite the damned while they are floating in excrement. There is also a Hell of Burning Ashes. In the Hell of Swords the damned are torn in pieces by the knives, swords, and other sharp instruments amongst which they are rolling. In the Hell of Hooks they have their lungs., livers and bowels torn out by these cruel instruments ; and, in the Hell of Hammers, they are miserably beaten with red-hot implements of that BUDDHIST HELL 41 kind. There is a Hell of Thorns and Prickles ; a Hell of Biting Dogs ; and a Hell of Crows and Vultures. There is a hell in which the damned are constantly obliged to ascend and descend a tree, which is armed with the sharpest thorns ; another, in which they are forced to drink putrid gore ; and still another, where fiends despitefully use them. Fig. 16. — Illustration of Eighth Great Hell. In these hells are punished those who did not honour their parents, magistrates, and old age ; who paid little attention to the words of pious men, and neglected the observance of holy days; who were speakers of scandal, undervaluers of their neighbours ; who used abusive language ; who • confined their fellow-creatures with chains, bonds, or fetters ; who admitted any forbidden thing in their thoughts, words or deeds; and who did not console the sick with 42 BUDDHIST HELL soothing sentences. All these crimes are punished in the smaller hells, in proportion to the atrocity of the deed, and the frequency with which it has been repeated.;! After death, the bodies of certain per sons are, the Burmese believe, greatly in creased in length,: with crooked nails on their hands and Fig. 17. feet. Sometimes, like bats, they creep through the caves and dark caverns in the deep recesses of the mountains ; at other times they hang on trees like a swarm of bees. Mutually tormenting and abusing themselves with horrible language, and urged in cessantly by a cruel hunger, they tear each other limb from limb. The limbs, falling into the cold water, are dissolved like salt ; but all parts of their bodies being again reproduced, they repeatedly undergo the same torments. Although Buddhism is not the national religion of Japan, it is there professed by many thousands. Japanese art depicts the torments of hell very vividly. Three scenes are here reproduced (figs. 17-19). BUDDHIST HELL 43 The Chinese may be congratulated on the fact that, until the introduction of Christianity and Buddhism, they were ignorant of the dour doctrine of ever lasting punishment. Neither Lao-Tsze — the " old boy," born with grey hair, having sojourned seventy years in the womb — nor Confucius taught it ; on the contrary, they held that prosperity is sent by Heaven as the reward of a virtuous action, and that every [calamity comes as a visitation of guilt. Lo-pi, a high and ancient authority, gives the following maxim as dogma : " All those who do good are loaded with felicity, and all those who do evil are loaded with misery ; this is the immutable law of Heaven." Taoism, as taught by Lao-Tsze, has waned and is rapidly declining. From a purely metaphysical system, it is now so mixed with the comparatively modern super stition of Buddhism, and has borrowed so much from it, that Chinaman so an ordinary can scarcely discriminatebetween the two Fig. 18. 44 BUDDHIST HELL regards them as to all intents and purposes the same, Thus, punishment after death has been grafted on to Taoism, with its concomitant hell, although crime, is still punished in this world ; the Lord of the Under-, world, or the Recording Angel, abridging a man's life, by so many years, according to his sins. Du Halde tells a story how the Lord of the Under world, by following the Chinese mode of bookbinding, was once led into a strange error. He took a thin slip of paper, and used it as a thread to sew up one of the volumes, or livraisons, in his fatal register f but he did not remark that there was inscribed thereof the name of a man called Pung, who thereby escaped the destined erasure. The consequence was that this man lived eight hundred years, and espoused succes sively seventy-two wives, nor did there appear any prospect of a termination to his life and marriages, The seventy-second lady, however, happened to in herit an ample portion of curiosity. Having arrived, after death, in the infernal court, she made the most earnest inquiries into the cause of her husband's longevity, and at length, through an acquaintance formed with his grandfather, the mystery was disclosed^ to her. Unfortunately for Pung, his departed consort was imbued with another frailty of her sex. She. could not confine so remarkable a secret within her own breast, 'and this extraordinary incident soon: became the talk of the lower regions. It then un avoidably reached the ears of the Lord of the Under world, who presently called for the book, and seeing his mistake, with one stroke blotted out the patriarch from its pages and from the earth. Another case of error is recorded in the Liao-Ghwk Chih-I, or Strange Stories, a collection of tales of < 1-5 BUDDHIST HELL 47 the seventeenth century. A man named Chang died suddenly, and was escorted into the presence of the Lord of the Underworld. His Majesty turned to Chang's record of good and evil, and then, in great anger, told the lictors they had brought the wrong man, and bade them take him back again. As they left the ^judgment hall Chang persuaded his escort to let him have a look at purgatory ; and, accordingly, the devils conducted him through the nine sections, pointing out to him the Knife Hill, "or cliff over which sinners are hurled, to alight on the upright points of knives below ; the Sword Tree, whose branches are sharp blades which cut and hack all who pass within reach, and other objects of interest. By-and-by they reached a place where there was a Buddhist priest hanging suspended in the air, head downwards, by a rope through a hole in his leg. He was shrieking with pain and longing for death ; and, when Chang approached, lo ! he saw it was his own brother. In great distress he asked his guides the reason for this punishment, and they informed him that the priest was suffering thus for collecting subscriptions on behalf of his order, and then privately squandering the proceeds in gambling and debauchery. " Nor," added they, " will he escape this torment unless he repents him of his misdeeds." When Chang's soul was reunited to his body he thought his brother was already dead, and hurried off to the Hsing-fu monastery, to which the latter belonged. As he went in at the door he heard a loud shrieking, and, on proceeding to his brother's room he found him laid up with a very bad abscess in his leg, the leg itself being bound above him to the wall, and this was, as his brother 48 BUDDHIST HELL informed him, the only bearable position in which he could lie. Chang now told him what he had seen in purgatory, at which the holy man was so terrified' that he at once gave up taking wine and meat, and devoted himself entirely to religious exercises. In a fortnight he was well, and was known ever after wards as a most exemplary priest. The pains of hell, or purgatory, are kept vividly before the Chinese, every municipal temple having an imitation of its torture chambers. The various figures of the devil lictors and the tortured sinners are made either of clay or wood, and painted in very bright colours. Nicolas Tregault, a Jesuit French missionary, who died at the beginning of the • seventeenth century, has given a description of one of these torture chambers ; in which he saw a monster of gigantic size, and made of clay but gilded from head to heel, called Tica, sitting in the midst of an altar painted in red (a colour forbidden in private houses), having sceptre and crown. " Exactly," as Tregault says, " like one of our own kings was this Chinese Pluto, surrounded by attendants," and demons of terrible shapes. These bore in their hands instruments of torture such as would instil horror into any living .being. He goes on to describe the various pictures. " Some," says he, " of the damned were being burned on iron beds, some fried in boiling oil, some chopped up into mincemeat, some devoured by dogs," much as they are repre sented in their modern illustrations. "Miserable men," concludes the father, referring to the painters of an alien creed, "who propose to others that of which they are themselves ignorant ! " A vivid semblance of the Chinese hell can be seen BUDDHIST HELL 49 in the temple of Shing-"Wohg in Canton, called by barbarians, or foreign devils, with a vivid remem brance of Madame Tussaud's, The Chamber of Horrors ; and a book in this temple, entitled Yuk lik chi po pin, describes very fully its ten principalities, with their respective princes, whose attendants are all provided with fans, for the place is hot. Pictures, lurid, weird, ghastly — which will be more particularly described later on — succeed one another as in a kaleidoscope. We see suicides impaled on stakes ; fraudulent trustees, quacks and backbiters sunk in burning black clouds ; and saucy wives and busybodies engaged in boiling oil ; cheating tradesmen, men who cast broken glass into the highway, and ruffians who push aside the aged from the path common to all, mashed together in a mighty mortar by foot-pestles worked by fiends. The eyes of sportsmen are pecked out by birds they have shot, and fish they have caught batten on their bowels. In the tenth and final kingdom are the mill of transmigration and the wheel of change. Monier "Williams, in his Buddhism, referring to some pictures copied for him by a Sinhalese artist, from the Sacred Tooth Temple in Ceylon, says : " The European visitor inquires with amazement how it is that a system so mild, merciful, and tolerant should have invented the horrible tortures here exhibited. The explanation is not difficult, and his astonishment ceases when he is reminded that Buddhism, recog nising no moral governor of the universe, is compelled to resort to such artifices for the coercion and intimidation of evildoers." But the European visitor, in addition to questioning the morality of such artifices, may remember some Christian hells of 50 BUDDHIST HELL which the Buddhist are but a copy, writ, as Milton says, large ; and doubt the efficacy of this mode of intimidation. There are indeed sad descriptions of both hells by eye-witnesses ; but reprobate folk are to be found both in Europe and Asia who hold these visions as the outcome less of inspiration than of priestly cunning, or a cataleptic fit. In the Jdtakamala or Garland of Birth-tales, so admirably translated by Prof. Speyer, an agnostic king is converted by a Rishi through a sight of hell, Its furniture and the sufferings of its inmates are described with considerable verve. Spotted dogs— the spots adorn some of the pictures of other animals in this book — of great strength, with sharp-biting teeth, crows who crave for blood, demons chiding with harsh cries, and others carving like carpenters who delight in cutting as if they wrought in fresh timber, are among the executioners, Yama's terrible servants. The throes and twinges of the unbeliever are set forth with more than common felicity. The king had said to the Rishi, "If you will lend me five hundred nishkas" (a gold coin of uncertain value) " in this life, I will return you a thousand in the life to come." This indecent proposal displeased the Rishi. ""When," replied the Sacred Being, "you sit in the salt water of Vaitarani, who will call on you for that debt at that time ? "When a forced potion of boiling brass shall make you utter raw cries, who will call on you for that debt at that time ? When your bones are being decomposed by worms in Asukikunapa (the hell of corpses), when your coro nation occurs with a diadem of fire, when you are stripped of your skin, and even bereaved of your bones, when you hang head downwards from a tree BUDDHIST HELL 51 red-hot like coral, when you, with bit and harness of flame, are dragging a fiery chariot over a pavement of glowing iron, who' will call on you for that debt at that time ? Dwelling perhaps 'in thick fog pierced by a penetrating icy wind, wandering in foul smoke, drawing together your rags fastened with leather thongs, you will form one of a crew, all unable to die till their evil karma is annihilated, and crying loudly as they tumble over one another in the dark, — who being wise would enter that hell to get that money ? In that time you will be made to believe that there exists something like a world beyond this." The Liao-Ghai has a popular tale, which shows the effect of the Buddhist Hell as feeble as that of other hells in producing a salutary apprehension in the public mind. At Ling-yang there lived a man named Chu-Erhtan. One day he was taking wine with a number of fellow- students, when one of them said to him, " If you will go in the middle of the night to the Chamber of Horrors, and bring back the Infernal Judge from the left-hand porch, we will pay for your dinner." For at Ling-Yang there was a representation of the Ten Courts of Purgatory, with the gods and devils ; and in the eastern vestibule there was a full-length image of the judge, with a green face and a red beard, and a hideous expression in his features. Sometimes sounds of examination under the whip were heard to issue during the night from both porches, and persons who went in found their hair standing on end with fear. Chu then departed for the temple, and, before many minutes had elapsed they heard him shouting outside, " His Excellency has arrived ! " At this they all got up, and in came Chu with 52 BUDDHIST HELL the image on his back, which he proceeded to deposit on the table, and then poured out a triple libation in its honour. His comrades felt ill at ease, so they begged him to carry the judge back again,* But he first poured some wine upon the ground, invoking the image as follows : "I am. only a fool hardy, illiterate fellow ; I pray Your Excellency excuse me. My house is close by, and whenever Your Excellency feels so disposed, I shall be glad to take a cup of wine with you, in a friendly way." He then carried the judge back ; and the next day his friends gave him the promised dinner, from which, in the evening, he went home half-tipsy. But, not feel ing that he had had enough, he brightened up his lamp and helped himself to another cup of wine, when suddenly the bamboo curtain was drawn aside, and in walked the judge. Chu said, "Alackaday! Your Excellency has come to cut off my head for my rudeness the other night." The judge parted his thick beard and, smiling, replied, " Nothing of the kind. You kindly invited me, last night, here I am." Chu made his guest sit down, while he wiped the cups and lit a fire. " It is warm weather," said the judge ; " let us drink the wine cold." Chu obeyed, and putting the bottle on the table went out to tell his servants to get some supper. His wife was much alarmed when she heard who was there, and begged him not to go back ; but he only waited until the things were ready, and then returned with them. They drank out of each other's cups, and by-and-by Chu asked the name of his guest. " My name is Lu," replied the judge ; " I have no other names." They then con versed on literary subjects, one capping the other's quotations as echo responds to sound. The judge BUDDHIST HELL 53 then asked Chu if he understood composition, to which he answered that he could just tell good from bad; whereupon the judge repeated a little infernal poetry, which was not very different from that of mortals. He was a deep drinker, and took off ten goblets at a draught ; but Chu, who had been at it all day, soon got dead drunk, and fell fast asleep with his head on the table. "When he woke up the candle had burnt out, and day was beginning to break, his guest having already departed ; and from this time the judge was in the habit of dropping in pretty often, until a close friendship sprang up between them. Sometimes the latter would pass the night at the house, and Chu would show him his essays, all of which the judge scored and underlined as being good for nothing. One night Chu got tipsy, and went to bed first, leaving the judge drinking by himself. In his drunken sleep he seemed to feel a pain in his stomach, and, waking up, he saw that the judge, who was standing by the side of the bed, had opened him, and was carefully arranging his inside. " What harm have I done you," cried Chu, " that you should thus seek to destroy me ? " " Don't be afraid," replied the judge, laughing : " I am only providing you with a more intelligent heart." He then quietly put back Chu's viscera, and closed up the opening, securing it with a bandage tied tightly round the waist. There was no blood on the bed, and all Chu felt was a slight numbness in his inside. Here he observed the judge place a piece of flesh upon the table, and asked him what it was. "Your heart," said the judge, "which was not at all good at composition, the proper orifice being stopped up. I have now provided you with a 54 BUDDHIST HELL better one, which I procured from home, and I am keeping yours to put in its place." He then opened the door, and took his leave. In the morning Chu undid the bandage and looked at his waist, the wound on which had quite healed up, leaving only a red seam. From that moment he became an apt scholar, and found his memory much improved ; so much so» that a few days afterwards he showed an essay to the judge, for which he was very much commended, " However," said the latter, " your success will be limited to the master's degree ; you will not get beyond that." " When shall I take it ? " asked Chu, " This year," replied the judge. And so it turned out, for Chu passed first on the list for the bachelor's degree, and amongst the first five for the master's degree. . . . The judge and Chu were friendly during the latter's life, and, when he died, the judge procured him a registrarship in Hell. These familiar Chinese tales show the ordinary ideas of Chinamen as to future punishment ; but the dogmatic teaching of Taoism on this subject' is to be found in a well-known Taoist work, the Fw Ti ch'ao chuan, not sold in bookshops, but circulated gratuitously by pious persons all over the Chinese Empire. The Yu Ti, translated by H. A. Giles, is here quoted at some length, although with abridgment, as a fair popular exposition of the Buddhist re ligious faith. It throws many interesting side-lights on the home life of the Chinese. The following explanations are necessary to its due comprehension. Yu Ti is the divine vicegerent of the Deity. P'vrsa is but a corrupt Chinese form of Bodhisattva or intelligent essence. It is the name commonly given BUDDHIST HELL 55 to a supreme Saint, or to what in the popular mind is much the same thing, a superior Deity. The " six paths " are the six gati or conditions of sentient life — Devas, men, asuras, pretas, brutes, and the people of hell; the last three are called the lower paths, or the "three states." The doctrine of " cause and effect " is a cardinal tenet of Buddhism — that the condition of a subsequent is the necessary result of behaviour in an antecedent life. The "three systems" not to be confounded with the " three states " are Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism. The " spirits of the City Guardian " are those subject to the tutelar deity which every Chinese city possesses. The " Wu-chiao rock " is Hell-gate. The " yellow springs " is a term for Hades. A " tael " (from the Hindu tola, through the Malay tahil) is an ounce weight of pure silver, not a coin. The " four obligations " are to heaven, earth, king, and relations. Yen Lo, popularly known as the Chinese Pluto, is the Indian Yama. If the stoves of a house are moved at wrong seasons, as in winter or early spring, the Spirits of the Hearth and Threshold 'become liable to catarrh. There should be a separation between the Yin and the Yang, as the modest lady separated the female and male authors in her* library. The Svastika, or good luck, is the symbol on the heart of Buddha corresponding somewhat with Thor's hammer, fylfot, or gammadion. The "Dragon and Phoenix" are emblems of imperial dignity. The " eating of red lead " confers, or is supposed to confer, immortality. A kalpa is a large period of time. A great kalpa, which equals eighty small kalpas, has been given by mathema ticians as 1,344,000,000 years. The " lingering death " 56 BUDDHIST HELL or Ling che, is a vivisectional process of slicing before- the final slice or coup-de-grace. The recipe for K% is: "Take insects of all kinds and cast them into a pot of any kind. Let them stand for a year. The survivor who has eaten all the others is Ku." Chuan Lun is the Chakravati or wheel king, causing the motion of the world. Feng-Tu is the metropolis of hell. A chien is the ghost of a ghost ; for the dead are subject to a second death, which in Buddhism is not eternal. Women are far more revengeful than men. Thus China agrees with Juvenal, vindictanemo magis gaudet quam fcemina. The " Han dynasty," somewhere about the third century a.d., is the epoch of renaissance of Chinese letters. The days of the moon set apart for fasting, and registration of vows of repentance, are Chinese holy days. For example, the first ten days of the tenth month form a sort of Festival of all Souls in the Chinese sacred calendar. It must also be remembered that the Chinese have a horror of deaths by violence, considering that the virtuous die only of sickness or senile debility; and then, having gone in the flesh to Purgatory, at once leave it for earth or heaven ; that it is a great satisfaction and relief to ghosts to return and terrify people, and that if the ghost of a murdered person can compass the death of the living by fright or otherwise, that ghost returns to earth, and leaves his substitute, the murdered, to suffer the murderer's misery in hell; that to escape punishment by entering the priesthood, a sort of benefit of clergy, is very common in the Flowery Land; that the Imperial bounty alone permits common people to live on this earth, of which every inch belongs to to the Emperor ; that taxes are commonly paid in BUDDHIST HELL 57 grain ; that, as sometimes happens even in Christian countries, rice is watered to increase its weight, and cloth scraped to raise its nap, and give it an appearance of excellence ; and that a woman's second wedding is looked on with extreme disfavour. " The Divine Panorama, published by the mercy of Yii Ti, that Men and Women may repent them of their faults, and make atonement for their crimes." On the birthday of the Saviour P'u-sa, as the spirits of purgatory were thronging round to offer their congratulations, the Ruler of the Infernal Regions spake as follows : " My wish is to release all souls, and every moon, as this day comes round, I would wholly or partially remit the punishment of erring shades, and give them life once more in one of the Six Paths. But, alas ! the wicked are many, and the virtuous few. Nevertheless, the punishments in the Dark Region are too severe, and require some modification. Any wicked soul that repents, and induces one or two others to do likewise, shall be allowed to set this off against the punishments which should be inflicted." The Judges of the Ten Courts of Purgatory then agreed that all whose balance of good and evil is exact shall escape the bitterness of the Three States, and be born again among men ; that those who have a balance of evil against them shall pass through the various courts of purgatory, and then be born again amongst men, to be put a second time upon trial. Then, if they behave badly, they will be dragged by horrid devils through all the courts, suffering bitterly as they go, and will be born again, to endure in life the uttermost of poverty and wretchedness, in death 58 BUDDHIST HELL the tortures of hell. Those who are disloyal, unfil^l, who commit suicide, or disbelieve the doctrine of cause and effect, saying to themselves that when a man dies there is an end of him ; that when he has lost the skin purse of his bones he has already suffered the worst that can bef al him ; that living men can be tortured, but that no one ever saw a man's ghost in the pillory ; and that after death all is unknown,— truly these men remember not that whatsoever evil they do in this life, the same will be done to them in the life to come. All who commit such crimes are handed over to the everlasting tortures of hell ; for, alas ! in spite of the teachings of the Three Systems some will persist in regarding these warnings as vain and empty talk. Lightly they speak of divine mercy, and, knowingly commit many crimes, not more than one in a hundred ever coming to repentance. Therefore the punishments of purgatory are strictly carried out, and the tortures dreadfully severe. But now it has been mercifully ordained that any man or woman, young, old, weak or strong, who may have sinned in any way, shall be permitted to obtain remission of the same by keeping his or her thoughts constantly fixed on P'u-sa and on the birthdays of the Judges of the Ten Courts, by fasting and prayer, and by vows never to sin again. Or, for every good work done in life they shall be allowed to escape one ward in the courts below. From this rule are to be excepted those who plot in secret against good people, those who are struck by thunder, and those who perish by flood or fire, by wild animals or poisonous reptiles — these to pass through all the courts, and to be punished according' to all their deserts. All other sinners will BUDDHIST HELL 59 be allowed to claim their good works as a set-off against evil, thus partly escaping the agonies of hell. This account of man's wickedness on the earth, and the punishments in store for him, was written in language intelligible to every man and woman, and was submitted for the approval of P'u-sa, the intention being to wait the return of some virtuous soul among the sons of men, and in this way to publish it all over the earth. When P'u-sa saw what had been done, he said it was good, and on the 3rd day of the eighth moon proceeded with the Ten Judges of Purgatory to lay the book before God. Then God said : " Good indeed ! Good indeed ! Henceforth let all spirits take note of any mortal who vows to lead a virtuous life, and, repenting, promises to sin no more. Two punishments shall be remitted him. And, if in addition to this, he succeeds in doing five virtuous acts, then he shall escape all punishment, and be born again in some happy state ; if a woman, she shall be born as a man. But more than five virtuous acts shall enable such a soul to obtain the salvation of others, and redeem wife and family from the tortures of hell. Let these regula tions be published in the Divine Panorama, and circulated on earth by the Spirits of the City Guardian. In fear and trembling obey this decree, and carry it reverently into effect." THE FIRST COURT His Infernal Majesty Ch'in Kuang is specially in charge of the register of life and death, both for old and young, and presides at the judgment-seat in the lower regions (fig. 20). His court is situated in the great 60 BUDDHIST HELL ocean, away beyond the Wu-chiao rock, far to the west, near the murky road which leads to the Yellow Springs. Every man and woman dying in old age, whose fate it is to be born again into the world, if their tale of good and evil works is equally balanced, are sent to the First Court, and thence transferred back to life, male becoming female, female male, rich poor, and poor rich, according to their several deserts. But those whose good deeds are outnumbered by their bad, are sent to a terrace on the right of the court, called the Terrace of the Mirror of Sin, ten feet in height. The mirror is about ten armfuls in circumference, and hangs towards the east. Above are seven characters, written horizontally : " Sin Mirror Terrace upon no good men." There the wicked souls are able to see the naughtiness of their own hearts while they were among the living, and the danger of death and hell. Thus do they realise the proverb : — Ten thousand iaels of yellow gold cannot be brought away : But every crime will tell its tale upon the judgment day. When the souls have been to the Terrace, and seen their wickednesses, they are forwarded into the Second Court, where they are tortured and dismissed to the proper hell. Should there be any enjoying life without re flecting that heaven and earth produce mortals, that father and mother bring the child to maturity — truly no easy matter ; any who ignoring the four obliga tions, lightly sever before receiving the summons, the thread of their own existence, then such suicides, if the deed was not done out of loyalty, filial piety, chastity, or friendship, for which they would go to Jk BUDDHIST HELL 63 heaven, but in a trivial burst of rage, or fearing the consequences of a crime which would not amount to death, or in the hope of falsely injuring a fellow- creature, then such suicides, when the last breath has left their bodies, shall be escorted to this court by the Spirits of the Threshold and of the Hearth. They shall be placed in the Hunger and Thirst Section, and every day, from 7 to 11 o'clock, they will resume their mortal coil, and suffer again the pain and bitterness of death. After seventy days, or one or two years, as the case may be, they will be conducted back to the scene of their suicide, but will not be permitted to take the funeral meats or avail themselves of the usual offerings to the dead. Bitterly will they repent, unable as they will be to render themselves visible and frighten people, vainly striving to procure a substitute. For, when the substitute shall have been harmlessly entrapped, the Spirits of the Threshold and Hearth will reconduct the erring soul back to this court, whence it will be sent on to the Second Court, where its balance of good and evil will be struck, and dreadful tortures applied. Finally it will be passed on through the various courts to the utter misery of hell. Any soul which, after suicide, shall not remain invisible, but shall frighten people to death, will be seized by black-faced, long-tusked devils, and tortured in the various hells, to be finally thrust into the great Gehenna, to remain hung up in chains, and not permitted to be born again. Every Buddhist or Taoist priest who receives money for prayers or liturgies, but skips over words, and misses out sentences, on arriving at this, the First Court, will be sent to the Section for the Completion pf Prayer, and there, in a small dark room, he shall 64 BUDDHIST HELL pick out such passages as he has omitted, and make good the deficiency as best he can, by the uncertain light of an infinitesimal wick, burning in a gallon of oil. Even good and virtuous priests must also repair any omissions they may have made accidentally, and so must every man or woman who, in private devo tion, may have omitted or wrongly repeated any part of the sacred writings, from over-earnestness, their attention not being properly fixed on the actual words they repeat. The same applies to female priests. A dispensation from Buddha to remit such punishments is put in force on the first day of each month, when the names are entered in the Register of the Virtuous. 0 ye dwellers upon earth, on the 1st day of the second moon, fasting, turn to the north, and make oath to abstain from evil and fix your thoughts on good, that ye escape hell ! The precepts of Buddha are circulated over the whole world to warn mankind to believe and repent, that when the last hour comes their spirits may be escorted by dark-robed boys to realms of bliss and happiness in the west. THE SECOND COURT His Infernal Majesty Ch'u-Ching reigns at the bottom of the great ocean. Away to the south, below the Wu-chiao rock, he has a vast hall, many leagues in extent, and subdivided into sixteen wards, as follows : — In the first, nothing but black clouds and constant sand-storms. In the second, mud and filth. In the third, chevaux de frise. In the fourth, gnawing hunger. In the fifth, burning thirst. In the sixth, blood and BUDDHIST HELL 65 pus. In the seventh, the shades are plunged into a brazen caldron of boiling water. In the eighth, the same punishment is repeated many times. In the ninth, they are put into iron clothes. In the tenth, they are stretched on a rack to regulation length. In the eleventh, they are pecked by fowls. In the twelfth, they have only rivers of lime to drink. In the thir teenth, they are hacked to pieces. In the fourteenth, the leaves of the trees are as sharp sword points as (fig. 21). In the fifteenth, they are pursued by foxes and wolves. In the sixteenth, all is ice and snow. Those who lead astray young boys and girls, and then escape punishment by cutting off their hair and entering the priesthood, those who filch letters, pictures, or books, entrusted to their care, and then pretend to have lost them ; those who injure a fellow- creature's ear, eye, hand, finger, or toe ; those who - practise as doctors without any knowledge of the medical art; those who will not ransom grown-up slave girls ; those who, contracting marriage for the sake of gain, falsely state their ages ; or those who, Fig. 21.— The Tree of Sword Points. 66 BUDDHIST HELL in cases of betrothal, before actual marriage, find out that one of the contracting parties is a bad character, and yet do not come forward to say so, , but inflict an irreparable wrong on the innocent one ; such offenders, when their quota of crime has been cast up, their youth or age and the consequences of their acts taken into consideration, will be seized by horrid red-faced devils, and thrust into the great hell, and thence despatched to the particular ward in which they are to be tormented. When their time of suffering there has expired, they will be removed to the Third Hall, there to be tortured, and passed on to Gehenna. 0 ye men and women of the world, take this book and warn all sinners, or copy it out and circulate it for general information ! If you see people sick and ill, give medicine to heal them. If you see people poor and hungry, feed them. If you see people in difficulties, give money to save them. Repent your past errors, and you will be allowed to cancel that evil by future good, so that when the hour arrives, you will pass at once into the Tenth Hall, and thence return again to existence on earth. Let such as love all creatures endowed with life, and do not recklessly cut and slay, but teach their children not to harm small animals and insects — let these, on the 1st of the third moon, register an oath not to take life, but to aid in preserving it. Thus they will avoid passing through purgatory, and will enter at once the Tenth Hall, to be born again in some happy state. , THE THIRD COURT His Infernal Majesty Sung-Ti reigns at the bottom of the great ocean, away to the south-east below the Wu-chiao rock, in the Gehenna of Black Ropes. BUDDHIST HELL 67 This hall is many leagues wide, and is subdivided into sixteen wards, as follows : — In the first, everything is salt : above, below, and all round, the eye rests upon salt alone. The shades feed upon it, and suffer horrid torments in conse quence. When the fit has passed away, they return to it once again, and suffer agonies more acute than before. In the second, the erring shades are bound with cords, and carry heavily-weighted cangues (fig. 22) Fig. 22. — Bound with Cords and in Cangues. In the third, they are perpetually pierced through the ribs. In the fourth, their faces are shaved with iron and copper knives. In the fifth, their fat is scraped away from their bodies. In the sixth, their hearts and livers are squeezed with pincers. In the seventh, their eyes are gouged. In the eighth, they are flayed. In the ninth, their feet are cut off. In the tenth, their finger-nails and toe-nails are pulled out. In the eleventh, their blood is sucked. In the twelfth, they are hung up head downwards. In the thirteenth, their shoulder-bones are split. In the 68 BUDDHIST HELL fourteenth, they are tormented by insects and reptiles. In the fifteenth they are beaten on the thighs. In the sixteenth, their hearts are scarified. Those who enjoy the light of day without reflecting on the imperial bounty ; officers of state who revel in large emoluments without reciprocating their sovereign's goodness ; private individuals who do not repay the debt of water and earth ; wives and con cubines who slight their marital lords ; such as reap what advantages there are, and then go off to their own homes ; slaves who disregard their masters ; working partners who behave badly to the moneyed partner ; culprits who escape from prison or abscond from their place of banishment ; those who break their bail and get others into trouble ; and those infatuated ones who have long omitted to pray and repent — all these, even if they have a set-off of good deeds, must pass through the misery of every ward. Those who interfere with another man's Feng-Shui — the Chinese for luck, prosperity, or influence, literally signifying " wind-water," not to be seen, and not to be grasped — those who obstruct funeral obsequies, or the completion of graves ; those who, in digging, come on a coffin, and do not imme-. diately cover it up, but injure the bones; those who steal or avoid paying up their quota of grain ; those who lose all record of the site of their family burying- place ; those who promote litigation ; those who write anonymous placards; those who receive payment of a debt, without signing a receipt or giving up the I.O.U. ; those who counterfeit signatures and seals ; those who alter bills ; those who injure posterity in any way,— all these, and similar offenders, shall be punished according to the gravity of each offence, BUDDHIST HELL 69 Devils, with big knives, will seize the erring ones, and thrust them into the great Gehenna : besides which, they shall expiate their sins in the proper number of wards, and shall then be forwarded to the Fourth Court, where they shall be tortured, and dismissed to the general Gehenna. 0 ye sons of men, on the 8th day of the second moon, register an oath that ye will do no evil ! Thus may ye escape the bitterness of these hells. THE FOURTH COURT The Lord of the Five Senses reigns at the bottom of the great ocean, away to the east below the Wu- chiao rock. His court is many leagues wide, and is subdivided into sixteen wards, as follows : — In the first, the wicked shades are hung up, and water is continually poured over them. In the second, they are made to kneel on chains and pieces of split bamboo. In the third, their hands are scalded with boiling water. In the fourth, their hands swell and stream with perspiration. In the fifth, their muscles are cut and their bones pulled out. In the sixth, their shoulders are pricked with a trident and the skin rubbed with a hard brush. In the seventh, holes are bored into their flesh. In the eighth, they are made to sit on spikes. In the ninth, they wear iron clothes. In the tenth, they are placed under heavy pieces of wood, stone, earth, or tiles. In the eleventh, their eyes are put out (fig. 23). In the twelfth, their mouths are choked with dust. In the thirteenth, they are perpetually dosed with nasty medicines. In the fourteenth, it is so slippery, they are always falling down. In the fifteenth, their 70 BUDDHIST HELL mouths are painfully pricked. In the sixteenth, their bodies are buried under broken stones, the head alone being left out. Those who cheat the customs and evade taxes; those who repudiate their rent, use weighted scales, sell sham medicines, water their rice, utter base coin, get deeply into debt, sell doctored silks and satins, scrape or add size to linen cloth ; those who do not Fig. 23. — Eyes put out. make way for cripples, old and young ; those who encroach upon petty trade rights of old or young; those who delay delivering letters entrusted to them ; steal bricks from walls as they pass by, or oil, or candles from lamps; poor people who do not behave properly, and rich people who are not compassionate to the poor ; those who promise a loan and go back on their word ; those who see people suffering from illness, yet cannot bring themselves to ,part with certain useful drugs they may have in their possession ; BUDDHIST HELL 71 those who know good prescriptions, but keep them secret ; who throw vessels which have contained medicine, or broken cups and bottles, into the street ; those who allow their mules and ponies to be a nuisance to other people ; those who destroy their neighbour's crops, or his walls and fences ; those who try to bewitch their enemies — by burning their waxen images or their Nativity characters in a candle — and those who try to frighten people in any way, — all these shall be punished according to the gravity of their offences, and shall be thrust by the devils into the great Gehenna until their time arrives for passing into the Fifth Court. 0 ye children of this world, if on the 18th day of the second moon, you register an oath to sin no more, then you may escape the various wards of this hall ! and if to this book you add examples of rewards and punishments following upon virtues and crimes, and hand them down to posterity for the good of the human race, so that all who read may repent them of their wickednesses — then they will be without sin, and you not without merit ! THE FIFTH COURT His Infernal Majesty Yen Lo said: "Our proper place is in the First Court; but pitying those who die by foul means, and should be sent back to earth to have their wrongs redressed, we have moved our judgment seat to the great hall at the bottom of the ocean, away to the north-east below the Wu-chiao rock, and have subdivided this hell into sixteen wards for the torment of souls. All those shades who come before us have already suffered great 72 BUDDHIST HELL tortures in the previous four courts, whence, if they are hardened sinners, they are passed, after seven days, to this court, where, if again found to be utterly hopeless, corruption will overtake them by the fifth, or seventh day. All shades cry out, either that they have left some vow unfulfilled, or that they wish to build a temple or a bridge, make a road, clean out a well, or to publish some book teaching people to be virtuous ; that they have not released their due number of lives, that they have filial duties or funeral obsequies to perform, or some act of kindness to repay. For these reasons they ask to be allowed to return only once more to the light, and are always ready to make oath that henceforth they will lead most exemplary lives. We, hearing this, reply: 'In days gone by, ye openly worked evil; but, now that your boat has reached mid-stream, ye bethink yourselves of caulking the leak. For, although P'u-sa, in his great mercy, decreed that there should be a modification of torture, and that good works might be set off against evil, the same being submitted to God, and ratified by Divine decree, to be further published in the realms below, and in the Infernal City — yet we, Judges of the Ten Courts, have not yet received one single virtuous man amongst us, who, coming in the flesh, might carry this Divine Pano rama back with him to the light of day. Truly, those who suffer in hell and on, earth cannot com plain, and virtuous men are rare ! But, now ye have come to my court, having beheld your own wickedness in the mirror of sin. No more — bull-headed, horse- faced devils, away with them to the Terrace, that they may, again, gaze upon their lost homes ! ' " This Terrace is curved in front, like a bow ; it looks BUDDHIST HELL 73 east, west, and south. It is 81 li from one extreme to the other. The back part is like the string of the bow ; it is enclosed by a wall of sharp swords. It is 490 feet high ; its sides are knife-blades ; and the whole is in 63 storeys. No good shade comes to this Terrace ; neither do those whose balance of good and evil is exact. Wicked souls, alone, behold their homes close by, and can see and hear what is going on. They hear old and young talking together; they see their last wishes disregarded and their instruc tions disobeyed. Everything seems to have under gone a change. The property they scraped together with so much trouble is dissipated and gone. The husband thinks of taking another wife; the widow meditates second nuptials. Strangers are in pos session of the old estate ; there is nothing to divide among the children. Debts, long since paid, are brought again for settlement, and the survivors are called upon to acknowledge claims upon the departed. Debts owed are lost for want of evidence. Then end less recriminations, abuse, and general obloquy, ripen and fall upon the three families, father's, mother's, and wife's, of the deceased. They, in their anger, speak ill of him that is gone. He sees his children become corrupt, and his friends drift away. Some, perhaps, for the sake of bygone times, may stroke the coffin, and let fall a tear. Others depart quickly, with a cold smile. Worse than that, the wife sees her husband tortured in the yamen — or yamun, or official residence— the husband sees his wife victim to some horrible disease, lands gone, houses destroyed by flood or fire, and everything in unutterable confusion — the reward of former sins. All souls, after the misery of the Terrace, will be thrust into the great 74 BUDDHIST HELL Gehenna, and, when the amount of wickedness of each has been ascertained, they will be passed through the sixteen wards for the punishment of evil hearts. In the Gehenna they will be buried under wooden pillars, bound with copper snakes crushed by iron dogs, tied tightly hand and foot, be ripped open and have their hearts torn out (fig. 24) minced up, and given to snakes, their entrails being Fig. 24.— Ripped open and Heart removed. thrown to dogs. Then, when their time is over, the pain will cease, and their bodies become whole once more, preparatory to being passed through the six teen wards. In the first are non-worshippers and sceptics. In the second, those who have destroyed or hurt living creatures. In the third, those who do not fulfil their vows. In the fourth, believers in false doctrines, magicians and sorcerers. In the fifth, those who tyrannise over the weak, but cringe to the strong; BUDDHIST HELL 75 also those who openly wish for another's death. In the sixth, those who try to put their misfortunes on to other people's shoulders. In the seventh, those who lead immoral lives. In the eighth, those who injure others to benefit themselves. In the ninth, those who are parsimonious, and will not help people in trouble. In the tenth, those who steal and involve the innocent. In the eleventh, those who forget kindness or seek revenge. In the twelfth, those who by pernicious drugs stir up others to quarrel, keeping themselves out of harm's way. In the thirteenth, those who deceive or spread false reports. In the fourteenth, those who love brawling and implicate others. In the fifteenth, those who envy the virtuous and wise. In the sixteenth, those who are lost in vice, evil-speakers, liars, and slanderers. All who make a pretence of piety, talk of other people's sins, burn or injure religious books, omit to fast when praying for the sick, interfere with the adoration of Buddha, slander the priesthood, or, if scholars, abstain from instructing women and children ; those who dig up graves and obliterate all traces thereof, set light to woods and forests, allow their servants to be careless -in handling fire and thus endanger their neighbour's property; those who wantonly try their strength against the sick and weak, throw potsherds over a wall, poison fish, let off guns, catch birds, either with net, sticky pole, or trap ; those who throw clown salt to kill plants, who do not bury dead cats or venomous snakes deep in the ground, who dig out corpses, who break the soil or alter their walls and stoves at wrong seasons, who encroach on the public road or take possession of other people's land, and fill up wells and drains,— 76 BUDDHIST HELL all these, when they return from the Terrace, shall first be tortured in the great Gehenna, and then, such as are to have their hearts minced, shall be passed into the sixteen wards, thence to be sent on to the Sixth Court for the punishment of other crimes. Those who in life have not been guilty of the above sins, or, having sinned, did on the 8th day of the first moon, fasting, register a vow to sin no more, shall not only escape the punishment of this court, but shall also gain some further remission of torture in the Sixth Court. Those, however, who are guilty of taking life, of gross immorality, of stealing and implicating the innocent, of ingratitude and revenge, of infatuated vice, which no warnings can turn from its course —these shall not escape one jot of their punishments. THE SIXTH COURT This Court is situated at the bottom of the great ocean, due north of the Wu-chiao rock. It is a vast, noisy Gehenna, many leagues in extent, and around it are sixteen wards. In the first, the souls are made to kneel for long periods on iron shot. In the second, they are placed up to their necks in filth. In the third, they are pounded till the blood runs out. In the fourth, their mouths are opened with iron pincers and filled full of needles. In the fifth, they are bitten by rats. In the sixth, they are enclosed in a net of thorns and nipped by locusts. In the seventh, they are crushed to a jelly. In the eighth, their skin is lacerated, and they are beaten on the raw. In the ninth, their mouths are filled with fire. In the tenth, they are BUDDHIST HELL 77 licked by flames. In the eleventh, they are subjected to noisome smells. In the twelfth, they are butted by oxen and trampled on by horses. In the thir teenth, their hearts are scratched. In the fourteenth, their heads are rubbed till their skulls come off. In the fifteenth, they are chopped in two at the waist (fig. 25). In the sixteenth, their skin is taken off and rolled up into spills. Those discontented ones who rail against heaven Fig. 25.— Chopped in two at Walst. and revile earth, who are always finding fault either with the wind, thunder, heat, cold, fine weather, or rain; those who let their tears fall towards the north ; who steal the gold from the inside, or scrape the gilding from the outside, of images ; those who take holy names in vain ; who show no respect for written paper, who throw down dirt or rubbish near pagodas or temples, who use dirty cook-houses and stoves for preparing the sacrificial meats, who do pot abstain from eating beef and dog's flesh ; those BUDDHIST HELL who have in their possession blasphemous or obscene books, and who do not destroy them, who obliterate or tear books which teach men to be good, who carve on common articles of household use the symbol of the origin of all things, the Sun, the Moon, and Seven Stars, the Royal Mother and the God of Longevity, the yin and yang on the same article, or represent any of the Immortals ; those who embroider the Svastika on fancy work, or mark characters on silk, satin, or cloth, on banners, beds, chairs, tables, or any kind of utensil ; those who secretly wear clothes adorned with the Dragon and the Phoenix, only to be trampled under foot, who buy up grain and hold until the price is exorbitantly high, — all these shall be thrust into the great and noisy Gehenna, there to be examined as to their misdeeds, and passed, accordingly, into one of the sixteen wards, whence, at the expiration of their time, they will be sent for further questioning on to the Seventh Court. All dwellers upon earth who, on the 8th day of the third moon, fasting, register a vow from that date to sin no more ; and, on the 14th and 15th of the fifth moon, the 3rd of the eighth moon, and the 10th of the tenth moon, to practise abstinence, vowing, moreover, to exert themselves to convert others, — these escape the bitterness of the above- mentioned wards. THE SEVENTH COURT His Infernal Majesty T'ai Shan reigns at the bottom of the great ocean, away to the north-west, below the Wu-chiao rock. His is a vast, noisy BUDDHIST HELL 79 court, measuring many leagues in circumference, and subdivided into sixteen wards, as follows : — In the first, the wicked souls are made to swallow their own blood. In the second, their legs are pierced and thrust into a fiery pit. In the third, their chests are cut open. In the fourth, their hair is torn out with iron combs, In the fifth, they are gnawed by dogs. In the sixth, great stones are placed upon their heads. In the seventh, their skulls are pierced. Fig. 26. — Disembowelled. In the eighth, they wear fiery clothes. In the ninth, their skin is torn and pulled by pigs. In the tenth, they are pecked by huge birds. In the eleventh, they are hung up and beaten on the feet. In the twelfth, their tongues are pulled out and their jaws bored. In the thirteenth, they are disembowelled (fig. 26). In the fourteenth, they are trampled on by mules and bitten by badgers. In the fifteenth, their fingers are ironed with hot irons. In the sixteenth, they are boiled in oil. All mortals who practise eating red-lead and certain 80 BUDDHIST HELL other nauseous articles, who spend more than they should upon wine, who kidnap human beings for sale, who steal clothes and ornaments from coffins, who break up dead men's bones for medicine, who separate people from their relatives, who sell the girl brought up in the house to be their son's wife, who allow their wives to drown female children, who stifle their illegitimate offspring, who unite to cheat another in gambling, who act as tutors without being properly strict and thus wrong their pupils, who beat and injure their slaves without estimating the punish ment by the fault, who regard districts committed to their charge in the light of so much spoil, who disobey their elders, who talk at random and go back upon their word, who stir up others to quarrel and fight — all these shall, upon verification of their sins, be taken from the great Gehenna and passed through the proper wards, to be forwarded, when their time comes, to the Eighth Court, again to be tortured according to their deserts. All things may not be used as drugs. It is bad to slay birds, beasts, reptiles and fishes in order to prepare medicine for the sick; but to use red-lead, and many of the filthy messes in vogue, is beyond all bounds of decency, and those who foul their mouths with these nasty mixtures, no matter how virtuous they may otherwise be, will not only derive no benefit from saying their prayers, but will be punished without mercy for so doing. Ye who hear these words, make haste to repent! From to-day forbear to take life ; buy many birds and animals in order to set them free ; and every morning, when you wash your teeth, mutter a prayer to Buddha. Thus, when your last hour comes,, a BUDDHIST HELL 81 good angel will stand by your side and purify you of your former sins. Some steal the bones of people who have been burnt to death, or the bodies of illegitimate children, for the purpose of compounding medicines ; others filch skulls and bones from graves with the same object. Worst of all are those who carry off bones by the basketful, using the hard ones for making various articles, and . grinding down the soft ones for the manufacture of pottery. These, no matter what may have been their good works upon earth, will not obtain thereby any remission of punishment; but, when they are brought down below, the Ruler of the Infernal Regions will first pass them from the great Gehenna into the proper wards, and will send instructions to the Tenth Court that, when they are born again on earth, it shall be either without ears or eyes, hand, foot, mouth, lips or nose, or maimed in some way or other. Yet, if they buy coffins for the poor, and persuade others to do likewise, then, when the death summons comes, the Spirits of the Home and Hearth will make a black mark upon the warrant, and punishment will be remitted. Sometimes, when there is a famine, people have nothing to eat, and die of hunger, and wicked men, almost before the breath is out of their bodies, cut them up and sell their flesh to others for food — a horrid crime indeed. Those who are guilty of such practices will, on arrival in the lower regions, be tortured in the various courts for the space of forty- nine days, and then the Judge of the Tenth Court will be instructed to notify the Judge of the First Court to put them down in his register for a new birth — if among men, as hungry, famished outcasts, a 82 BUDDHIST HELL and if among brutes, as loathing the food that falls to their lot, and by-and-by perishing of famine. Such is their reward. Besides the above, those who have eaten what is unfit for food, and willingly: continue to do so, will be punished, either among men or brutes, according to their deserts. Their throats will swell, and, though devoured by hunger, they will be unable to swallow, and thus die. Those who do not err a second time may be forgiven, as they deserve ; but those who, in time of distress, subscribe money for the sufferers, prepare gruel, give away rice to the needy, or distribute ginger tea and soup in the open street, and thus sustain life a little longer, and do real good to their fellow-creatures— all these shall not only obtain remission of their sins, but carry on a balance of good to their account which shall ensure them a happy old age in the life to come. Of the above three clauses, two were proposed by the officials attached to this Seventh Court, the third by the Chief Justice of the great Gehenna, and the whole submitted together for the approval of God, the following rescript being obtained: "Let it be as proposed ; let the thre^ clauses be copied into the Divine Panorama; and let the officials concerned be promoted or rewarded. Also, in case of crimes other than those already provided for, let such be punished according to the Statutes of the Rulers of the Four Continents on earth, and let any evasion of punishment, and implication of innocent people,' be at once reported by the proper officials for our consideration. This from the Throne ! Obey ! " 0 ye sons and daughters of men, if on the 27th of the third moon, fasting, and turned towards the BUDDHIST HELL 83 north, ye register a vow to pray and repent, and to publish the whole of the Divine Panorama for the enlightenment of mankind, then ye may escape the bitterness of this Seventh Court ! THE EIGHTH COURT His Infernal Majesty Tu Shih reigns at the bottom of the great ocean, due east below the Wu-chiao Fig. 27.— Seethed in roomy Saucepans. rock, in a vast, noisy court, many leagues in extent, subdivided into sixteen wards as follows : — In the first, the wicked souls are rolled down f mountains in carts. In the second, they are seethed ! in roomy saucepans (fig. 27). In the third, they are (i minced. In the fourth, their noses, eyes, and mouths, !' are stopped up. In the fifth, their uvulas are cut off. '¦In the sixth, they are exposed to all kinds of filth. iin the seventh, their extremities are rescinded. In 84 BUDDHIST HELL the eighth, their viscera are fried. In the ninth, their marrow is cauterised. In the tenth, their bowels are scratched. In the eleventh, they are inwardly burnt with fire. In the twelfth, they are disembowelled. In the thirteenth, their chests are torn open. In the fourteenth, their skulls are split and their teeth dragged out. In the fifteenth, they are hacked and gashed. In the sixteenth, they are pricked with steel prongs. Those who are unfilial — who do not nourish their relatives while alive or bury them when dead, who subject their parents to fright, sorrow, or anxiety— if they do not quickly repent them of their former sins, the Spirit of the Hearth will report their mis doings, and gradually deprive them of what prosperity they may be enjoying. Those who indulge in magic and sorcery will, after death, when they have been tortured in the other courts, be brought here to this court, and dragged backwards by bull-headed, horse- faced devils, to be thrust into the great Gehenna. Then, when they have been tortured in the various wards, they will be passed on to the Tenth Court, whence, at the expiration of many million years, they will be sent back to earth with changed heads and faces, for ever to find their place amongst the brute creation. But -those who believe in the Divine Panorama, and on the 1st of the fourth moon make a yow of repentance, repeating the same every night and morning to the Spirit of the Hearth, shall, by virtue of one of three characters, obedient, acquiescent, or, repentant, to be traced on their foreheads at death by the Spirit of the Hearth, escape half the punishments from the First to the Seventh Court inclusive, and escape this Eighth BUDDHIST HELL 85 Court altogether, being passed on to the Ninth Court, where cases of arson and poisoning are investigated, and, finally, be born again from the Tenth Court among mankind as before. To this God added : " Whoever may circulate the Divine Panorama for the information of the world at large, shall escape all punishment from the First to the Eighth Court inclusive. Passing through the Ninth and Tenth Courts, they shall be born again amongst men in some happy state." THE NINTH COURT His Infernal Majesty P'ing-Teng reigns at the bottom of the great ocean, away to the south-west, below the Wu-chiao rock. His is the vast circular hell of A-pi; many leagues in breadth, jealously enclosed by an iron net, and subdivided into sixteen wards, as follows : — In the first, the wicked souls are sawn asunder (fig. 28) [like Isaiah by Manasseh, as told in Yebamoth], In the second, their muscles are drawn out and their bones rapped. In the third, ducks eat their heart and liver. In the fourth, dogs eat their intestines and lungs. ¦ In the fifth, they are splashed with hot oil. In the sixth, their heads are crushed in a frame, and their tongues and teeth drawn out. In the seventh, their brains are taken out, and their skulls filled with hedgehogs. In the eighth, their heads are steamed, and their brains scraped. In the ninth, they are dragged about by sheep until they fall to pieces. In the tenth, they are squeezed in a wooden press and pricked on the head. In the eleventh, their hearts 86 BUDDHIST HELL ar.e ground in a mill. In the twelfth, boiling water drips on to their bodies. In the thirteenth, they are stung by wasps. In the fourteenth, they are tortured. by ants and maggots ; they are then stewed, and. finally wrung out like clothes. In the fifteenth, they are stung by scorpions. In the sixteenth, they are tortured by venomous snakes, crimson and scarlet, All who on earth have committed one of the ten Fig. 28. — Sawn retween Planks. great crimes, and have deserved either the lingering death, decapitation, strangulation, or other punish ment, shall, after passing through the tortures of the previous courts, be brought to this court, together with those guilty of making Ku poison. Then, if it be found that, hearkening to the words of the Divine Panorama, they ceased practising the magical art, they shall escape the punishments of this Court, and be passed on to the Tenth Court, thence to be born again amongst the sons BUDDHIST HELL 87 of men. But if, having heard the warnings of the Divine Panorama, they still continue to sin, from the Seco;nd to the Eighth Court their tortures shall be increased. They shall be bound on to a copper pillar, clasping it round with their hands and feet. Then the pillar shall be filled with fierce fire so ;as to burn into their heart and liver; and, afterwards, their feet shall be plunged into the great Gehenna of Api, knives shall be thrust into their lungs, they shall bite their own hearts, and gradually sink to the uttermost depths of hell, there to endure excruciating torments until the victims of their wickedness have either recovered their property or their life. Then may they pass into the Tenth Court, to be born again in one of the Six States of Existence. 0 ye who have committed such crimes as these, on the 8th of the fourth Moon, or the 1st or 15th of any moon, fasting, swear that you will circulate copies of the Divine Panorama to be a warning to others ! Then, when your last moment is at hand, the Spirit of the Hearth will write upon your forehead the two words, He obeyed, and from the Second, up to the Ninth Court, your good deeds will be rewarded by a diminution of such punishment as you have incurred. THE TENTH COURT His Infernal Majesty Chuan Lun, reigns in the Dark Land, due east away below the Wu-chiao rock just opposite the Wu-cho of this world. There he has six bridges of gold, silver, jade, stone, wood, and planks, over which all souls must pass. He examines the shades that are sent from the other courts, and BUDDHIST HELL according to their deserts, sends them back to earth as men, women, old, young, high, low, rich or poor, forwarding monthly a list of their names to the Judge of the First Court for transmission to Feng-tu. The regulations provide that all beasts, birds, fishes and insects, whether biped, quadruped, or otherwise, shall, after death, become chien, to be born again for long and short lives alternately. But such t,s may possibly have taken life, and such as must necessarily have taken life, will pass through a revolution of the Wheel, and then, when their sins have been examined, they will be sent up on earth to receive the proper retribution. At the end of every year a report will be forwarded to Feng-tu. Those scholars who study the Book of Changes, or priests who chant their litanies, cannot be tortured in the Ten Courts for the sins they have committed. When they come to this court, their names and features are taken down in a book kept for the purpose, and they are forwarded to Mother Meng (fig. 29) who drives them to the Terrace of Oblivion and doses them with a draught of f orgetfulness. Then they are born again in the world for a day, a week, or it may be a year, when they die once more ; and now, having forgotten the holy words of the Three Religions, they are carried off by devils to the various courts, and are properly punished for their former crimes. All souls, whose balance of good and evil is exact, or whose crimes are many and good deeds few, as soon as their future state has been decided— man, woman, beautiful, ugly, comfort, toil, wealth, or poverty, as the case may be— must pass through the Terrace of Oblivion. BUDDHIST HELL 89 Amongst those shades, on their way to be born again in the world of human beings, there are often to be found women who cry out that they have some old and bitter wrong to avenge, and that, rather than be born again amongst men, they would prefer to enter Fig. 29. — The Mother Meng and Wheel of Fate. the ranks of Pretas, or hungry devils. On examining them more closely, it generally appears that they are virtuous victims of some wicked student who had an eye to their money, and accordingly dressed himself out to entrap them, or promised marriage when sometimes he had a wife already, or offered to take care 90 BUDDHIST HELL of an aged mother or a late husband's children. Thus, the foolish women were beguiled, and put their property in the wicked man's hands. By-and-by he turned round upon and reviled them ; and, losing face in the eyes of their relatives and friends, with no one to redress their wrongs, they were driven to commit suicide. Then, hearing their seducer is likely to succeed at the examination, they beg and implore to be allowed to go back and compass his death. Now, although what they urge is true enough, yet that man's destiny may not be worked out, or the trans mitted effect of his ancestors' virtue may not have passed away ; therefore, as a compromise, these injured shades are allowed to send a spirit to the Examination Hall, to hinder and confuse him in the preparation of his paper, or to change the names on the published list of successful candidates, and, finally, when his hour arrives, to proceed with the spirit who carries the death summons, seize him, and bring him to the First Court of Judgment. Ye, who on the 17th of the fourth Moon swear to carry out the precepts of the Divine Panorama, and frequently make these words the subject of your conversation, may, in the life to come, be born again amongst men, and escape official punishments, fire, flood, and all accidents to the body. The place where the Wheel of Fate goes round is many leagues in extent, enclosed on all sides by an iron palisade. Within, are 81 subdivisions, each of which has its proper officers and magisterial appoint ments. Beyond the palisade there is a labyrinth of 108,000 paths leading by direct and circuitous routes back to earth. Inside, it is dark as pitch, and through it pass the spirits of priest and layman alike. BUDDHIST HELL 91 But, to one who looks from the outside, everything is seen as clear as crystal, and the attendants who guard the place, all have the faces and features they had at their birth. These attendants are chosen from virtuous people, who, in life, were noted for filial piety, friendship, or respect for life, and are sent here to look after the working of the wheel, and such duties. If for a space of five years they make no mistakes, they are promoted to a higher office ; but if found to be lazy, or careless, they are reported to the throne for punishment. Those who have been unfilial, or have destroyed much life, when they have been tortured in the various courts, are brought here, and beaten to death with peach twigs. They then become chien ; and, with changed heads and altered faces, are turned out into the labyrinth to proceed by the path which ends in the brute creation. Birds, beasts, fishes and insects, may, after many myriads of millions of years, again resume their original shapes, and if there are any that, during three existences, do not destroy life, they may be born amongst human beings, as a reward, a record being made, and their names forwarded to the First Court for approval. But all shades of men and women must proceed to the Terrace of Oblivion built by Mother Meng. Mother Meng was born in the earlier Han dynasty. In her childhood, she studied books of the Confucian school ; when she grew up, she chanted the liturgies of Buddha. Of the past and the future she had no care, but occupied herself in exhorting mankind to desist from taking life, and become vegetarians. At eighty-one years of age her hair was white, and her 92 BUDDHIST HELL complexion like a child's. She lived and died a virgin, calling herself simply Meng ; but men called her Mother Meng. She retired to the hills, and lived as a religieuse until the Later Han. Then, because certain evil doers, relying on their knowledge of the past, used to beguile women by pretending to have been their husbands in a former life, God com missioned Mother Meng to build the Terrace of Oblivion, and appointed her as guardian, with devils to wait upon her and execute her commands. It was arranged that all shades who had been sentenced in the Ten Courts to return, in various conditions, to earth, should first be dosed by her with a decoction of herbs, sweet, bitter, acrid, sour, or salt. Thus they forget everything that has happened to them, but carry away with them to earth some slight weak nesses, such as the mouth watering at the thought of something nice, laughter inducing perspiration, fear inducing tears, anger inducing sobs, or nervousness inducing spitting. Good spirits who go back into the world will have their senses of sight, hearing, smell and taste very much increased in power, and their physical strength and constitution will be much bettered. But evil spirits will experience the exact contrary to this, as a reward for previous sins, and as a warning to others to pray and repent. The Terrace is situated in front of the Ten Courts, outside the six bridges. It is square, measuring ten (Chinese) feet every way, and sur rounded by 108 small rooms. To the east there is a raised path, 1 foot 4 inches in breadth, and in the rooms above mentioned are prepared cups of forgetfulness ready for the arrival of the shades, Whether they swallow much or little matters not; BUDDHIST HELL 93 but sometimes there are perverse devils, who altogether refuse to drink. Then beneath their feet sharp blades start up, and a copper tube is forced down their throats, by which means they are compelled to swallow some. When they have drunk they are raised by the attendants and escorted back by the same path. They are next pushed on to the Bitter Bamboo floating bridge, with torrents of rushing red water on either side. Half way across they perceive written in large characters on a red cliff, on the opposite side, the following lines : — To be a man is easy, but to act up to one's own responsibilities as such is hard ; Yet to be a man once again is, perhaps, harder still. For those who would be born again in some happy state, there is no great difficulty ; It is only necessary to keep mouth and heart in harmony. When the shades have read these words, they try to jump on shore, but are beaten back into the water by two huge devils. One has on a black official hat and embroidered clothes ; in his hand he holds a paper pencil, and over his shoulder he carries a sharp sword. Instruments of torture hang at his waist, fiercely he glares out of his large round eyes, and laughs a horrid laugh. His name is Short Life. The other has a dirty face, smeared with blood ; he has on a white coat, an abacus in his hand and a rice sack over his shoulder. Round his neck hangs a string of paper money ; his brow contracts hideously, and he utters long sighs. His name is, They have their reward, and his duty is to push the shades into the red water. The wicked and foolish rejoice at the prospect of being born once more as human beings ; 94 BUDDHIST HELL but the better shades weep and mourn that, in life, they did not lay up a store of virtuous acts, and thus pass away from the state of mortals for ever. Yet they all rush on to birth like an infatuated or drunken crowd ; and, again, in their early childhood, hanker after the forbidden flavours. Then, regardless of consequences, they begin to destroy life, and thus forfeit all claims to the mercy and compassion of God. They take no thought as to their end ; and, finally, they bring themselves once more into Hell. The foregoing extract, notwithstanding its grue some details, and tedious repetitions, its absence of all punitive proportion and scientific order, may yet interest from its curious style and minute analysis, its strange variety of sins and still stranger variety of sufferings. How far the fear in a future life of a skull filled with hedgehogs, of a rapping of bones, of a scratching of bowels, of a nipping of locusts, of a perpetual dose of nasty medicine, of a rescission of the extremities, of a rolling down mountains in carts, or of a rolling up of skins into spills, has contributed to the circulation of the Divine Panorama mf&i remain uncertain ; but its concluding counsel t3 keep mouth and heart in harmony cannot be too highly commended. Virgil, after having mentioned certain special sins, and their perpetrators, such as fraud towards a client and fraternal enmity, those who dared innumerable crimes, as the invasion of a daughter's bed, and accomplished what they dared, confesses himself inadequate to enumerate the vast multitude' of moral enormities and their punishments. The author of the Yu Ti, who found himself probably in a like predica- BUDDHIST HELL 95 ment, may have been consoled by the remembrance that Buddha himself declared it would take 100,000 years to describe the tortures of the damned. The Christian exegetist of a Japanese book-roll, exhibiting the progress of Japanese sinners through punishment, begins somewhat naively thus : " Our first thought on inspection of this terrible picture was — God forgive us ! — that it must be of Christian origin," in fact, a sort of pictorial " Everlasting Damnation ! " adapted for Japanese converts. The expression of the patients is accurate and natural, and though the eyes, teeth, and horns of the devils are exaggerated, they have no tails. The colouring is rude, and there is but little shadow in the mansion of fire. The first portion of the roll recalls the figure in white supported on a staff ascending the sandy slope of the Libyan hills in search of Sokaris. It exhibits mournful pilgrims in shrouds, slowly feeling their way with staves across a hilly tract of country, rent with dark valleys, to the side of a foaming torrent, the river of death, on which falls abundant snow. There on the other side a giantess, San zu no kojfie baba^ or the grey-headed old woman of the river, with bffck pointed teeth, waits by the trunk of a withered tree to receive them. As the wretched ones pass by she robs them of their single robe, a shroud, and hangs it on her tree. The Brahman hell can boast of a like lady, 160 feet high, with eyes like burning wheels, sitting by Vaitarani's bank. Next we see the giant judge Emma 0 in resplendent attire, poring over a wooden tablet. Two assessors and a scribe attend him. Beside the scribe is the Pillar of Witness, a column bearing two heads, one, Mirume, of seeing, the other, Kikume, of hearing. These 96 BUDDHISTl HELL heads observe and listen to the confessions of crouch ing criminals, and supply as adminicular evidence such of their misdeeds as _ they have neglected or forgotten. On the right hand of the judgment seat a horned executioner whirls a two-handled club. In the case before the court in the Japanese roll the accused is reminded of a past misdemeanour by the picture of a farmhouse in flames. Next in order appears a red executioner weighing a slender criminal in scales, against a huge piece of rock, which mounts up and kicks the beam. Such and so great is the weight of sin. Then- comes a green executioner dragging off a chap-fallen company in a chariot of fire. In the background lies Hachi kan Jigokou or the eight-times-cold hell, an icy pit filled with struggling and lacerated victims. Then we see the slope of spears, a steep hill horrid with iron spikes, up which sinners are being hunted. Some think to escape by running to a blasted tree ; but the tree is thickly set with thorns, and foul birds await their ascent to the top to tear them to pieces. Others fly to Tetu bazan, a region of delusive joy, which vanishes upon their near approach like a mirage. And then, says the ingenious exegetist of the roll, as if all this were mere tortas y pan pintado, they come to the Place of Torments. The description is a little tedious ; the reader probably is a little tired. Briefly, then, the chief subjects of interest in the Place of Torments are a three-headed monster, girt with skulls, whirling a red-hot mace ; another with the head of a bull cramming the bad into a boiling caldron, over which other bad are suspended head downwards, for a foretaste of horror ; a vast whirlpool of durid storm broken by jagged lightnings; the BUDDHIST HELL 97 final pit called " eight times deep " edged with serpents ; miserable sinners pounded in an iron mortar with spiked mallets, others packed tightly into a hole, and grievously pressed therein by a mass of rock, while after every third " squash " (the expression is that of the interpreter of the roll) they suffer restoration, and renewed destruction. One artistic and novel touch, which might commend itself to antivivisectionists, is that of a fiend in green, who, with a probe in one hand and a scalpel in the other, witnesses with apparent delight the long-drawn-out agony of an unfortunate subject, with bleeding stumps for feet, whom he is busily dissecting on an ordinary deal table. A classic description of the Buddhist hell, differing considerably from the preceding, is to be found in the Foe Koue Ki. In this work, translated by Remusat and annotated by Klaproth, A yeou, as Remusat spells it, pays a visit to the mansion of Yun-loh, or Yan-lo according to Remusat. Te yo, the underworld, holds, we are told, hells both big and little. Of the large variety there are eight hot and eight cold ; of the small there are sixteen, so disposed that the torments may be successively augmented. The damned pass through all these sixteen stages. The first, He cha te yo, is of black sand. This sand is made red-hot by a burning wind which drives it against the skin of the culprits. After some delay they pass into Fey chi, where they swallow upon compulsion iron balls filled with ardent excrement, what time they suffer from the bites of insects with beaks of iron. In Thi ting they are nailed with five hundred nails to a plank of hot steel. After that they pass successively 98 BUDDHIST HELL through the hells of hunger, thirst, boiling caldrons, being cast with iron pothooks from one to another, of crushing stones, of blood, of pus, and of a river of cinders with pestilential vapours. These, however are but the little hells. In the eight large hells there is a tearing out of eyes, sawing off of heads, and calcining of bones ; which seem but bathos after some of the agonies of the sixteen. All who commit bad actions in this life, having endured these, pass into the eight cold hells. Of these the first, 'Ofeouto, the Sanskrit arbuda, is the hell of wrinkles. In this and the hell succeeding it there is a sad falling off, for the damned herein suffer nothing more than chaps and chilblains. In the third cold hell, they cannot move their frozen lips, uttering only Atata, the name of this hell in Sanskrit. In the fourth they cannot move their frozen tongues, and utter only Ababa, which gives its Sanskrit name. In the fifth they can move neither tongue nor lips, but the air entering their throats produces a doleful sound, like Ahaha, the Sanskrit name of the fifth cold hell. It is curious that in the Dharma pra- dipikd, the Ababa naraka corresponds with the fourth, and the Atata with the third hell. The sixth hell shows the wicked with their skin opened like the blue nenuphar or water-lily, and is therefore called Utpala. In the seventh, their flesh is as the red nenuphar, the Nelumbium speciosum, the Pali paduma and Sanskrit padma. In the last of the cold hells their flesh falls off, and their naked bones resemble the white water-lily, from which this hell Fen to ly or Sanskrit Pandarika Mahdpadma derives its name. The Buddhists of Ceylon diverge somewhat in the BUDDHIST HELL 99 number of their Nirayas, since their sum-total of places of chastisement amounts only to forty; but agreement, it has been said, on this subject is hope less. The duration of the shortest term of misery is generally represented by one unit followed by fifty-six zeros of years. The reader who has read and digested the notable divergences in the preceding narrations will hold M. Leon Feer justified of the remarks which he makes in his L'Enfer Indien. Disgusted apparently with the distressing disagreements of disputant theologians, he writes, " 11 ne parait guere possible de mettre d' accord ces autoritis contradictoires. Nous ne pouvons guere faire autre chose que noter leurs divergences," which he proceeds to do at some length. This diligent author has given an alphabetical list of at least a hundred hells. But it is sad to find him saying, in conclusion of the whole matter, " Chacun suit sa fantaisie." Yet can aught be hoped for of definite and reliable returns of the Hells, when the statistics of the best authorities are not at one whether the Heavens be thirty- one or thirty-four ! But there is certainly — if aught in so dubious a matter may be stated with certainty- — and happily no dispute of the fact that when Buddha laughs, hot and cold emanations from his mouth arrive cold and hot in Hell; giving the "fierce extremes" of Milton, a dominant note in so much of the varied infernal music. Unfortunately this rapid interchange cannot well be represented pictorially, as it would certainly have been a prominent feature in the Les Enfers Bouddhiques of Riotor and Leofanti, of whose plates two are here given, executed by the Japanese artists Pha and Sy, after the hauts-reliefs of the Dark 100 BUDDHIST HELL Pagoda of Punishments in the province of Hanoi, The portrait of Visvakarman, the doer of all deeds — it has been said of him that he was so thoroughly complete in the justification of his name, as to include himself in a sacrifice which he offered up of all beings — is not destitute of weird interest. Like Tubal- Cain he is a whetter of every artificer of brass and iron Fig. 30. — in hell. His main business is in molten metals, and he may be considered a sort of Buddhist Vulcan. Other pictures are to be found by those solicitous to search for them in Du Bose's Dragon, in which we are introduced to drunkards ornamented with the cangue, and standing on their heads, to whom fiends offer " hot drinks " with suitable irony. An uncommon form of torture recorded by Du Bose puts completely out of countenance Procrustes, and laughs BUDDHIST HELL 101 the art of the gold-beater to scorn. It consists of a bed of steel measuring ten thousand miles, upon which the sinner, being stretched out its whole .^¦*iy length, becomes at the last excessively attenuated. But no sinner is punished without due warning in this world ; or for any other sins than his own, 102 BUDDHIST HELL In the Devadatta sittta Yama inquires of the accused : " Did you not see the five divine messengers, childhood, age, sickness, crime and death?" "Yes," replies the prisoner, " but I neglected fully to think of these things." " Very good," says Yama, then your wickedness is not that of your parents or friends. You alone are guilty." He is then delivered over to the tormentors, and his works do follow him till the time of his moksha or emancipation. Deva datta — inspired by Mara or the murderer, an opponent of Gautama or Sakya muni — a sort of Buddhist Iscariot — is swallowed up alive like Korah, and re mains in hell wearing a red-hot metal cap. He is pierced with five red-hot metal bars, of which one passes through him perpendicularly and the other four horizontally, two from east to west, and two from north to south. In this condition he awaits the revolution of the wheel of change, the mechanism which brings nearer to the longed-for Nirvana of ultimate extinction, or escape from existence, or nonentity — the votaries of a creed which considers human life at its best but bitterness and delusion, and sees only a' work of supererogation in any other additional hell. Zoroastrian Hell At a time when the minds of the majority of mankind were enfettered by a natural fear of the unknown, and debased by a barbaric and superstitious attachment to the ghastly, and a very prevalent and very sad credulity in the pretensions^ of sacerdotal astuteness ; when men in the early age of the world were delivered up wholly to the childish terrors of a future replete with horror, of savage punishments visited upon them from without, for misconceptions of the right besieging them from within, the famous Iranian sage Zarathustra, — or Zardusht, or Zoroaster, sometimes confounded with Abraham, — holding that a good God cannot be responsible for permanent evil, devised a faith — abstract, indeed, and lacking colour, but, so far as can be discovered through an imperfect acquaintance with the Zend, in no way inconsistent with sound logic, however tainted with sacrifice to human passion. The Parsee religion of the present is not very widely removed from the Zoroastrianism of which Anquetil du Perron interpreted the Scriptures. The Vandidad in the Zend has yet — like many other sacred books — many pages of undoubted obscurity. In the third fargard, or chapter of the Vandidad, a sort of Persian Leviticus, constituting the third part of the Avesta, it is said, or seems to be said, that the 103 104 ZOROASTEIAN HELL first thing which displeases the Earth is having holes in it, which allow the devils to ascend and descend from hell, the abode of the evil principle of the outer darkness, Angramainyu, or the black spirit Ahriman. In the beginning of the fourth fargard, borrowing without the intention of paying is deservedly con demned. Those who commit this Mithra Druj, or sin against Mithra suggested by Drug, shall pass three hundred years in hell. Druj, a form of the modern Darouj, is all one with " a lie," in the Avesta the worst of sins. As to those who enforce a com pact by shaking hands upon it, and thereafter break it, six hundred years in hell is the portion of these. Zoroastrianism believes in a resurrection of the darvands, or accursed, about the dawn of the morning following the third night after death, when the splendent Mithra and the brilliant light begin to rise on the mountains. The devil at that time having bound the souls of the darvands, carries them off. The darvand, when he reaches the bridge of Chinavad, drops into darkness. The time to be passed in hell by the darvand may be diminished, as in other creeds, by the intercessory prayers and good deeds of his friends. A Zend fragment gives the following de scription of the punishment of the wicked soul, which commences immediately after death, though it does not reach hell till the fourth day. Zoroaster asked : " When the darvand dies, what becomes of his soul on the first night ? " The wise Lord of existence, Ahuramazda or Ormuzd, answered : " It haunts his body, and cries out, 'What earth shall I invoke, 0 Ormuzd, what prayers shall I choose in which to address you ? ' In that very night the soul experiences trouble, according as the man has wrought during his life in ZOROASTRIAN HELL 105 this world ; and so on the second and the third night. At the end of the third night, 0 holy Zoroaster, the soul of the darvand man is in the world ; it burns, it is in rottenness, as if it had its body (or like its body). Then it rises up and breathes a wind from the North, from the parts of the North, a wind evil, rotten, the rottenest of all winds. This wind catches the nostrils. The soul of the darvand man says : ' Up to the moment when this wind began to blow, never has a wind more rotten affected my sense of smell.' The fourth step taken by the soul of the darvand man lodges him in the first darkness. Then the darvands already dead aforetime, apostrophize him thus : ' What, art thou, too, dead, 0 Darvand ? What, art thou, too, come from those places inhabited by birds and flocks and fishes, from the world where one looks for good, and marries, and begets children ; from the existing world into this abode hidden in night ; from the world of evils into this world of evils still greater ? How long wilt thou remain here, desirous to get out ? ' " Forcibly this reminds the reader of the circumstance of the descending day star, of the entrance of Lucifer into Sheol. He hears a faint echo of Israel's triumphant insultation over Babel, as set forth in Isaiah : "Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming : it stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth ; it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations. All they shall speak and say unto thee, Art thou also become weak as we ? art thou become like unto us?" Ahriman says: "I will not punish this man, I who punish him who has walked in the way of violence, of fear, of tor ment ; who when he had his body walked in this 106 ZOROASTRIAN HELL way. Carry him off to eat abundantly an excess of things rotten ; he who seeks nothing but evil, who is wicked in thought, wicked in word, and wicked in deed, who follows an evil law, shall eat thereof after his death. And the sinning woman, absolutely impure of word, impure of action, who, through defect of instruction, recognises not her master in he*r husband, this darvand woman shall, after her death, devour rottenness." The abode of Ahriman and the damned is called in Zend the home of the darvands, the germ of the blackest darkness, and in Parsi Dozakh. Zoroaster, in the nineteenth Fargard of the Vendidad, is anxious to destroy this Ahriman, the Persian Satan, who wanders, going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it, precisely like the Satan in Job. "This Ahriman," says he, " this Dev, master of the evil law, full of death, runs to and fro in the world. May I take him, take him away entirely, as though I had him by the girdle ! All these Devs and darvands who look with an evil eye, would that I, Zoroaster, might take them, take them up forcibly as though I had them by the girdle, and annihilate them. Then should these masters of the law of evil fly into the domain destined for them, into Dozakh." But Zoroaster is too impatient, for in the end of all things, though Bihisht or Paradise subsist for ever, Dozakh shall be no more, the darvands shall be purified in molten metal, Ahriman and evil shall be burned away, and that which is hidden in crime shall fail with the Devs and their murky germs. In the treatise known as Arda Viraf Nama, or the Story of the Saint Viraf, originally in Zend, but translated into Persian and Gujerati, Arda-viraf ZOROASTRIAN HELL 107 relates what he saw in hell. His guide is Surosh- izad, or the angel Gabriel, who, after warning him to take particular care of dogs on his return to earth, and never to put wet wood on the sacred fire, introduces him to a river of fetid water of the depth of nine lances (a lance is seven feet long). Down the stream of this, smoking souls floated, while their complaints were carried away by the wind. They were harassed on their journey by numbers of noxious reptiles. Suroshizad explains that this river consists of unavailing tears. It recalls the Brahmanic Asrumati, the classic Cocytus. But these tears are shed for the dead, which, says Surosh, is a heinous sin. Arriving at the bridge Chinavad, he finds a sinner urged by a demon with the teeth of an elephant and the nails of an eagle, whose eyes are blood and whose mouth is pestilence. The unlucky soul inquires into the personality of his tormentor. "I," says the demon, "am yourself deformed by crimes. Time was when my face resembled the moon." Then he seizes the sinner by his nape and forces him on to the bridge, thin as the edge of a sword ; and this sinner, after a step or two, falls head forward into the abyss. Again, he sees a narrow lane, cold and dark, in which the souls, sitting in corners, solitary, are beset by scorpions. Again, he sees a woman drinking cup after cup of a broth brewed for her by devils. The laches of this lost soul is best left in the original, as indeed that of several other souls who are here punished. A man hanging by one leg to a tree, who is being skinned by devils, had persecuted the true believers — that is, of course, those of the Magian, or more properly, the Mazdian faith. Another, 108 ZOROASTRIAN HELL biting for hunger bits out of his arms, suffers the result of ingratitude, one of the sins most hateful before God. One woman is suspended by her breasts ; another by her heels, with her tongue protruding from the back of her neck — the latter for disobe dience to her husband. One who adulterated his milk with water is flogged with snakes ; another, a liar, has his tongue covered with centipedes ; while of another the same member is laid on a stone and beaten with stones. But this Sacred Scripture of the ancient Persians and their Parsee descendants, describing the varied punishments in Dozakh of the Darvands, according to the prophet Zoroaster, is very long, and may occupy but little more space. Yet the punishments, as wholly original, of digging stones out of a quarry with bleeding nails, and the burial in ice up to the neck, deserve a passing notice, and curiously in the long list of the damned appears a sorceress who leagued with devils ; a lady who had thrown her hair combings into the sacred fire ; and a gentleman con victed of improper conduct in the bath. Strange, also, is it to find a soul in hell for neglecting to hand down his name to posterity, " one of the highest duties we owe our Creator " ; and another as a destroyer of a dog, to protect which beast is most pleasing in God's sight. " How happy," says the angel Surosh, "might men be, if they would but remember this ! " However, the caliph of the day ordered the Arda Viraf Nama to be written in letters of gold, and to be preserved among the archives of his empire : just as the good Harun Alrashid, in the Arabian Nights, the stories which delighted him. And yet, this honoured and elaborate history ZOROASTRIAN HELL 109 notwithstanding, Mazdeism is surrounded by a murky mist of uncertainty, contradiction and error in the important matter of future punishment and the destiny of the soul after death. Few faiths, in fact none, excepting of course the only true faith, have escaped this encircling cloud. A mystic Hamestan, or purgatory, is spoken of, but the Dozakh is in itself a purgatory, though commonly rendered Hell. For " good " in Zoroastrianism " is the final goal of ill." The ultimate victory is with Ormuzd. Even the most profane and unclean of livers, the perverted reprobate, will, after a burning of three days and as many nights, become beatified. The pains of the damned, which seem to be corporeal, are not par ticularised in the Avesta with that minute precision which we encounter in the books of other creeds ; but it is related that Ormuzd annually visits these unfortunates on the last five days of the year, and is merciful and just in forgiving the sins of all who with sorrow confess them. Thus Zoroastrianism is not emblazoned with any edict of everlasting agony : and a door is always open, as for the dead Muslim, to the possibility of repentance. Classic Hell Polybius, in his JHistory, regards religion as the chief support of the Roman republic. "If the world," he argues, " consisted of wise men only, religion would perhaps be unnecessary; but since the multitude is full of illicit love, of headlong anger, and of violence, the result of both these passions, it must be kept under by unseen terrors and figments of horror. Therefore," he says, "in, my opinion, the ancients neither rashly nor with light cause intro duced these opinions about the Gods and the agonies of hell into the minds of the common people ; but, on the other hand, those who live now reject them hastily and without sufficient reason." It is clear that the infliction of torture here or hereafter is no argument against the truth of any religion. The ingenious punishments of the Spaniards in the New World were, we know, executed in the name of Christ and that religion which came to bring peace to mankind. The philosophic student in comparative eschatology finds in various religious systems new and important discoveries concerning the nature of the Supreme Being and the destiny of the human soul. In inquiries of this kind there is a principle which we should ever remember, to wit, that the more absurd or repulsive any religious dogma may appear, the more certainly is its meaning important ; no CLASSIC HELL 111 the uglier and rougher the shell, the fairer and smoother the kernel. It was the written opinion of Cicero that time, while deleting vague assurances, confirms the sounder judgments of mankind. He regards time as a test of truth, and adduces the pagan religion as a sample of his doctrine. He seems to have considered a belief in hell no part of that religion, for he declares that its destruction by time is a proof of its untruth. Bayle has in this matter taken a distinction between public and private sentiment. What seemed fabulous to Cicero, as without foundation of reason, was probably held in high esteem by the ordinary Roman of his period. " What old woman," asks the forensic orator, "is so stupid now as to tremble at those tales of hell which were once so firmly credited ? " The answer would seem to be, " Very many old women, and of both sexes." Interest combined with ignorance, and a general preference of rumour to reason, natural malice, and a love of the horrible, made other than Juvenal's unwashed children to believe in the Manes and subterranean mansions, the black frogs in the Stygian marsh, and the one ferry boat destined to bear so many millions of immortal souls. Gibbon, holding that nothing short of a Divine revelation was able to certify the existence and describe the condition of the invisible country of souls, found, or professed to find, several defects inherent in the popular religions of Greece and Rome which rendered them unequal to so arduous a task. Of these, the most prominent were the want of support by proof, the contempt of the learned, the absurd monsters introduced into Tartarus by the 112 CLASSIC HELL poets and painters, and the little equity there pre vailing. These slight objections may be easily set aside. Even Christians, in their desire of heaping up the infernal horrors, have discountenanced proba bility ; and how could any reader expect an accurate description of hell from a philosopher, for instance, whose disciples boasted that he had rescued the captive world from the tyranny of religion and the fear of a future state ! Virgil, who thought happy him who could trample on the strepitus Acherontis avari, has for the most part offered us pictures of hell cold and declamatory as the love scenes in the plays of the philosophic Seneca. The doctrine of eternal pain has been, by varied ¦ sections of differing societies, assumed a truth of natural religion and an intuitive belief of mankind. But the student of early religious creeds may, per haps, find that the vague notions of immortality, dimly seen by early peoples, included no idea of retribution whatever. Man, with them, survived only as a shadow. Morally, emotionally, intellectually he ended at death. The chief concern of the ancient mind was that his whilom lodging should be properly cared for. This concern is manifested ^ in the supplication of the ghost of Archytas to the seaman : " Don't grudge a particle of wandering sand to my bare bones and unburied head. If you are pressed for time, cast but a little dust thrice over me, and run." The majority of early peoples, having buried their dead, seem to have supposed that the souls or ghosts accompanied their bodies underground. Thus Hades, the unseen, and Erebus, the dark, came into ideal being. The river PyriphlegethQii was, perhaps, born CLASSIC HELL 113 with the burning of the dead. But the idea of fire, as a punishment, is of later growth — indeed, there seems to be no fixed or dogmatic notion of penality in the pagan hell. Phlegyas and Tantalus, Sisyphus and Ixion, were exceptional criminals who had interfered with the Greater Gods ; and no idea of a general retribution of agony can be derived from their isolated misfortunes. To the ordinary Greek or Roman citizen, that fearful looking forward to the wrath to come, which harrows the heart of the Christian householder with dreams of despiteful usage and persecution by devils, was unknown. In primitive faiths that particular font of mental misery is all but dry. The heathen reason was not astounded by that doctrine of permission of evil which brings about the damnation of nearly the whole of the human family. The pagans were not, like the Socinians, driven to deny the eternity of punishment as incompatible with orthodox theology. Their hell was neutral- tinted. Though sighing may there have been the rule, suffering of physical agony was apparently the exception. It had no consistent or veracious relation to any hell now " actually operative," to use the words of Gladstone, "among mankind." Apparent carelessness, inconsistency of treatment, diversity of opinion prevail to an inconvenient extent in the descriptions of Tartarus. Hardly two accounts, for instance, of the descent of Hercules will be found to agree. The Greeks are said to have derived their ideas of hell from the Egyptians. The punishments of Tartarus have been, it is affirmed, taken from Egyptian funeral rites. Those punishments the reader of the Metamorphoses will not easily forget, 114 CLASSIC HELL as told of Tityus, the Lapithse, and others of that rebel crew, the sum of whose sufferings was found !by the Augustan poet incommunicable. To the Homeric hell, painted as it was in the infancy of art and shadowy and undetermined, succeeding hellsJoaxe., nevertheless, been often deeply indebted. Dante has left unchanged Cerberus and Charon. The con version of Minos into a hideous demon, describing degrees of punishment by the folds of his tail, though necessary perhaps to the mystery of Christianity, was hardly a happy or poetic permutation. There is a disagreement about the locality of the Classic as of the Christian hell. Hercules, according to Apollodorus, descends by an opening in Tsenarus, in Laconia ; Ulysses visits the Cimmerii, a people dwelling in. darkness beyond the ocean stream ; iEneas finds the gate of Avernus hard by Cumse and the Sibyl's cave. The philosophic creed found hell equally distant from every place. Wherever you die, pretends Cicero, you will have just as far to travel to arrive at hell. But the Hermionians, says Pausanias, believe the shortest route to be through an opening in the sanctuary of Clymenus : so short, indeed, that they put no money in the mouths of their dead to pay the ferryman. Tartarus is, however, as far below Hades as Hades itself is below the earth and the warm precincts of cheerful day. Much has been written about the ostia Ditis, but perhaps the most curious observation was that of Pythagoras. Dio genes Laertius in his life of that philosopher says that Aristotle in his book of beans says that the'celebrated Samian scholar ordered abstention from beans for some other reason which need not here be mentioned, and because they were like the gates of hell. CLASSIC HELL 115 Hesiod, in his Theogony, declares that a brazen anvil falling from heaven would reach earth on the tenth day, and again falling from earth would in a like time arrive in Tartarus. Milton's adaptation of this idea in the Christian hell is well known. Hesiod also speaks of a brazen fence, and the ruthless clog, with its evil trick of fawning on those coming in and devouring those going out. In spite, however, of this beast, and the subterraneous distance of the mansion of the damned — calculated by arithmeticians at twenty-seven millions of miles — Hercules and Theseus descended thither and re-ascended without apparently any excessive fatigue or difficulty. In their cases, as in those of many early Christian authorities — whether in the body or out of the body, who can tell? — the descent into, was as easy as the ascent out of, Avernus. It is somewhat remarkable that every hell, with the exception of the Christian, and that for an obvious reason, holds one or more rivers. Milton, indeed, has introduced into his hell "live pagan streams ; but Marsilius Ficinus did perhaps better in converting these rivers into so many demons. The classic waters surrounding hell we have already met in the belief of the Brahmans. Cocytus is a literal translation of Asrumati, and represents the Scandinavian VaSgelmir. Charon also has his Hindu prototype, who is equally concerned about the payment of his fare. But Virgil, admitting the nine circumambient rivers, is careful to conduct his hero over one only, — Virgil, who having copied Lucretius in that author's "Et metus ille foras praeceps Acheruntis agendus Funditus, humanam quae vitam turbat ab imo," in his declaring that man to be happy who can 116 CLASSIC HELL trample underfoot the uproar of avaricious Acheron, is yet for terrifying his reader with that tale of Tartarus we wot of. Polygnotus paints, in close vicinity to the tortures of the damned, the two little maids Clytie and Camaro playing at knuckle bones. And the general condition of the classic reprobate seems, with a few exceptions, that of utter weariness or ennui ; which induced Achilles, in reply to the hero of the Odyssey, to declare that he would rather be a poor farm labourer for hire than rule over all the countless myriads of the dead. " One might apply to Paris," says Chamfort in one of his Pensies, "the exact words which Sainte Therese uses in her definition of hell: L'endroit ou il pue, et ou Von n'aime point." The stench of sulphur, and of the damned themselves, with which the readers of the Christian hell are surfeited, is but poorly insisted on in the pagan ; and the mutual hatred of heathen souls offers a feeble image of the rage and vengeance which Vathek beheld in the eyes of Nouronihar, or the despair and aversion which that princess beheld in the eyes of Vathek. The classic dead mostly regard one another with indifference, and no poet or painter has given them the reciprocal gestures of imprecation, the screams and ghastly convulsions of horror, the gnashing of teeth and unchangeable fury with which Beckf ord has adorned the empire of Ebbs. Milton's devils must become pigmies, and reduce their shapes immense to smallest forms in order to become denizens of the pagan pandemonium. The hell of early Hellenic faith, or Tartarus, in the Iliad, is a dark precipice down which Zeus cast the Titans and the Aloidse, his personal foes. Tityus, Ixion,Phlegyas, Sisyphus, Salmoneus, Tantalus CLASSIC HELL , 117 and others here suffer for their varied enormities. Rank blasphemers these, while Zeus, in his relations to Juno and Ganymede, uttered only a choleric word. Attention has been called to the fact that the best- known punishments of the classic hell were borne by those alone who had in some sort incurred the animosity of the gods. To take examples among the sinners last mentioned : Tantalus stole their favourite food, or, according to others, their favourite dog ; Salmoneus, an early pioneer of electricity, imitated their hghtning ; Sisyphus, his brother, insulted Pluto, and revealed an erotic indiscretion of Zeus ; Phlegyas burnt the temple of Apollo, being moved thereto by the god's behaviour to his daughter Coronis ; Ixion, as all the world knows, suffered from an unfortunate amour with Juno ; and Tityus from an indiscreet love of Latona. Suidas says that Pythagoras descended into hell, and saw there the soul of Hesiod Bound fast to a brazen pillar, and heard it' shrieking in its bonds. As for the soul of Homer, it was hanging from a tree surrounded on all sides by serpents. And these things happened to these poets on account of what they had sung concerning the gods. The other souls which the Samian saw suffered from not having conformed in a cardinal matter to the wishes of their wives. Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras endeavours to enfeeble the force of this history by asserting boldly that the scientist discovered a way to restrain men from injustice by the punishment of their souls in hell. The Furies generally have little else laid to their charge than the occasional, by no means eternal infliction of a sound whipping. There is more of the 118 CLASSIC HELL bark than the bite with Cerberus, and the sorrows of Orcus are deficient in variety. Virgil tells that he could not run through all the varieties of infernal punishment, though endowed with a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths, and a voice of iron for that very purpose. Others than Hampole have said much the same thing; but Hampole seems to have done his best in the attempt, which can hardly be said of the Augustan poet. The dark haze of his infernal horizon shows but a meagre monotony of torture. We find but little discursive ness of fancy, little originality of remark, in the wide arena of human agony. There is but a small variation of ingenuity in his religious history of hell. The pains adopted to punish — hardly to correct- such as had been in their lifetime unquiet, dis obedient, and criminous have too much homogeneity of hue. On the other hand, there are few additions, except in divine matters, of private spite, of partiality, of arbitrary revenge, such as have polluted the pages of later theologians, and introduced pictures of doubtful taste, and artistically postiche. The fate of the rebel Rephaim, the giants that sinned, those famous proud old angels which kept not their first estate, but fell away in the strength of their foolishness, seems not to be painted with such lurid colours as those which Milton used for his hierarchy of hell. Typhon touched the east with one hand and the west with the other and heaven with his head ; Manilius labels him anguipedem alatis humeris, but he rivals not Satan high with dragon's feet. The Titans Otus and Ephialtes, Briareus and Brontes, Iapetus and Cronos, the giants Prometheus and Enceladus, Alcyoneus and Porphyrius compare unfavourably with those CLASSIC HELL 119 who left their own habitations and wereidestroyed be cause they had no wisdom ; with Mammon and Belial, with Moloch and Beelzebub. All alike, however, are cast down to hell and reserved under darkness in everlasting chains. The woes of these old workers of iniquity, who turned religion into rebellion, and faith into faction, hardly affect humanity, because their misdeeds were mostly directed against the gods. Thus they miss the attainment of their legitimate end, of powerfully instructing and terrifying even the most carnal men. It is no business of a mere mortal to picket Death in the palace of Pluto like Sisyphus, to commit sacrilege on so large a scale_ as Phlegyas, to steal nectar and ambrosia from the tables of the gods like Tantalus, to conduct himself indecently with a goddess as Tityus, or to attempt adultery with the Divine Mother like Ixion. In other respects the Classical has no few features in common with other hells. There is the same anti- peristasis (may the reader bear with a word which Sylvester in his Du Bartas held not amiss) of heat and cold by which the effects of both were intensified. For Autonoe, describing hell to Scipio in Silius Italicus, speaks, both of Acheron, which in the old translation of Thomas Ross belches up with horrid murmurs the gelid sand, and of Phlegethon, which roaring turns the flaming quarries up with storms of fire. Now, cold we know, and heat we know, but where— albeit the scraper is present— are the Buddhist heart-scrapings ? Tityus and Prometheus both suffer from a vulture, though there is a variant for Tityus of a snake, the Classic representative of the undying worm. In the early Etruscan hell alone is punishment at all satisfactory. There the bad soul is dragged 120 CLASSIC HELL along its dreary way by Charun, or beaten with hammers, or stabbed and torn by attendant demons in funereal black. Charun, a sort of Home-secretary in the Etruscan underworld, is represented hideous, squalid, old, fiery-eyed, tusked as a boar, and snub- nosed as a negro. In a portrait on a sepulchral tablet, here introduced, his brow is said to be snake-bound, and he holds a raised hammer in his right hand (fig. 32). Mantus and Mania were the king and queen of the Etruscan hell. Mantus is shown old, crowned, Fig. 32. winged, bearing a reversed torch, or it may be a few large nails. Herein exegetists differ. Mania, called Mater Larum by Macrobius, battened on the sacrifice of boys, till Junius Brutus, on the expulsion of the Tarquins, substituted poppyheads and garlic. The manalis lapis, according to Festus, was the hell-mouth by which the souls of the dead passed into the upper air; but perhaps it was rather so called from the Dii Manes (fig. 33). The picture given of this institution cannot compete in horror with the hell-mouths of the Christian artist, It can hardly be CLASSIC HELL 121 said to " yawn terrific," and the extrusion of the tongue recalls nothing more terrible than the contempt of a refractory school-girl. Occasionally, however, it was compassed round about by the heads of wild beasts and monsters, and still later on by the fairer forms of the Furies. The avenging Furies are variously represented with Fig. 33 wings on their heads or shoulders or on both, with their heads bare or covered, and sometimes bearing a tutidus or columella, as in the illustration. They have occasionally necklace and armlets (fig. 34 and 35). Their weapons are also varied. Some carry a spear, others torches, or a torch, or a burning lamp, others a battle-axe- or pole, a sword or hammer, or a sort 122 CLASSIC HELL of scraper (fig. 36). The sword recalls the cherubim and the flame of that sword which turned every way at the east of the gates of Eden ; the scraper, that weird instrument of which antiquarian erudition Fig. 34. has explained the purpose among the leading horrors of the Christian hell, and the curious looking sacks depending from their shoulders, the seven angels with their seven respective vials. For the rest, they are commonly of comely face, like young girls, with CLASSIC HELL 123 neatly bound hair — and sometimes dishevelled. Pic tures of three, distinguished as in the text, are here given. Of Furina or Ancharia, the queen of the Furies, mentioned by Tertullian in his Apologetics, two pictures are introduced : in one she has two pairs of wings (fig. 37), in the other one pair only and a pole-axe (fig. 38). With naked neck and Fig. 35. bosom and arms in the first, she stands unadorned with the usual ornaments of girdle, brooch, necklace, or armlets. But her hair, in order to inspire the wicked with terror, is erect, disposed in two rows, like a double diadem ; her eyes are large, her mouth foul, her face terrible. The wings she bears on head and shoulders are not feathered, but rather like unto the wings of bats. She is clothed with a 124 CLASSIC HELL short tunic beneath her breast; showing her to be ever ready for active service in the execution of punishment. This is perhaps made more clear in the second picture, wherein her head only bears wings; while her breast is adorned with fillets divided cross wise, and her legs and feet are clad in the buskin. She hides, as it were behind her back, her left hand, Fig. 36. as a dentist hides his right. Therein we may suppose the scraper or some other implement of pain, while the battle-axe in her right shows her ready to requite the guilty and to scare the innocent. In the picture (fig. 36) a Fury is seen, armed with that oblong instrument, apparently of iron, furnished with many hooks, which we have ventured to call a scraper, with which she is about to discomfort a soul hanging in the air by its hands, and naked, ready CLASSIC HELL 125 to receive its punishment. Another Fury approaches the unfortunate one whose hands are tied, in order, it would seem, to burn him with her torch. In the original picture, one possibly of the mysterious Cabiri is also represented, with the scraper in his left, and in his right hand a hammer. The torches borne by Fig. 37. the Furies, as also by Mercury, may have been con trived to pay a double debt: to give them light as they led their victims to the place of punishment, and to assist in punishing them when they arrived there. In the matter of monsters the Classic Hell is match less. Among the many which infest hell's gate, Virgil 126 CLASSIC HELL has introduced the Chimsera armed with flames. The form of this beast, lion, goat and dragon, is generally known. It is of ancient lineage, mentioned by Homer and Hesiod, of whom the latter presents it as breath ing flames from broad nostrils and gaping mouth. The Chimsera has long ears, sharp twisted horns, bearded chin, and a smooth neck wounded both right Fig. 38. and left, probably by Bellerophon, and dripping gore. Swift is she, truculent of aspect, and with bristling hair. The sceptic Lucretius speaks of her with his usual Qua fieri potuit, but she was doubtless taken, with the Gryphes, Sphinxes and other sacred beasts, from the Egyptians, though she seems not to appear in the paintings of that people. Her name in Tuscan is Tinmcvil, which being interpreted is, we are told CLASSIC HELL 127 " the avenger " (fig. 39). Metaphorical ex planations, as anger, love, and so on, have been given of her, as of many other deities — it would seem need lessly. Another race of beasts abounding in Orcus are the Gryphes (fig. 40). We show one just bursting forth from the Acherontian cave. These animals are male and female. Some of the latter have a dozen breasts or more They are wont to tear the damned with their nails. They bear the wings of an eagle, and the tail of a lion, which is commonly curved. Their ears and hairs are erect. The three-headed Hydra calls for no special com ment. The less-known Volta, a most terrible monster, — Pliny, quel savio gentil, che tutto seppe, asserts that she nearly depopulated Volsinii, the birth place of Sejanus, till Por- senna called down light ning to prevent further damage, — is here pictured (fig. 41). She appears to be springing from a crypt, and has seized a soldier by the right arm; a piece of rope is round her neck, which in the original picture is held apparently by one of the Furies. Two more sol- Fig. 40. diers lie prostrate before her. 128 CLASSIC HELL The Capra is also here portrayed (fig. 42). It is a beast of a placid countenance, but zoologically not devoid of interest. Several other monsters seem to have been introduced by the Etruscans into their idea of hell. Here is a very horrible dragon, furnished with three wings, with beak and mouth and beard, with a remarkable belly, who is pressing a youth in its folds, with a view to his destruction (fig. 43). Two armed men are Fig. 41. shown fighting against this dragon, and endeavouring in vain to slay him. The picture given here is a faith ful copy of the original, and the spectator will be surprised at the apparent indifference of all parties concerned. The militant force is listless, the dragon without excitement, the youth pretern'aturally calm. Two lionesses crowned with garlands, and lolling out immense tongues, are also given in the original drawing, contingents probably of the torturers in hell. CLASSIC HELL 129 A third picture copied here shows a slave, to judge from his dress, being pushed by a fellow-slave into Orcus, or it may be Charon, by command of Pluto, for his conduct of Hercules into hell. Different anti quarians entertain different views on this matter; where, doctors disagree it is not easy to decide, and it would be indeed a parlous and presumptuous busi- Fig. 42. ness for any unskilled person to offer an opinion (%• 44). It is appointed unto all men once to die, and the Fates or Parcse busied themselves about this matter. The Kijpe? were another kind of Fates who became interested where death was violent or unnatural. The Krjpes were of. terrible aspect, as indeed were most of the inhabitants of hell — -bloody and unapproach able. Hesiod, in his Shield of Hercules, has described them. Teeth and curved talons like wild beasts are added unto them by Pausanias in his description of 130 CLASSIC HELL the chest of Cypselus, in which one of them is en gaged with the slaughter of Polynices. Other poetic figures are found in Tartarus. A certain Achlys, d^\uM xS[3> ^^^fy^WlkJu. TTn gj^ ^rrdy J^^^^C^P/ K*\ A < Jn 1 (SsSv #) rl ( /^ \) \V Wt vr^ L Tkjki X W/ll/iw. i^V^WV. l^lllrjM»TV1'/7^ ffiilvsl^o •XVVAw. ^sK^>y > ^K/y y. — ' A^4fr .) I^v WSnM^P" WSfl^l 1 ,^M SI K\V\lfliU\\ \ Js^^^w mm ¦^3^31 '^~(hi TV ^^\A Fig. 6S. csterna occisio of Tertullian, might induce even a saint to make such verses as were made by that poet who opined that the " majority of Englishmen think of God as an immeasurable clergyman in a white tie," and have generally taken the DevU for the Deity. But we fail to find in St. Frances aught like a CHRISTIAN HELL 269 looking forward to a time when the " man will make the Maker dark no more with human hatreds in the glare of deathless fire," nor are we fed with any antepast of But the God of Love and of Hell together— they cannot be thought. If there be such a God, — the reader is referred to the original. Rabelais, in curious contrast to the Kalendrier, deals with heU in very much the same flippant style as Raoul de Houdaing and the Salut d'Enfer. We recaU the exceptional experience of Epistemon. Coming down, he saw the devU, and spoke familiarly with Lucifer, and was very much delighted. He found that the devils were merry feUows and boon companions. This he affirmed seriously, "ei asseuroyt deuant tons que les dyables estoyent bons compaignons." In respect of the damned, indeed, he was sorry that Panurge had caUed him back so soon, for he took a real delight to see them. Everything was in such a sort turned upside down. Those in life the most eminent became after life the most abject. Mighty lords had but a scurvy living of it below. The Knights of the Round Table were now common boatmen, Nero a mere fiddler, Alexander the Great a breeches-maker. Changed, indeed, in a marvellous manner were they, but treated by no means so badly as people supposed in the world above. It is true that a hundred millions were suffering from a certain disease, " which," says Epistemon, " if they suffer not from it in this world, they must certainly catch in the next." But, on the other hand, Diogenes appears giving himself the airs of a prelate, and Epictetus 270 CHRISTIAN HELL invites Epistemon to drink. Francois Villon makes him merry with Xerxes, asking him how much the mess of mustard? for that potentate now sells this condiment. It is not remarkable that the usurers have a hard time of it here, as in Dante's Inferno, and possibly for a similar reason. They pass their hours [although, according to other authorities, there is no time in hell] in picking up old rusty nails and pins in the street kennels, and yet a hundredweight of iron in Epistemon's hell sold only for a penny loaf. Alexander the Great is here occupied in patching boots and breeches — he who, in Dante's Inferno, is seethed in a river of boiling blood. Pierre Ange Manzolli, who by a poor and imper fect anagram, latinised his name into Marcellus Palingenius, according to the fashion of his time, and under such title published his Zodiacum Vitas in a dozen cantos, described hell — which he locates in the earth's centre — with extreme singularity, having divided it into many kingdoms. The unlucky author was suspected of Lutheranism, and his book con demned by Rome. His opinion, delivered in his last canto, of the human race is discouraging. It has, says he, reached such a degree of madness as scarcely even to believe in a heU, and the greatest part thereof laugh if any tell them that the soul survives death and lives everlastingly. " All," says the author — herein anticipating Carlyle by some three centuries — " that the human race cares for is the accumulation of gold: Aurum omnes cupiunt et amant, placet omnibus aurum," but whatever the human race may think, hell is no trifle, no fable, no dream ; and, guided by Timalphes, CHRISTIAN HELL 271 he describes it in his ninth canto, entitled Sagittarius. ManzoUi was born in the beginning of the sixteenth century, and the lapse of four hundred years seems to have done but httle to modify the avarice or to magnify the faith of the human race. Manzolli's heU is dominated by four kings, in the east, west, north, and south. Where Aurora chafes away the heUish night, sits Typhurgus, a mighty king on a mighty throne. His hair is girt with a flaming garland, his mouth and breast are swollen, his eyes scintiUate, his brows are lifted up, his nostrils broad. He is one black, — thus nature has coloured demons — only his tusks are white. He has two horns, and a lion's tail ; his wings are those of a bat, his feet of a wild duck or creaking goose. ' His sole covering is shaggy hair. A large company surrounds him, armed with hooks and beUows. With the bellows they blow wind into the heads of those who exceed others in riches or learn ing, in strength or beauty ; with the hooks they drag them, thus wind-swoUen, into a smoking lake, a prey for toads and serpents and other monsters who dwell therein. In the west Aplestus reigns. He it is who makes men avaricious, and then, with supreme justice, punishes them for avarice. His demons are also armed with hooks and with dipsades. The dipsades are provoked by the demons, to make their bites more deadly. Those bitten lose their wits, and are vexed with a raging thirst which causes them to despise heavenly things. Then the hooks drag them into a lake of thorns filled with many monsters, but notably leeches, who suck back for everlasting ages the blood they sucked from others. In the north Philocreus is king. He it is who inspires men with luxuriousness and gluttony; his attendant demons catch their prey 272 CHRISTIAN HELL with hooks baited with sweet morsels, infected with Stygian poison, and then drag them into a lake of black mud, where they become pigs, asses, oxen, foxes, bears and wolves, and are tormented by wasps, hornets and beetles, which buzz innumerous about the banks. In the south Miastor, hissing, vibrates a three-forked tongue and vomits venom. Not other wise the adder, in love with the lamprey, casts out his poison on a rock before embracing his beloved, and then, when their pleasant play is overpast, returns to seek it, and if he finds it not, dashes out on that same rock his brains. Miastor is the great cause of envy ; his emissaries are armed with prods, which they thrust through the backs of all those who pine away in cankered spite at others' wealth ; after which Cerberus champs their souls into sad aconite, and their bodies are turned into scorpions. But high in mid-air Sarcotheus sits supreme, from whom radiates all the wickedness of the world. He is described by Palingenius as still more horrible than his viceroys. The tale which the ghost of Hamlet's father was forbidden to unfold. is, like many of the preceding stories, rather of purgatory than of hell ; but the partitioning wall between them, if any, is but of time, and has been declared to be made of tissue-paper, or of a spider's web. The prohibition to reveal the secrets of his prison-house, to make that " eternal blazon to ears of flesh and blood," seems not to have troubled others, in this branch of art, to a like extent. But the subtle suggestions of freezing the hearer's blood and harrowing up his soul have, perhaps, more effect than all the detailed imagery of horrors of ruder writers. Claudiq-^-tjlie reader probably i§ by now a CHRISTIAN HELL 273 trifle cloyed with Claudio — in his ineffectual appeal to his most affectionate sister Isabella, imagines the " delighted " spirit bathing in fiery floods and residing in thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice, but he adds a novel feature : Imprisoned in the viewless winds And blown with restless violence about This pendent world, an apparently lawless and uncertain variant of the popular reading. Lessius, in the Divine Perfections, explains the suit ability of sulphur in the infernal see. This consists in its suffocating stink, and its appliance in the upper world to the disinfection of houses visited by zymotic disease. He has also a remarkable notion that the damned will not in hell stand on their feet, nor run about hither and thither, but will be assem bled and gathered together into parcels and bundles, like coals and faggots. Cornelius a Lapide looks askance at this conclusion, and thinks rather that the bodies of the damned will be made into bales or pack ages, but afterwards set on gratings or shelves, as in large warehouses, or on wooden horses, so that the demons may loose them as occasion, or the vengeance of the Deity, or their own pleasure, demands. Thus will the wicked ones be tossed from one shelf to another, and afterwards again piled up together, and immersed in the Vulcanian pot. This Cornelius a Lapide — his name is as appropriate as that of Christopher Love, or Father Furniss, or Radulphus Ardens — has consecrated a very large number of quarto pages to the quantity, quality, and duration of the punishment of the damned. 274 . CHRISTIAN HELL How carefully the able ecclesiastic has studied the matter may be seen from the following translation of his lucubrations over the worm : "It has been inquired whether or not there are actual worms in Gehenna. Many opine these worms metaphorical— [we have already encountered the opinion of St. Augustine on this point] for instance, remorse and anguish of a barking conscience, continually objecting to the damned, Why did you get drunk ? why did you neigh after your neighbour's wife? why did. you not foresee these torments ? why for so vile a bait have you deserted God, heaven, happiness? why for so short and small a pleasure have you lit for yourself these eternal fires of hell ? How easily you might have escaped them if, etc. Now you are paying the penalty of your madness, now repentance is too late, now, etc. 0 unhappy me ! etc : it is aU over with me ; I am damned, and shall burn for ever ! etc. 0 me ! of all creatures the most hopeless and the most unhappy ! oh, etc. The saints Ambrose, Jerome, Thomas [quotations are given in the text], take the worm for the woe of conscience. But the saints Anselm, Basil, Chrysostom, Cyril, and Theophylact [this is stated solely on the authority of Cornelius], believe the worm to be real and literal, and prove it thus: because the fire in Gehenna is no metaphorical fire, therefore neither is the worm metaphorical. Secondly, St. Anselm says. ..." But of Cornelius a Lapide this taste will probably suffice. He who wishes more may consult the sixteen folio volumes which the good Belgian Jesuit theologue Corneille van den Steen has left behind him. Quevedo's hell, in the sixth of his visions, written in 1608, goes by the appellation of Las Zahurdas de CHRISTIAN HELL 275 Pluton, or Pluto's Pigsties. This is rather a satire on the follies and vices of his time than a deliberate attempt to portray the condition of the damned. Passing through a little door, like a mouse-trap, through which it was easy to get in but impossible to get out, Quevedo beholds the devils busied in punishing with various pains the tradesmen who ruin their neighbours by selling them what is unnecessary at a high price, the poets who torment one another, the false wits who are confined by themselves lest their frigidity should extinguish the fires of hell, those who boast of their high birth and ancient descent, men of so-caUed honour, astrologers, hypocrites, and many others. Shelley's Peter Bell the Third is written in much the same vein. Both Shelley and Quevedo offer a contrast — equally startling with that of Rabelais to the Kalendrier — to the majority of the hells hitherto considered. Both writers regard the subject with as little reverence as Falstaff, who in amorous despair thought the devil would not have him damned " lest the oil that it is in me should set hell on fire." Tormenting Tophet, or a Terrible Description of Hell, able to break the hardest heart and cause it to quake and tremble, was preached at Paul's Cross, June 14th, 1614. The sermon, which reached a fourth edition, consists of some fourscore pages, and would severely tax the patience of a modern audience. Henry Greenwood therein expounds a text of Isaiah (xxx. 33), under seven heads, supported by heaps of patristic erudition, declaring the certainty of hell for all ungodly wretches, yea even for the King ; the im possibility of getting out of it, once in, the great number of its victims, the everlastingness of its torments, and lastly . . . But here, to give -the 276 CHRISTIAN HELL reader a taste of his style, this " preacher of the word of God " may speak for himself. " The seventh and last part of the description of Tophet is set down in these words, The breath of the Lord like a river of brimstone doth kindle it. In which words there is not only a Prosopopeia in the breath, but a Topographia in the brimstone used, both which figures do notably express the furious indignation of the Author and the fierce severity of the act. The Author or Inflictor of all these fearful punishments is the Lord .... who doth execute all these fearful torments upon the damned both im mediate, immediately from Himself : and mediate mediately by His instruments as by the devils, fire, darkness, stinch (sic) and other creatures . . . The severity of punishment is set down by a double allegory, breath and brimstone. The perplexing property of brimstone is to burn, darkly to grieve the sight; sharply to afflict the more, loathsomely to perplex the smell. We read in the Scriptures ..." And here follows an array of texts, with which we leave this excellent and warm-hearted divine. In 1620 was published Decker's Dream. Opened for Decker was the volume of hell, wherein he read many wonderful things. It bears the somewhat unlucky motto Est Deus in nobis, agitante calescimus illo. Decker passes through hell's regions — Being mounted on a spirit's back, which ran With mandrake shrieks, and like a lubrican. The lubrican adds a mysterious charm to the couplet. There is no remarkable originality in the Dream. It is the old, old story of agonies — In boiling brimstone, lead, and oil, and blood. CHRISTIAN HELL 277 Another dream — the Godly dream of Lady Culross, — an old Scotch ballad of the beginning of the seven teenth century, shows this lady passing through hell, under due protection, like Dante, on her path to heaven. There is in it nothing novel or remarkable, save the good Scotchwoman's compassion for the " puir damnit saullis," which tormentit sair for sin, In flaming fyre were frying wonder fast. a divine pity which may be favourably contrasted with the lurid gratitude of the amiable Frances, or with the ardent zeal of the two-fisted monk in Heine's Reisebilder against those sinners die nicht mehr zoo recht kristlich an's alte Feuer der Holle glauben, und so gar wahnen sie habe zich in neuerer zeit etwas abgekuhlt, und werde nachstens ganz und gar erloschen. Surely the philosophy of the Divine pushed beyond her mark, and became procuress to the Lords of hell, when the pious monk was for rekindling its smoulder ing fires with his own breath. He doubtless held with Justin Martyr in his, Second Apology for the Christians, in which to those supposed philosophers who thought the saint's stories of hell kouitoi Kai 6/3r}Tpa, mere big words and bugs, he shortly answered, "If an eternal hell does not exist, then there is no God, or if there be a God, he is careless of men." Nor would Justin have availed himseK of that ingenious subtlety of Thomas Hobbes in his De Givitate Christiana. " Ignis paratus hominibus impiis perpetuus esse potest : inde inferri non potest quod Mi qui in ignem ilium conjicientur in eo ceternum ardebunt." To which the scoffer might reply, "Why, then, is the fire ever lasting ? " No, Justin is of one kidney with Ruse a, 278 CHRISTIAN HELL who at the end of his second book says, " I would not have any one fool enough to suppose that all these horrors of hell which I have gathered together from sacred letters and from pious men are so many vain maggots to frighten people into doing right." Rusca was no Eunomian. His belief was firm in the confession of our Christian, faith, commonly caUed the creed of St. Athanasius, that they that have done evil shall enter into everlasting fire. But Antonius Rusca, as one of the chief authorities on the subject of Hell, deserves especial notice. St. Gregory modestly declined to make any peremptory decision about its locality, but, says Rusca, it is most certain (certissimum) that hell is a cavern within the earth at its centre, and it is surrounded in concentric circles, of which this erudite theologian has given illustrations, by Purgatory, Limbo, the bosom of Abraham, and so on. The fire is corporeal, and so are the serpents, but far more powerful than their earthly antitypes. They are also both eternal. There is no water in hell, but only fire. What then is the cause of the cold ? — for the damned move not about, but in one place are alternately frozen and broiled. It seems difficult for fire, an element whoUy incapable of cold, to produce cold ; nay, it is sure that fire cannot possess the attributes of frost with out suffering extinction, for fire grows not cold, though water may become hot. The Creator of fire can, however, change its nature. Those immersed in the darkness of infidelity cannot understand the matter ; but hell fire will affect a man like a fever. Also, in spite of fire, the position of hell, at so great distance from the sun, and surrounded by so many envelopes, will naturally produce extreme chill. CHRISTIAN HELL 279 Rusca's work is, with naive simplicity, dedicated to the Saviour of Mankind. The ecclesiastical censor who diligently perused it says nothing about its scientific value, but finds in it, on the other hand, nought contrary to morality or sound religious behef. And indeed Rusca is very bitter against the Seleucians and Hermians, and other similar sons of Behal and backsliding heretics : and as for Luther, why, that impure man uttered words about heU — Esse peculiarem locum ubi nunc sunt aninue damnatoriun, id nihil est mm quidem sententia — foider than mud and much fitter to be trodden underfoot than to be answered by argument. Calvin and Beza and Bucer are httle better than Luther. Riiffinus and PhUo Judseus, who thought a wicked life was hell, are dismissed with contempt, and Rusca, like Justin Martyr, sums up the whole matter to his own satisfaction thus — Aut Gehenna est, aut Deus non est. Rusca's revilement of Luther is no new thing. Some — men who would speak disrespectfully of the equator — have asserted that modern clerks have been found foUowing in Rusca's footsteps, and resorting to aspersion, when gravelled for lack of argument. Such harmonies are in immortal souls whether larval or in imago, whether traduced or created, whether transmigrated or infused. Natura non amat saltus. Neither does art. The formation of heU has been gradual. Successive mystery-mongers, preachers, essayists, and visionaries have contributed thereto, every one adding some patient touch of unwearied industry. The infant fancy of Furseus in the seventh century gives a compara tively poor picture of heU's denizens as deformed, black, and scranny, with long necks and with swoUen 280 CHRISTIAN HELL heads. For an Irishman this is meagre. But his compatriots amply supplemented his deficiency in succeeding ages. Tundale, in the middle of the twelfth century, left from an sssthetic point of view but little to be desired. The tale of Dricthelm, told by the Venerable Bede in the middle of the eighth century, and of Charles the Fat, are not devoid of new interest. The latter' s pits of sulphur and oil and lead and pitch, in which bishops were boiled, is sufficiently audacious. The vision of Tundale is remarkable as representing the Prince of Hell in propria persona. Lucifer, the Star of the morning, is, according to Tundale, black. He is one hundred cubits high, and his breadth is ten cubits. His hands are more numerous than those of Briareus : they are in number over one thousand. His claws are of iron, and his beak and tail are equally terrible. But the extraordinary part of Tundale's story is yet to come. Lucifer is himself punished. He is bound upon a gridiron, and innumerable fiends are occupied solely in blowing a fierce fire underneath that gridiron. In his immortal agony he takes, from time to time, handfuls of damned souls, and squeezes them out like lemons ; and thus, Tundale tells, he suffers for his pride. There is, says the candid Voltaire a fine book for fools, composed by the reverend Father P. d'Outreman (or Oultreman), a Jesuit. We have, adds this scoffer, thank heaven, fifty-one editions of the Pedagogue Ghr&tien, " dans le quel il n'y a pas une page ou l'on trouve une ombre ale sens commun." Le Baron de Honsden (Lord Hunsdon), who, according to Voltaire, never existed, was, according to Outreman, councUlor of EUzabeth, Queen of England. He, being sick unto death, was CHRISTIAN HELL 281 visited by six of his coUeagues who had predeceased him. The first was Lecestre (Leicester), aU on fire ; the second Walsingan (Walsingham), Secretary, also on fire and in flames ; the third, Pouckerin Lord (Sir J. Puckering), sovereign judge of England, so frigid and frozen that, taking Honsden by the hand, the Baron thought to die with cold : the fourth, Hadde (Sir Christopher Hatton), Chancellor of the Kingdom ; the fifth, Thomas Heninghe (Thomas Fleming), coun cUlor : the sixth, Francis Knouls ^Sir Francis Knowles), councUlor — and these last three were also aU on fire ; and the whole half-dozen told him to warn GuiUaume Cecyle (Sir William CecU), one of their companions, who was yet Uving, that he should very soon form one of their company, and should therefore get ready. The said baron attested all this by oath, dying a few days afterwards in a most miserable plight ; and after him CecU died also suddenly. Such, then, is the end of heretics, and of- aU bad Christians who have lived as pagans, idolatrising their own blind judgment, their beUy, and the devU. They go, as pagans, into eternal fire. Voltaire adds to this edifying story the foUowing quip : The councUlor GuiUaume Cecyle probably put no faith in Honsden ; but if the baron had made his communication to half a dozen of the peasantry, his word would certes have been taken for gospel. Nicolas Caussin, a Jesuit father, and confessor of Louis XJJJ., had, in his own opinion, according to Bayle, a remarkable sympathy with the sun — experi encing, in body and soul, various effects according to the varied distance and luminosity of that great star. His book, La Coin- Sainte, was printed, says Bajde, " I don't know how often," and translated into Latin, 282 CHRISTIAN HELL Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and English. For the. salutary horror of the impious, eleven times at least were its counterfeits presented to the hardened sinner. It is chiefly remarkable for a curiously prac tical preface. " Would you not," asks the author, "consider an abode before you bought it ? Would you pass a single night in a haunted house for the greatest treasure ? And yet you buy hell with your soul, before you have visited it; and pass an eternity of nights in a hostelry, where there are more devils and ghosts than sands on the seashore." In the second part of the first volume of La Gour Sainte we are told to "ask the great TertuUian what is hell ? He will reply, Hell is a low, deep sink, and a drain for all the ordures of all the ages. Ask Hugo de S. Victor [not Victor Hugo] the same question, and he will answer, a bottomless abyss where there is no hope of good and no despair of ill. Ask St. John [the father places him in this order], and he will say, a lake of fire and brimstone, for ever kept alight by the strong and vigorous breath of the Omnipotent. And what do there the damned? They burn and smoke. What do they live on ? The gall of dragons. What air do they respire ? The gas of burning coals. . . . What do they sleep on ? Asps and basilisks. What hope have they? Despair, etc., etc.," and then 0 l'enfer ! 6 l'enfer ! arriere 6 ver mordant ; arriere 6 mart vivante, arriere, mort qui ne meurt jamais ; arriere vie qui meurt tousjours sans mourir ! " St. Bruno, founder of the Chartreuse, heard one say from his bier that he was damned. St. Boniface, the German Apostle, tells of his conversation with a man who in his days was raised from the dead. The miracle was notorious, and verified before the CHRISTIAN HELL 283 whole world. What this second Lazarus recounted to the great prelate is far too long again to recount here, but the usual graphic touches abound : uCestoit chose horrible de voir la tyrannic avec laquelle les demons les traictoient" — i.e., those graceless souls which sat like Ul-omened birds on the edges of weUs of fire, and were ultimately cast down therein. Jeremy Drexel's book on hell is filled with such scaring images of that locality as might be fortunate enough to meet with the commendation of Faber. They cannot be here reproduced. They are also tempered by pious reflections. So pious reflections are not to be found, no, not in TertuUian. His argument for eternal pain has been praised by Leibnitz. It is, in short, nee mirum damnatos semper torqueri ; continue blasphemant, et sic quasi peccant semper, ergo plectuntur. His definition of eternity is famous. " Think of a mUlion involved to the tenth power, a decillion of years, 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 and so on, with as many more ciphers annexed. All these cen turies are as a second of time in the sufferance of the damned." Drexel speaks of the eternal fire, to which our fire is but as a picture of fire, as unspeakably active. Again, he says : " Suppose a mighty moun tain of the finest grains of sand, stretching from east to west, from north to south, and from earth to the empyrean. Suppose a sparrow every hundred million centuries subtracts one grain, at last that mountain would disappear. If a hope of an end of hell's torments in this period were given to the damned they would be much consoled thereby. How joyful would they be ! " He says this seriously. His dreary history is relieved by no touch of satire. This sparrow and the grains of sand wiU remind the 284 CHRISTIAN HELL reader of the little bird and the millstone of St. Amandus. Other images of eternity hatched by Drexel show an equally lively fancy. " Suppose," he says, " one flea or ant drinks its fill, for one minute only, out of the oceans of the world. In time they would become dry. If after such a period the damned might cease to suffer, they would derive great satisfaction, for they would spy, albeit afar off, an end of their pain ; but alas ! . . . Suppose a sloth, its life being lengthened by divine intervention, visited every cathedral, abbey, monument, castle, and museum in the universe, at length its itinerary would terminate ; but alas ! . . ." Thus the damned (of Drexel) desirous of death, are never able to attain unto it. Directly opposed to this is the curious belief of other theologians, that the damned desire life in spite of agony : in other words prefer suffering to annihilation. Like madmen, say these doctors, inflamed by ambition, love, hate or envy, they are loth to part with the occasion of their discomfort, and hold eternal life a consolation and full equivalent for everlasting pain. Drexel next speaks of a pitiful cook. It is curious how often the kitchen is called upon to furnish illustrations in the description of hell. Possibly some natural or artistic affinity between them may account for Dante's Non altrimenti i cuochi ai lor vassalli Fanno attuffare in mezzo la caldaia La came con gli uncin, perche non galli, if. not for the use of the colander, which the reader wiU remember in Tundale, or Tnugdal, or Tondal, or Tungulus, or Tantolo, or Theodolo— for in so many CHRISTIAN HELL 285 ways, and probably more, has the name of this ill-starred Irish knight been written. But the cook of Jeremy Drexel wept whenever he approached the fire, out of pure compassion for the castaways. Drexel next speaks of a clerk who was damned from a doubt as to the soul's immortality, and returned to admonish one of his brethren. Then that evil ghost wiped his forehead, and a drop of his sweat fell upon his brother, which burnt him, leaving a hole the size of a filbert, whereupon that brother rebroussa chemin, et prit la route du cid, se faisant religieux. Pere Damien, on the authority of Pope Victor, tells a story of a hermit at Naples, who one night, looking through his window, saw many black shapes, ap parently negroes, riding with large trusses of hay before them. Entering into conversation with them, he learns that these trusses are not for their horses, but for fuel for hell-fire, in order to burn Pandulph Prince of Capua, and John, general of the Neapolitan army. The hermit warns John, who discovers that Pandulph is already dead, and John himself dies a fortnight after. Then Vesuvius was observed to belch forth an inordinate quantity of fire, proving demonstratively the combustion of the pair. It is notorious that the volcanic energy is increased every time a bad rich man dies. An Indian woman who led a loose life near Cuzco, in the West Indies, saw her doctor in hell, and an empty seat reserved for a certain great Spanish ady. Being ordered by a devil to confess her sins to a priest, she did so, and some time after died in the odour of sanctity. This seems to have been very bad policy on the part of the devil. 286 CHRISTIAN HELL In Calderon's Purgatory of St. Patrick, in a part which, as he himself says — mas propriamente Llaman, infierno, there is a stage direction : " Here a mouth of a cavern is discovered, the most horrible that can be devised, into which the impious monarch Egerio sub sequently sinks, with much noise of wailings and fiery flames coming up from below." In his de scription of hell, we meet with a river adorned with all the poetic imagery of the Castilian priest. It is a river with flowers of fire growing on both its banks ; it rolls a torrent of sulphur, and in it are marine monsters such as snakes and hydras. It is exceeding broad, and is crossed by a bridge extremely narrow- not broader, indeed, than a line apparently impass able, era una linea no mas, Y ella tan delgada y debil, Que & mi no me pareci6, Que, sin quebrarla, pudiese Pasarla. Jeremy Taylor, in his Contemplations on the State of Man, which appears to be little more than a trans lation, with the references to the Saints omitted,. of the Crisol de desengano of the Jesuit Nieremberg, treats of the infelicities of the damned and eternal evils. Some fifty quarto pages are occupied with the sufferings of those sealed of the tribe of Hell. Alex ander, son of Hyrcanus, crucified, according to Hegesippus, eight hundred men at once, and slaughtered their wives and children before their eyes, that they might not die one, but many deaths. CHRISTIAN HELL 287 Such is the agony of the eyes of hell. SyUa's homicide of six thousand men made a terrible noise. in Rome. Such is the agony of the ears in heU. That of the noses is set forth by the ingenuity of King Mezentius. St. Martin once met a demon, says Nieremberg— but not Jeremy Taylor — and the odour of him was such as to cause the saint to reflect on what it might be when its index was indefinitely multiplied. The reader wiU recall Buonaventura's one dead body of the damned. Nieremberg speaks of Phalaris and his brazen buU as a mere toy to in fernal pain ; tells the pretty story of the priest and the frying-pan ; of Eberbach, the servant of Theodosius, Bishop of Maestrick, who sold himself to the devil ; and of that accursed caitiff in Lombardy, who fue castigado con este castigo de no poder salir de un estanque de fuego, pues en esta vida salia tan astuta- mente de qualquiera adversidad. Many are called, says that householder who went to hire labourers into his vineyard, but few are chosen ; and Jeremy Taylor in his sermon on Christ's Advent to Judgment opines that the greatest part of men and women shall dwell in the portion of devils to eternal ages. His description of the pains of hell affords a strange contrast to the gross and material pictures we have lately looked at. " The pains of the accursed souls in hell are great pains, pain above patience, sorrows without ease, amazement without consideration, despair without intervals of a little hope, indignation without the possession of any good ; there dwells envy and confusion, disorder and sad remembrances, perpetual woes and continual shriekings, uneasiness and all the evils of the soul." With regard to the numbers of the damned, 288 CHRISTIAN HELL Jeremy Taylor and Christopher Love are at one. Christopher Love, executed for high treason in 1651, the Puritan and zealous Presbyterian, who, according to Wood, would " hold out prating for more than an hour," in his Hell's Terror, a treatise of the torments of the damned, shows at full length how in this terrible state of things the elect may " suck forth consolation." " Nee creator nee creatura ulla erga damnatos afficientur sympathia. It is the speech of Austine, when thou art scorching in thy flames, when thou art howling in thy torments ; then God shall laugh" [oh excellently named Christopher Love !] "and His saints shall sing and rejoice, that His power and wrath are thus made known in thee." And farther on Love resolves affirmatively that the " most of men and women that God hath made, it shall be their portion and misery to be tormented in hell for evermore." Lest any should take this for a rash and ill-digested conceit of Love, Love proceeds to prove it after the following fashion :— " It is certain that the greatest multitude of men shall be damned ; for nineteen parts of the world — which geographers have divided into thirty-one— are possest, at this day, by Turks and Jews, whose doom it is to be tormented in hell for ever, for it is impossible they can be saved with out regard of Christ ; and seven parts of the world are possest merely by heathen, who are in a like parlous condition with Turks and Jews. Of the remaining five parts of the world many of them are papists ; and„as Perkins saith " [we apologise for utter ignorance of the amiable and liberal-minded Perkins] " ' a papist living and dying so, in a place where the gospel is preacht in an ordinary way, cannot be CHRISTIAN HELL 289 saved.' Besides, the wicked are compared in Holy Scripture to dirt, stones, briars, fishes, bees, and grass hoppers, all of which are notoriously plentiful, and indeed we ' know a grasshopper. There is no flie upon the earth so numerous as they.' " But alas ! if Christopher Love, following the good Perkins, is not content with putting Catholics to open penance, as persons convicted of notorious sin or of a naughty life, so that by punishing them in this world their souls might be saved in the next, and that others, admonished by this gruesome example, might be the more afraid to offend, but damns these souls to all eternity ; what, in the other world, it may weU, and with some general anxiety, be inquired, is to become of the souls of the Puritans, Philadelphians, Quakers, Independents, Unitarians, Moravians, MiUennarians, Baptists, Methodists, Con- gregationalists, Bible Christians, and the hundred-and- one other sects of Christianity ? Nay, what is "to become of the Church of England itself ? Can it be that the Presbyterians — Love's particular persuasion will not be forgotten— and possibly only a few of those, wiU ultimately escape ? Such, says the genial Dr. Johnson, is the malignity of Milton, that hell grows darker at his frown. Let us see if this be so. We may well imagine that human fancy cannot add to the horrors we have already encountered. MUton's hell is situated at the bottom of Chaos. Its description is, in short, an antarctic region of fire and ice, of dire hail and ever burning sulphur. Its distance from heaven is three semi-diameters of our mundane system. The stature of Satan reaches the sky. Four infernal rivers are introduced from the pagan theology. In this u 290 CHRISTIAN HELL geographical view Lethe is also included. On the other side of the flood of oblivion is a frozen con tinent. Hither all the damned are haled by harpy- footed Furies from beds of fire to pine in ice. The gates of hell are guarded by Death and Sin, in forms too well known to need description. By these ideal architects a long bridge is built from hell to the " utmost orbs of this frail world," which, being inter preted by Masson, is, the uttermost circle of the starry sphere. Milton's torments are more poetic, but less painful, we may suppose, than those of the Christian fathers. Milton's Hell is, in short, in Milton's language, " A dungeon horrible on all sides round," which As one great furnace flamed, yet from these flames No light, but rather darkness visible Served only to discover sights of woe. Regions of sorrows, doleful shades where peace And rest can never dwell, hope never comes That comes to all, but torture without end Still urges, and a fiery deluge fed With ever-burning sulphur unconsumed. Milton's hell is poor in particulars. It is like the prisonhouse of the ghost in Hamlet. Its peculiarity lies in its dealing with the exterior rather than the interior of that mansion. We read of the thrice threefold gates of iron and brass and adamantine rock, impenetrable and impaled, yet unconsumed, with circling fire, and of the grisly and formidable shapes that sat before them ; but for the tortures of the damned in this infernal vale, beyond a mere general description, are substituted the agonies of Sin herself, surrounded in a dark and dismal house of pain by yelling monsters, which howl from hour to hour and gnaw her entrails. CHRISTIAN HELL 291 Justus Georg Schottel, a learned jurist and a contemporary of John Milton, gave to the subject of hell a systematic and erudite attention which recalls the pages of Drexel, and is equally curious with those of Quevedo. Among the inspectors of hell who have made it so hot in their ghostly zeal for their brother men, Schottel, with his Eisernes Rad von der ewigen Hbllenquaal, holds high and honourable rank. Dante is terrible, but he has a poetic licence, which cannot be extended to the prosaic positivism of the German jurist. "Dear reader," quoth the affectionate Schottel, " just look at this wheel " [we reproduce the wheel for the reader's welfare] (fig. 69). " Read with care what is written round it concerning the poena damni and the poena sensus and the vermis conscientite ; of the anguish, the agony, the remorse and despair : of the flames of pitch lasting a thousand years, and the burning sulphur lasting twenty thousand, and the glowing iron lasting a hundred thousand, and the bodkin fires lasting a million ; of the marvellous thirst and hunger, of the terrible stench and dark ness, of the incessant weeping and wailing, and the interminable gnashing of teeth. All these penalties [we have not followed their precise order] are to be suffered in one revolution of this cruel wheel. But the iron circle must and wiU go round many hundred thousand and million miUion times, and never grow rusty, and never be at rest. After being bedded in fire for a hundred years on the right side the wicked will," says Schottel, possibly with some touch of pity, " lie for a thousand on their left, and then twenty thousand on their back, and again one hundred thousand on their belly. And after this da capo. Man dies in hell for ever, in order for ever to live in agony." 292 CHRISTIAN HELL Thus the good Schottel for some three hundred printed pages. Well may the Augustine barefoot, Abraham a St. Clara, write in his Messing-Brenner : " In der Hbll ist ein steter Syllogismus in Ferio." Of the learned scholar and divine, John Matthew Fig. 69. Meyfart, first professor of theology at Erfurt, the fifth edition of Das hollische Sodoma was published in 1671. The book had clearly thus by that time attained great popularity. It contains some nine hundred pages, octavo. Says Meyfart of hell-fire: CHRISTIAN HELL 293 " Of troublesome things it is the most troublesome, of horrible things it is the most horrible, of terrible things the most terrible," and so on. Once on a time a noble knight lived on the Rhine, not far from Bonn. On a day he fell sick, and on his recovery was taken in a litter into the country. The devil met him, with the head of a donkey and horns of a goat: "which," says Meyfart, "must have been a sad sight indeed."' The knight plucked up heart, remembering his former prowess, and asked the accursed ghost concerning the degree of heat in hell. The devil replied: "If yonder mountain, with the castle built on it, were both of iron, and were cast into it, they would both melt in a trice." This story bears a considerable resemblance to that of the Cistercian, Csesarius. In Bunyan's Last Remains, some seventy pages are allotted to the glories of heaven, but less than half that number to the terrors of hell. Bunyan says he had the unhappiness to be acquainted with one of the " sort of brutes (for they are scarce worth the name of men) " who believed that there was neither God nor devil, heaven nor hell, but that these were mere bugbears to affrighten children. However, Bunyan was so disturbed by the arguments of the brute, that he resolved to destroy himself, and went out into an adjacent wood to act this bloody tragedy. Then he heard a secret whisper : " 0 Epenetus ! plunge not thyself into everlasting misery ! " The voice turns out to be that of his guardian angel, who conducts him within hell's sooty territories, placed in the caverns of the infernal deep, where, in a sulphurous lake of liquid fire, bound with an adamantine chain, sat Lucifer, "on 294 CHRISTIAN HELL a burning throne, his horrid eyes sparkling with hellish fury, as full of rage as his strong pains could make him." In Tophet's description occur the usual sulphur, serpents, gnashing teeth, knotted whips of burning steel, fiends, brimstone, fire, gnawing worms, chains, lamentations, darkness and blasphemies. Several damned souls hold converse with the pious Anabaptist. One, a lady who kept no house because she would not be taxed, nor treasure in her hands for fear she should be robbed, nor let it out without good bonds and mortgages for fear of being cheated, has molten gold poured down her gullet. Another, a gentleman, lying on a bed of burning steel, and almost choked with brimstone, while explaining that all the diseases of the body, such as gout, fever, plague, suffered at once, are but as the biting of a flea to the pungent pains of hell, has yet leisure and convenience to deliver a discourse of several pages, in some dozen heads, on the difference of poena sensus and poena damni. Last, Bunyan meets his quondam friend the brute, who turns out to be no less a person than Hobbes, the author of the Levia than. The philosopher of Malmesbury explains how he at first believed in a God, but after "falling to vicious courses," wished, and so believed, there was none. He it is who explains the non-luminous flame which torments him as exceeding ten thousand times in fierceness all culinary fire. Again, a reference to the kitchen. Moreover, this fire seizes souls, which a corporeal flame cannot do, and, standing in no need of fuel, is unquenchable — and thus is death, in the words of Paul, robbed of its sting by John Bunyan. What was it that stirred up the wrath of Bunyan against the author of Leviathan and Behemoth ? What CHRISTIAN HELL 295 made that eminent Christian so bitter against the unhappy " brute," whose reason bound him to regard life as a short winter day, a poor little passing glimmer in the midst of the starless dark of a mid night, upon which no morrow might ever dawn? Could it be perchance the mathematician's despiteful reduction of religion to a mere department of state ? Was it that the pious Epenetus feared the weakening of his everlasting wall of separation between the Pharisee and the Publican, between Mary and Messa- lina, between Judas and the disciple that Jesus loved ? Or was it that knowing Ebal and Gerizim but twin peaks of the same mountain, he suspected the logic which annihilated HeU might destroy Heaven also ? There is more than one edition in the present century of the Sighs from Hell ; or, Groans of a Damned Soul, an unfamUiar sample of the familiar eloquence of the inspired tinker ; a work which can boast of some score of editions before the second quarter of the last century. Pope, speaking of hunting, says he dared not attack a diversion which had such authority and custom to support it. The bolder Bunyan damns in his Sighs alike hunters, dancers, those who paint their faces, those that follow plays and sports, singing drunkards on the ale-bench, and such as for fear of rain or wind, are loath to leave their chimney-corner and go to church. Bonner fares badly in this book, in company with " several filthy, blind priests " whose sermons were " ratsbane for souls." Louis BaU, a contemporary of Bunyan, and a French theologian, in a work now exceedingly scarce, known as Theologia Affectiva, considers " l'enfer bon et aimable comme une partie tres-considerable du palais 296 CHRISTIAN HELL de Dieu." " This hell," says Bail, whose notion of Deity seems akin to that of S. Chrysostom, "is the avenger of all slights and insults and injuries offered to God; and so becomes a benefactor to him, and renders him a very great service. And thus every one who sincerely loves God, ought, for this reason, also sincerely to love hell." Francisci, in his Weg der Ewiglceit, has given some two score pictures, exceedingly well drawn, and not characterised by the vulgarity of conception mark ing the majority of such productions, which rather distress the inteUect than assist the imagination. In one is represented a whirlpool, which swallows up incontinently all who walk uncircumspectly, including Satan himseK. In another a vulture plays havoc in the carcass of a corpse — the similitude of hell and eternal death, which riot in the souls and bodies of the damned. A king is portrayed casting from him a golden goblet on which a spider crawls. What, then, would he do with a cup of common clay? So the Judge who has damned angels will hardly acquit men. A thief is shown hanged in chains — a scarecrow for the doers of evil. Should not those already gone to hell be a warning for others? The lake Singoc, in Japan, a lake of evil smell bursting from bubbles of boiling water, and a horse driven wild by the stings of wasps and hornets, are among other excellent illustrations of the circumstances of hell. Francisci has also a picture representing the torments not only of the tormented, but also of the tormentors ; forming a notable exception to the generality of the illustra tions of this subject, which either leave the devils indifferent or invest them — as has been seen — with a CHRISTIAN HELL 297 smUe of placid satisfaction or grin— and there are divines to support them — of extreme delight. The strangest drawing, however, in the Way of Eternity, is that of a louse seen through a magnifying glass ; "for thus," says Francisci, "shall any peccadillo, even the smallest of human sins, be investigated." The Archbishop of Canterbury, John Tillotson, in his Sermon preached before the Queen at Whitehall, on March 7th, 1690, observes that Origen, " I know not," says the prelate, "for what good reason," is said to have been of opinion that the punishment in hell of men and devils will last but for a thousand years, and after that time they shaU all be finally saved. " But," says the Archbishop, " I can very hardly persuade myseK that so wise and learned a man as Origen was, should be positive in an opinion for which there can be no certain ground in reason, especiaUy for the punctual and precise term of a thousand years ; and for which there is no ground at all that I know of from divine revelation." Upon the whole matter, says Tillotson, we have " all the reason in the world to believe in the eternity of hell- torments," which he shows, to his own satisfaction apparently, not to be inconsistent with the justice or goodness of God. Tillotson's arguments have- been answered in extenso by Bayle. The conception of Fenelon, disgraced for his support of Madame Guyon, in his TiUmaque, that the punish ment of hypocrites faisant sembler d'aimer la religion . . . pour se jouer des hommes credules, is more severe than that of those who murder their own mothers, is a happy thought ; nor less so is his insistance on the penalty to be paid by those whom public opinion holds not for sinners, hommes que le vulgaire ne croit CHRISTIAN HELL guere coupables — the ungrateful man, the flatterer, and the liar. The notion seems original in the Arch bishop, that no demon ever becomes tired of tor menting, or quarrels about the kind of torment to be used with any other demon ; for if the devils grew weary of their business, or were not unanimous in its execution, what would become of hell ? Then the patients would repose, and the hydras, scorpions, and other marvellous beasts, constituting the fauna of the infernal world, would be thrown for the time out of work. But Belphegor, Apollyon, Moloch, Belial, Mammon, Beelzebub, however rebellious in heaven, must show themselves extremely docile and unani mous in hell, or what betides the immortality of pain ? A Welsh view of hell was given in the beginning of the last century by Elis Wynne, a Welsh parson, in a prose allegory called Bardd Cwsc, or The Sleeping Bard. The reverend gentleman is taken by an angel to hell in his sleep. There is nothing remarkable about this work, except the donation to the devil of a family of three daughters— Pleasure, Lucre, and Pride— and the introduction — owing assuredly to the priest's objection to smoking — of a new demon, the demon of tobacco. In 1715 appeared Hell opened to Christians, to caution them from entering it, a translation from the Italian of the Jesuit Pinamonti. This book contains considerations of the infernal pains distributed like Francatelli's bills of fare for every day in the week. The first consideration for Sunday treats of the prison of hell, its straitness, its darkness, its stench, and concludes with a prayer to avoid it. The book is illustrated with seven woodcuts of fantastic horror. CHRISTIAN HELL 299 The woodcut for Sunday shows a sinner in a cage fettered and in flames. He is pierced through with spears. Two monsters assail him, one above with the head of a panther, the body of a serpent, and the wings of a griffin, and one below of a similar compo site form. Marks of their bites are plainly beheld about him. This book, with its emblematic plates, passed through several editions. The last was printed in 1844. Successive artists have occasionally added to the original alarm. " Do not," says Pinamonti in his preface, " suppose that I have exaggerated aught. I have indeed failed on the other side. The work of Pinamonti is fairly familiar, from Lecky's reference to it. It cannot, however, compete in any way with a much less known volume, published some haK a century earlier, by Father Gio. Battista Manni, also an Italian Jesuit. The Eternal Prison of Hell for the Hard-hearted Sinner reached, in 1692, its eleventh edition. It was translated, with additions, into German, in 1683. It has four times the number of pictures in Pinamonti, and every picture is quadruply painful. Historical examples accompany every iUustration. It treats, in order, of the pains of the five senses, of which the illustrations are here given (fig. 70). The torment of sight is one of the greatest, for the devils assume various shapes to frighten. This iU habit of demons has been insisted on in the Buddhist hell. St. Catherine of Siena wished, rather than see a devil twice, to walk barefoot through streets of burning coals till the day of judgment. The story follows of a good man who saw two devils, "and," says he, "that you may know what a thing of horror it is to see a devil, I would rather be immersed for ever in a lake of molten brass and sulphur than 300 CHRISTIAN HELL see a third. But in hell there are devils innumerable," etc. Revelation assures us that after the opening of the seventh seal there was silence in heaven about Fig. 70. the space of half an hour — from which the absence therein of women has been too hastily inferred — but how great is the torment of noise (fig. 71) ! What a terrible thing to hear continually blasphemies and CHRISTIAN HELL 301 swears ! The story follows of a Cistercian monk who on a day heard a grunting of infernal pigs, so horrible that " the whole world seemed turned upside down." Fig. 71. The torment of smeU is exemplified by the most learned and pious Baronius, who, to obtain a victory over himseK, chewed, on one occasion, a most fetid bug (fig. 72). The story follows of two clerks, of whom one 302 CHRISTIAN HELL was damned as a laic, and, having died, visited his friend a monk, and shook one drop of perspiration from his forehead. This procedure is, we have seen, Fig. 72. deficient in originality. But its consequences, accord ing to the Jesuit, are, on the present occasion, far more serious. For the odour was so foul that it not only half killed the monk, but brought all the other CHRISTIAN HELL 303 monks in a body to his cell to learn the origin of the stench. Ultimately the whole monastery was abandoned as uninhabitable. Now, if one drop of Fig. 73. sweat, etc. ; and then follows the usual rule-of-three conclusion. The torment of taste should be interesting to gluttons and drunkards (fig. 73). A most bitter juice 304 CHRISTIAN HELL distils incessantly through their jaws, and demons feed them with snakes and toads, and give them to drink only of molten lead. The story follows of a certain Cesario, who died, leaving behind a son, at whose door late one night a loud knocking resounded. The servants refused to open. Whereupon a voice was heard : " Tell my son he will find in the morning on what food I satiate myself in hell ! " And when the son arose in the early dawn, he found a bundle of toads and serpents attached to the door-knocker. The torment of touch. Doctor Silone's disciple comes to visit him from the dead (fig. 74). " Behold me," he says, with inconsiderate abruptness : " I am damned ! Take warning ! " It is curious that these stories have as little to do with the illustrations as the letterpress of the well-known chapbooks and broadsheets with the gruesome woodcuts which usually adorned them. Other pictures of like atrocity follow — :but a pro longed exhibition of pyrotechny tires the eyes — of fire, immobility, darkness, wrath, despair, eternity, and poisonous reptiles. Manni's book has a chapter on the multiplicity of torments, and of the want of room among the damned. Tyrants, misers, drunkards, blasphemers, and unchaste women have all their specially devised punishments. The conclusion of the whole matter is that absence or debility of faith is the cause of hell. " Dalle quali cose tutte chiaramente si comprende," thus the author, " che la mancanza o la freddezza della fede sia la vera cagione di tutti i peccati che sono nel mondo." What a contrast these two volumes of the Italian Jesuit present to the innocent loving - kindness of that tender - hearted village priest who observing, not without concern, his congregation affected to tears by a picture of the CHRISTIAN HELL 305 infernal punishments he had predicted from tbe pulpit as their possible fate, concluded his homily to his frightened flock by this comfortable exhortation : Fig. 74. "Do not, my beloved brethren, I beseech you, be thus overburdened with distress. I have told you of these punishments as they have been told to me, but, after all, I really cannot vouch for their x 306 CHRISTIAN HELL truth." This compassionate clerk may recall to the reader the charitable hope of La Fontaine in the matter of eternal torture : " Je meflatte qu'ils s'y accou- tument, et qu'ct la fin Us sont Id comme le poisson dans I'eau." And the hope of La Fontaine may recall the astuteness of the little Rabbi with the burnt legs. The reflecting spectator of the pictures in this book will doubtless be disturbed by some little sur prise to find the demons — excepting those of Tundale and Bunyan and a few more — for whose sake hell was primarily created, in no way disheartened by the varied tortures in the midst of which they exist, but rather self-satisfied, or indeed urged, to judge from their facial expressions, to supreme delight. Fenelon has, we have seen, noticed the docility and unanimity of the fiends, and the consciousness of a duty well done may account for their looks of joy. Catholic writers have explained that the tormenting demons experience no inconvenience from summer's heat or winter's rages, from the fire or from the frost; and that this is by a dispensation of Provi dence, to the end that these infernal executioners may in nowise be discouraged in their work of tempting men and punishing their souls. To this effect Franpois Eximenes, Cardinal, in his Livre des Anges, about the end of the fourteenth century, writes : " Le premier point est que les deables mai/nent les ames des dampnez en enfer, et les tourmentent la sans ce que en enfer les diz deables seuffrent paines sensibles, cest challeur et froideur excessive, car tant quilz sont viateurs nostre seigneur ne veult qu'ilz seuffrent telles paynes pour tant que la leur exercite a nous tempter ne soit empeschiS ne occupee." CHRISTIAN HELL 307 Another explanation of the transport, or at least tranquiUity, of the Alastors of hell, is given by another ecclesiastic, to wit, that eminently pious and learned Scottish theologian, the Rev. T. Boston, an elder, minister of Ettrick in the beginning of the eighteenth century. His discourse on the Fourfold State of Human Nature, attempts with remarkable modesty, sufficiently to express a " misery not to be expressed sufficiently by the tongues of men and angels." The reverend Boston has in many pages done his best, inquiring "soberly" and at great length into the poena sensus and the poena damni. " God," he tells us, " always acts in a peculiar way," and the fire for those on the left hand — for the goats and bundles of damned — is " a pecuhar fire of his own manufacture." Though this fire was prepared for the devil and his angels, the intense pleasure the infernal crew take in tormenting their human fellow-citizens seems to compensate for in a great degree, or wholly to extin guish, their own suffering. Witness the faces of the devils in nearly all our illustrations, which, were it not for the uncouth blackness of their hideous deformity, might seem, in their general appearance of satisfac tion, those of the blessed company in heaven, who will delight and sing Hallelujah while the smoke riseth up for ever and ever, in their exquisite knowledge of their own happiness. A fortunate matter for the Christian that he is not bound to examine what he is commanded to believe — a sick man who ventures to chew a pUl of bitter aloes, rarely succeeds in swaUowing it. The very meritorious bishop of Ypres, Herincx, the great opponent of the Jansenists, seriously con sidered the question, "whether devils had any delight," 308 CHRISTIAN HELL and declared that the matter was undetermined. But an eminent theologian has lately advanced the theory that the state in hell is, as he explains elsewhere— a state of evolution, a beneficent pro cess by which happiness is ultimately attainable. An original idea of hell was the result of the speculative inquiries of Jean Hardouin. This " most learned fool," as he has been somewhat impolitely called by Peignot, among the Jesuits, was a con temporary of Pinamonti. He maintained that the rotation of the earth was due to the efforts of the damned to escape from their central fire. Climbing up the walls of hell, they caused the earth to revolve as a squirrel its cage, or a dog the spit. Possibly this erudite Jesuit was mistaken, as is the lot, sometimes, of the saints themselves, to wit, St. Genevieve. They were visiting her shrine to obtain fair weather. Scarcely had the pious pilgrimage begun, when it also began to rain in bucketfuls, upon which 1'evSque de Castres — we owe the story to Chamf ort — observed adroitly and pleasantly : " La sainte se trompe; elle croit qu'on lui demande de la pluie." The reader has met with early dramatic versions of hell in ViUani and the Histoire de la Ville de Paris. In a letter of Joseph Spence to his mother in 1739, Spence speaks of a play he saw at Turin: The Damned Soul, with Proper Decorcdions. The play was in seven scenes; the admission, threepence. The rising of the curtain discovers a lady, who, in a gown of flame-coloured satin, with many lamenta tions confesses her naughtiness. The poor soul then addresses herself to Christ, " who," says Speiice, " rattled her extremely," with a prayer for purgatory, CHRISTIAN HELL 309 and afterwards to the Virgin Mary. She then en treats successively, but not successfully, three little angels, St. John the Baptist, and the army of saints. In the fifth scene she is left to two devils — one fierce, but the other " of the droll, kind, and good-natured enough." The sixth scene shows the Virgin melted to tears by the importunity of her cries, and her sentence is commuted to purgatory for sixteen hundred thousand years. In the last scene of all the two devils fight with her guardian angel, who tells them summarily to go about their business, and hands the lady in flame-coloured satin off the stage with a polite assurance that all — after the little period mentioned — should be weU. Matthew Horbery's Inquiry into the Scripture Doc trine concerning the Duration of Future Punishment — a work bristling with sacred texts, and originally written against Whiston in 1744 — was republished not more than a dozen years ago. St. Alphonsus Liguori, that great and illustrious man, the founder of a most admirable religious order (the Redemptorists), the apostle of the ignorant and the poor, speaks of hell as a gloom where light only reveals horror, where the carcasses of the damned lie in heaps, unmoved and unmovable, in torrents of fire, which interpenetrate the brains within the head, the marrow within the bones, and the bowels within the body. The sight of sinners will be appalled by the ugliest of demons dancing upon their prey, their smell by a stench compared to which all the evU odours of earth are jasmine or attar-gul. St. Liguori goes on to explain the sufferings of the other senses, and concludes that the souls of the lost must toss to and fro for ever in a fiery deluge, 310 CHRISTIAN HELL like chips upon an ocean, but chips consubstantiated with fire. Thomas Burnet — remarkable for his original theory of the earth being a gigantic egg, of which the sheU was crushed at the deluge, leaving its fragments for mountains — in his De Statu Mortuorum argues, with considerable support from the ancient fathers, against the endlessness of hell torture ; " but," says he in Latin— which the reader may have forgotten — "whatever you determine within yourself about the eternity of punishment, you certainly ought to preach the common doctrine of hell-fire to the people, especially to those of the lower rank." He adds : " Who ever shall translate this sentiment into the mother tongue, I shall think it was done with an evil design and a bad purpose." This notwithstanding, Dr. Watts, in his Nature and Duration of the Punishments in Hell, extending over some sixscore pages of his book of The World to Come, has enriched the mother tongue with this evidence of the truth and honour of Burnet. An extraordinary picture, here reproduced (fig. 75), apparently approved of by Dr. Watts — it may be said to bear his imprimatur — appeared in the title page of his World to Come. It presents an idea of hell, conceived for the correction of others or for his own consolation, by the celebrated author of "Behold the glories of the Lamb," and of other pieces of orthodox divinity, of which a long and wide circulation attests the popularity. It is, by the way, somewhat remarkable that this celebrated dissenter, alike eminent for his poetry and venerable for his piety, while substituting CHRISTIAN HELL 311 "Britain" for "Judah" in his version of some psalms attributed to David, has thought fit to omit from that version aU the imprecatory passages in regard to the well-being of his foes, which adorn and Illustrate, with so generous if not prodigal profusion, the sublime and sacred compositions of the sweet singer of Israel. Dr. Watts was inclined to interpret the Fig. 75 penal brimstone metaphoricaUy. That " nothing is more painful than suffering the violence of fire enraged with brimstone," — is a lesson in pathology for which we are indebted to Alexander Cruden, whose waits, according to his biographer, were rendered so tedious, by his constant habit of effacing with a piece of wet sponge such mural observa tions as he thought injurious to general morality, 312 CHRISTIAN HELL or inconsistent with his own religious or political creed. It was reserved for a certain Joachim Boldicke, who wrote in the middle of the eighteenth century a book entitled Abermaliger Versuch einer Theodicee von dern Ursprung des Bosen, to declare openly, and to maintain that the eternal torments of the damned spring from pure benevolence in the Deity ; because the happiness of the elect wiU be so greatly heightened and intensified by the contem plation of their sufferings. Rusca, whom the reader has met already, has something to say on this subject in his six hundred pages on hell, with his syllabus of some three hundred authors from Albertus Magnus and Augustin to TertuUian and Thomas Aquinas. The erudite Rusca opines, with Chrysostom, that the All-mercKul is not less to be praised for making hell than for making heaven. For a physician not only nourishes but starves his patients, not only brings them into the market but lays them up in bed, not only lacerates but anoints, not only cauterises but cures. The views of Emmanuel Swedberg (afterwards Swedenborg) on the subject of hell are that hell is of the human race only, and that no angel of light nas ever been made a devil therein. Those who in this world have lived in an infernal faith and an infernal love are its inhabitants. This is " a Christian myth which astounds the angels." Love of self and of the world constitute the true heU. EvU in man is hell in man. The words are here synonyms. The principal hells are three, and yet these three are one, for all the evils in the hells are in unison. God is the governor of the hells, " It has been given to me," says CHRISTIAN HELL 313 the Baron, " to look through all obstacles into hell." Minor hells are manKold. Some are like caverns trending downwards, some like dens of wild beasts in the woods, some like galleries in mines. Generally the heUs are in three layers one over the other, but they are everywhere. In mountains and valleys, in hUls and dales, in ponds and marshes, in holes and crevices of the rocks dwell dark infernal spirits like unto burning coals. These hells open only to admit the damned, otherwise their doors are shut. The wicked dwelling in fire and smoke and soot are able to see nought on leaving their caverns, because their proper atmosphere is darkness, as congenial to hatred and revenge, and other faults proceeding from self- love or love of the world. Of the hells arranged in three layers the highest is obscure, the lowest fiery ; the reason of this is given by the Baron, but it is complex. The interiors of the hells are varied : some are like ruined houses in a city after a conflagration, amongst which the infernal spirits hide, after the fashion of the Arab ghoul ; some are with roads and streets, in which robbery and quarrels run riot continuaUy ; some are as dark forests, through which the wicked wander like wild beasts, and hunt others like infernal game ; some as deserts of sand, in in which the reprobate live, rejected of hell, under going extremest punishment. In the chief est hell are they who have excelled in cunning and hypocrisy. The situation of this hell is known to none except to God. In the western quarter, which is the most horrible of all, suffer those who from seK-love wished to be worshipped as Gods, treating others with a cruelty now exercised against themselves. The least dreadful of the hells in this 314 CHRISTIAN HELL quarter lie towards the south ; the most dreadful towards the north. In the eastern quarter suffer the proud unbelievers. At present there are no hells in the east, as they have been transported to the front of the west. In the northern and southern quarters are hells without number, occupied by sinners in the love of the world, hostility, theft, avarice, and hard ness of heart. Behind the south those sandy deserts already spoken of lie. The opposites of Love, Charity, and Faith, and their numerous specific variations, render the hells also numerous. The aU-merciful God casts no one into hell, but the sinner casts himseK therein. Only the fear of pain is able to eradicate the desire of evil. The Brother Juan de Olmedo wrote in 1761 a memorial of the lament of the afflicted souls in purgatory for the edification of Catholic Christians. The graphic picture which heads the memorial is given here (fig. 76). The Spanish assonant verse sets forth the usual array of horrors, calculated to move even an " admantine heart," and quotes the opinions of the Saints Thomas, Augustin, Cyril, and Suarez. AU the wood in the world made into a bonfire would not equal a spark of the fire of hell. This conceit appears word for word in Nieremberg. Like the sentence following it, it is a favourite kind of grist often found in the literary granary of hell. "And do not suppose," says Olmedo, "that herein I have exaggerated aught; on the contrary," etc. The memorial concludes with an exhortation to be diligent in attending divine service, the confessional, and other sacred duties ; but, above all, to be liberal in benefactions towards the Church, Daras alguna limosna al pobre necessitado. CHRISTIAN HELL 315 The Eloge de I'Enfer, attributed to one Benard, or Bernard, but probably written by the Abbe Quesnel, is, like Quevedo's Pigsties, merely a picture of humanity, a satire on the foolish fashions of the time. The reader must be sick and tired, says the author, of the numerous descriptions of hell torments. He therefore proposes, for a change, to write in praise of hell. It is a strange subject perhaps of praise, but the learned Erasmus has written in praise of folly, and the elegant Lucian in praise of a fly. The nature of the work is shown by its com mencement. All good things are placed in the middle. The mean is golden. The kernel is in the centre of the fruit. Jerusalem is in the centre of the habitable globe. The sun is in the centre of our cosmic system. Hell is the centre of the earth. The broad way is easier than the straight. Philosophers, politicians, poets, historians, artists, mathematicians, the bravest men, the fairest women, the best society, we find them all in hell. The description of the abode of Eblis in Beckf ord's Vathek is powerful, and not unworthy of honourable mention. It lies in the very entrails of the earth, Fig. 7G. 316 CHRISTIAN HELL where breathes the Sansar or icy wind of death. A vast multitude of people there passes incessantly. These severally hold their right hands on their hearts, without once regarding anything around them. They have all the livid paleness of death ; their eyes, deep sunken in their sockets, resemble those phosphoric meteors that glimmer by night on graves. Some stalk slowly on, absorbed in profound reverie ; some, shriek ing with agony, run passionately about like tigers wounded with poisoned arrows ; while others, grinding their teeth in rage, foam furiously, more frantic than the wildest maniac. They all avoid each other, and each wanders unheeding each. The bosoms of aU are transparent as crystals, and the hearts of all are enveloped in flames in this home of vengeance and despair. The Reverend Father Gilbert Baur, a Premonstrant (a white monk of the indicated meadow), a man of discursive genius, who has written on the Fattening of Cattle and the Uncertainty of Life, on the Rules of Politeness and the Visitation of the Sick, speaks in all earnestness thus : " You know what happens when a man salts pork ! " This commencement recalls the panegyric of Dulcinea del Toboso. " The salt pene trates by degrees through every nerve and fibre, it enters into the substance of the bones, and yet is the meat in no wise disintegrated, but rather preserved by this process of pickling. Precisely in the same fashion the fire of hell pierces the marrow, occupies the inwards, and the brain boils therewith in raging smart, and yet suffers neither death nor dissolution." The good monk has certainly done his best to make the matter clear to the meanest intelligence. From the description of hell contained in a sermon CHRISTIAN HELL 317 preached by Jonathan Edwards, that sturdy theo logian, and President of the College of New Jersey, one sentence will probably be found more than sufficient : — " After you shall have worn out the age of the sun moon, and stars in your dolorous groans and lamenta tions, without rest day and night, or one minute's ease, you shall yet have no hope of ever being de livered. After you have worn out a thousand more such ages, you shall have no hope, but shall know that you are not one whit nearer to the end of your torments ; but that still there are the same groans, the same shrieks, the same doleful cries incessantly to be made by you. . . . Your , bodies, which shall have been burning all this while in those glowing flames, shall not have been consumed, but will remain to roast through eternity." But still, even according to this amiable ecclesiastic, the damned will have one satisfaction. It is an ill- wind that blows nobody good, and theirs will be the unselfish consolation of reflecting that the sight of the hell torments which they suffer will exalt the happiness of the saints for ever ; for it will make them "more sensible of it, it will give them a more lively relish of it." Parents will see their children, children their parents, wives their husbands, and husbands their wives, in ineffable agony, and prize their own felicity the more — " a sense of the opposite misery in all cases greatly increases the relish of any joy." We have already seen that this humane senti ment is no new idea of Jonathan Edwards. In the third part of the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas, the great schoolman, the friend of Bonaventura, 318 CHRISTIAN HELL in the ninety-fourth supplementary question, it is concluded in three articles : first, that since con traries set each other in relief, the blessed in the kingdom of heaven will see the tortures of the damned, that their own blessedness may the more delight them ; secondly, that since the damned cannot be transferred from their misery, the blessed will have no compassion upon them ; and, lastly, that the holy ones in heaven will not rejoice in the pains of the damned per se, but per accidens, since they con template therein the divine justice and their own freedom therefrom. Thus the Seraphic Doctor. And TertuUian, in his De Spectaculis, anticipates with frank delight the torments of his ethnic opponents. " Ah ! the broad magnificence of that scene ! How shall I laugh and be glad and exult when I see these wise philosophers, who teach that the gods are indifferent and men soulless, roasting and browning before their own disciples in hell. Then shall I hear these dramatists declaim in tragedies of their own passion; then shall I see these actors become yet more supple in the fire. Then will this chariot-driver appear one red with his flaming chariot," with other considerations of the same kidney. " Tantsene animis cselestibus irse ! " " Suave mari magno," — it is a nice thing, says Lucretius, when the winds are warring with the waves, to look from land on the deep distress of somebody else, — in a word to sit in safe harbour, what time others are suffering shipwreck. Not, as the Epicurean is careful to explain, because there is any satisfaction in alien agony, but because it is a consolation to behold calamities, wherein the sufferer is not oneself. This philosophic maxim may justify CHRISTIAN HELL 319 the Seraphic Doctor, but can hardly excuse the dehght of TertuUian. It might almost seem that his idea of punishment was less for reformation than for revenge. Too literal surely was the saint's inter pretation of such passages as, " He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh : the Lord shall have them in derision. I also will laugh at your calamity ; I will mock when your fear cometh." The moral difference of these utterances of the Old, from the teaching of Christ in the New Testament is enormous. It is a Sabbath day's journey compared to the distance between Sirius and Alcyone. A certain Samuel Hopkins, D.D., Pastor of New port in New England, a disciple of Jonathan Edwards, is of opinion that if the fire of hell should go out, the light of heaven would no longer shine, and that for every degree of misery which the damned in hell shall feel, the happiness of the saints in heaven shall be increased millions of millions of degrees. This salutary doctrine is peculiarly Christian. No other heU can boast of aught equal to it. If there were no casting of stones, said a sceptic, where would be the evidence of Christianity ? Surely this petulant reasoner had never read the works of the good pastor Samuel Hopkins, D.D. Chateaubriand, in Les Martyrs, gives a more modern and less horrible idea of hell than has yet been presented to the reader. His hell reminds us of that of Jeremy Taylor and Swedenborg. The pain in Les Martyrs endured by the damned is rather moral than physical, and no minute detail of torture is attempted. The book is big with pretty passages. Satan is dragged down to hell by the weight of his own wickedness. Though the king of that dismal 320 CHRISTIAN HELL domain, he himself is appalled by its lugubrious sounds. Death — a skeleton — appears like a black shadow upon the flames, which burn and leap behind her. The livid rays of infernal light pass through the hollows of her bones. Satan mocks the cries of the poor — placed in hell by Chateaubriand probably for the first time — calling them the enemies of all exalted above them by education or by morals. In the centre of the abyss of pain, in the midst of an ocean of blood and tears, a black castle stands, beaten by eternal storms. This is Satan's home. A barren tree is before its door, and on its windy summit waves, half consumed by the divine lightning, the fallen archangel's standard of pride. In Pollok's Course of Time, published in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, we have several graphic and interesting pictures ; notably of the wall of fiery adamant, so high that Hope cannot fly over it, of the sad figures traced in fire, of the worm that never dies, feeding upon a quivering heart — pictures described, without much pretence to originality, but with considerable unction, in blank verse. In Philip Bailey's Festus we learn from the lips of the guardian angel that evil is not an ultimate, even in Hell. Bailey seems to have considered such a consummation as a virtual defeat of Christ by Satan, and of the seed of the woman by the serpent. " Nothing," says the angel, — recalling the religion of Zoroaster, — " is eternal but of God." Pain and woe are finite. They will not be allowed to increase and multiply, solely in the interest of evil, and finally be crowned with immortality. Bailey would have none of such dogmatic De novissimis. He goes CHRISTIAN HELL 321 further than Origen, and converts every devil in hell, and finally Lucifer himself. Man's duty to man, says Carlyle, in his Mock Samson, is reduced to "handing over to him certain metal coins, and then shoving him out of doors " ; and man's duty to God is become a " cant, a doubt, a dim inanity, or such like ; and the thing a man does infinitely fear — the real heU of a man — is that he do not make money and advance himself." Sauerteig noticed that the English people frequently used the word ' hell,' but were not agreed as to its signifi cance. The mere building beavers of the gospel of Mammonism, the spinning arachnes, the predatory vultures, and the vulpine species, were not able to discern it well. What, then," asks the philosopher, " does the modern English soul dread infinitely and contemplate with entire despair ? It is the terror of not making money ! " Thus Carlyle, in a picture of hell, certainly not stimulated by patristic study. The literature of hell is, we have seen, extremely rich. Legions of writers, inspired or otherwise, have scattered it about with all its adjuncts, as though with a pepper-castor held in no parsimonious hand, upon every soul save their own, and that of him who beheves as they believe. Such torments as few but theologians in their hate have been able to imagine, secrets of gruesome pain, which, it is to be feared, many good people read with pleasure, have been revealed to a shuddering world, as the lot of the unsanctified society in that cindery cell. But it was reserved for the reverend Jesuit father, Furniss, to show by his Sight of Hell, published in 1861, the comparative aridity and poorness of the majority of the writers who preceded him. One of his tracts, 322 CHRISTIAN HELL written for children, was a great — though of course unpremeditated — commercial success. It gives a detailed description of many terrible tortures. It deserves more space than we can allot it. It begins thus : " Three very wicked men, Core, Dathan, and Abiram, owing to disobedience of the priests, went down alive into hell. Millions on millions dash themselves against the gates there : that is the reason why these gates are made so strong." Father Furniss is not without poetry ; he speaks of fogs of fire, and hailstones of glowing iron : a spark, less than a pin's head, thrown into the Atlantic, would set the whole world in a blaze. Of two little maids of sixteen, one cared only for dress, and went to a dancing school, and dared to disport in the park on Sunday instead of going to mass : that little maid stands now, and for ever will stand, with bare feet upon a red-hot floor. The other walked through the streets at night, and did very wicked things ; now she utters shrieks of agony in a burning oven. A very severe torment — immersion up to the neck in a boiling kettle — agitates a boy who kept bad company, and was too idle to go to mass, and a drunkard ; avenging flames now issue from his ears. For like indecencies, the blood of a girl, who went to the theatre, boils in her veins ; you can hear it boil, and her marrow is seething in her bones and her brain bubbles in her head. "Think," says the compassionate father, "what a headache that girl must have ! " In a book labelled Christian Maxims; or, Tiny Flowers of Ars, selected by the translator from the labours of M. Vianney, the Cure d'Ars, who died some forty years ago, may be found curious samples CHRISTIAN HELL 323 of religious horticulture. One of the hot house plants of this pious priest regarded by the translator as fruiting to Christian edification is to be seen here : " The damned soul will raise himself from the burn ing fire only to fall back again ... as a bird in a room flies up to the ceiling and then falls down . . . the justice of God is the ceiling which attracts the damned." The Breve fra Helvede, written by V. A. Thisted, under the pseudonym of M. Rowel, published in 1866 in Copenhagen, present consciousness and memory as heU's only torments. Thisted, both in his sobriety and in his satire, reminds the reader of Quevedo. Not inferior to the best pictures of the Spanish wit are those of Pilate ever washing his hands, like Lady Macbeth, to efface the stain of blood, and ever asking "What is truth?" Of Judas with a noose about his neck, and thirty pieces of silver burning his palm, which return to him as often as he casts them away, while he repeats incessantly "What is that to us ? See thou to that ! " Of the servant of the high priest, with shrivelled fingers, crying again and again, "Why smotest thou me ?" Curious things are set forth in this book. Hell has its churches and its sensational preachers, but there are no children in hell. It has its theatres, balls, novels, and, finally its post-office, of which the peculiarity is that the applicant is compeUed to receive the letters he him self has written, and all his scandal-disseminating, anonymous, lying, blackmailing epistles burn holes in his compulsorily outstretched hand. A sermon by the Rev. Dr. Strickland, Vicar of St. Saviour's, Hans Place, preached in 1882, maintaining the eternity of punishment, and bristling with texts 324 CHRISTIAN HELL in defence of that doctrine, has been, most unfortu nately, included in a series of homilies entitled " Burning questions of the day." The place of hell has given rise to very wide divergence of theological doctrine. It is perhaps, in this recondite matter, more reverent to dwell with old Fuller, and the Rechabites, in the tents of con jecture ; or with Chrysostom to be content in saying it is " somewhere, as I suppose, well out of all this habitable world," just as mines and prisons are far removed from royal palaces. Some have located heU neither in earth nor in the waters under the earth, but, with sufficient indecency, in the planet Mars. The Vicar of Wakefield maintained, with Whiston, that it was unlawful for a priest of the Church of England, after the death of his first wife, to take a second, or, to express it in one word, valued himseK upon being a strict monogamist. Whether he also agreed with that eminent mathematician and divine in localising the place of torment in a comet's tail Goldsmith has not informed us. Whiston observed that the sacred accounts of hell were agreeable not only to the remains of ancient, profane " tradition," but to the true system of the world also. The sad state, as described in Scripture, in every circumstance so exactly agrees — in the opinion of Whiston — with the nature of a comet, ascending from the hot regions near the sun, and going into the cold regions farthest beyond that central star, with its long smoking tail arising up from it, through its several ages or periods of revolving, and this in the sight of aU the in habitants of our air, and of the rest of the system ; that "I cannot," says he, "but think the surface or atmosphere of such a comet to be. that place of CHRISTIAN HELL 325 torment, so terribly described in Scripture, into which the devil and his angels . . . shall be cast for their utter perdition or second death, which will be indeed a terrible, but a most useful spectacle to the rest of God's rational creatures." Thus, according to Whiston, the comets constitute hells, which in their trajectories carry damned souls now into the vicinity of the sun, whereby they are effectually roasted, and afterwards into the frozen district beyond Saturn's orb, where, by an ingenious but archaic religious refinement, they are speedUy iced. Others hold hell to be the darkened air of Chaos, it is the waters above the firmament, it is the valley of Jehoshaphat, it is the poles, it is the antipodes, it is, according to Tupper, and as is to be read in Plutarch, the moon. For the American poet that placid luminary is the scarred prison of sin where damned souls feed on punishment ; the wakeful eye which glares by night upon the wicked. It is clearly not any burning mountain, such as Hecla, Etna, or Vesuvius, as some fatuous folk have maintained, because these mountains are not for ever vomiting fire. The general, and perhaps the orthodox, opinion — this assertion is made with considerable doubt — places hell in the earth's centre. Such appears to be the conviction of Ter tuUian and others, borrowed, perhaps, from Plato's Phcedo ; Jeremy Drexel deduces it from the history of Korah. Objections were very soon started to this belief, such as the absence of air, the presence of water, the combustion of the earth, and the insuffi ciency of room. About the shape of heU another question arises. Is it oblong, square, circular, or pyramidal ? It is probably circular ; but its area is uncertain 326 CHRISTIAN HELL The topography of hell has, indeed, occasioned con flict almost internecine. One Tobias 'Swinden, M.A., rector of Cuxton, in Kent, rose up, and published, in 1797, a book well stuffed with recondite erudition, showing that the local hell is, in all probability, the sun. The spots upon that fiery orb are possibly clotted companies of damned souls. How the gradual extinction of heat, foretold by physicists, in the solar star, will affect these souls has not been determined by the Kentish divine. The idea of locating hell in the sun was promulgated more than a century before the time of Swinden by Sandys in his Travels, but he speaks of the Muslim, and not of the Christian, Tartarus. The religious tenets enter tained by the Muhammadans — who make, by the way, the third of their seven hells, called Hutamah, which, being interpreted, is the place of breaking, an especial hell for Christians — a refinement of inter- religious courtesy which the Christians have not been loth to return by the wholesale consignment of all Muslim souls alike to- everlasting perdition — exceed, according to Sandys, the vanity of dreams and all old wives' fables. For they declare that Cain will be the ringleader of the damned ; that the burning globe of the sun wiU be their continent ; and that the devil or Iblis will be ultimately annihilated. The Carthusian Surius, in his Short Commentary, thinks it extremely probable that hell, whatever philosophers may say, lies in volcanic mountains such as Etna or Hecla. The fire of the latter mountain has the property of consuming water, but not tow. The ghosts of the dead, principally those who have met with death by violence, have been seen by their friends, ignorant of their decease, and asked to return CHRISTIAN HELL 327 home ; but with a sigh the ghosts say that they seek Hecla, and straightway disappear. Voluit mim Deus ejusmodi in terris extare loca terribilia, ut certius ndrint mortales quae poence maneant impios post hone vitam, et sic discant timere Deum, ut possint ceternos ignes evadere. An eminent book collector, noted for his good nature, is said to have been of opinion that a man who published a book without an index ought to be put " into the thistles beyond hell," where the devil could not get at him. The good nature of tbe collector is shown in the latter clause of this sentence ; it is, however, somewhat tempered by the thistles. Anent these thistles in hell's geography a tale is told. The devil on a day, having met the Deity, asked for wheat and oats as recompense for his part in the creation. The Deity granted his asking with a smile, and the devil began to dance for joy. The woK came up, and full of disgust at this indecency, inquired the occasion of his skipping. The devU forgot his gift in his confusion, and answered that he danced on the receipt of the rush and the thistle— to which plants, placed beyond his confines, he still adheres. In the Courteous Knight, published in Buchan's Ancient Northern Ballads, a proud person is threatened with Pirie's chair : " In Pirie's chair you'll sit, I say, The lowest seat o' hell." But information about this chair is as scarce as that about Heckiebirnie, of which we know only from Dr. Jamieson that it is three miles beyond heU. It has been suggested that the latter is the same as Heckenfel. In an old Danish hymn of the 328 CHRISTIAN HELL sixteenth century is to be read a story of a hunt of condemned souls on the way to Mount Hecla from Denmark. In the Icelandic Hecla is known as Heklu-f jail ; from this Heckenfel is said to be de rived. Satan the huntsman, called Lureman, sings, " Come, come, you must to Hecken field, to Hecken with the swarm of souls into the black hole." Frisius says of Hecla, " is locus est career sordidarum animarum." The various views as to the place, quantity, quality, duration, and other categories of infernal dolour, are far too many to describe here in due detail. Some advocate a certain elasticity in the the city of sorrow. At present it is smaU, for the space occupied by souls is infinitesimal. Re garding them as molecules, it has been calculated that one cubic centimetre of room might contain a quadrillion, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 souls ; but after judgment and the resurrection of the bodies, the accommodation for the race of the lost would have to be very considerably enlarged. In the matter of hell's inhabitants also, declarations greatly differ. When Elizabeth died and James I. came in, an Irish priest thus curtly expressed the course of the royal succession : " Elizabetha in Orcnm detrusa, successit Jacobus alter hcereticus." " You will ask," says the audacious Selden, who relates this story, " why did they use such language in their church ? " Answer : " Why does the nurse teU the child of Raw-head and Bloody-bones ? To keep it in awe!" Mediseval ecclesiastics commonly placed in hell their enemies and opponents. Even in an age of sweetness and light we are wont to say a judgment falls upon a man for something in him CHRISTIAN HELL 329 we cannot abide. Much more than two-thirds of the human race must necessarily be turned into hell, according to those who set therein all the heathen. By numerous authors, the wisest and best men of antiquity — Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Trajan, and Epictetus — the most moral and religious votaries of alien creeds, are confounded in the penal pit with the most execrable of mankind. Dr. Emmons, an American clergyman of repute, in the earlier half of the present century, in a remarkably impartial sermon On the Hopeless State of the Heathen, damns atheists, deists, heretics and heathen alike. The future state of man, it seems to some, depends upon his views of predestination. Dr. Prideaux is said to have told his auditory they are damned who do not believe in this, and in original sin and in other matters of a similar nature. Very few in this business are so liberal as Luther, who spoke of Cicero as " ein weiser und fleissiger Mann ; ich hoffe unser lieber Gott werde ihm und seines gleichen gnadig sein." The most interesting book on the future state of the heathen was written by Francis Collio in the beginning of the seventeenth century, De Animabus Paganorum, libri quinque. This work, which is full of learned arguments and quotations, contains some eight hundred octavo pages. Its reach extends from Adam to that arch-heretic Zwingli, and it embraces Orpheus, Homer, the seven Wise Men, the Sibyls, the Magi, Apollonius Tyaneus, and many.more. About the souls of the Queen of Sheba and Hermes Trismegistus Collio declines to express an opinion. He supposes that the friends of Job, the midwives Sephora and Phua, Melchisedec and Solomon, are exulting in the beatitude of the blest; but that Balaam, 330 CHRISTIAN HELL Nebuchadnezzar and TertuUian are irrecoverably damned. In this list of the lost Origen — possibly because he — as Du Pin says — ruined the simplicity of the faith by reasoning on the infernal torments — is commonly included. Etienne Binet, who wrote a whole book about Origen's future state, puts the matter, like Cor- nellius in his Exactissima Infantium in limbo clausorum Querela, etc., in a legal form. The judge defers his opinion sine die, but Binet thinks that the evidence, on the whole, is in favour of the Saint's acquittal. Others besides Origen have had books devoted solely to a consideration of their condition after death. Among them are Pythagoras, Seneca, and Thomas a Becket. Swedenborg is said to have set David and Paul among the damned, but made George II. and Louis XIV. into angels. Byron and Southey put George III. in heaven, but the latter made a devil of Wilkes. The Rev. R. W. Dibdin, M.A., thinks, in his sermon The Patriot Palmerston, was he saved f that the Lord may have had mercy on him at the eleventh hour. In the matter of the inhabitants of hell, Gulielmus Parisiensis has found on an exact computation that there are 44,435,556 devils ; but it has been said that they vastly exceed that number. Their external forms and internal characteristics have been minutely described. Their bodies are not terrestrial, but, according to the Church scholastics, something analogous. John Wier, a physician of Cleves, convinced that this world is peopled by crowds of devils, wrote in 1576 a book of some thousand folio pages, which is one of the chief sources of information on the subject. He makes seventy-two CHRISTIAN HELL 331 princes of devils, with 7,405,926 subjects. He may have owed this information to his master, Cornelius Agrippa. CoUin de Plancy in his Dictionnaire Infernal, has given pictorial illustrations to supple ment Wier. The figure of a devil generically, is that of a goat with two horns in front and two behind ; but he also appears as a frog, a fly, a donkey, and a spider. Blake saw him as a swimming spider. He assumes, shortly, every shape except that of a dove and of a lamb. By Europeans he is commonly painted black. The Africans prefer a white devil. That old serpent Satan, the supreme prince of this world, of the powers of the air, and of darkness, LucKer the devil par excellence, is described as a great red dragon with seven crowned heads, ten horns, and a huge tail. He has two deputies, one of the sea, having three crowns more than his master, displayed with the body of a leopard, the feet of a bear, and the tail of a lion ; the other of the earth, known as the Beast— with a capital B, but with two horns. only. LucKer, who spoke with Eve, being bound in Tartarus, is, according to some authorities, not busied with this world, and Beelzebub is his lieutenant here. The demons are divided into hierarchies, and one is preferred before another. There is, moreover, a division of demons into those of air who are con cerned with storms and lightning, those of earth who bring sickness and death, and those of water who concern themselves about wrecks. Some of the most important demons are named by the pupil of Cornelius Agrippa Sytry, Nibhas, Morax, Nisroch, Otis, Pruflas, Oray, Tartac, Valefar, and Chax. Chax, or Scox, is described as like a stork, with a thin hoarse voice. He can take away the sight and 332 CHRISTIAN HELL hearing. He can also take away (from their right owners) money and horses. He is addicted to lying, save when he is introduced into a triangle, when he will immediately speak of hidden treasures. He rules over thirty legions of devils. As to the number of the damned there is also dissent. Some, as Cselius Secund'us Curio, in his Amplitude of the Heavenly Realm, suppose that the number of the saved wUl be much greater. Prudentius, a Christian poet of the fourth century, opined that a few only would be damned :— paucosque non piorum Patitur perire in sevum. Others think the number will be much less, and others again that it will be equal. But Dr. Lewis du Mouhn, a professor of history at Oxford in 1680, proved from scripture and other evidence, to his own satisfaction plainly and conclusively, in his Moral Reflections upon the Number of the Elect, that not one in a hundred thousand (nay, probably not one in a milhon), from Adam down to our times shaU be saved. And the Professor is certainly in the right of it if, as we are told, aU liars, drunkards, evU-speakers, cheats, gamblers, rich and (according to Chateaubriand) poor will alike be damned. Modern opinion on this subject seems to side with Curio. If all idiots and children between the ages of seven and twelve will undoubtedly go to heaven, the proportion of the damned to the saved will be as that of the inhabitants of prisons and penitentiaries to the whole population. Selden himself has little chance of escape, for it is a vain thing, says the author of the Uxor Hebraica, to CHRISTIAN HELL 333 talk of a heretic, since a man can think no otherwise than he does think. Opinion, whereof neither gods nor brutes partake, has made all the confusion in the world. Yet will men continue to disseminate opinions and to talk of heresies, and many are those which have from time to time arisen about hell. They should be touched as lightly as possible, for here one walks " per ignes suppositos cineri doloso." Very early in the history of the Christian world there arose dissension about the eternity of punish ment. In addition to the old disputes — forming in themselves a small library — there has been lately quite a little epidemic of controversy on this subject. We know not that aught of new or true has illumined this very old matter of religious debate since St. Augustine wrote his celebrated book. The lively discussions and discordant speculations which buzz about our ears buzzed with a near similarity of sound from the mouths of Epicureans and Peripatetics, Platonists and Origenists, lewd pagans and carnal Christians, about the ears of the early Fathers of the Church. Nothing was satisfactorily determined then ; nothing is satisfactorUy determined now. Yet is eternal damnation an article of faith with many exceUent Christian people. Both Jew and Muslim, however bad, are saved from everlasting torment ; but for the Christian eternal damnation seems — it is more prudent to speak in this precarious matter with the utmost incertitude — a cardinal tenet of orthodoxy. This burning question is like the shirt of Nessus : it is difficult for many people to tear it from them. In vain may Mr. Morley speak of it as the most frightful idea that ever corroded human character. In vain Herbert Spencer includes it among beliefs 334 CHRISTIAN HELL destined to die out. In vain is the observation of Oliver Wendell Holmes that all reasoning, all texts, cannot reconcile the supposition of a world of sleep less torment with the declaration that God is love. Unbelief, pathetically laments Carlyle, has got so far that it would be some comfort even if we could believe in a devil. The phUosopher takes too desponding a view of the situation. Not only do most of us believe in a devil, but in eternal damnation to boot. The mixed constitution of the human mind is curiously shown by the fact that the same saint who wrote a book supporting eternal pains was also the author of some observations touching the purpose of the creation of hell, otherwise too naughty to be quoted. " I reply," says St. Augustine, " to him who inquires what the divinity did before he made heaven and earth — not, indeed, that which one is reported to have replied in a jocular fashion in order to avoid the question — he prepared Gehenna for such as are for investigating mysteries. No ! I would reply that I know not what I do not know, rather than put off the matter in a manner which might cover an earnest inquirer with mockery, though the respondent might obtain the praise of a witty fellow." The Saint afterwards says boldly, that before the divinity created heaven and earth he did— nothing. The jocular story of St. Augustine recalls the negro preacher who, in explaining the creation, showed how Adam was made out of clay, and then set to dry against a post. "But," said a sceptic of the congregation, " if Adam was first man, who fixed dat 'ere post?" "Dry up dere, nigger!" replied the preacher: "anoder of dem questions '11 bust up dis whole meeting." CHRISTIAN HELL 335 Prudentius has in some of his hymns given vent to the heterodox opinion that the damned have an annual holiday. " They repose," he sweetly sings, " on the day of the resurrection " : — Marcent suppliciis Tartara mitibus Exsultatque sui carceris otio Umbrarum populus liber ab ignibus : Nee fervent solito flumina sulphure. Of this matter Jeremy Taylor has taken notice. It is, according to him, an idle fancy to suppose that when the paschal taper burns, the flames of hell wax weak, until that holy fire be faded ; and he assures us that the evil portion of the damned shall be continued without intermission of evil. The reader has seen that other writers are of a contrary opinion. Reference has been made to the form of excom munication writ by Ernulphus in Tristram Shandy. When, to the wholly absurd and heterodox declara tion of Uncle Toby — Hazlitt's " most unoffending of God's creatures" — Dr. Slop replied, "Satan is cursed and damned already to all eternity," — " I am sorry for it," quoth my Uncle Toby." " Too merciful," says Dr. Rusca, that eminent Italian theologian we wot of — " too mercKul are many, and insanely mild and compassionate in the matter of devils. They will have us suppose that at some time — after many myriads of years indeed, yet still at some time — they may return to happiness and to heaven." John Tritheim, in his Chronicle of the Benedictine Abbey of Hirsau, of Wurtemberg, speaks of a yet more terrible heresy in Austria, that both Lucifer and his demons — as Bailey sang— would be eventually restored t.Q 336 CHRISTIAN HELL beatitude, while St. Michael and all angels would be deputed for eternal torment. The final restoration of the devil has been supported by the authority of Origen and his less-known pupil, Gregory of Nyssa, and Ambrose and Jerome, according to some ; but others deny this support, and declare, in the case of Origen, that his ' pages have been adulterated by heretical subterfuge and deceit. This particular heresy bears, in the religious phraseology of the present, the title of "Restorationism." It was maintained by Oliver Cromwell's chaplain, Jeremy White, who, in the interval of making love to his master's daughter, wrote a book on the Restoration of All Things; or, the Recovery of the whole Creation out of their Fall. The opinion of the modern Annihilationists, among whom is to be numbered John Locke, appears to have been sustained by Arnobius and Irenseus. They sup posed the damned would be annihilated by the fire, which is with them the symbol of destruction but not of suffering. The Universalists, whose views approach very closely those of the Restorationists, who seem to deny the existence of hell and say that all will be ultimately saved, date from the beginning of Christian history. A celebrated modern exponent of these views, Hosea Ballou, of Boston, was also a Unitarian. The famous Archbishop Tillotson in formed his audience that the threatened pains of hell might be remitted. Of course, the Bible is quoted in confirmation of all these heresies by their supporters, as it is quoted in defence of every variety of religious creed; the Bible — whereby, as Selden explains, if men would speak clearly, they mean themselves, but they are ashamed to say so. Origen holds the fre resy of a metaphorical fire in CHRISTIAN HELL , 337 direct opposition to the Schoolmen, who, describing hell's pains as positive and negative, tell us that the former, those of sense, are literally indicated by the fire, and the latter, those of loss, metaphorically by the worm. Origen, in his De Principiis, says, the fire of hell is kindled by the sinner himself and not by another. That the fuel of this fire is sin. That outer darkness is nought save ignorance. That the sinner has, as it were, some seeds of sin left in his soul, from which arises a. whole harvest of iUs. The contemplation of these iUs is his punishment. This is the fire which is profitable for the soul's cleansing. It is an emendatory fire. The raison d'etre of hell is not condemnation, but correction. Origen, in a word, substituted purgatory for hell. Some think Erigena followed his example in the ninth century ; and Bossuet, in his sermon on the glory of God, says : " L'Enfer, si nous entendons, c'est le peche lui-meme." The Christian homihst is dangerously near the pagan philosopher Lucretius, who says, " in vita sunt omnia nobis." And they both approach in this respect the unbelieving Sadducee. Hell has also been supposed to be a living animal, as, according to Origen, was the earth ; conscience, passion, the body, death, and a naughty life. The last view was that of Philo and of Jean-Jacques. It resembles that of Swedenborg, who found the fire of hell in the love of seK and of the world. " Why," asked Rousseau, " are we to look for hell in another life ? " But these are idle interpretations. There is, indeed, or seems— much virtue is in " seems " — no orthodox doubt that the fire is material. A common opinion divides hell into four parts: the lowest part is for demons, for the souls of the 338 CHRISTIAN HELL damned, and for their bodies after the resurrection ; the next is purgatory, where the same fire burns; but differs in duration ; the next is the limbo of unbaptised infants ; and the next, or highest, called Abraham's bosom, that of the fathers or just men dead before the season of redemption. The third of these partitions of hell will be thickly populated. It has been reckoned that, including embryos, two- thirds of the human race perish as infants unbaptised, If this be so, the domus exilis Plutonia of Horace must by this time be fairly full. The damnation of unbaptised babies has afforded, from the days of St. Augustine, the durus pater in fantum in the fourth century, a wide arena for the tactics and evolutions of the Evangelical militia. A certain priest has condemned the doctrine of their salvation in terms to which an auditor unfamiliar with polemical theology might object as unbefitting a humane man, not to speak of a servant of God. " This monster of atheism," says the religious, referring to that doctrine, "has little by little grown a venomous serpent, and by its slimy convolutions wound its way into our midst." Michael Wigglesworth, in his Day of Doom, written in what its author probably supposed was poetry, introduces the reprobate infants complaining of their punishment for Adam's sin. "But," replies the divine Arbiter, "you may with reason share in his treason . . . yet unto you I shall allow the easiest room in hell." How deeply theology has dived into this question may be seen by consult ing Walch (J. G.), De Fide in Utero. That the matter was seriously discussed is clear from the mention by Walch of his opponents Johannes Marckius, Theodore Beza, and Campegius Vitringa. CHRISTIAN HELL 339 Peter Cunseus thinks the supporters of fetal faith "tarn fatui, ut flagris castigari digni sint." This, however, notwithstanding, Walch in some forty quarto pages declares, without fear of contradiction, that infinite power can produce such faith, and probably " deus apud hosce infantes ab ordinario agendi modo discedit, ut sues benignitati possit satisfacere." The same singular miraculous providence impelled the hand of Jacob to take hold on Esau's heel, and caused John to leap for joy in the womb of Elizabeth. Whatever the reformed party may opine as to the fetus being devoid of reason, and therefore devoid of faith, there is httle doubt that faith, real and actual, though accidentally different from that of the adult, existed before birth both in John and Jacob. Still, the reader wiU agree with Walch " ardua res est de hoc philosophies capite disputare." The prevalent persuasion in all, unstained by the Pelagian heresy, appears to be that babies are the predestined prey of demons. The infant asp or scion of the serpent is, says Molinseus, deservedly slain. Hell is paved with good intentions according to St. Bernard, George Herbert, Baxter, and Dr. Johnson ; according" to others with skulls of sucklings not a span long. That the soul of an unbaptised baby flits over marshes in winter nights as an ignis fatuus, and that the bosom of the robin was burned in the penal fire while he carried a drop of water in his charity to a chUd in heU are familiar faiths. How, it is asked, K belief and good works be essential to salvation, can infants be saved ? And again, If chUdren be totally depraved, is it true that of such is the kingdom of heaven ? The Exactissima Infantium, etc., of Cornellius, published at Paris in 340 CHRISTIAN HELL 1531, now exceedingly rare, gives a fanciful report of a case on this matter — a case reported with all the formalities of civil and canon law. First comes the declaration of infants in limbo against divine judgment, then the plea of the defendant, then the replication of the plaintiffs, and finally the decision of the judge. Solvuntur tabulae. But there is no laughter. The decision is against the plaintiffs, The humane and affable Father Garasse is indeed so shocked that he abuses the author of the case as a miserable abortion ; and piously thanks God that even the publisher was reduced to poverty for having printed so impious and pernicious a book. If the pen had been inadequate to depict the horrors and torments of the damned, the brush and pencil would have fully made up for its short comings. The conversion of the dissolute page — afterwards known as St. Dositheus — in the sixth century by the sight of a picture at Jerusalem, is no solitary sample of the salutary influence of the painter's art. It has been truly said that "pictures are the books of the unlearned," and the graphic delineations of the artists of many ages and many nations have brought the terrors of hell very vividly into view. But at first, if hell were depicted at aU, it was. not as a place of torture. The ancients had a more dignified notion of the place of punishment. The Egyptians, as we know, only showed a fiery serpent whose breath burnt up the sinful, or a lake of flame in which the bad disported themselves whilst they were fed by human-headed birds. The Assyrians, however much they may have depicted the spirits of evil, never, to our knowledge, sculptured a heU ; nor did tbe Hebrews ever display a graphic Gehenna. CHRISTIAN HELL 341 The Muhammadans were debarred by their religion from reproducing a representation either of in humanity or of humanity. It was reserved for Christianity to weave the warp, K not the woof, of our modern hell, and painters have rivalled poets in adding- thereto their respective embroideries. The subject being of great popular interest, fuU of the mystery so congenial to the uneducated mind, affords an exceedingly ample field to the imagination. Without the artistic assistance of pictorial illustra tion the popular ideas of hell would perhaps have been singularly jejune and vague. The painter's eye, rolling in that fine frenzy which is usually attributed to poets, bodied forth in profusion forms of things unknown to the sober man of business : those airy or fiery nothings to which the poet's pen had already given a local habitation and a name. The ancient people of Rome and Greece were, possibly, mainly indebted to their poets for the neat pictures of their heathen mythology ; for the classical Hades did not teem with horrors, nor were the punishments of Sisyphus and Tantalus revolting to an artistic taste. Pluto is painted in a manner far different from the typical Christian Satan. For the painters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Dante was the general guide. Sandro BotticeUi's engravings illustrate every circumstance of the Divine Comedy. The Orcagnas, both Bernard and Andrea, Jacques Callot and Peter Breughel the younger, have contributed largely to the infernal Nigaristan. In a word, painters crystallised for the masses the semi-religious matter held, as yet, only in poetic solution; they materialised the shadowy, rendered the 342 CHRISTIAN HELL nebulous distinct, and confirmed the doubtful. How many good people have found spiritual consolation and carnal comfort in the vast storehouses of Dore's Inferno and Paradise Lost ! How many have rejoiced like David in the anticipated tortures of their foes in suffering such varieties of pain as are represented in the pages of the painter Manni ! The material forms of material distress, the contortions of endless agony in that fiery deluge fed with ever-burning sulphur, in the wailing city of eternal sorrow, the accumulated horrors of the much diversified devils, painted with equally minute detail and masculine vigour, have contributed, alike in the rude engravings of the Kalendrier des Bergers and Biblia Pauperum, with the realistic ,picture of Michael Angelo, and the dire engravings of Gustave Dore, to give such satisfaction to the majority as David found in the shame and smiting of his enemies, when their necks were given to him, and his foot dipped in their blood; and he cast them out as the dirt in the streets, and beat them small as the dust before the wind. The artist expended much of his fancy. upon the devil, as may be seen in the illuminated service- books which have survived until our time. In an Anglo-Saxon manuscript of the eleventh century he is depicted without horns or tail ; in the next century both appear. But for very long his feet were human, then they changed to bird's claws, and, finally to cloven hoofs. He then somewhat resembled the heathen Pan, his probable ancestor, and made an animal, in the language of Cuvier, "graminivorous, \ and decidedly ruminant." This was the devil of the mystery-plays, in which he suffered the same wanton indignities from the CHRISTIAN HELL 343 " Vice " as the poor pantaloon in the pantomime from the clown. He is frequently depicted in comic situations in the illuminations of manuscripts, and in the carvings of abbeys and cathedrals, especially Pin the miserere seats in the choir-stalls. There is one at Ludlow shown in the accompanying illustration which contains an evident allusion to a miracle-play of the Last Judgment, or Doomsday in which the ft gv . oo i &Mff/Vrvlk~ J?^S/"V \t& ^M?M$m wt yj *w \\ -i«r\^ Fig. 77. demons are introduced dragging into hell a variety of dishonest people (fig. 77). One of these offenders was the ale-wKe who used short measures. Here we see a demon, whose head has been broken off, carry ing her, with her false measure and smart headdress, to thrust her into hell mouth, while another demon plays a tune on the bagpipes as she is being borne along. A third demon, seated, reads a catalogue of her sins from a roll of parchment. Some of the early artists endowed Satan with wings, 344 CHRISTIAN HELL bat-like or fancy-formed. But there was a universal consensus of opinion that liis body must be black, with horribly uncouth and hard-cut lines. During the fifteenth century some painters relaxed the ugliness of their devils, notably Fra Angelico, who has not succeeded in making his demons formidable, but en revanche has made them fat (fig. 78) ; whilst in the succeeding century Peter Breughel (known as " Hell " Breughel) makes his fiends curiously comic. Breughel, evidently an irreligious and carnal-minded man, seems to have called for his devils — as the Philis tines, when their hearts were merry, called for Samson — to make him sport. The hardened profanity of his treatment of a sacred subject recaUs the blasphe mies of Rabelais and Raoul de Houdaing, of Shelley and Quevedo. There are some who cannot be serious. Such persons have attributed to St. Jerome the argu ment, " If the dead be not raised with their bones, how will the wicked be able to gnash their teeth ? " have exempted married men from hell, as having already suffered sufficient martyrdom, and have declared it a calumny to say sermons are preached there, such torture being too refined even for devUs. The principal pictorial delineations of hell are in the representations of the Day of Judgment, or of Doom; and here unfortunately we seldom get beyond its mouth, of which Illustrations are given in this book: a pair of yawning, cavernous jaws, vomiting flames, which are fed with fresh souls by fiends, delighting in their office. These pictures in the illuminated service-books were unattainable by ordinary people, therefore the Day of Judgment was liberally and literally represented on the chancel arch of churches, for the artist :was always extremely CHRISTIAN HELL 347 realistic in its treatment. Puritanical whitewashing has hidden many of these frescoes, and in some in stances has utterly destroyed them; but their frequency may be shown by three examples at an easy distance from Oxford : at Cassington, where the fresco, after having been uncovered, was re-whitewashed, lest it should excite ' ridicule among the congregation ; at North Leigh, where it still remains visible ; and at South Leigh, where it has been faithfully restored. On the Continent the subject has been treated by the greatest painters. There is a fresco by Giotto in the Annunziata dell' arena at Padua, by Andrea Orcagna in the Campo Santo at Pisa, and a picture by him in the church of Santa Maria Novella at Florence. At least five pictures of the Day of Judg ment by Fra Angelico are known. Luca Signorelli painted it in fresco in the Cathedral of Orvieto, as did Michael Angelo in the Sistine Chapel. Marcello Venusti produced a Ukeness of it which is now in the Museum at Naples; there is one by Rogier van der Weyden in the Hospital at Beaune, and in the Louvre is one by Jean Cousin. Coming to modern times, there is a fresco in the Ludwigs-Kirche, at Munich, by Cornelius, finished by him in 1840, and in the Exposition Universelle of Paris in 1855 was a singular but attractive portrait by M. Chenavard, in which he mixes the pagan and Christian hells in picturesque but wholly indecent confusion. Kings and pontiffs share the evil mansion with the Danaids; and Prometheus, iEacus, Minos, with the three-headed Cerberus at their feet, sit in judgment over Christian souls. The demons and serpents of the true faith go far to the filling up of a scene, in which Charon holds the foreground. Sisyphus is engaged with his 348 CHRISTIAN HELL rolling stone, but from the inside of this stone peep forth the head and arms of a probable Christian. A woman, possibly of the same faith, is fixed upon the wheel in place of Ixion ; and the singularly placid devil who is flying in the upper part of the canvas with two damned bodies, one tucked under each arm, though fully expressing a forcible abduction, is hardly consistent with the severe dignity of the pagan hell. The treatment of the Day of Doom in sculpture is rare in England, although on the Con tinent it may occasion ally be seen in the tympanum of some cathedral doorway ; indeed, any sculptured representation of hell is quite exceptional. The accompanying illustration of heU mouth is from Lincoln Cathedral, and is chiefly notable for the serpents contained therein (fig. 79). StiU rarer is a representation of the Last Judg ment in stained glass, and, when it occurs, it is technically known as a "Doom" window. There is, for instance, a rose window containing the Last Judgment at Chartres, another at Mantes on the Seine, and yet one more in the Church of St. Radegund at Poictiers ; it is also represented in the Church of St. Gudule at Brussels. The eastern clerestory window of Winchester Cathedral is sometimes called a "Doom" window, but, the, only Fig. 79. CHRISTIAN HELL 349 signs of its being so consist of two angels blowing trumpets. Perhaps the finest example in England of a vitreous hell is in the west window of the Church at Fairf ord, in Gloucestershire. The portions of the window containing hell are the fifth, sixth, and seventh lights below the transom. In the centre of the head of the fifth light, between the cusps on either side, is a fair angel face within a halo, around which, in large old English letters is inscribed, " Iudicium dampnatorum." Immediately below, a flying form whose floating vesture of white and gold remains, though the head and hands are lost, carries a wavy scroll, of which many of the letters have shared the fate of the head and hands, to this purport: "Ite maledicti in one parata vob ." A mihtant saint on the wing, next in order, forces back, with the lower end of a long cross, a swinish demon, from whom he rescues a child-soul, bearing it away in his arms. A fierce struggle foUows between the resisting dead and the devils who claim their prey. The spiked and scaly tail of a dragon waves in tbe air ; beneath which a woman, mounted unwillingly on the shoulders of a horned blue fiend, who stays his steps under his load with a fiery fork, is borne shrieking into heU. Close below her right arm is a crimson executive, wielding a morning star (or spiked ball slung by a chain to the end of a handle), and flogging with it into the flames one of the affrighted dead. At the bottom an open grave is seen amid the green grass, and by it an empty shroud. The cinquefoil head of the sixth light consists of fragments of smaU human figures falling feet 350 CHRISTIAN HELL upwards into Gehenna. Great tongues of flame leap toward them from below. Devils abound. A crimson devil has seized and flung over his shoulder a man, whom he grasps by the legs. The head, body and arms hang over the devil's back. A long-haired woman, whose hands and feet are tied together, is hurried off on the shoulders of a lilac fiend, over whose shoulders is a chain with a ring at its end. Grasping this chain the fiend drags behind him a man to whom it is fastened, who resists in wild despair, turning back and flinging up his arms in agony. Under the last group is a hideous blue devil with scales like armour harnessed by a chain to a cart, in which sits a fair woman. Beneath these a homed devil wheels off, in a wheelbarrow, an aged crone, who grasps the edges of the barrow to steady herself as she sits down within it ; the curling flames writhe and stream upward about the barrow as she is hurried off. The head of the cinquefoil of the seventh light is also in a fragmentary condition. On the right is a circular building like a blast furnace, with well- marked courses of masonry; it glows with intense heat, flames burst Gut from its mouth below, and inside is its guardian spirit, whose nostrUs breathe fire ; above the edge of the upper part of this fur nace are seen the damned. In the centre of the panel a human figure is fastened down by its feet and hands, bent backwards over a stake. To the left of the picture two men are impaled, one through his breast, the stake passing out behind him, and the other through his back. Two fierce devils stand close to the mouth of the furnace, one steel-colour with green scales, the other flame-colour, also scaly, CHRISTIAN HELL 351 but with a woman's breasts ; these are snouted, and furnished with terrible teeth. Beneath is the mill of eternal torture ; a fearful flaming devU, with glaring yeUow eyes, turns a cranked handle which puts into action the toothed wheels of the machine, which is fastened to an upright post : one of the toothed wheels is vertical, working by a ratchet into the other, which is horizontal, and furnished with knives to tear and rive the damned; they vainly struggle to escape from beneath it, and one tosses his arms in anguish, while the flames curl around his doomed head. Under the mill is a great tun, represented as if made of staves, and hooped. In its side, through a square opening, are depicted on a piece of deep, ruddy purple, two souls, whose heads only are visible, howling in pain in their perpetual prison ; flames close them in around. Below the tun is heU's caldron, tongues of fire play about it in every direction, the eddying bubbles of scum are seen on its surface as it boUs, and two pallid faces gleam above the seething mass, one a face of wonderful fixedness of agony and terror. Fantastic forms of accursed spirits, armed with forks and trumpets, sparkle amidst the lurid light. Still below this is heU mouth, delineated as usual by a pair of wide, gaping jaws, into which men and women are being sucked with irresistible force. Lowest of all is the dreadful King of hell, whose vast head is toad-like ; two savage eyes, widely apart, glare from his scaly front; his horrible mouth is harnessed with shark like teeth, and his tongue glows with heat; in his right claw he wields a fiery sceptre, with a fleur- de-lys of dancing flame, his left claw rests on his knee, and he is surrounded by demons. 352 CHRISTIAN HELL Many of the poetic hells described in this book bear close relation to those of the mediaeval church, which were probably borrowed in their turn from other poets, who, alas, have shared the lot of the many brave men who lived before Agamemnon. The simple text concerning the fire and the worm, the gnashing of teeth and the outer darkness, falling into the hands of the mediseval painters, fared with them as with the poets. The popular creed, so far as it is intelligible, of the present, whUe embellishing the fire, has left, as a rule, the worm alone. But snakes of all kinds haunt the pictures of the middle ages. Choice collections of worms are also to be met in modern art. Nor, indeed, is the weeping and gnashing of teeth disremembered. But the meaning, the true meaning according to the authors of the Unseen Universe, of these texts was obliterated. The Christian hell was changed from the Gehenna of the universe, a sort of ethical dust- heap, into a place of physical fires, the " devil himself being the chief stoker." It became the hell attributed by H. T. Buckle, perhaps somewhat unfairly, to the Scotch clergy. Fancy revelled and ran riot in the description of agony inflicted by the beneficent Being, regarded too often as a remorse less tyrant, on all mankind, except the very few destined to be saved. Miserable wretches roasted, hung up by their tongues, lashed with scorpions by a company of howling fiends, or simmering in boiling oil and scalding lead, or with worms gnawing their bodies, or with bones, lungs, and liver aU boiling together in rivers of fire and brimstone recall the horrors of the Buddhist hell. And this is but the first act in the drama devised by the Deity in his CHRISTIAN HELL 353 leisure hours before the creation of Adam. A very human Deity ! Alas, in the best of human nature, even in those who made hell so very hot and dealt around them such sickening damnation, lay and stUl lies tbe desire to make our enemies, es pecially our religious opponents, as uncomfortable as possible. The lot of the Christian Hell has been, of date years, an unhappy one. It has been tabooed alike by the pulpit and the religious press. Books of theology and religious gatherings fight shy of it. Nay, it is even rare in revivalist and mothers' meetings. It seems to survive only in a few old sleepy parish churches, and in the profanity of the day. Nay, even in these country churches it is difficult to fetter the attention of the bucolic audience by the most harrowing pictures of eternal horror. A stray, sparrow entering the fane by chance in the midst of the parson's denunciations of the reprobate, unbeliever, sorcerer, liar, and worshipper of the Beast (so famUiar to the rustic), and his image, denunciations liberally decorated with brimstone, and set in a flamboyant aureole of the Orient hues of everlasting agony, — such a sparrow has been found sufficient to distract the unstable attention of the con gregation from the extreme calamity of the painful colonists of the bottomless pit, and has proved more than once an antagonist which the profoundest and most eloquent theologian has acknowledged himself utterly unable to overcome. Even the damnatory clauses of what is popularly known as the Athanasian Creed, which Leibnitz — possibly to display his acumen, — alone among philosophers defended, have found their wonted virtue gone out of them, when disturbed A A 354 CHRISTIAN HELL and interrupted by an unexpected incursion of a small member of the family FringillidcB. It was not, as we have seen, always thus. The pages of mediseval theology were so fuU of the fear of hell, that it has been supposed by some flippant persons to be a creation of that period. It con stituted a veritable cave of Adullam for every one that was in distress, and every one that was dis contented. If a man thought himself aggrieved, he straightway put his enemy in hell. There, in pages abounding in bituminous rhetoric, novel accretions of pain, — expansions of the fire and the worm, — were devised for that enemy's punishment. The sanitary fires of the valley of Hinnom by a mental process of pullulation analogous to that which produced golden pavements and gates of pearl, grew into the terrific pictures of Dante and Orcagna. These doubt less reflected the popular opinions, the idola fori, of many of the melancholy and meticulous heads of the middle ages, but received also with equal 'certainty some distinct touches of local colour from private animosity or political feud. The feats of Dante in this direction are not unparalleled. The picture of Esdras or Ezra, to which, possibly, the Jews are in a great measure indebted for their present conceptions of hell, are adulterated with bitter complaints of the heathen going unpunished, with fervid anticipa tions of vengeance, and the limitation of salvation to "very few." This feeling of personal animosity is of aU time and place. It appears equally in the dying injunctions of David, and in the charitable prayer of Paul. "Do therefore," says the dying monarch to his son Solo mon, " according to thy wisdom, and let not the hoar CHRISTIAN HELL 355 head of Joab (a cousin whom he disliked) go down to the grave in peace." A more explicit direction is given in the case of Shimei the Benjamite, who had cursed David : " Thou art a wise man and knowest what thou oughtest to do unto him: his hoar head bring thou down to the grave with blood." In other words, murder him on the first convenient occasion. David was for gratifying his spite indirectly and by deputy — a far safer way in this world. Paul, in his pathetic prayer for Alexander the coppersmith, invoked apparently divine assistance in the next : "Alexander the coppersmith did me much evil: the Lord reward him according to his works." The unlucky coppersmith, though he is not mentioned by name, perhaps occupied a prominently painful position in the Vision of Saint Pol le ber. In the Book of Judith, fire and worms constitute a punishment after life for the wicked, which they shaU " feel and weep for ever." But this final and enduring torment is only to be in the flesh of those who rise up against Israel, the nations that rebel against the kindred of Judith. The heU of Judith is for the anti-Semites alone. Again, in the fourth book of the Maccabees, as it appears in the transla tion of Dr. Henry Cotton, it is the tyrant Antiochus who, for his injurious treatment of the family of Eleazar, is to undergo hereafter "from divine ven geance, eternal torment by fire," and in the fragment of the fourth book of Esdras, as given by the Arabic Professor John — not Edward — Palmer, the lake of torment and the furnace of hell and the pain and anguish of seven kinds are shown for those who have set at nought the law, or the Hebrew religion. The frank delight of TertuUian in the torments of 356 CHRISTIAN (HELL his Gentile foes, the dramatist and the charioteer, his anticipatory exultation at the sight of their roasting in hell, and the amiable efforts of St. Carpus to assist the snakes, have already been noticed. Personal revenge, like personal vanity, dies hard. Nor is it more easy to destroy the malice fed with the misery of our foes than the pride associated with the ghastly trappings of the undertaker or the men dacious flatteries of the tombstone. In the early description of Dante some trifling of this sort has been suspected, and from the direness of the punish ment assigned by him to some of his compatriots we can weU understand how the world-worn Dante grasped his song and, in the words of Tennyson's Palace of Art, " somewhat grimly smiled." In Dante's hell, the city of Cahors in Auvergne shares the punishment of Sodom. It is placed on the verge of the seventh circle, because the Cahorsines were declared to be usurers. What, asks Dante with inconvenient curiosity, makes usury a sin? And Virgil, after expressing his surprise at his asking such a question, shows at some length how the usurer in making barren money breed, despises not only nature but art, inasmuch as he follows not the means of maintenance adopted by either. Man is to eat bread by the sweat of his face. Dean Plumptre, in his Dante, recalls this, quoting it, however, as " sweat of brow," with the text Gen. ii. 15, which apparently deals with the dressing of Eden. Whatever gives man bread without labour, as interest on invested capital gives it, is clearly contrary to the law of God. Thus Aquinas and Dante, though Calvin and Selden here support the science of political economy. Dante's straitened circumstances may have CHRISTIAN HELL 357 condemned him to eat the bread of others as well as to mount their stairs, and to place in hell those who wanted repayment, or, still more impudently, interest for their money which procured it. Dante's animosity is pretty clearly seen in his Inferno. More than one miserable man is there punished of whose ghost he might say, " Vidi e conobbi I'ombra di." The Tuscan poet has not treated Francesca da Rimini kindly, and has placed Farinata degli Uberti among the blackest spirits in the lowest parts of hell. Fihppo Argenti, the elder Cavalcanti, shares no better fate. Those of Dante's acquaintance who chanced to be partisans of the Neri or Guelphs, are introduced liberally into his fiery lake. Ubaldini, a worthy cardinal who devoted himself entirely to pohtics, regardless alike of the Popedom and the only true faith, shows by his particular pain the poet's hatred of heresy. Jacomo di Sant Andrea is punished very severely, from Dante's dislike to his prodigality. Nay, even his tutor, Brunetto Latini, owing to some eccentricity of ethics, is not spared by his pupil. TraveUing through the nine circles of hell and its ten concentric malebolge or pits of evil, we should meet with a great number more who expiate their opposition to Alighieri's moral, political, or religious opinions by exceedingly severe and loathsome punish ments. The conceptions of the Jesuit Pinamonti pale before them, Se tu sei or lettore a creder lento Cio ch'io dir6, non sara maraviglia Che co che il vidi, appena il mi consento. Pinamonti has nothing so startling as the de scription of the unlucky Vicojnte Bertrand de Born, 358 CHRISTIAN HELL the troubadour friend of the eldest son of Henry H. of England. He appears to have done nothing more terrible than share in the political dissensions of his period. But as the side he chose was not the party of the poet, this wretched sinner is represented as. a trunk walking along without its head : " . . . and it held the severed head by the hair, dangling it in its hand like a lantern, and it gazed at us, and said, ' Woe is me ! I carry my brains parted from the spine which is in this mutilated trunk. This is the law of retaliation observed in me.' " Bunyan, as has been seen, is somewhat unkind to the "brute" Hobbes; and Milton, fresh from the supereminence of beatific vision in the dateless and irrevoluble circle of eternity, declares, seemingly not without some heat, in his Reformation in England that the wicked in high places shall be thrown into the deepest and darkest gulf of hell, where, under the despiteful spurn of all the other damned —that in the anguish of their torture shall have no other ease than to exercise a raving and bestial tyranny over them as their slaves and negroes — they shall remain in that plight for ever, the basest, the lowermost, the most dejected, most underfoot and downtrodden vassals of perdition. Vasari in his Life of Michelagnolo Bonarroti, as this biographer calls him, records an interesting fact concerning that artist's Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel at Rome. The great indecency of Charon's pagan bark is commonly known, but not so the tale of an indecency which appeared to Biagio yet greater. Pope Paolo went to see the picture before it was completed, being informed by a certain Biagio, persona, as Vasari calls him, scrupolosa, that it CHRISTIAN HELL 359 was a most disgraceful thing, in so sacred an edifice, to have exhibited so many naked people, che s\ disonestamente mostrano le lor vergogne, and that the whole picture was less suited to the Basilica than the bathroom. Whereupon Michel Angelo took umbrage, and in a fit of acrimony introduced the good Biagio into hell as Minos, with a large snake round his legs. This " snake round the legs" appears to be a mistake of Vasari for the well- known tail. Biagio complained to the Pope, who answered — with a somewhat unseemly quirk — Se vi avesse dipinto nel purgatorio, ci sarebbe stato qualche rimedio, ma nell' inferno nulla est redemptio. But Dante and Michelangelo, and all other painters of hell who have introduced by their pictures to the unfavourable notice of posterity such persons as were unlucky enough to excite their animosity, have lofty example and respectable precedent in Alfatiir's treatment of Hel, in Satan hurled headlong, flaming, from the sethereal sky down to bottomless perdition, and in the classic Zeus who dismissed his father Kronos and the Titans to tarry for ever in Tartarus as fettered prisoners. ,In the Speculum Humance Salvationis, the first book, it is said, printed from type from woodcuts, in the middle of the fifteenth century, the author gives a few necessary cautions. " First," says he, " let no man presume to investigate why God wished to create man whom he knew about to fall; or, indeed, those angels themselves of whose rebeUion he had most certain precognisance ? Why he hardened to obstinacy the heart of Pharaoh, but softened to penitence that of Mary Magdalene ? Why he sent contrition into Peter, thrice denying him, but permitted Judas to 360 CHRISTIAN HELL despair in his sin ? Why he lightened one thief with the grace of conversion, but bestowed no similar boon on his companion ? For such works of God as these," explains the author, " are inscrutable to the human intellect, and all such questions have been for ever and satisfactorily and shortly solved by St. Paul in the epistle to the Romans : ' Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he wUl he hardeneth.' Let no man presume, for praise of wit, to inquire into these works of Godj for they pass man's ability, and " Powle " has answered " al swilk questions " concisely as above. " Swilk questions " might well include the reason of eternal punishment, and Powle's answer might not completely satisfy some of our later theologians. The Rev. Farrar, Archdeacon of Westminster, in his Eternal Hope, " hurls from him representations so cruel of a doctrine so horrible with every nerve and fibre of his intellectual, moral, and spiritual life." Of such representations are the crude and glaring travesties of the awful and holy will of God ; such he arraigns as ignorantly merciless, such he impeaches as falsehoods against Christ's universal and absolute redemption, and such he denounces as a blasphemy against God's exceeding and eternal love. Such samples of physical excruciation he labels a hideous incubus of atrocious conceits, and considers them supported by Scripture as gin-drinking by Timothy and slavery by Philemon. The dawn slowly broadens, and he who runs may read, " Theologia symbolica non est demonstrativa." The refined hells of Fenelon, Swedenborg, and Chateaubriand have, in some religious minds, occupied the places of the grosser conceptions of the culinary CHRISTIAN HELL 361 '1 straining through a cloth of Tundale, and the fiery ladder of Hildebrand. There are in these latter days people who, with other •heretics, consider hell nought else than conscience, than memory with Thisted, or even the terror of not making money with Carlyle ; and, so far from not being able, with Drexel, to conceive a God without a hell, they are in the opposite condition of not being able to conceive a God with one. Such people, not content with a "new heaven and a new earth," such as Isaiah prophesied, Simon Peter looked for, and John saw, would have also a new hell. Science, it has been said, cannot be incompatible with true rehgion. And yet it is not science which finds proof of immortality in a supposed universal craving — among so-caUed intelligent races — for a life beyond the grave. It is not science which asserts the resurrection of a material body, a phenomenon inconsistent with the integrity of that principle of continuity which, according to the author of the Unseen Universe, underlies not only all scientific in quiry, but aU action of any kind in this our world. It is not science which gives the devil a material body and makes him share or derive satisfaction from the degrees of suffering of the damned in those regions of sorrow and doleful shades. The maxim of science is the maxim of Christ. It is not if ye fear me, but "K ye love me keep my commandments." Nor indeed is science far removed from theology, as it is interpreted by such men as Whichcote, the contemporary of Milton and Taylor, the friend of Cudworth and Henry More. A few extracts from his sermons will serve to show the width, as Plumptre expresses it, of his mind. If the sinner 362 CHRISTIAN HELL leave off to sin and condemn himself, then the necessity of punishment is taken away ; for where there is wisdom and goodness in the agent, all punish ment is for instruction, reformation, and bettering of the offender, and not for revenge. It is more according to the mind of God that a sinner should repent than undergo the torments of the damned to aU eternity. The creature's suffering punishment is a very sorry amend for his transgression. For what doth God gain by it ? Hell arises out of a man's self. Hell's fuel is the guilt of a man's conscience. " Myself am Hell," says Satan, in his sublime address to the Sun. The mind, say the scientists, is its own scourge or reward without aid of any physical adjunct. The idea so satisfactory to some intelligences, that the punishment should accord precisely with the crime — an idea devolved on painter and poet amidst the moral detritus of many ages, has no place in science. The graphic conception of the fate of the damned in the sermons of Dominic and the Seraphic Doctor, preached at midnight, with a sudden and dramatic extinguishment of candles, outer darkness, fire and worm, however well suited to an evil and adulterous generation, is to the scientific mind nothing more than the painful memory of bygone folly, of which additional knowledge shows the additional evil, and time is no alleviation. The wrong-doer is by the law of cause and effect punished for ever by his wrong-doing. FinaUy, what have the sceptics, the free-thinkers, to say on this subject of hell ? Like the poor, these are always with us ; and their surmises, though in accurate and illusory, must be allowed to adulterate CHRISTIAN HELL 363 the pages of the present, as they stained from the earliest period those of the past. These say, with Madame Guyon, that pure love and not pure hate is the only everlasting fire ; and with Canon Farrar, that, undeterred by the base and feeble notion that virtue would be impossible without the horrors of an endless hell, they are grieved at the dark shadows flung across God's light by human theology. That, though they are provoked to mirth by the absurdity of the infernal hobgoblins, they are also provoked to wrath by their cruelty. That the good should be loved, and the bad should be hated for itself, and not from hope of reward in heaven or fear of punishment in hell. For some there are of the disposition of the woman' in Plutarch, who went through the streets of Alexandria with a water-bottle to quench the infernal fire, so that folk might no more refrain from evil for fear only of resultant pain. They say that endless punishment is not credible, being out of all proportion to crime, and that the distinction between the worst and best of men or creeds, between the reprobate and the elect, is insufficient to support the sharp dichotomy of ever lasting joy and everlasting agony. That the clergy would have us believe that God will leave our souls in hell, against the voices of our heads and hearts. As the good woman said to her husband, " What ! will you believe your own eyes before your own sweet wife ? " That the infliction of aches is not overcoming evil with good : that it is, on the contrary, the devil's triumph and the defeat of God. That it would not benefit, to use a human figure of speech, the deity as inflictor, nor the saints as spectators, nor the damned as sufferers. That it is- hardly the good 364 CHRISTIAN HELL tidings of great joy to all people, which the angel promised to the shepherds watching in that far-off midnight the Eastern Star. They allow, however, that it is essentially necessary for the angry reclamations and controversial cuffs of the militant battalions of endless perdition and the restitution of all things ; that it forms a grand motive for missionary effort, if it be true that souls, accord ing to the calculation of an eminent American missionary, are now being sent to hell at the rate of fifty thousand per day. They allow that all wisdom and knowledge, all art and science, all peace and happiness, all vicissitudes of shares and fevers of elec tions, all the winners, all the fashions, and all the fates of all the empires are but as dust in the balance, — if this doctrine be true. That, in fact, it is the chief and bounden duty of us all at once to sell all that we have and give to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel or some kindred company, and to become the disseminators of this one idea, and of this idea only — if it be true. They quote Queen Mary's justifi cation of her human bonfires by the argument that since the souls of heretics were to burn eternally in hell, there could be nothing more proper for her than to imitate the divine vengeance on a small scale by burning as many of their bodies as she was able here on earth. And she burnt them with green wood out of pure kindness, in order to give them more time to repent. Besides this, they say that the orthodox should have no children, knowing the ultimate fate, according to all probabUity, in store for them. Then they ask — and " dimidium sapientise," says Bacon, " prudens interrogatio " — why should the devU per secute his own friends ? If a deity made an endless CHRISTIAN HELL 365 hell, was it included in the works which he saw were very good ? They say the orthodox doctrine of hell is a traditional abstraction, and refuse to regard it as an evangel. That it is intellectually inconceivable and morally dangerous. That it is alike incredible to the mind and intolerable to the heart. They say it is the outcome of human cruelty and revenge and wrong, and not of divine mercy, charity, and justice. That it is one of the results of the evil influence of priestly ambition and hierarchic greed upon the sad docUity of ignorance and superstition. That it is of the mUk of human kindness turned sour. That it is utterly inconsistent with the gentle and tolerant character of Christianity's Founder, who said, " I, if I be hfted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me " ; who, in answer to Peter, advised unlimited forgive ness ; who hates nothing that He has made, and would not the death of a sinner, but rather that he should be converted and Uve. That it is wholly out of possibihty with that mercy which endureth for ever, and with the pitying love of that great Arbiter who said to the adulteress, " Neither do I condemn thee ; go and sin no more." That it debases the character of man, and is a blasphemous misrepresentation of that of God. That it can hardly be that " one far-off divine event " to which, according to Tenny son, the whole creation moves, or the " purpose of the ages " of Paul. That it is neither the completion of what on earth is fragmentary, nor the harmony of what on earth is discordant. That not even a Nero or a Phalaris could look with complacency upon millions in eternal anguish on account of some ancestral crime or some metaphysical mistake. That 366 CHRISTIAN HELL it seems to support that startling heresy of the Manicheans, who maintained that the universe was the production of a malignant Demon. That it is a sombre dream of an exceptional fanaticism due possibly to disease of the supra marginal and angular gyri of the brain. That the sweet love of Him whose tender mercies are over all His works is not to be discovered in burning coals. That, if it be true that God is a father, nay, the best of fathers, hell is a moral anomaly. That it makes men callous or drives them mad. That it paralyses the best, the emotional part of humanity. That it destroys the possibUity of happiness for those in heaven and for those on earth. They say that hell is not made for the rich and the powerful, but for the poor and the weak. That it condemns too often the innocent and acquits the guilty. That it is like the spider's web which ensnares the harmless little fly, but lets the hornet and the wasp go free. They quote Colonel Ingersoll's fable of the animals' conclave, in which they sought out the guilty one when they were stricken with a plague. "I of course am blameless," said the lion: " if any one denies it let him step forward." " I," said the fox, "have obtained absolution for the slaughter of the fowls." And "I," said the wolf, " have attacked the shepherd solely to obtain de liverance for the sheep." Quoth the poor donkey, " It is I who am the naughty one. Mea culpa : peccavi. Once in a fit of hunger I ate two thistles in a field belonging to a company of monks who were engaged at mass." 'In less than a minute they had that donkey's hide on the fence. Finally, they say with Selden, if the physician sees you eat anything that is not good for your body, he CHRISTIAN HELL 367 cries, " 'Tis poison " ; if the divine sees you do any thing hurtful for your soul, he cries, " You are damned." To preach long, loud, and damnation is the way to be cried up. We love a man that damns us. If a man had a sore leg, and an honest chirurgeon should only bid him keep it warm, he would not much regard him. But if a surgeon should say, " Your leg will gangrene ; it must be cut off, and you will die unless you do something I will tell you," what listening there would be to this man ! Muslim Hell. It was the opinion of Alexander Ross, Master of Southampton Grammar School, expressed in what he calls a " needful caveat for them who desire to know if there be danger in reading the Alcoran " prefixed to the Sieur du Ryer's translation of the book so named, that it is a " gallimaufry of errors, a hodge podge made up of contradictions, blasphemy, ridiculous fables and lyes." It is somewhat sad for those who agree with this opinion to think that for twelve centuries the Kuran has been the fundamental code of theo logical, civil, and criminal jurisprudence — has been, to quote Carlyle, in his Hero as Prophet, the "re ligion and life guidance" of a fifth part of the whole family of mankind ; that it has been acknowledged, in the words of Gibbon, " from the Atlantic to the Ganges," from New Guinea to Cape Verd, and from Lithuania to Mozam bique ; that some two hundred millions of souls believe it revealed out of heaven to Muhammad by the Angel Gabriel, and that its commentaries, written, we may suppose, by men of at least average intelligence, are so numerous that there are said to be no less than twenty thousand in the library at Tripoli alone. Possibly the schoolmaster was a poet, and the poets — of whom Boileau, MUSLIM HELL 369 who said in his indifference, " Pour moi, je lis la Bible autant que 1' Alcoran " may be taken as an example — have ever been erratic in the matter of faith. It was no whit better in the classical tunes. " Esse aliquos Manes," says Juvenal : " that there are any such things as souls of the dead, or subterraneous realms, or ferryman's pole, or black frogs in the Stygian pool, not even chUdren believe, save those who are not yet old enough to pay for admission to the public baths." In this want of faith in a hell the amiable poet was not alone. "If," says Pliny, " there were any after IKe, what hope or expectation could there ever be for us of repose ? Surely such credulity deprives us of the benefit of death, Nature's greatest boon." " 0 Charidas ! " says Callimachus, m a weU known epigram, " what is there down below ? Much darkness. And what is this other IKe ? A Ue ! And the God of heU ? A fable. AU is over with death ! " Lucretius explains the tortures of Tantalus, of Tityus, and of Sis3phus as the punishments in this world of the superstitious person, the lover, and the man of ambition ; and adds that Cerberus and the Furies neither are nor can be anywhere. Seneca, in the Troades, by the mouth of his chorus, aUudes with the " rational indifference " of Gibbon, to these calentures of a heated fancy as a fable resembling a troublesome dream, an idle rumour, a tale of air. The faith of Amphitryo in the Hercules F wrens can hardly be characterised as uberrima. Theseus on his return from heU is asked by Amphitryo, verane est fama inferis Tarn sera reddi jura, et obbtos sui Sceleris nocentes debitas pcenas dare? B B 370 MUSLIM HELL To which Theseus answers, somewhat concisely, Quod quisque fecit patitur, autorem scelus Repetit, suoque premitur exemplo nocens. In the Apocolocyntosis, Claudius is conducted to hell by Mercury and there condemned— as he had con demned others, without a hearing — to play everlast ingly at dice, in a dice-box with the bottom out. Seneca, in such raptures of drollery, speaks as a Spanish Rabelais or as his own compatriot Quevedo. But in his Consolation of Marcia he says, with suf ficient seriousness, men make a bug-bear of the lower world, but no darkness for the dead is there, nor prison, nor fiery river, nor tribunal, nor accused, nor judge, in that state of final freedom. It is the poets who have made us tremble with these idle fears. Death is the end and solution of all our sorrows, into which no ills of earth may enter, leaving us once more in that tranquillity wherein we lay before we were born. In Islam there are not many who have spoken so boldly as these poets. But some there were and are. And Muhammad had a salutary dread of the whole irritable genus. The Kuran, signifying the reading, as the Christian Scripture signifies the writing, has a chapter honoured by their name. And in that Surah, The Poets, they are thus-censured. " As for the poets, it is those that err who follow them. Dost thou not see how they wander — (explained by the com mentator Jalal-al-din of their extravagant speech) — in every wadi, and that they say that which they do not ? B.ut those who act unjustly shall know here after with what return they shall return," or, in other words, how they shall be punished in hell, MUSLIM HELL 371 Before entering on what may be called the hell proper of Islam it would perhaps be convenient to describe a certain agony — an article of faith with the orthodox Muslim — which must be undergone soon after death by unbelievers. In the chapter of The Spoils it is written, " If thou didst behold when the angels cause the unbelievers to die, they strike their faces and their bodies and ' Taste ye of the punishment of burning ; ' " and the same words are found in the chapter of Muhammad. Out of these two texts, with the help of traditions of the Prophet, commentators have built up what is called the Su'dl Kabr or In terrogation of the Grave. This precedaneous pain or antepast of hell is thus described by the Proof of Islam or the Ornament of Religion al-Ghazzali. Two angels, called Fattdndn, or the Inquisitors, Munkar and Nakir, awful, horrible, and black, with blue eyes, which are objects of detestation to the Arabs- — -there is also a tradition that these angels are blind and deaf and dumb — wiU immediately after burial cause the buried, of body and soul consisting, to sit up in their graves. The Muslim corpse is wrapped in a winding-sheet without any coffin, and the graves are made hollow, and are not filled with earth, but a space is left for sitting up before the angels with less inconvenience. Then the inquisitors will ask concerning the unity of God and belief in His apostle, and will say " Who is your Lord ? and what is your religion ? and who is your prophet ? and what is your Kiblah f" If the answers given prove unsatisfactory to the examiners they . wiU incontinently torment the wretched dead with heavy strokes of iron mallets between their ears, to the pain of which strokes the victims wiU testify with an exceeding loud cry, to be heard from East to 372 MUSLIM. HELL West by all living things save men and genii. Ninety- nine Tannin will then be sent into the sepulchre of every one of them. And if you ask what are Tannin? they are serpents with serpents' heads, which sting and bite and blow up the bodies of the wicked till the day of judgment. Children are pre pared for this examination, and taught at an early period to say " Allah is my Lord," " Islam is my religion," " Muhammad is my prophet," " The Ka'bah is my Kiblah." The idea of this initiatory torture is not the least remarkable of Muhammad's many loans from the Talmudists, who caU it Khibbut Hakkeber, or the Per cussion of the Tomb. To the present day the Ashkenazim, or German Jews, use the following prayer in their Benschen or blessings : " Deliver us, 0 Lord, from evil decrees and from poverty and from affliction, and from every kind of punishment, and from the judgment of hell, and from the percussion of the tomb." Elijah ben Asher, the Levite, in his work called Tishbi, says when a man is separated from the world the angel of death comes and sits upon his sepulchre. Then his soul immediately enters his body, and causes him to stand upon his feet. In the hand of death's angel is a chain, half of iron and half of fire, and he smites him therewith. At the first stroke his limbs are loosened ; at the second his bones are dispersed, and angels come and gather them together ; at the third stroke he becomes dust and ashes, and thus is he returned again to his sepulchre. " More hard," said Rabbi Meir, " is the judgment of the percussion of the tomb than the judgment of hell, for even the perfectly righteous and infants at the breast and untimely births are MUSLIM HELL 373 judged thereby, excepting him who dies on the eve of the Sabbath and lives in the land of Israel." The Su'dl Kabr,i£ notexpressly declared in the Kuran, is amply supported by tradition. According to Anas, the Prophet said, " When a man is put into his grave, and his companions turn away from him, he hears the clatter of their shoes as' they depart, and immediately the inquisitors come and ask, " What do you say about this man, Muhammad?" Then as to the hypocrite and unbehever he will answer, "I know him not, and I say about him what other people say." Then they wiU ask him, " Have you not understood ? have you not read ? " and they will strike him one stroke with sledge-hammers of iron, such that if mountains were struck therewith they would become dust. Then a voice wUl faU from heaven, " Prepare him a bed of fire and bedclothes of fire, and open for him the door towards hell." Then he will feel the heat and the simoom of hell, and the earth will descend on him in a mass ; and his grave will become contracted, and his ribs will be dislocated, and so he wiU be tormented until the consummation of all things. One day 'Uthman sat on a grave, and he wept until his beard grew wet. They said to him, " You remember the fire and weep not, and yet you weep from sitting on a grave." He replied, " The Prophet said the grave is the first of the stages of eternity, and if a man escape not from the evil thereof, what follows is more hard for him ; " and he said, " I have not seen any sight but the grave is more hopeless than it." Of the Tannin, Abu Sa'id said the Prophet said if one of these were to breathe upon the earth, it would never again bring forth any green thing. " Behind the unbelievers," says the chapter of the 374 MUSLIM HELL Believers, " there shall be a Barzakh until the day of resurrection." Jawhari and Firdzabadi define Barzakh as what is between this world and the next. It is used for the intermediate time, place, and condition, and corresponds in some measure to Hades. Whoever dies is said to have entered Barzakh. The beginning of Barzakh for a bad man is bad ; even in articulo mortis he will be treated unkindly. Baidawi, in his commentary on the first words of Ndzi'dt, says that the angel of death and his assistants wUl tear out the souls of the unbelievers from the innermost parts of their bodies as a man drags up a thing from the bottom of the ocean. A tradition says when the soul of a bad man is taken by Azra'il, or the angel of death, he cries, " 0 foul soul dweUing in a foul body, 0 contemptible soul, come forth ! " Then as when a hot spit is dragged forth out of wet wool, part of the wool sticks to the spit ; so with the soul is dragged forth a part of the veins. Another accommodation from the hell of the Hebrews. It is brought to the gates of heaven, but these will be shut against its evil smell. When Abu Hurairah on one occasion spoke of this smell to the Prophet, he put his garment to his nose. After the soul of the wicked has been rejected by heaven as evil-smelling and by earth, it is cast into Sijjin, a dungeon below the seventh and lowest earth, situated under a green rock, or, according to a tradition of the Prophet, under the jawbone of Iblis, there to remain until it is once more married to its body. After judgment the wicked wUl turn to the left, like the goats in the Gospel of Matthew, and will then pass over the well-known bridge of Sirat. Swat in the Kuran is the road to hell, but tradition has MUSLIM HELL 375 converted the road into a bridge stretching from earth to paradise across heU, finer than a hair, and sharper than the edge of a sword, beset, moreover, on both sides with briars and hooks and thorns. And so, what with the extreme tenuity of the path, its slipperiness, the entanglement of thorns, and the extinction of light, the wicked will fall down very quickly into the gulf below. This idea of the bridge seems also borrowed from the Jews, who possibly derived it from the Persians. In the Yalkut Reubeni idolaters pass over it as a thread, and fall upon their faces into heU. In the Hakk al-Yakin or Ex perimental Knowledge (as of the presence of fire from faUing into it), a Persian exposition of Shi'ah theology by Muhammad Bakir Majlisi, the bridge is said to be a journey of three thousand years. For one thousand they will go downwards, for one thousand over thorns, briars, serpents and scorpions, and for another thousand they wUl go up. " Implicit faith," says Bakir, " must be placed in this matter. All attempts of speculative exegesis are just so many occasions of Satanic doubt." Not only the wicked must pass over this bridge, but the good also, as both must undergo the interrogation of the grave, and both must be weighed in the Mizdn or balance. The Mizdn, like the Sirdt, is an article of orthodox belief in its literal and material sense. It is supported by the Kur&n, the Sunnah, or tradition, and ljmd', or the unanimous consent of theologians. Al-Ghazzdli says the Muslim must believe in the balance with its twin basins, and its tongue, a balance which, as to its size, is as the stories of earth and heaven. In this, by the power of God and the hand of Gabriel, the Persian Sarosh, all 376 MUSLIM HELL works will be weighed. In the Prophets it is written, " We will set just balances forthe day of resurrection, and no soul shall be wronged in aught, even though it were in the weight of one grain of mustard seed ; we will bring it forth, and we suffice as accomptants." And the weighing of that day, says al-A'rdf, shall be just, and they whose balance is light, these are they who have lost their souls. They shall be of the inhabitants of hell, and the fire, says the Believers, shall scorch their faces. The Mizdn may also be taken from the Jews. In the Talmudic treatise on the New Year there is a prolonged reference to the weighing of moral actions, but the scales in this treatise are clearly rather metaphorical than real. " Between them twain " (the blessed and the damned), says al-A'rdf, " a veil, and on A'rdf men. who know all by their marks and cry to the fellows of paradise, ' Peace be on you ! ' They cannot enter therein though they desire, and when their eyes are turned towards the fellows of the fire they say, ' 0 our Lord, place us not with the ungodly people.' " A'rdf is commonly understood of a partition separating para dise from hell. The marks of the bad are their black faces and others, with which may be compared the Christian mark of the beast in the forehead and the hand. " On A'rdf," says Jalal, " will stand those whose good and evil works are equal, and are not, therefore, to be placed in heaven or in heU." A'rdf seems to be a sort of limbo or purgatory. This also seems taken from the Jews. In the Midrash of Ecclesiastes it is asked, " How much space is there between heaven and hell ? " Rabbi Jochanan said a waU ; Rabbi Acha, a span. Others say they are so close that it is easy to see from one into the other. This idea MUSLIM HELL 377 is supported by Socrates in the Phcedo, who tells his friends that the moral middlemen wUl pass, using such vessels as they have, to the lake of Acheron, and dweU- ing there be purified of their evU deeds : though he adds : " To be very positive that this matter is as I have related it is not becoming to a man of sense." A similar notion is conveyed by the great guK of the Christian evangeUst dividing the rich man from Lazarus in Abraham's bosom. Muhammad was not of the opinion of Swedenborg, who said of purgatory, " I aver that it is a pure Babylonish fiction invented for the sake of gain, and that no such place can or does exist." Praying for the dead is clearly a religious act. " When the prayer reaches the dead," says Abu Hurairah, "it is more dear to him than aught in the world, and, indeed, God gives to the dead, on account of such intercessions, rewards hke mountains. The opinions, however, about A'rdf are far from unanimous in making it a state of purification, lasting tiU infectum eluitur scelus, aut exuritur igni, or until the crimes done in the days of nature shaU have been burnt or purged away, and leading at last, though late yet at last, to heaven. Jahannam, the word used by Muhammadans for heU when it is not spoken of as al-ndr, or the fire, the common term in the Kuran and Traditions, is of course taken from the Jewish Gehinnom, or southern vaUey of Jerusalem, named possibly after some unlucky ancient owner or inhabitant. The retention of the final letter shows it did notreachlslamwa. Christianity. Iblis, on the contrary, of whom hereafter, seems derived from the Christians, though Shaitdn is a form of the Hebrew Satan. In books of Persian theology heU is known as Dozakh. After a general bodUy 378 MUSLIM HELL resurrection, in which Muhammad agrees with Parsee, Christian, and Jew — and insists on it with unwearied iteration — there will be a general descent into hell. " There is none of you but shall descend into hell," says Mary ; " this with your Lord is a decided decree." The pious will be delivered, but the wicked will be left therein kneeling. In alr-Hijr it is written, " Jahannam hath seven gates, to every gate of them a distinct portion." Out of this small text, Muhammadan ecclesiastics, following the Magians and the Jews, have constructed seven stories of hell one below another, designed for the reception of so many differing companies of the damned. The uppermost layer of these stories is caUed Jahannam, a particular name for this story, and a general name for hell. This compartment is for wicked Muhammadans only, or the people of the Unity. There is a tradition that the great majority of its inhabitants are women. These, after being punished according to their demerits, will be finaUy released and their particular hell destroyed; the next, Lathd, or the Flamer, is for the Christians ; the third, Hutamah, or the Smasher, for the Jews ; the fourth, Sa'ir, or the Blazer, for the Sabians ; the fifth, Sakar, or the Scorcher, for the Magians ; the sixth, Jahim, or the Burner, for the idolaters ; and the seventh, Hdwiyah, or the Abyss, the undermost, the worst, for the hypocrites. This is also called Dark asfal, or the Profoundest Degree. Seven hells are also to be met among the Jews. Simeon ben Yochai, in the second volume of the Zohar, after saying that once in this world there was no Yetzer Hara', or Lust of evil, because it was enclosed in a ring of iron and set in a hole in the great deep, adds that during all this MUSLIM HELL 379 time the fire of hell was extinguished and burnt not at aU. But when the Lust of evil returned to its place, the wicked of the world began to grow warm therewith, and the fire of hell began to be rekindled, for, as Rabbi Simeon explains, the fire of hell is only brought into being by the force of the Lust of evil in the wicked. By this it is kept burning day and night and is not quenched. He goes on to say there are seven doors in hell and seven habitations. It is remarkable that the seventh or worst hell is by aU the commentators assigned to hypocrites. There appears to be a natural fitness in this, which has pleased aU tastes. But with regard to the in habitants of the other hells there is much strife. Agreement among clerics, eastern or western, is to the fuU as hopeless as among clocks. Some, for example, set idolaters in the second, in the third Gog and Magog, devUs in the fourth, those who neglect almsgiving and prayer in the fifth, and Magians, Jews, and Christians together — an ingenious torture —in the sixth. Others say that Jahannam is the abode of the Dahriyah, who deny the creation, be lieving in the world's eternity ; Lathd, of the Dualists or Manichees and idolatrous Arabs; Hutamah, of the Brahmans; Sa'ir, of the Jews; Sakar, of the Christians; and Jahim, of the Magians. A very common confusion, supported by very respectable authority, gives the second heU to the Jews, and the third, or worst, to the Christians. That Muhammad never intended this seems clear from the Table, in which he says the Jews are the most violent enemies of the Muslims, because they "are not puffed up with pride," while the Christians are the most inclin able to entertain friendship for them. Every one of 380 MUSLIM HELL these hells is mentioned by its proper name in the Kur&n. For example, of the seventh, lowest, and last hell, the hell of hypocrites, in al-Kdri'ah or the Striker — one of the many names of the judgment day, so called, as Jalal explains, because it strikes all hearts with its terrors, a day eloquently described in the inspired language of the Prophet, " Of men scattered to and fro like moths, of mountains flying to and fro in the air like locks of carded and coloured wool," — in al-Kdri'ah ut is said, " And as for him whose balance shall be light, his metropolis shall be Hdwiyah." The descriptions of hell in the Kuran are varied, vivid, copious, and exact. There is a certain dramatic, energetic, trenchant force in the words of Muhammad, a Dantesque realism, compared with which the well- known terms of the Christian evangelists, the furnace of fire, the worm, the wailing, and the gnashing of teeth, sink into insignificance. The author of the Revelation, speaking of the apostate worshippers of the beast, says, " the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever, and they have no rest day nor night." Whether this be more powerful than Muhammad's " They shall remain for ever therein," it is for the reader to determine. Speaking of the damned, or of the fellows of the left hand, the Kuran says, " They shall be dragged into hell by their forelocks and their feet" (Rahman); "There shall be cut out for them garments of fire " (the Pilgrimage) ; " Flameless smoke shall envelop them, and smokeless flame " (Rahmdn),; " They shall be holpen with water like molten brass" (the Cave); "They shall taste no coolness, nor any drink save boiling water and ghussdk" (the News); "So often as their skins are MUSLIM HELL 381 sufficiently cooked, we will change them for skins other than they" (Women); "For them shall be the simoom and the shadow of black smoke " (Kdri'ah) ; "The fuel of the fire is men and stones" (the Pro hibition) ; " It shall cast out sparks like castles, as it were yellow camels" (Mursaldt). According to Jalal, the camels are pitch-coloured. Some copies read " cables" instead of camels. "It shaU mount above their hearts, and be vaulted over them on extended columns " (the Slanderer) ; " It leaves nothing behind, it lets nought remain" (the Covered); "As often as they in their anguish shall desire to get out of it, they shall be returned into it " (the Pilgrimage) ; "Therein shall they groan and sigh, dwelling for ever therein so long as the heavens and the earth endure " (Hud) ; an idiom, according to Baidawi, for eternity, but according to others — precisely as in Christian Theology, — for a long duration. The "groan and sigh" in the Arabic signify precisely the expiration and inspiration of an ass. Abu Sa'id al-Khadri says there is a smoky curtain round heU composed of four walls, and the breadth of every wall is a forty years' journey. " Hell," says the Dawn, " shall on the day of judgment be ' brought up.' " This passage is understood by orthodox Mus lims in a literal sense. Jalal interprets, "It shall be moved by seventy thousand halters, every halter being in the hands of seventy thousand angels, and it shall come roaring in its rage." This spiritual traction has been diffusely treated in the Hebrew HeU. So in Furkdn, " As soon as the fire sees the wicked from afar, they shaU hear it ' braying ' : " a forcible expression not commonly retained in translations, but countenanced by the authority of 382 MUSLIM HELL both Milton and Shakespeare. In Ibrahim, or Abraham, it is written of the proud and the con tumacious one: "Before him is hell, and he shall be given the drink of Sadid. This shall he drink by sips, and he will not pleasantly let it pass his throat." Abu Darda said, "Hunger shall be cast upon the fire-folk, and it shall equal what they are in of punishment, and they shaU cry out for help; then will they be holpen with victual from Dari'. Then they will cry out again for help, and they will be holpen with victual of choking, and they wiU remember that in the world they rid them of their choking with drink. So they will cry out again for help from drink, but boiling water shall be raised for them by pothooks of iron." Dari' by the leading Arabic lexicograpers is defined as " a thing more bitter than aloes, more burning than fire, and more fetid than a corpse." In Sad, the name of an Arabic letter, it is written, " Aye, let them taste of boiling water and ghassdk and divers other things of a like kind." The Prophet, according to Abu Sa'id al-Khadri, said, " If a bucket of ghassdk were poured into the world, it would cause all the people in the world to stink." It is variously interpreted. Wahl, in his translation, gives Faulniss- eiter. It bears a generic resemblance to Sadid, which is otherwise explained as a cold, clammy, filthy, and fetid moisture flowing out of the folk of the fire, which cannot be drunk from its coldness, as boiling water cannot be drunk from its heat. The drinking of this boiling water by the damned is compared in Wdki'ah, or the inevitable accident (of the judgment day), to the drinking of female camels distraught with thirst. Another food in heU is of Zakkum, the worst MUSLIM HELL 383 of trees, which is prepared expressly for the fellows of the fire. No tree more bitter is known in the flora of Arabia. Thrice is Zakkum mentioned in the Holy Scripture. It has been designed, says the Kur&n, as an occasion for dispute among the unjust. HeU fire, they will say, burns trees ; how, then, can this tree spring from the bottom of hell? If one drop from it, says a tradition, were to fall into the habitation of the world, verily it would corrupt all the victuals of the folk of the earth. How, then, will it be for him whose food is Zakkum ? The buds of the tree of Zakkum are like the pates of devils, explained by Jalal of serpents of the foulest favour. As devils are unknown, it has been urged that the comparison is defective. " But," said Abu Ubaida Mamar, " God spoke to the Arabs after their own style," and supports his opinion by a verse of Amr al-Kais, "WUl he slay me, me of whom swords are the bedfellows, and arrows blue steel-pointed like the teeth of ghouls?" And the Arabs never have seen a ghoul, but since the word ghoul frightened them, they were threatened therewith. Al-Kazwini, however, says several of the Companions of the Prophet on a certain day saw ghouls, and one of them, 'Amr, struck at a ghoul with his sword. Zakkum may be derived from the Jews. In the Talmudic treatise Succah it is written, "There are two palm trees in the vaUey of the children of Hinnom, and from between them smoke goes up, and those are the palms of the Har Barzel, or mountain of iron, and here is the entrance to hell." In heU, too, is Sa'ud, a lofty hill of fire. In the Covered it is written, "I wiU drive him up Sa'ud." Abu Sa'id, quoting the Prophet, said, " He shaU climb 384 MUSLIM HELL up it for seventy autumns, and then shaU be cast down again, and so on for ever." " The damned," says the Believers, " shall grin in the fire." Abu Sa'id has explained the grin: "Their upper lips shaU be shrivelled till they reach the middle of their heads, and their lower lips shall be relaxed till they strike their navels. In the Inevitable, the unbeliever is bound in a chain of seventy cubits. Its length is increased by a saying of the Sanctified, commemor ated by 'Abd Allah Ibn 'Umar. "If a ball of lead like this "¦ — and he pointed to his skull — " were thrown from the heavens to the earth, a journey of five hundred years, it would reach the earth before night ; but if it were thrown from the top of this chain, it would be forty autumns, travelling night and day, before it reached its rest and bottom." HudhaKah says : " I swear by God, the depth of hell is seventy years' journey." " The fellows of the fire," it is written in al-'Ardf, "shall cry to the fellows of paradise, 'Pour upon us some water, or of that which God hath given you.' They shall answer, ' Truly God hath forbidden such to unbelievers.'" Of this incident, recalling the Christian story of Dives and Lazarus, Baidawi makes use to show that Jannah, or the garden, or paradise, is situated physically above the fire. " They shall remain for ever therein." That is the fate of all who are not Muslims — of the Jews, for instance, who, in the Cow, say the "fire shall touch us only for numbered days." Forty, as Jalal explains, according to the days their fathers worshipped the caK. But Muslims shall all escape after a period suited to their works, not less than nine hundred, and not greater than seven thousand, years. Their skins, MUSLIM HELL 385 indeed, according to tradition, shall be scorched black, but the place of prostration of their knees and foreheads, or other parts of their body which touch the ground in prayer, shall be white, for the fire shaU have no power over them, and by these they shall be known. Some suppose that the fire shaU be damped for them, and the fierceness of its flames abated. Others declare they shall be cast into a deep sleep during the whole duration of their sojourn in Jahannam. But, be this as it may, their smoke and filth shaU at last be washed from them — again a loan from the Hebrews — by the waters of life of one of the celestial rivers, and they shall enter paradise whiter than pearls. From the repeated expression in the Kuran, "Verily I wiU fiU hell with you," the orthodox suppose that this place wUl be quite full on the day of judgment. On that day, says Kdf, the name of an Arabic letter, we wUl say to heU, "Art thou full?" and it shall say, " Is there any augment ? " Anas explains, hell wUl continually receive, and say thus until the Lord of glory puts His foot in it, then its parts wUl be contracted, and it wiU cry, " Enough ! enough ! enough ! by Thy glory, and by Thy munificence ! " This wiU take place, according to Abu Hurairah, on an occasion of a dispute between the fire and paradise. As for a private pique Uranus placed in hell his children, and as one of them, Saturn, placed in hell Uranus, and as Jupiter is said to have in his turn placed in hell Saturn, so Muhammad — in common with the good men of other faiths — has not hesitated to place in hell his own particular foes. For instance, his uncle 'Abd al-Uzza, surnamed by the Prophet c c 386 MUSLIM HELL Abu Lahab, or the Father of the Flame, in explanatory anticipation of his after life, has a Surah consecrated to him, and caUed by that title, in which it is said not only that he shall be burned, but his wife also, with a rope of twisted palm-fibre round her neck. Muhammad in his turn, it will be remembered — and thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges — is placed by Dante in the eighth limbo or circle of hell, the Malebolge. In al-Mutaffifin, or the Givers of Short Measure, it is said, " One day those who believe shall laugh the infidels to scorn, those on their bridal beds shall behold " Here the sacred text abruptly stops. But Baidawi explains, they shall behold the unbelievers ignominiously driven into the fire. And it is declared that a door shall be shown unto the damned, opening into Jannah or paradise, and it shall be said unto them, " Go forth into it " ; then when they come close to this door, it shall be suddenly shut in their faces, and then the believers in heaven will laugh. Such laughter may be agreeably accompanied by that extrusion of the tongue which denotes as a sort of hallmark the hate of the Buddhist devil. Such laughter recalls some mirth in the Christian creed. And such laughter is but an echo of David's prayer that the eyes of his foe might be darkened, his habitation be desolate, his children vagabonds and his wife a widow ; that his posterity might be cut off, and himself blotted out of the book of the living ; that none might extend mercy unto him, and that Satan might stand at his right hand. Abu Muhammad al-Husain Ibn Mas'ud Ibn Muham mad, more generally known by the title of al-Farra (the Fur Seller) al-Baghawi (of Bagh, a town in MUSLIM HELL 387 Khorasan), who died in the year of the Hijrah 516, corresponding with a.d. 1122, was a doctor of the sect of al-Shdfi, a Sea of Knowledge. This Imam was far from a luxurious liver. His ordinary meal was a little dry bread, but as this was regarded by some as an affectation of abstinence, he added thereto olive . oil. He composed a work supplementary to the Kuran ,and holding the second degree of authority, entitled Masabih al-Sunan, or Lanterns of Traditions, the great collection of orthodox or Sunnite sentences attributed to the Prophet. This work was afterwards remodelled by the Shaikh Wali al-Din Abu 'Abd Allah Muhammad Ibn 'Abd Allah al-Khatib, and caUed by him Mishcdt al-Masdbih, or the Niche for the Lanterns. It is a contracted recension with some additions, and was finished a.h. 737. Here may be found the numerous Asdnid, feeble, fair, and genuine, weak, respectable, and authentic, the sayings, with their various degrees of authority, which have been attributed to the Prophet by the primitive Fathers of the Faith. Of these, some concerned with hell may interest the reader. Abu Hurairah, or the Father of the Kitten, said the Apostle of God, upon whom be blessing and peace, said the fire of the world is one part in seventy of the fire of hell. It was then answered, " 0 Apostle of God ! surely our fire is sufficient." The Apostle said, "it shall be exceeded by sixty-nine parts, every one of them equal to the fire of this world." Something of this sort will be found in Abraham Gikatilla's Garden of the Nut. According to Abu Hurairah, the fire of hell burnt for a thousand years tiU it became red, then for another thousand till it became white, then for 388 MUSLIM HELL another thousand till it became black. This change of colour is reported in Abkath Rocliel and other Hebrew books. It is now in the Miltonic condition of no hght but darkness visible. Abii Hasan said Abu Hurairah said the Prophet said on the day of the resurrection sun and moon will be hurled into the fire like two cheeses. " What are the faults of the pair of them ? " asked al-Hasan. Abu Hurairah rephed, "I inform you from the prophet of God." Al-Hasan was then silent. Usamah ben Zaid said, the Apostle of God — may God bless and preserve him — said on the day of resurrection a man wUl be brought and cast into the fire, and his bowels wiU fall therein, and he will walk round and tread on them like an ass in a miU tUl they become like flour. Then the inf ernals wiU collect around him and say, " What are you about ? did you not order us in the lawful and forbid us in the unlaAv- ful ? " And he wUl say, " I ordered you in the lawful, but did not do it myself ; and I forbade you the unlawful, and I myself did it." And his Majesty mentioned in the Khutbah, or Friday Sermon, that there will be on the day of resurrection a standard for every breaker of his promise by which he shall be known ; but for the position of this standard the reader must consult the tradition itseK. In the matter of Purification the Prophet said he who leaves one hair without washing— under certain circumstances — will be punished in hell accordingly. " On this account," said the Prophet, " I hate the hair of my head, and shave off the whole of it." A party on the Mecca road neglected through haste to wet the under part of their feet in the wadu or ablution for afternoon prayer. " Alas," said the Prophet, " for the MUSLIM HELL 389 soles of those feet, for they will be in the fire of hell." One mudd, about two pints, of water is sufficient, nor is this water denied if a cat drink of it. " May your two hands be rubbed in earth" was said in reprehension of a women who had conceived an erroneous idea on a subject related to this. The legal distribution of charity is strictly enjoined. Those who possess gold and silver and yet give not what is due shaU be punished with plates of gold and sUver heated in hell and appUed to their forehead, side, and back, these being the parts which they turned away from the supplicant. The plates wiU be continuaUy reheated, as a blacksmith heats iron on a forge. They who possess wealth without charity shaU find their riches on the day of resurrection a serpent roUed hke a necklace about their neck. This serpent wUl have no hair on his head — a baldness which proves him to be both poisonous and long- lived — and wUl have two black spots upon his eyes, and wUl seize the jawbones of him damned for avarice, and say, " I am the wealth from which thou didst not separate alms." An improper distribution by a testa mentary bequest has also its allotted suffering. A man and a woman practised obedience to Allah for six consecutive years ; after that they died, and injured others by their wUl : therefore heU was fit for them. Two women approached the Prophet, each having a bracelet of gold. He enquired, "Do ye perform the alms for these." They answered, "We do not." He asked, "Do ye wish that God should cause you to wear fire for them." They said " No." Then said the Prophet, " Perform the alms for them," 390 MUSLIM HELL Bacon, writing of good-nature and quoting Bus- bechius, apparently from memory, reports of the Turks that they are kind to beasts, and give alms to dogs and birds, insomuch that a Christian boy in Constantinople had like to have been stoned for gagging, in a waggishness, a long-biUed fowl. The religion of Islam is sublimed by its tender solicitude for brutes. A proud, cruel person, the owner of many camels, and treating them with unkindness, the largest and fattest of those camels will tread on him and bite him on the day of resurrection. The Prophet's favourite camel, Ghazba, has, it is weU known, a home in Paradise. The proprietor of bullocks and goats behaving unjustly to them will be stricken by their horns. It was asked of the Prophet what about asses. "I have received," answered his Highness, "nothing in particular about asses, but this sign alone, Whoso does them an atom of evU will see it and find its punishment. In the ' Hour ' the souls of the damned among the brutes will be changed to dust, and the wicked will cry, ' Would to God we were dust also ! ' " Another ornament of the Muslim faith is its hatred of hypocrisy. This has been seen in the order of the hells. It also appears in the Traditions. On the day of resurrection it will be asked of the soir-disant martyrs, "What was your gratitude for the Book?" They will answer, " We were slain in Thy cause." But it will be said to them, " Ye lie ; nay, it was in order to extol your own courage." And they will be dragged upon their faces into the fire. And of the learned, the Ulamd, it will be asked, " What was your gratitude for the Book." They will answer, "We read it to please Thee." But it will be said to them, " Ye lie ; but that people might call you learned," And they also will MUSLIM HELL 391 be dragged upon their faces into hell fire. And thus also will be punished those who did alms and fasted, that they might have glory and be seen of men. "Those who approach God with their lips, while their hearts are far from him, verily God hath cursed them and prepared for' them a fierce fire wherein they shaU remain always. They shall find no patron nor defender. On the day wherein their faces shall be rolled in hell fire, they shall say, 0 that we had obeyed God, and obeyed His Apostle ! " A dream of Muhammad is mentioned in the tradi tions remarkable for a barbaric and unfashionable disapprobation of such falsehood and deceit as is essential to the existence of social civility. His Highness beheld a man with an iron hook hook ing another in one lip and splitting it therewith to the back of his neck, and then he did the same with his other lip. In the meantime the first lip was healed, and he tore it again, and thus he kept leaping from one lip to the other. And it was told the Prophet, liars will be treated thus to the day of resurrection. Again, he saw one man breaking the head of another with a stone, then he rolled along the stone and followed it, and the man's head healed while he followed the stone. And then he began breaking his head again. And it was told the Prophet that the unfortunate was one who did not repeat the Kuran by night nor practise it by day. And then we find a receiver of usury immersed in a river of blood, and a man on the bank of that river threw stones in his face whenever he attempted to get out of it. All flesh which is nourished by bribery deserves the fire. His Highness said, " Whosoever is fed with 392 MUSLIM HELL usury is worthy of hell." For we read in the Cow : " They who devour usury shall not arise but as he ariseth whom Satan hath infected by a touch." The usurer, as a Sabbath-breaker, seeing that his plough goes every Sunday, may, according to some minds, merit the touch of Satan ; but it is strange — if aught remains for the reader still strange — to find the artist suffering a kindred sorrow. Yet for him will there be a piece of hell fire with two eyes to see with, and two ears to hear with, and a tongue to speak with ; and it will say, " God has appointed me to burn three persons — the proud, those who ascribe partners to God, and painters." As for the proud, they wUl be raised up on the day of resurrection like small ants in the shape of men, and will be disgraced on aU four sides, and will be driven toward the prison which is in hell, the name of which is Baidast, or despair ; and hell fire will take them, and they will be given to drink of the yellow water of the inf ernals. Equally remarkable with the appearance of the painter in hell is that of the musician. We are told that whistling (Mucd) was an idolatrous ceremony of the Kuraish — a tribe which has given its name to one of the Suras of the Kuran — in the days of ignorance, in the temple of Mecca. It is certain that this evil habit of selfish barbarism, the gross and Illiberal delight of the looby and the butcher boy, is generally held unlawful by the Muslim of the present time. The hatred with which the Prophet regarded the practice may be seen in the Spoils, where he places this musical folk in hell : " Their prayer at the House is no other than whistling and clapping of their hands. Taste, therefore, the punishment, for that ye have been unbelievers." MUSLIM HELL 393 The day of resurrection, according to some authori ties, wiU last fifty thousand years, but according to others a much shorter period. Plenary and perfect agreement seems among mankind on any — even the most important — subject impossible; and Rabelais' Morris dance of Heretics may be found in the Catalogue of Books of the Muslim as of the Christian library. In one matter, however, there seems to be no discord ance or contrariety of opinion. In this the true band of unity is unbroken. All men will allow that the infernals sweat. The river of exudation has varied depths; but the worst of the damned sink therein up to their ears. This stream has two chief fountains : one the vast concourse of the culprits ; the other the proximity of the sun. For this fiery orb wiU not be farther removed from the infidels than a bodkin's length. The reader will recall the withdrawing of the solar sheath in the theology of the Hebrews. Eastern eloquence has little more sublime than the impassioned description — in the original — of the Day of Judgment or the Hour. " In that day one soul shaU be weak to aid another, and all sovereignty shaU be with God. And it shall be said to the infidels, ' This is what ye deemed a lie.' In that day thou shalt see men drunken, and yet they are not drunken ; and the suckling woman shall forsake her sucking child. In that day the sun shall be folded up, and the stars shaU fall, and the seas shall boil, and the leaves of the book shall be unrolled. In that day shall the heaven be exhausted and hell made to blaze, and earth cast out what was in her and become empty, and the graves be turned upside down. Who shall teach thee what the Day of Doom 394 MUSLIM HELL is ? Once more, who shall teach thee what is the Day of Doom ? " And this is but a feeble version of the inspiration of the Arabic, of which the orthodox declare every translation unfaithful. On that day a strange beast, Ddbbat ul ard, or the reptile of the earth, will make its first appearance, and for that day only. A composite beast sixty cubits high or long, related in structure to the bull, cat, hog, elephant, ostrich, tiger, and ass, she will scratch on the faces of the damned — faces darkened with that deepest dark of night which precedes the dawn — the letters K F R, the Arabic equivalent for infidel. With the rod of Moses she will smite the behever, and the unbeliever with the seal of Solomon. That beast will speak Arabic and show the vanity of all faiths but Islam. There is a tradition in the matter of face scratching — not necessarily or exclusively for women — thSt he who begs of people, having that which makes him in no need, will in the Hour scratch his own face with his nails, and dig his skin with a bodkin. Al Baidawi says that discretory marks will be fixed on ten sorts of the damned. The backbiters will appear as apes ; oppressors enriched by oppression as swine. Usurers will have their heads reversed and also their feet. The faces of unjust judges will be blackened and become blind. The self-glorious will be deaf. The doctors whose deeds contradict their words will gnaw their tongues lolling over their breasts, and blood will flow from their mouths as slaver. Those who have injured their neighbours will be maimed as to their feet and hands. False informers will be fixed to the trunks of palm-trees. The voluptuous will smell as a putrid body. The proud will be clad in clothes of pitch. MUSLIM HELL 395 It is written God is a swKt accountant. Therefore in the trial of the future will be no delay. But the exact duration is disputed. Some think half a day, others the space between the two milkings of a she- camel, others opine no longer than while a man may milk an ewe, and yet others the twinkling of an eye. The book of the actions of their life will be given to the wicked in their left hand, which will be bound behind their back. The Western reader will remember that the left hand is alone employed for what are commonly considered the meaner offices of nature. Infidels among the Jinn, including the devil, will be punished eternaUy ; yet even for these some suppose a loophole of escape. " Abide these in hell for ever," says more than once the Bible of Islam, " unless as God shaU wiU — verily thy Lord is wise." It is written of hell's denizens, " They shall have no defender against God." And yet in a tradition full of pathetic interest, the Muslims set free from hell will intercede for .their brothers remaining therein. They will say, " 0 our Cherisher, they used to say prayers with us and keep fast and pilgrimage." Then will they be permitted to bring out all those in whose hearts is one dinar of right, and God will say, " Return and bring out those with half a dinar." Then they wiU bring out great numbers. And God will say, "Bring out those in whose hearts you find a grain of mustard seed of Iman, and those wherein is the weight of one ant of good." Then they wiU say, " 0 our Cherisher, we have not left a single one possessing the weight of one ant of good in the fire of hell." And Abu Hurairah said two of the fellows of the fire will com plain more than the rest, and God wiU say, " Bring out those two," and wiU ask them ' Why do you complain 396 MUSLIM HELL so very much?'" They will say "That you might have mercy." And God will say, " Verily, my mercy is this that you return to the fire." And one wiU go and God will make it cool and safe for him, and the pther will remain. And God will ask the reason, and he will answer, " 0 my Cherisher, my hope is that you will not send me back into the fire after having brought me out of it." And God will say, " For you is what you hope." And according to another author ity a tribe through intercession will come out of the fire like white grass, which is like cotton. ¦ The reader has heard something like this before in the Hebrew Hell, but what follows is not to be found in either Catholic or Hebrew creed. For it is said that on the day of resurrection God will give a Jew or a Christian to every Muslim, and will say, " This Jew or this Christian is the means of your redemption from hell." Even for a woman sending three chUdren before her there will be a veil to prevent her entering the fire — nay, a premature birth disputes with God when He brings its parent into the fire, and the mother will be drawn up by its navel cord into Paradise. It is for God to redeem from hell in the month Ramadhan, and in every night of that month is this freeing from the fire. Also, a person who keeps a day's fast God removes from hell as far as a crow flies from its first being fledged until it expires at a great age. Truly God has made a door for repentance in hell, the breadth of which is seventy years' journey, nor will this door be shut until the sun rises in the west. When Fatimah, the Prophet's daughter, passes over Sirdt, one end of her veU will be attached to the Bridge in the Plain of Judgment, and the other end she will take with her into Paradise. Then a voice MUSLIM HELL 397 will be heard, "0 ye friends of Fatimah, couple yourselves to the fringe of her veil." And a thousand mUlion souls will thus be preserved from hell. According to Nu'man Ibn Bashir, the lightest of punishments in heU is his whose shoes and latchets of fire cause his brain to boil like a pipkin ; and according to Ibn 'Abbas the lightest punished of the folk of the fire is Abu Talib, an uncle of Muhammad, and he is shod with a pair of shoes affecting his head in such a manner. Some of the infernals, according to Samurah ¦ Ibn Jundub, the fire wUl catch up to their ankles, some of them up to their knees, some of them up to their waistbands, and some of them up to their collar-bones. The most luxurious of this world's folk, according to Anas, will be dipped once into the fire on the day of resurrection, and it will be said to every one of them, " 0 son of Adam, hast thou seen any good thing at all ? Has the pleasant ever passed by thee ? " And he wUl answer "No, by God ! 0 my master." Also, on the day of judgment Allah will say to the lightest punished of the folk of the fire, " If thou hadst aught what the earth holds, wouldst thou redeem thyself therewith ? " He wiU answer "Yea." Then AUah will say, "I intended for thee hghter than this, when thou wert in Adam's back, that thou shouldst not associate with me aught, but thou hast disobeyed." According to 'Abd AUah Ibn al-Harith, there are in hell ', serpents like Bactrian camels with two humps. When one of them bites a single bite the infernal feels its venom for forty autumns. There are also in hell scorpions like saddled mules, whose bites have the same sad effect as those of the serpents. According to Abu Hurairah, when God created the 398 MUSLIM HELL fire he said, " 0 Gabriel ! go and look thereon." So Gabriel went and looked, and returned and said, " 0 Lord ! by Thy glory none who hear thereof will enter therein." Whereupon God surrounded the fire with lusts and objects of concupiscence, and said again, " 0 Gabriel, go and look thereon." So he went and looked, and returned and said, " 0 Lord, by Thy glory I fear that not one will be left but enters therein." According to Anas, the Prophet one day acted as Imam, or parson, and when he ascended the Mimbar, or pulpit, he pointed with his hand towards the Kiblah, or the point of direction in prayer of the mosque, and said, " I was shown just now, while praying for you, paradise and the fire, likened upon the face of this wall, and only this day have I seen the good and the evil." The infernals, according to Ibn 'Umar, will all be very fine and large and fat in the fire ; so much so that between the lobes of the ears of one of them and his shoulders is a journey of seven hundred years. According to Abu Hurairah, the distance between the shoulders of an infidel in the fire is a three days' journey to a rider galloping all the way. He will trail his tongue one or two parasangs or leagues, so that men shall tread thereon. His grinders will be like Mount Uhud ; the thickness of his skin will be seventy cubits. This latter peculiarity would seem to be rather an advantage for the infernal. Abu Hurairah perhaps on this account has reduced the thickness to forty-two cubits. According to the same authority, the thigh of an infidel will be like Mount Baida, and his buttocks as the distance from Maccah to Madinah. An anonymous tradition declares that his skin will be swollen to the extent of a seven nights' journey. MUSLIM HELL 399 According to Anas, the Prophet said, " Weep, 0 men ! and if ye are not able yet strive to weep. Verily the fire folk weep in the fire with tears running like rivulets down their faces, and their eyes are sore, and'after their tears are cut off blood flows. Truly vessels would float were they cast thereon." Abu Burdah relates from his father, that there is a certain valley or ivddi in hell called Habhab, a word strictly signKying a light and swKt wolf. This valley is the habitation of the supercilious. According to Jabir, the Prophet said, "I was shown the fire, and I saw in it a woman of the children of Israel, who was in pain for a cat of hers, which she had tied up and fed it not, and permitted it not to eat of the reptiles (or sparrows) of the earth, till it died of hunger." In a Persian work called the Hay at al-Kulub, or Life of Hearts, written by the learned Mulla, Muham mad Bakir Majlisi, may be found some later traditions concerning hell. Herein is a description of the Mi'rdj, or the famous Night of Ascent, when the Prophet ascended to God through the seven stages of the heavens. Paul says he knew a man in Christ caught up to the third heaven. This man, unlike Muham mad, refused to communicate what he saw on that exceptional occasion. Nor is it clear whether his ascent was spiritual or corporeal. " Whether in the body I cannot tell, or whether out of the body I cannot tell," says Paul ; " God knoweth." But in the case of Muhammad, successive and respectable traditions, both private and public, show that his ascent was in the body, and not, as the Zanddikiyah falsely assert, in the spirit without the body, in vigil and not in sleep. It cannot, therefore, be compared with the dream of Jacob, but resembles rather the 400 MUSLIM HELL vision of the four beasts and the Ancient of days of Daniel, or the waking dream of the wheels of Ezekiel. On the night of the Mi'rdj, says the Imam S&dik, the angels Jibrail and Micail, the Arabic names of Gabriel and Michael, and Israfil, the angel of death, brought to Muhammad the celebrated beast Burdk. Burdk is described as bigger than an ass, but smaller than a camel, like an ox, but with a human face. His eyes are emeralds, and his breast perspires pearls. He is possessed of reason, and his speed is such that (if God permitted him) he could circuit this world and the next in one heat. The swiftness of Puck, who boasted to his master Oberon that he would put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes, compared with the velocity of Burdk, is as the passage of an old-world stage coach to a modern express train. While one of the angels holds Burdk's bridle, another holds the stirrup, and the third arranges the clothes of the Prophet after mounting. On his way upwards Muhammad hears a terrible noise. This is afterwards explained by Jibrail to be the dash of a stone, which had been cast seventy years before from the brink of heU, and had on the night of the Mi'rdj at length reached its bottom. After this, says the Imdm, the Prophet never smUed again. Precisely like that historic Henry who died from a surfeit of lampreys. Muhammad next meets a most gigantic angel with an ugly look and signs of anger in his countenance. This, explains Jibrail, is the storekeeper of hell, whose counten ance has never relaxed its severity from the day on which his Lord made him master of this dread ful world. Then Muhammad sees a company with MUSLIM HELL 401 lips like those of a camel. Angels were cutting gobbets of flesh from their sides, and casting them into their mouths. " Who," he asks his guide, as iEneas asks the Sibyl, or Dante Virgil — "who are these?" "They are," Jibrail replies, "those who winked, and sought out the blemishes of the believers." Passing on, and seeing another crew- beating their breasts with stones, he is told that these are they who went to sleep without uttering the Namdzi Khuftan, or the Prayer of Bedtime. Others he sees, into whose mouth angels were pouring fire which came out at their hinder parts — an incident of a similarly delicate character adorns the vision of S. Francis : these are they who devoured the property of orphans unjustly, as it is written in the Kuran in Women, " They who eat the property of orphans unjustly, they shall surely eat fire in their bellies, and they shall be roasted in the flame." Some, who were unable to rise from the magnificence of their paunches, were usurers, who in the Believers are likened unto the people of Fir'un (Pharaoh), " Every morning and evening they shall be exposed to the fire." Upon women the Prophet is hard. On the day of Fitr or relaxation of fasting of the Muslim Lent, the Chosen One on his way to Idgah passed by some women and said, " 0 Women, verily the most of you will go to heU: bestow therefore something in the way of God." The women inquired the reason of their future punishment. " Because," replied the Prophet, "ye are abusive and ungrateful, defective in faith and defective in understanding ; and yet there is not your equal in captivating men of the most exalted intelligence. There are two tribes of the people of DD 402 MUSLIM HELL hell, which " said the Prophet " I have not seen, nor will I see — the one a tribe with whips in their hands like cows' tails, or the cruel publicans and tax- gatherers, the other a concourse of women who wear thin attire through which their bodies appear and allure men to approach them, who incline towards men in their own hearts, having braided their hair like the hump upon the back of a Bukhti camel, • which hangs down from fatness." These will not enter Paradise nor perceive its smell, though that smell is perceived at an amazing distance. In the Life of Hearts it is related on the authority of the Imam Taki, that the Commander of the Faithful with his wife Fatimah went one day to call on the Prophet, and found him copiously weep ing. Whereupon 'Ali said, "May my father and my mother be thy ransom, 0 Prophet of God! What is the cause of thy weeping ? " He answered, " 0 'Ali, in the night in which I was borne to heaven, I saw some women of my people in great punish ment, and my weeping is on account of these. I saw a woman hanging by the hair of her head, and her brains bubbled. I saw a woman hanging by her tongue, and the boiling water of heU was being poured down her gullet. I saw a woman eating the flesh of her own body, and underneath her the fire was flaming. I saw a woman bound hands and feet together, and serpents and scorpions were set in authority over her. I saw a woman deaf and dumb and blind, encased in a coffin of fire, and her brains came out from her nose, and her body was falling to bits from (khura) gangrene and from leprosy." From another woman the flesh was being cut off both before and behind with fiery scissors; another MUSLIM HELL 403 ate with burning hands her own bowels ; another, with the head of a pig and the body of an ass, was punished in a thousand different ways ; as to another in the form of a dog, fire entered her fundament and issued from her mouth, what time angels beat her head and body with battleaxes red hot. Having heard all this and more than can be here with proper decorum divulged, Fatimah said, "0 my beloved and hght of my eyes ! tell me what were the deeds and courses of action of these women, that God submitted them to such punishment's ? " His Majesty the Sanctified replied, ' 0 most revered daughter, the woman hanging by her hair did not conceal it from the sight of men ; the woman hanging by her tongue caused torment therewith to her husband. The woman eating her own flesh denied her husband his conjugal rights ; she bound hand and feet gadded about without her husband's consent, and omitted some forms of customary ablution ; she in the coffin was an adulteress ; she who suffered from the scissors showed herself to men to excite their love ; she who ate her own entrails was a pimp ; she with the head of a pig was a tale-bearer and a liar ; and she in the shape of a dog was a professional singer or mourner at funerals. Woe be it," concluded the Prophet, "to the woman who angers her husband, and sweet is the state of her who contents him ! " But repentance avaUs much, for according to 'Abd Allah Ibn Mas'ud, the Prophet said there is no Muslim servant who emits tears from his eyes and they trickle down his cheeks, even though they be no bigger than the head of a fly, for the fear of God, but he wUl forbid him hell fire. Nevertheless, the numbers of the damned will be large. According to 404 MUSLIM HELL 'Abd Allah Ibn 'Amr, the Prophet said, "God wiU say, Bring out those who are for the fire, and the angel will ask how many ? And God will answer, Of every thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine." The venue of hell is uncertain. There are seven earths in successive layers — the first tenanted by men, beasts, and Jinn ; the second by the suffocating wind which destroyed the tribe of 'Ad ; the third by the stones referred to in the Coiv and the Prohibition as the fuel of the fire, stones which are explained by Jalal to be idols or statues ; the fourth by the sulphur of hell ; the fifth by its serpents ; the sixth by its scorpions, black, as big as mules, with tails like spears ; and the seventh by Iblis and his companions. Some locate hell in this seventh earth ; others declare it to be beneath this earth, and beneath the seas of darkness which are below it, whose number is unknown. The Apologetic Dictionary of Jaugey says every one is free to form an opinion on this subject, pourvu qu'elle soit raisonnable. There are of hell, keepers and under-keepers. " Over it," says the Covered, " are nineteen; we have made none save angels keepers of the fire." These angels are declared in the Prohibition to be fierce and violent. The damned cry to them, but without avail, " Call on your Lord, that He would lighten for us our punishment for a single day." The head keeper is Malic— possibly connected with the Ammonite Molec or Moloch. In the Golden Ornaments it is said that the damned will cry out to him, " 0 Malic, that thy Lord would make an end of us." And according to al-A'mfish he will answer— but not tiU after a thousand years — " Verily you must endure." And Baidawi says there is a reading, Mali, intended to MUSLIM HELL 405 show the weakness of the damned in their inability to enunciate the whole of the head-keeper's name. In al-'Alak, or the Clotted Blood— from which, according to Yahya, all save Adam and Eve and Jesus were created — there is mention of the Zabdniyah, or under-keepers. These are they whose duty it is to cast the damned into the fire. But according to the Jdhathiyah, to be hereafter con sidered, their office is a sinecure. "I will certainly fill hell with Jinn and men to gether," says Hiid, a chapter named after the apostle of the Adites, supposed by Geiger to be the Eber of the Old Testament. " Enter," says al-Ardf, " with the people who have preceded you, of Jinn and of men, into the fire." These Jinn lead to a considera tion of the demonology of Islam. This, again, is commonly derived from Jewish sources. The ancient Arab cult seems also indebted to Persian theology. The Jinn, genii, or Persian Divs, familiar to most readers through the so-called Arabian Nights, were created, according to some authorities, two thousand years before Adam. Others say they were begotten by Adam and born of Eve after their expulsion from Eden. Others again give them a common ancestor Jdnn. Some of them are good and others altogether naughty, hke mankind. They have, like mankind) their sects and heresies. The Shaitdns are evil Jinn. Many of these were converted by Sulaimdn or Solomon to the true faith. They may boast of the honour of having — like the cow, the bee, the ant, the spider, the elephant, and the fig — a Surah called by their name. As men were created of earth, and angels of light, so were the Jinn created of smokeless fire. The 406 MUSLIM HELL mountain of Kdf, which surrounds the circumambient ocean, is their chief mansion ; what is beyond this mountain God and His Messenger know best. They also inhabit baths, burial-grounds, ovens, ruins, wells, and privies. Th3y are aerial, terrestrial, and marine, and of varied shapes. They have a horror of Hadid or iron. There is a tradition that there are five classes of them. The Jdnn are the least powerful, then come the Jinn properly so called, the Shaitdns, the 'Afrits — one of these in the Ant offers to bring Solomon the throne of Balkis, Queen of Sab& — and lastly the dominant class of Mdrids. These corre spond with the Persian Narahs. The good Jinn are called in Persian Paris, or winged. It is curious that the latter word is usually applied to females, while Narahs is the term for males. The Jinn survive men, but die before the resurrection. Many of them are, however, kiUed before this period. They may be slain by a Shihdb, or shooting star, or wounded, in which case their blood, which is of fire, bursts forth from their veins, and consumes them to ashes. This was the fate, though after some delay, of the genie — as Galland calls him, the grandson of the Devil, who is labelled by Lane an 'Efreet — in the Story of the Second Calendar. Their death by a Shihdb seems borrowed from the Talmudic treatise Chagigah, where we read that shooting stars are hurled against the Shedim or devils, who steal a hearing of divine matters from behind a certain veil. This petty larceny is also mentioned in the Kuran. The supreme devil, the Christian Lucifer, the spirit once called ' Azazil, the prince of the apostate angels, the Td'us or Peacock of the Jinn, said by Jalal al- Din to be their father, but by others to be a MUSLIM HELL 40? descendant of Jann, is Iblis. He is fully as important in Muslim theology as the Christian Devil, who has — however dignified by the Revised Version — been profanely caUed the pUlar of the Christian Church. When the angels were commanded by God to worship Adam on his creation, Iblis alone dis obeyed. In al-'Ardf he is represented saying, " I am better than he : him hast thou created of clay, but me thou hast created of fire." Then was Iblis dismissed from paradise and made one of the contemptible. It is somewhat strange that he was condemned for refusing to do what is most frequently and sternly forbidden in the Kuran. " Fire," says a Persian poet, " which was the origin of the nature and pride of Iblis, shall be for ever the instrument of his pain." But he is respited, at his own request, till the day of resurrection. How far the other devils enjoy this privilege is uncertain ; Christian devils seem to share it. These, in the country of the Gergesenes, according to Matthew, cried out, on meeting Christ, " Art thou come hither to torment us before the time ? " The present abode of Iblis is a subject of contro versy. There are, who set his throne, the 'Arsh Iblis, in the Bahr-al-Muhit, or Circumambient Ocean, some where about the south of Africa. Others say he lives in Sijjin, a place already mentioned, which gives its name to a book in which are engrossed by demons aU the actions of the damned. There is a tradition that Abraham drove Iblis away with stones, when he was for hindering him from sacrificing Ishmael. Hence Iblis is called Rajim, or the Stoned. He is also called Mdrid, or the Rebel. Against him in the vaUey of Mina, near Maccah, pilgrims to the present 408 MUSLIM HELL time throw a specified number of stones. Five sons of Iblis are especially noteworthy : Tir, who is responsible for unlucky accidents ; A 'war, the demon of lubricity ; Ddsim, who creates discord between man and wife ; Sut, who is a liar, and the father of lies ; and Zalambur, who interferes for evil in mercantile transactions. Some especial devils deserve notice, supposed to be bastards of Iblis, and a lady created for him of smokeless fire. These are the Ghul, a female, and the Kutrub, a male cannibal ; the Si'ldh, of hideous form, who plays with men as a cat with mice ; the Ghadddr, a similar being ; the Dalhdn or Dahldn, who rides on an ostrich and eats the ship wrecked ; the Shikk, whose form is that of a half-man divided lengthways, who causes trouble to traveUers; and the Nisnds, genericaUy resembling the Shikk, but having its face in its breast, and a tail like that of a sheep. Al-Kazwini, who gives exact information about these devils, says that it is a native of Hadramut, and the people eat it and its flesh is sweet. Traditions about demons are not wanting. Accord ing to Anas, there is a devil indissolubly connected with every man — he does not say woman, possibly he considered that unnecessary or tautologous. Accord ing to Abu Hurairah, a Shaiian comes into a man like his blood. No one, excepting Mary and her son, is born but the devil touches him at his birth, and he gives his first cry owing to that touch. It is also said that the devil promotes his officers according to their degrees of mischief. " I did not leave him," said one of these officers to Iblis, " till I had separated him from his wife." Whereupon Iblis caused him to draw near and said, " Welcome, 0 most exceUent !" MUSLIM HELL 409 There is a demon called Khinzdb— which being inter preted is bold in villainy— who interferes with devo tion. "When you become aware of him," said the Prophet, " take refuge from him with Allah, and spit thrice over your left shoulder." "I did this," said 'Uthman, " and he departed from me." In the Life of Hearts, already mentioned, there is a story, too long for reproduction, but not devoid of interest, which treating of devils, records how the Prophet read the Ktiran to some Jinn of Ndsibain. On that occasion they appeared like black people in white raiment. Among the Shaitans, says the same book, there is but one believer, and his name is Ham. The story of his conversion is also too long even to condense. But about 'Arfatah, son of Shamrdkh, there is much of interest". First his appearance : he has plenty of hair, a high head, big eyes, and their lids open sideways. 'Ali goes home with him underground. After some time 'Ali reappears from the side of a mountain with his sword dripping blood. He has pronounced the name of God, and slain un assisted eighty thousand rebellious devils, subjects of 'Arfatah. The rest become Muslims. The reader may recaU a somewhat similar wholesale slaughter of a hundred fourscore and five thousand Assyrians by the angel of the Lord. Demons play a considerable part in Firdausi's Shdh Ndmah. In the very commencement of that some what tedious poem we learn how a certain king of the Arabs named Mardds fell into a pit, like that made for the capture of elephants, by the device of Iblis, and died. Zahhac— which being interpreted is a great laugher— a king of the Peshadian dynasty proverbial for bis cruelty, succeeded Mardds, and was 410 MUSLIM HELL approached by Iblis under the disguise of a cook. Iblis indeed — an item for vegetarians — is supposed to have been the first introducer of the eating of animal food. He prepared on a day the back of a caK for Zahhac, and seasoned it with saffron and rose water and old wine and musk. Zahhac was delighted with the repast, and offered to grant the demon cook whatever he should desire. Ibh's asked for one kiss on each of the King's shoulders. After his kisses, Iblis vanished, but serpents sprang up where his mouth had been. It was useless to cut them off — they hurtled forth again like the heads of the hydra. The only remedy was to gn^e them the brains of men to eat, which food Iblis, in another shape, told the King would make them die. Now the object of the devil in this business, says the historian, was to dispeople the world. The poets deal with devils as with hell, according to their wonted poetic licence of irreverence. In the Boston of Sadi we read that the key of the door of Dozakh is the prayer which is made long in the eyes of men. " If," says the poet, " your way tends anywhere but to God, your prayer carpet will be spread for you in the fire." The quickness of the passage from life to hell is thus shown by the same author. A man of black deeds fell from a ladder. " I heard that with a breath he gave up his soul to God." His son took to weeping for some days, and then for some days to sitting in the society of his friends. He saw his father in a dream, and asked concerning his state. "How," inquired he, "did you» escape from the resurrection and the interrogation ? " He replied, " 0 my son ! ask not my story. Straight down from my ladder I fell mto Dozakh." In the MUSLIM ttELL 411 Oulistdn one of the pious ones sees in his dream a king in paradise and a holy man in the fire. " What is the reason," he asked, " of the ascending steps of the former and of the descending steps of the latter?" It was replied to him by a voice from heaven, " The King, through his devotion to Darwishes, is in para dise, but the holy man, through his association with kings, is in heU." In one of the pretty jests in the sixth Kitchen- garden of the Bahdristdn of the Persian poet Jami, we find two rival bards seated together at one table, and anxiously awaiting the cooling of a mess of honey, flour, and water, known as Pdludah. To while away the time, one of them remarks on the hotness of the dish. " It is," he says with con ciliatory courtesy, " hotter than that boiling water and that ghassdk which you will taste to-morrow in heU." Quoth the other in answer, " Sing but over it one of your baits [pieces of poetry], and with that air you wUl obtain relief for yourself and others." And he added the following, expressed poeticaUy in the original as a strophe, " If you were to write one hemistich of your chilly verse on the door of Dozakh, it would take away all the heat from the fire of hell, and change its boiling water into the coldness of ice." In the well-known Persian book, the Dabistdn, or Writing School, of uncertain authorship, but attri buted to the Shaikh Muhammad Muhsin of Cashmir, surnamed Fdni, or the Perishable, a book of which Sir William Jones said some hundred years ago it " contained more recondite learning, more entertain ing history, more beautiful poetry, more ingenuity and wit, more blasphemy and indecency," than he 412 MUSLIM HELL ever saw collected in a single volume, may be found the dogmas of twelve religions with their sects. The five great religions, according to F&ni, are the Hindu, Persian, Hebrew, Christian, and Musulman. "What," he asks, " is the belief of the Muslim philosopher, the Arabic Hakim, or Persian Zirdc, about heU?" "It is," he answers, "elemental nature." Another opinion explains the seven gates of the seven capital sins, or of the principal members of the human body, which are the instruments of sin. " You have seven gates in your body," says a Persian poet, " but the soul has fastened them with seven locks. The keys of these locks are in your hand. Take care not to open them to your own detriment." Fani connects the bridge Sirdt with the mean of the Aristotelian ethics. The same euemeristic ex planation is presented in the Akhldk-i-Jaldli of the Fakir Jani Muhammad As'ad, in the section treating of vices, where hell, on the contrary, is said to be a type of extremes. Perhaps this is the philosophy to be found in Christ's expression, " Strait is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto IKe, and few there be that find it " ; and in the second book of Esdras, in that city of which the " entrance is narrow and set in a dangerous place to fall, like as K there were a fire on the right hand, and on the left deep water, and one only path between them both, so small that there could but one man go there at once." Islam, like Christianity, is divided into various sects, which are far from agreeing in their opinions of hell. According to 'Abd Allah Ibn Mas'ud, the Prophet on one occasion drew a straight line and MUSLIM HELL 413 said, " This is the way of God " ; then he drew all sorts of lines on the right and on the left of this line, and said, " These are ways in every one of which lurks a seductive devil." According to 'Abd Allah Ibn 'Amr, the Prophet said, "Truly the children of Israel were divided into seventy-two sects, but the Muslims will be divided into seventy-three, and all of them wiU be in the fire save one only." They asked, "Which one is that, 0 Prophet of God?" >He answered, " That with which I and my companions are concerned." According to another tradition they asked, " On which shall the sun of salvation shine ? " and Muhammad answered, " On the people of the Sunnah." The Sumnis are the orthodox Muslims, who hold the traditions of the Prophet as supple mentary to the Kuran, and are opposed in much the same fashion as the Catholics to the Protestants, to the heretical Shi'ahs, or dissidents, the followers of 'Ali, destined, as the Sunnis suppose, to damnation. The Sunnis interpret the Kuran literally, the Shi'ahs figuratively. The former wash from the elbow to the fingers, the latter from the fingers to the elbow. In one of the evening prayers of the Christian Liturgy, God who alone works great marvels is asked to pour upon clergy and people the continual dew of His blessing, in order that they may truly please Him. Indeed little short of a miracle seems requisite to bring about that unity of Christian folk which, in its well-pleasing of God, is all in all. It is not, however, only Christian chapels and churches, heretic and catholic, which are divided into sub-kingdoms, classes, orders, genera and species. The mosques of Islam are equally far from a peaceable substitution 414 MUSLIM HELL of catholic unity for internecine dissent. It would indeed seem that the change which fashionable physicians have considered so necessary for the humours of the body, has been thought equally desirable for those of the mind in the matter of modifications of religious belief. It is, however, comfortable to reflect that' there appears to be no counterpart in Islam of those who, as the forty-first article of 1552 has phrased it, " go about to renew the fable of the heretics called Millennarians, who be repugnant to holy scripture, and cast themselves headlong into a Jewish dotage " : only the Prophet — may God bless and preserve him ! — said " in Ramadhan the devils are chained by the leg." But though there appear to be none believing that the pain of hell ceases every thousand years, we find the Riyddiyah, who affect justification by works, the Tdrikiyah, who think it of faith only — it is the old divergence of Paul and James, but the Prophet is on the side of Paul — the Ndrisiyah, who hold it blasphemy for one to say he is better than another, the Ld'iniyah, who curse Ayishah the Prophet's wife, the Tandsukiyah, who maintain that the souls of their grandams may haply inhabit a bird, the Habibiyah, who believe the Creator will never forsake his creature, as a man is unwilling to forsake his friend, the Jdzimiyah, who regard the true religion as unrevealed, and the Akhnasiyah, who opine there is no future punishment at all. The Zindikiyah, nearly related, one may suppose, to these last, go so far even as to doubt the existence of hell, a matter which is shown to the Christian both by common and philosophic reason so clearly, that any proof thereof would be supererogatory. MUSLIM HELL 415 Faith, however, which we all know is a higher faculty than reason, is sufficient " substance " and evidence of the unseen fire. But the Muslim hell has never been painted with such richness or fecundity of colour as adorns that of our own religion, and forms in itself adminicular attestation of the dogma's fundamental truth. The Prophet appears in the tradition to have fixed the number seventy-three, from the Jewish seventy- two, which in its turn may have been derived from the seventy-one attributed to the Christians, origi nating perhaps in the seventy of the Magians. The Firdk, or sects of Islam, are now many more than the number mentioned by Muhammad. It has been even said— but God is aU-knowing — that they exceed those of the Christian religion. The Sunnis call them selves the Ndjiyah, or the Saved, or the Predestined, or the Elect ; but most of the other sects do likewise. The speculations of some of these are sufficiently daring. For instance, the Maimuniyah hold belief in the unseen to be absurd; the Th'alabiyah hold with Epicurus that God is as careless of the deeds of men as one asleep ; the Shaitdniyah deny Satan's per sonality; the Thanawiyah hold with the Magi the •existence of two eternal and contrary principles ; and the Ta'tiliyah, or the Indifferent, not atheists as sometimes supposed, hold the Deity, if Deity there be, inaccessible to human intelligence. The AM al-Tahkik, or People of Truth, are wholly materialists. Such folk have of course no fear of hell. " When we are dead," they say, with the Greek epigrammatist, " let earth be mixed with fire, we care not, for with us it is well." And in the opinion of Bayle it is only the materialists who can maintain this 416 MUSLIM HELL indifference. "For," says he, " in other worlds may be cruelty, hatred, and injustice as here." Phalaris and Nero, Jeffreys, Judas and Torquemada may adorn other states of existence, if such there be. Therefore in the mortality of the soul lies our sole refuge, our sole certainty of ultimate repose. Of heretics in the matter of hell, Jelal-al-din asks in his Masnavi or " couplets," Where is God's hell ? and the answer is, God makes his hell wherever he wills, producing pain and aches in your teeth, so that you say it is a hell, and a serpent's bite. Therefore, concludes the poet, bite not the innocent. The same author introduces a colloquy between a Sunni and a Dahri, an infidel, according to Alghazzali, denying the supremacy of a powerful intelligent Creator, and asserting the eternity of the world. Tbe conversation is too long to quote, but the conclusion is that they both enter a fiery furnace, wherein the materialist philosopher is in a moment burnt to ashes, but the pious Sunni is made even fairer than before. The Wdridiyah say that those who enter the fire will never escape, but no Mumin, or believer, wUl ever enter ; the Jabdiyah, that even believers, if committing heinous crimes, of which they die un repentant, will not only enter hell, but remain therein always. The Hamziyah, a sect by some identified with the Druses of Lebanon, place, like the Khalifiyah, the children of unbelievers — though without fault of action or of faith — in the fire ; which, says Shahrastani, " is the most marvellous con tradiction conceivable." The 'Ajdridiyah affirm, or seem to affirm, for the matter is darkly expressed, that they will inherit paradise. A diversity of creed Hi a MUSLIM HELL 417 in this business is not unknown to Christianity. The Khatabiyah consider hell to be the pain and agony of the world, and the Mansuriyah declare that the fire is a man, namely, the opponent of the Imam of the period, and him we are bidden to hate, as 'Umar and Abu Bakr, may God reward them both ! The Jahmiyah, who deny power in man either efficacious or acquisitive, looking on him in the light of a fossil, say with the Fdniyah and the Harkiyah, that hell, hke paradise, after its people have entered it, will be annihUated and nothing left save God. They explain the " dweUing for ever therein " as an hyperbole, and compare with it " May the King live for ever." The Jdhathiyah accord to the fire a magnetic virtue, by which it draws its own folk to itself, and stands in no need of any Zabdniyah to cast them therein ; and the Jahriyah say that the natures of the damned and the fire wUl in the end become one and the same. Shahrastani, who has composed on the subject a book caUed Milal wanihal, considers Paul the first Christian heretic. For, in the opinion of the Persian phUosopher, Paul, so far from preparing a way for the Gospel and making its paths straight, carried confusion into Christ's work, and made himseK a companion to him, and altered the foundation of his knowledge, and mixed it with his own philosophy and the whisperings of his own heart. And "I have," says Shahrastani, " seen a letter of Paul, which he wrote to the Greeks [? Hebrews], in which he says, ' Surely you suppose the place of Jesus, as the place of the rest of the prophets, but it is not so. For his hke is the like of Melchizedek, and he is the king of Salem, to whom Abraham gave tithes, whereupon he EE 418 MUSLIM HELL blessed Abraham, and anointed his head.' It is strange, then, that the Gospel says, that the Lord — may He be exalted ! — said, ' Truly thou art my only son,' and he who is alone, how can he be likened to any one of flesh ? " The leading Islamiticheresieshave been fully treated in the Sharh al-Muwdkif of Jurjani, whose work is not only a treatise on scholastic theology, 'Ilm al-Kalam, or the Knowledge of the Word, but on metaphysics. 'Ali ibn Muhammad al Jurjani, known as the Sayyid Sharif, says that certain heretics, calling themselves Muslims, deny the eternity of the torments of the fire. These opine that it is of the essence of all corporeal things to end, and that it is impossible for a thing to exist which continues burning for ever. But to this the Sayyid Sharif replies, that God is all-powerful and can do as he likes. Idle arguments of the kind offered by these infidels have been previously encountered in the Christian creed, where they have been at once quashed by both the oecumenical councUs 5 and 8, by the Athanasian Creed, and by the traditional theory and practice of the whole Catholic Church. And albeit a few have dreamed that the pains of the damned may have some moments of respite, '' leur sentiment" as Dr. Jaugey has explained, " est, loin d'etre enfaveur dans I'Eglise." Jurjani divides the heretical tree into eight principal branches, assigning the honour of the first branch to the sect called Mu'taziliydh. Early in the second century of the Hijrah a certain WasU Ibn 'Ata, the inventor of scholastic Muhammadan divinity seceded from the orthodox faith, and his foUowers, called after him the Separatists, or we may say the in. MUSLIM HELL 419 Pharisees, rose up, the Freethinkers of Islam. The Mu'taziliydh are subdivided into some score of per suasions. Among their schismatic peculiarities are their rejection of the Su'dl Kabr, in which they agree with the Kabriyah, of Mizdn and of Sirdt. The giving of the book of good and bad actions — pointedly recaUing Bede's Vision in Mercia — they altogether discountenance. With regard to the Balance, they affirm that the qualities of lightness and heaviness cannot be attributed to actions which are accidents, and that the Kuran in speaking of scales, intended only to express in a figurative way an exact dis pensation of perfect justice. Of the Bridge they say that the walking over it would be a trouble and anxiety to the true behevers, and such there is not for them. They explain away Devils as unruly men, and think the very wicked Muslim may remain in hell for ever, though his punish ment therein wUl be less than that of an infidel. A curious notion of theirs is that the Kuran is a body convertible now into a man, now into a woman, and now into a beast. It must not, however, be supposed that all these heresies have been allowed to rest unanswered. On the contrary, they have one and all been upset and demolished as completely and satisfactorily as the idle quips and quirks of agnostic writers by our own able divines. Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali has composed a book called Munkid min addalal or the Deliverer from Error for this very purpose. The rebuke given by al-Ghazzali to such as with the Persian nobleman scoffed at the Su'dl Kabr is well known. This profane person stuffed the mouth of his dead groom with dry grain, and, opening his grave some time 420 MUSLIM HELL after, found the grain still in his mouth. " So it is clear," he said, " that he never replied to the. Inquisitors." To those who wonder how it is that the howls of the corpse under the sore discomfort of the Su'al Kabr are not heard, al-Ghazzali re plies that in like manner, when Gabriel spoke to Muhammad, none save the Prophet heard his voice. To those who object the bodies of people on crosses, or in the bowels of wild beasts, or burnt and dispersed in air, he replies that certain parts of these bodies yet remain, intended by God's power to preserve sensation. Here, again, the Hebrew theology is recalled, with its little bone Luz, like an almond, at the end of the eighteen vertebrse, the Tarvad or spoon of putrefaction. That bone, as Hadrian — may his bones be broken — learnt from Rabbi Joshua, is moistened with the dew of heaven. It is the incorruptible bone of the human body which decays not in the grave, neither is softened by water, nor consumed by fire, nor ground by a millstone, and when it is beaten on an anvil by a hammer, the anvil and the hammer are both broken, but that bone suffers no damage.. By means of this bone God will compass the resur rection of the whole body. Thus we read in Bereshith Rabba, and in Abkath Rochel, or The Apothecary's Powder, or Poivder of the Merchant, of Rabbi Machir of Toledo. This is the little leaven of the Zobar, which leaveneth the whole lump. The many Arabic loans from the Hebrew attracted the notice of Antonius Hulsius, a Dutch divine, in the middle of the seventeenth century, who, holding the Talmud primarily responsible for the heresies of the Arians, Ebionites, Cerinthians, Photinians, SabeUians, MUSLIM HELL 421 Pelagians, and many more, also speaks of it as a Hydra, to which Muhammad was indebted for many of the heads of his Kur&n. The reader will readily admit the obligations not only of Islam, but of Ghristianity to the Jews ; but will not (it is to be hoped) cast mud into the fountain which fed his thirst, by imitating the courtesy of Hulsius in declaring one of the most holy books of the Hebrews to be a sort of " Trojan horse " or " putidissimarum fabularum colluvies, fsecium receptaculum, et Satanse cloaca." To return to the Resurrection. In the Muwdkif, it is said that it is not remote from reason that life should be restored to particles carried away by the wind, or at the least to some of these, and though this be contrary to custom, yet violations of custom are not impossible to God. With regard to the Tannin, the grave divine al-Ghazzali supposes their number to equal that of human vices ; the worst of these being the dragons, the least the scorpions, and those in the mean the serpents. Nor are these beasts to be perceived by mortal eyes ; they differ from ordinary reptiles as angels from men ;. they are of a stronger kind, and their bite is felt by another sense — he who denies them or derides them is ignorant of the marvellous ways of Providence. " In fine," says this apologist, " few indeed can understand this matter. I therefore advise you to be rather sohcitous to avoid the torment, than curious to investigate its nature. For if you neglect the former and busy yourselves only about the latter, you will be like him whom the Sultan took and cast into prison, promising to him the cutting off of his hand and his nose on the morrow. Whereupon 422 MUSLIM HELL that foolish one occupied the whole night in meditation whether this should be done with a knife, or with a sword, or with a razor, and never considered at all how he might best escape, which, as the Arab historian concludes, was the extreme of stupidity. Barbarian Hell. Cicero, in his treatise on Old Age, speaks of death as to be disregarded if destroying the soul, or to be desired K rendering its existence eternal. Taking these as exclusive alternatives, he bursts forth into " Quid igitur timeam si aut non miser post mortem, aut beatus etiam futurus sum ? " The pagan could apparently, owing to a lack or absence of grace, form no conception of hell. In such inability he was by no means alone. Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil is the burden of other pages than those of Lucretius. For this philosopher, " damned by his date," as for Prospero, our " little life is rounded with a sleep " ; the lasting slumber that is due to all ; the sleep from which man wakes no more to pain. That ingenious artificial enhancement of agony after life, for which more civilised peoples are — as some have dared to affirm— indebted to the sacerdotal inter vention of an arbitrary theology, could hold as little place in the mind of Marcus Aurelius as in the Psalms of David. Faint and dubious indeed are the indica tions of a fear of hell in the devotional fervours of the son of Jesse, impotent and meagre the attestations of individual immortality in the mouth of the man of Uz, feeble and dull the faith in a future life in the moral meditations about himself of the second Antonine. These had no conception of the subtle 424 BARBARIAN HELL device which evolved a punishment frorn, a law of nature, a punishment producing a pain far greater than any on earth for the vast majority of mortals beyond the grave, a punishment for minor peccadil loes, neglect of ecclesiastical ceremonies, or accidents in ages long anterior to their birth. An assertion more or less vehement of a supposed " universal belief of mankind " in favour of a future hell, if not in a passion of endless anguish, has often been urged as a powerful or rather convincing argument of its reality, though perhaps not always of the truth of the doctrine which teaches it. But this " universal belief " is shown by many trust worthy traveUers and ethnologists to be by no means universal: and it must also be remembered that the world has known so-called "universal beliefs" in other subjects of speculation, say for example, the geocentric system, the existence of witches, table- turning, and polytheism : beliefs against which a sufficient number of sceptics have arisen in these latter days to prevent any present predication of their universality. Of the vast number of diverse faiths in the matter of hell held by the vast number, we wUl not say of Jews or Turks — who, presuming Turks to mean Muhammadans, have already been considered — but only of infidels and heretics — such as those of Cape Town, which exercised so sad an influence on Bishop Colenso — upon whom we are wont to pray for mercy, that they may be saved among the remnant of the true Israelites, a large and interesting volume might be written. Far removed from Cowper's "church-going bell," ignorant of the power of that prelude or overture of BARBARIAN HELL 425 sacred music to scare away devils, blinded by no spiritual spindrift, their hells, in the rare cases where they possess them, are the faintest and weakest of worlds of ghosts, pallid and lunar substitutes for the meridian glow and glory of the Christian Gehenna. Such a poverty of conception surprises him who recalls the pictures of Dante and Pinamonti, of St. Patrick and St. Francis, and remembers the circle of salt, the skulls stuffed with hedgehogs, the mincing of hearts, the carding of brains, the rasping of bowels, with here a duck feasting on the human liver, and there a dog devouring the human lung, the recorded amenities of the Buddhist faith. Even when the " infidels '.' admitted a God, to speak of him as merciful, or jealous, appeared to these barbarians as absurd as the Deus eminenter triangularis to Spinoza ; and for them to praise him was to offer him what belonged not to that which is best, and is, according to the Ethics of Aristotle, beyond the • praise of humanity. Far too many of those whose lot is cast Where every prospect pleases, And only man is vile, have somehow become unconsciously tainted with the heresy of the Seleucians, that this world they live in is the only hell. The benighted heathen, though the eyes of their foes stood out with fatness, had no notion of that posthumous triumph over them, which forms so large a part of such Meditations as those of Andrew Wellwood. Not one of the editions— from 1721 to 1840— of that popular work The Glimpse of Glory, pointed out to these ill-starred barbarians how the future exaltation and exultation over the wicked 426 BARBARIAN HELL formed a part of the happiness of the Saints. " I'm overjoyed" — thus Wellwood — "in hearing the ever lasting howlings of the haters of the Almighty, . . . what a pleasant novelty are they in mine ears ! . . . the beholding of the smoke of their torment is a passing delectation." And of how solid a smoke might the heathen have had an anticipatory delight had they but known — as Chrysostom and Augustine knew — that the vast majority of their fellow creatures would assuredly be damned ; that the saved would, in the words of the Nonconformist Divine, Matthew Henry, be the mere gleanings of the grape harvest, while the lost were, as we are advised in the Com mentaries of Cornelius van den Steen, as numerous as the thickly faUing flakes of a winter snow. Of how solid a smoke, and how long enduring. Albeit Arianism, in the opinion of the judicious Hooker, has made it a matter of great sharpness and subtlety of wit to be " a sound believing Christian," the simple faith in an eternal hell would have given to the barbarian an occasion for boasting over the Zoro- astrian's limited conception of post-mortem pain, and the vain and futile idea of the foUowers of Muhammad, who, as has been seen, made the door of repentance in hell wide as a seventy years' journey, and never to be shut till the sun rose in the western sky. It were to be wished that some docimastic process, Ithuriel's spear or other touchstone of unimpeachable accuracy might be applied to what are known, all too familiarly, as " travellers' tales." Failing this, it were next to be desired that these tales might be treated as the traditions of Islam, and divided into sahih or genuine, hasan or fair, and da'if or feeble, with BARBARIAN HELL 427 canons expressly framed for their reception and rejection. Under this stringent system of the Muslim faith the Mutawdtir, or undoubted testimonies, have been reduced to five, and even this poor sum has been the subject of dispute. In the composite image of Nebuchadnezzar's dream, gold, silver, and clay were commingled. In the following account of the barbarian heU the names of authorities have been commonly given, and it is for the reader to dis tinguish between the " genuine," the "fair," and the " feeble," and to determine what is clay and what is gold. Extremes meet. In the matter of hell, barbarism and phUosophy are at one. Civilisation and non- civilisation kiss one another. Without attempting to define these terms, which are related pretty much as orthodoxy and heterodoxy, the reader of travels, before and after Pinkerton, wiU discover a large number of barbaric peoples, who, however firmly convinced of the existence of ghosts, have no faith whatever in hell. Barbarians, hke children, are commonly atheists. Our nurses are our first theologians, and, like an encumbrance on an estate, a behef in hell descends from father to son. Savages so seldom recognise the idea of a place of torment that even the few cases in which it occurs lie open to suspicion of not being purely native. The conception of hell as a fiery abyss, so famUiar to civilised religion is all but unknown to savage thought. On the other hand, most barbarous, and not a few civilised, peoples have wraiths or ghosts in their palseo- crystic psychology or animistic creed. The crapulous Christian— unless, indeed, he be also a spiritualist 428 BARBARIAN HELL — knows that the bogies which torment him in his cups are not what and where they seem to him to be. But the savage is not equally capable of discriminating clearly between subjective and objective impressions. He dreams of his dead friends and enemies, and believes that they actually exist. He dreams of blue devils, and believes after waking that such devils are, and that they are blue. He confounds fancies with facts. Real for him are the rerum simulacra which the Epicurean poet was at such pains to explain away : " ne forte animas Acherunte reamur Effugere, aut umbras inter vivos volitare, Neve aliquid nostri post mortem posse relinqui." The continuance theory, the animistic belief in ghosts as opposed to the theory of moral retribution, is well known to the reader of Primitive Culture. Mr. Tylor, indeed, has gone so far as to say that priests, to further their own professional ends, have used "unscrupulously" — if they have not created — the belief in future retribution. " This," says the Reader of Anthropology in the University of Oxford, " they have done to gain wealth and power for their own caste, and to stop inteUectual and social pro gress beyond the barriers of their own consecrated systems. On the banks of the river of death priests have stood for ages to bar the passage against all poor souls who cannot repeat their formulse, or pay their fee." Thus the philosophic schools, which from classic times have rejected the belief in a future existence, appear to have come back by a new road to the very starting-point, which, perhaps, the rudest races of mankind have never quitted. BARBARIAN HELL 429 Some barbarians, however, though not many, are not even animists, but rather in the darkened con dition of that " very intelligent, docile' Australian black " quoted by Lubbock in his Origin of Civilisa tion. A friend of Mr. Lang's tried long and patiently to make this very intelligent Australian black under stand his existence without a body, but the black could never keep his countenance, and generally made an excuse to get away. It was afterwards discovered that the very intelligent, docile black politely retreated to hide his merriment at the marvellous and ludicrous absurdity of the notions of the friend of Mr. Lang. Certainly this intelligent black seems of those races who, according to the same author, entirely disbelieve in the survival of the soul after the death of the body. The native of New Guinea who dines on his enemy considers any reappearance of such enemy, either as soul or ghost, utterly impossible. Many people in Paraguay seek the souls of deceased relatives for a certain time among the bushes which surround their dweUing-places. Not finding them, they discontinue their search, and confess, with a calm, philosophic modesty, that they cannot say what has become of such souls. Others in Paraguay, a large number of negroes and Hottentots, many Chilians, and those of Sumatra, have so little concern in this matter that they consider the souls of all animals, including human, alike. For them the soul of the man and of the beast is one, nor do they trouble to consider whether the dead man may live elsewhere, and what his condition may be. Many barbarous nations who have no belief in hell yet have a firm fear of a devil. 430 BARBARIAN HELL In the Strange Adventures of Andrew Battel of Leigh, in Essex, sent by the Portuguese prisoner to Angola, who lived there and in the adjoining regions near eighteen years, we learn that the Gagas, on commencing hostilities, make a sacrifice to the Devil in the morning before sunrise. The chief priest sits on a stool, with a man-witch — with so little reverence speaks this writer of the minor ministry — and women holding a Zeueras, or wild horse's tail, which they flourish, singing at the same time ; behind them a great number of drums are continually playing. In the midst is a fierce fire, whereon is an earthen pot with white powders in it, with which the under-priests paint the head-priest's forehead, temples, belly, and breast, during which operation they make use of long ceremonial and enchanting speeches. In this manner they continue till sunset, when they bring the high- priest's casengala, which resembles a hatchet, put it into his hand, and bid him be strong against his enemies, for his mokeso is with him. Then a male child is brought, which he kills ; then four men are brought before him, whom he also slaughters, or kUls two himself and orders his attendants to kill the others. Thus is the Devil propitiated in Western Africa, as elsewhere, by sacrificial butchery. In Central Africa the lesser luminary is Satan's favourite food. Captain Daniel Beechman, chancing on a great confusion and noisy uproar once on a time in Caytongee, asked his landlord the cause, who replied, " Leat joo Shatan dea macon Boolon," which, being interpreted, is, " Look there, the Devil is eating up the moon ! " It was an eclipse. At Tatas, when a person is ill, they buy provisions, dress them with great care, and carry the banquet into the woods to BARBARIAN HELL 431 a certain shed, built under the largest tree near the water, where they leave it. With many ceremonies of prayer they then invite the Devil very kindly, assuring him their banquet is weU cooked and of a sweet savour, and begging him to accept it. If the person recovers they utter thanksgivings, and send another feast; if he dies they rail against their Belial in the gate, calling him cross, a deceiver and ungrateful— in fine, they are very angry with him. In all cases, however, the provisions are consumed. But in this country there are many monkeys, besides priests. " In Pegu and Tamakey," says Fitch in his Ormus and E. Indies, " if the people be sick, they make a vow to offer meat unto Satan if they escape. They give the Devil to eat of ' cocoes, figs, arrecaes, and other fruits,' and in this sort they say they drive him away. Also a tallipou, or priest, or two will sit by them every night during their sickness and sing to please the Devil, that he should not hurt them." So in Baron's History of Tonquin, Abaddon plays1 a conspicuous part in the concerns of the Kingdom of Jangoma. Friends of the sick person bring presents of fruits for his recovery to propitiate the Evil Being whom they consider the author of all disorders. They endeavour by the sound of instruments to drive him out of the house of the invalid, and yet the sound of the human voice is supposed to give him pleasure. When great mortality occurs, a General Supplication or Theckydaw is made. The Archbishop, with many circumstances of state and beating of drums, begins in great pomp and solemnity to offer meat-offerings to Beelzebub and his attendant Divinities, inviting them to eat and drink, after which he accuses them 432 BARBARIAN HELL in a strange language, by characters and figures, of their varied wickednesses ; then guns are fired, so that by the noise of this artillery the devils may be driven away. This military expedition against aerial spirits is generally believed to result in complete victory. In William Bosman's Accurate Description of the Coasts of Guinea, the negroes banish the Adversary with abundance of ceremony from their towns. At an appointed time set apart for that end they hunt him out in the early dawn with a dismal cry, all running one after another, throwing stones, wood, and other matters not necessary here to particularise, as thick as hail at Satan's posteriors. When they have driven him far enough away they all return and conclude their service. The Apollyon of Ante is a giant with one side of his body sound and the other rotten. If any touch him, he dies immediately, "which," says that born historian Bosman, " I believe without the least scruple." This overgrown God they endeavour to appease with eatables, to which purpose thousands of pots or troughs of victuals are continually found standing throughout the whole Antese country ; " so that," says Bosman, " he must have a worse than canine appetite, if he hath not his belly full." In all these cases, though there be a sufficiency of devils, there is not a scintilla of evidence of any belief in any hell. The negro of the Guinea coast, like the dweller in land, believes that he has a soul, but is ignorant — alas ! the pity of it ! — where it goes and what will be its condition. He knows no hell, or, according to other testimony, imagines the seat of torment in the future life to be the sea. He calls the shadow of a man passadoor, or conductor, which he believes shaU BARBARIAN HELL 433 testKy whether he hath lived well or ill ; if ill, he is to perish with hunger and poverty. Thus the happy and the damned are sent to the same place. " The Guinea negroes," says William Bosman, " have no idea of future rewards or punishments for the good or ill actions of their past life," except some who believe that the bad are drowned and buried in eternal oblivion, or changed into white men. The system of posthumous pain, by which, according to the Semitic animist, the balance of good and evil is to be finally rectified, has no existence in the belief of the Fijians, or Vitians, as Seemann prefers to call them. There does not, he writes, seem to be any separation between the abodes of the good and the wicked ; nothing that corresponds to our hell ; no fire, no pit, no worm, and no brimstone. T. H. Lewin, in his Hill Tribes of Chittagong, says, quoting another authority, that the Cucis or inhabitants of the Tipra mountains in Bengal have no notion of heU or heaven, of any punishment or any reward. John Bailey, in his account of the wild tribes of the Veddahs of Ceylon, writes, "The Veddahs have no idea of a future state of rewards and punishments, and have no knowledge of a supreme being." The Brazilians also have no Gods, yet those dwelling in a region called by Rusca Tououpinam- baulutiorum declare that cowardly souls are snatched away by Aygan, for so they call their Cacodemon, and five with him for ever in torture. Moerenhout, in his Voyages aux iles du grand Ocean, says of these islands that they have une sorte d'enfer, ou plutdt de purgatoire. Here they suffered for their misdeeds punishments uniform, but so singular as to make the reader regard the Oceanic souls as some- 434 BARBARIAN HELL what corporeal. In O-taiti, for instance, innocence or culpability was determined by the position of two rocks on which souls after death alighted. If they rested on the right-hand rock they were admitted at once to Po, night or darkness, as innocent; if on the left-hand rock, purification or purgatory become essentially necessary. The minister of the Oromatouas or domestic gods, a sort of severe Lares who main tained family order, grated their skin from all their bones in succession without any indecent haste. By this method they were purified and passed into Po. The sole crimes for which they suffered were, ac cording to Moerenhout, la non-observation des rites sacres, la negligence et le mepris pour les dieux et pour les autels. The dread of this posthumous grating caused many donations during life to the Poures or priests, " qui la," says our author, " comme partout ailleurs, pouvaient seuls sauver le coupable, en apaisant les Dieux; et la, comme partout ailleurs, recevaient le plus souvent, des mains de I'agonisant, tout son bien et celui de sa famille, pour la seule promesse du pardon de ses fautes et I'exemption du terrible chatiment." It is the old story of the legend said to have been inscribed on the collecting-box of John Tetzel— Sobald das Geld in Kasten klingt, Sobald die Seel gen Himmel springt. The Formosans believed that the wicked were punished in bottomless pits of mire. The conceptions which the ancient Hawaiians had of a future state were, as those of many other peoples, inconsistent and vague. According, however, to W. D. Alexander the great majority of immortal souls, sank into % BARBARIAN HELL 435 subterranean hades, in which were two potentates, Wakea and Milu. The region of Wakea was com paratively comfortable, and reserved for those scrupulous during their life in the observations of religious rites and tabus. Milu's subjects, besides other evils, were fed on lizards and butterflies. His realm was noisy and disorderly, and wild and lawless games were played therein at night. It was with the Hawaiians as with that operative, a man " tenebrosse mentis et actionis " reported by the Venerable Bede, who went to hell because he would not go to church. " Qui non vult ecclesise januam sponte ingredi, necesse habet in januam Inform non sponte damnatus introduci." The Jesuit father Charles Le Gobien, in his History of the Isles Marianes, in the North Pacific, says this people have no idea of rehgion. They were " with out temples, altars, sacrifices, and priests." They beheved, however, in the immortality of their souls, and call hell— "of which," says the good father, "their ideas were assez bizarres" — " Zararraguan," or the house of Chayfi. This Chayfi is a certain demon, who crueUy torments such as are unfortunate enough to faU into his clutches. Since the Spaniards introduced the Diebin or Ladrones to fire, they say Chayfi has a burning furnace in which he heats the souls to a white heat, as the smith heats iron, and then hammers them out. A paraUel pain is to be found in the History of Ricordano Malispini. The paradise of this people is, exceptionally, under the earth; the locahty of their hell is not given. They have a Scandinavian belief that hell is a glowing oven reserved for those only who have died in their beds. But others say for those who died a violent 436 BARBARIAN HELL death. In either case the damned souls are not those of the wicked. So in the Gambier Islands it was noticed by Dumont d'Urville that it was not the immoral soul that suffered. The porter of the particular hell of the Gambier islander had no old turning the key for equivocator or thief. Those who knocked at hell-gate, and were let in by the devil porter, were the cowardly or careless, negligent in the performance of their religious duties, or retro grade in respect for priests. So in New Zealand it is the souls of the timid that Mira, the goddess of hell, devours ; and the reader may recall the Buddhist penalty for the backbiting of Bonzes with a hostile mind. The greater number of North American Indian aborigines are devoid of " original notions in regard to the judgment to come," says Dalton. It is not easy to reconcile this statement with the subsequent opinions of Bancroft and Schoolcraft. " The Cahrocs," says Bancroft in his Native Races of the Pacific States of North America, a book in five large volumes, in which has been amassed a vast quantity of information concerning heathen beliefs, "have a distinct conception of future punishment," and suppose that the soul of the wicked person comes to a road bristling with thorns and briars, leading to a place full of deadly serpents, where that unlucky soul must wander for ever. The Tolewahs picture hell as a dark abode where souls shiver indesinently in nipping winds, and are dis tressed by devils. Schoolcraft says the doctrine of the immortahty of the soul is " a distinct belief of most of the North American Indians." But death to them is not fraught BARBARIAN HELL 437 with terrors — it is rather a state full of attractions. Hell is a foreign word to the Indian mind and language, though a compound word Majimonidonong (place of bad spirits) has been coined for it. "The typical belief of the tribes of the United States," says Brinton, " was well expressed by Esau Hajo, speaking for the Creek nation : ' We think those who have behaved ill are left to shift for them selves, and that there is no other punishment.' In the New World generaUy," says the same author, " there is ' no notion or very faint traces ' of a belief in heU, except where it has been the result of inter course with Christian missionaries." Even Schoolcraft admits that when a North American Indian is asked to state his religious belief, or his notions of divine government, he becomes " profoundly thoughtful." H, as DaU affirms in his Alaska, he has no idea of immortality, his silence may be easily explained. Dark indeed is the sight of these heathen through their spiritual glasses. Not the faintest glimmer of conception have they of the hell so exactly described by old John Denison, the learned chaplain of a learned king, of which the only hymns are curses, and howls its only tunes ; blasphemies its only ditties, and tear drops its only notes ; " scriching " its only morn and even song, and gnashing of teeth its only descant and division. The Ojibwa, according to Mr. W. Warren, himself descended from the Ojibwas on the maternal side, believes that his soul follows a wide path towards the west, and enters a long lodge after crossing a deep and rapid river on a huge snake. If he has been bad, he is haunted by the ghosts of the persons or things he has injured; K he has damaged 438 BARBARIAN HELL furniture, he is obstructed by the phantom of that furniture ; if he has dealt unkindly or cruelly with a dog, that dog, after death, deals unkindly or cruelly with him. Catlin says that the Mandans, a tribe included by Schoolcraft among the Dakotas, describe their hell as barren and hideous, covered with eternal ice and snow. " There is yet in Virginia," says Captain John Smith, " no place discovered to be so savage that they have not a religion, deer, and bows and arrows. The Virginians hold that as soon as the soul is departed from the body it is, if it has done evil works inthe flesh, carried into a great pit or hole, which is in the farthest parts of their part of the world towards the sunset, there to burn continually ; this place they call Popogusso. The chief god the Virginians worship is the Devil. Him they call Okee, and serve him more of fear than love. They say they have conference with him, and fashion themselves as near to his shape as they can imagine." And here Captain Smith bursts into poetry, which was his wont : Fear was the first their Gods begot: Till fear began their Gods were not. And further on he again rises into what he supposes to be rhyme : Thus seek they in deep foolishness To climb the height of happiness. "In their temples is an image, evil-favouredly carved, of Okee — a word in their language signifying God— and painted and adorned with chains of copper and beads, and covered with a skin in such a manner as BARBARIAN HELL 439 the deformities may well suit with such a god." It were to be wished that the aid of poetry were called in to explain this last cabalistic sentence — but it is not. Hearne, in his Journey to the Northern Ocean, says the northern Hudson 'Bay Indians have no idea of a future state. They merely strive to pass through this world with as much ease and contentment as possible, without either animating hope of reward or painful fear of punishment in the next. The Laps and Finns agree, according to Castren, with the Greenlanders in being without any idea of spiritual retribution. They seem originally to have held a silly notion that the dead lay for ever un disturbed in their graves — that the dead, in a word, were dead. Afterwards they came to believe that they peopled a subterranean world, Tuonela, or the place of Tuoni. There, too, were woods and waters ; but the woods were dark, and the waters black. The likeness of Tuoni was that of an aged man with three fingers, with his hat hanging over his shoulders. His wife or daughter — different opinions have arisen as to her relationship — has hooked nails of iron and a distorted chin. The Finnish Iliad Kalewala in irony calls her hyvd emdntd, or the excellent hostess. She feeds her guests with frogs and toads. In an account of the Danish Laplanders, by Knud Leems, in Pinkerton's Travels, Rota-Aibmo, or the region of torture, is the seat of the Gods residing in the bowels of the earth. Into this hell are thrust down all who have lived lives impious, wicked, and hateful to the Gods— deprived of all hope of ever coming into the happy mansions of Radien. Rota-Aibmo is the place of torture— the residence of 440 BARBARIAN HELL that false God to whom the Laplanders, through a Shamanistic heresy, address their prayers when they have called the other Gods to their aid in vain. Rota seems to testKy some absence or lack of zeal or energy in missionary effort. The help of other deities in opposition to this malignant Being would be sought to no purpose. Sacrificing to Rota, they bury a dead horse in the ground, to the intent that that pernicious God should by its aid withdraw as fast as possible to his own place, and there cease from troubling, and leave the Laplanders at rest. A certain Lap witch on one occasion, once upon a time, saw hell. What did she see ? Nothing more extraordinary is shown in the various visions of purgatory lately published by Father Schouppe. An immense boiling lake, in which were many men. The Devil breathed out fire from an iron pipe and drew out a piece of bacon put into that lake, which was dressed in an instant. These things she saw in the shape of a crow. The Devil appeared in divers fashions : like a black man without a head, or a tall man with a horned forehead, or a rough man with horny knees, or a man with black hairy hands, large burning eyes, and a flaming mouth, or a cat, or a dog, or a little bird. He handled her from her feet upwards to her mouth, and counted her teeth. Other travellers affirm that the Laps, though believing in a future life for bears, have doubts as to any future being for themselves. Possibly, with the humility of the Tscheremis, they hold themselves unworthy of such distinction. The Kamtschatkans, according to Steller, believe that a certain demon named Haetsch holds the presi dency of hell. But the punishments therein are BARBARIAN HELL 441 simple : the rich are reduced to poverty ; for the poor, they think the punishment on earth suffices. The Danish missionary Hans Egede says of the inhabitants of Labrador and Greenland : " They have no heU. Their dead pass into heaven and the centre of the earth, where, satisfied with all joys and want ing nothing, they will look as well as, if not better than, ever they did in this world. They meet, how ever, on their way an evil female with a hand as big as a whale's tail, with which if she hits anybody, he is at one stroke mouse-dead." This must logically refer to a sort of second death. But the Angekkok, or priest, will, for a consideration paid beforehand, utter prayers affording the spirit protection in this perilous pass. It is here as it was with the Venerable Bede, "Multos eleemosynse viventium, et maxime celebratio missarum adjuvant." The Ul-fated Richard Lander, in his Journal of Exploration of the Niger, writes of the natives of Central Africa: "Of a heU, or place of eternal torment, they have no idea whatever." The souls of the good are translated into a beautiful region with one monkey ; but the wicked, before they can participate in such felicity, are forced to endure " scourging and beating and a variety of tortures " till sufficiently punished, when they are finally exalted into the tranquil mansion of the monkey. Here we have the abecedary, or simple rudiments of Purgatory. Peter Kolbe says the Hottentots of South Africa have no notion, that he could ever gather, of rewards and punishments after death, and that the behaviour of a sick Hottentot and of those about him are, he thinks, " pretty round proof " that they have none. 442 BARBARIAN HELL Of the Basutos of South Africa it would, perhaps, according to the Rev. Casalis, be " asserting too much to say absolutely " that they believe in the existence or in the immortality of the soul ; yet they have in the bowels of the earth a certain Mosima osa thaleng or abyss which is never filled. This seems to correspond rather with hades than hell. They have, however, a Styx which they call Tlatlama. Many are now enlightened. But there is always a fear of incomplete conversion. " Sambo," says the Missionary to the Negro in the old story : " have you stolen any more geese ? " " Sah ! I'se sanctified." " Chickens ? " " Sah ! I'se converted." "Turkeys?" "Sah! I'se regenerate." Aside : " Golly, if he'd said ducks, he'd 'a' had me." It is a curious divergence in eschatology that certain negroes, according to Dr. Prichard, locate heU in the air, and think the souls of the damned flutter about in the bushes and generally do evil. The Ibo say a wicked soul knocks his head against a waU. Burton, in Du Chaillu's Equatorial Africa, speaks of the religion of the Africans as admitting neither god, angel nor devil, ignoring a heaven or a heU, and not yet taught to look forward to a river of rum. "In one point," says Burton, "the East and West surely resemble one another — the ignoble dread of a death which leads to annihilation. Counting on nothing after the present life, there is for the East African no hope beyond the grave. Amekwisha, 'He is finished,' is the East African's last word. ' All is done for ever,' sings the West African. The African believes in a present but not in a future immaterial, in a ghost but not in a soul. The African Satan is a particularly unpopular ghost ; being very wicked, he is naturally much worshipped." BARBARIAN HELL 443 In a compendium compiled by Maclean, we learn that the Kafirs — represented so low or so high in the theological scale that they " have not even a likeness of any deity" — "have certainly lost all vestige of the knowledge of a Supreme Being as exhibited to us in divine revelation, nor have they the slightest knowledge of a future state of rewards and punish ments, arising out of the moral quality of our actions in this life." The orthodox of Dahomey believe in a DevU Elegba, but eschew a hell. He who escapes punishment here is safe hereafter. S. Jerome, according to Erasmus, though it more satisfactory " cum veris ac prcedonibus barbaris habere commercium " than with certain Christians. Those of Dahomey, like the ancient Getse described by Pomponius Mela, seem not unwiUing to take their chance of a hell in the future to avoid that in the present, " alii emori quidem, sed id melius esse quam vivere." The singularly optimistic judgment of Father Sahagun saw in the Mexican religion nought but a persistent suggestion of the Devil. Reville admits that it was not in the doctrine of a future life that it reached its highest development. Mictlanteuctli, the god of hell, and Mictlancihuatl, his female companion, were much honoured. The evil spirit caUed Tlacatecolototl — which, being interpreted, is the rational owl — confined apparently his evil deeds to the present life. AU who died of old age or disease were received in Mictlan, rather hades than hell, a place of utter darkness. Much regard therein was paid by Supai to the feelings of the aristocracy. The Abbe Clavigero says Dr. Siguenza was of opinion that the Mexicans placed hell in the north. Others say the south. Possibly the Mexicans themselves 444 BARBARIAN HELL were not at one. The bad suffered no inconvenience or punishment other than the darkness of their abode.. Clearly no moral concept vivified and hallowed their prospect beyond the grave. From the above mentioned barbarians, it may be concluded that the Barbarian hell is either non existent or extremely flaccid. The heathen generally appear to have been of the opinion attributed to Socrates, " Quod supra nos, nihil ad nos," and to have added to it " et quod infra." In those rare cases in which they had a hell, they failed to honour it with the irvp