p. 69 | The Sight of Hell

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Feb 22, 1877

“The Sight of Hell.”

THIS is the title of a book, written a few years ago by Father Furniss, of the Catholic Church, and designed especially “for children and young persons.” As such, it is recommended for general use in Sunday-schools. The extracts which we give below are enough to curdle the blood of even an adult. What, then, must be the effect of such horrid pen-pictures upon the tender minds of children? We are first introduced to a “striking devil”—a strange personage and a terrible tormentor:—

“Little child, if you go to hell there will be a devil at your side to strike you. He will go on striking you forever and ever without stopping. How, then, will your body be, after the devil has been striking it every moment for a hundred millions of years without stopping?”

Children who have had the full benefit of the rod, and who have learned by painful experience to dread its smart, might find in such a gloomy prospect a weighty motive to evade the blows of this eternal striker. But how much is that piety worth which is the result of a horrid scare? And where is the authority for making such frightful declarations? In what sacred book is such theology taught? Why does not Father Furniss back up his assertions by giving chapter and verse? The answer is easy. No higher authority exists for such unbounded nonsense than the heated brain of the presumptuous author. Thank God, there is no divinity in these shocking statements! Let us now gaze a moment upon another picture:—

“Come into this room. But see in the midst of it there is a girl, perhaps about eighteen years old. Her dress is made of fire! On her head is a bonnet of fire. It burns into the skin; it scorches the bone of her skull and makes it smoke. The red hot fiery heat goes into the brain and melts it. If she were on earth she would be burned to a cinder in a moment. But she is in hell, where fire burns everything, but burns nothing away. There she will stand, forever burning and not be scorched.”

In these days of fanciful flights and fabulous theology, there is a general disposition to figure away the “hell-fire” of the Scriptures, and to reduce the sinners’ doom to a mere mental uncomfortableness. Not so with Father Furniss. He believes in a furnace (happy coincidence of name) whose fire shall burn with undying fierceness, and yet fail to consume its suffering victims. We do not object to the literality of the fire, provided that it be correctly located, and provided also that it be endowed with an energy adequate to destroy the fuel upon which it is to feed. The Bible version of hell-fire is this: “The day cometh that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble; and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch.” Mal. 4 : 1. Another extract must suffice:—

“But listen! There is a sound just like that of a kettle boiling. Hear what it is. The blood is boiling in the sealed veins of that boy. The brain is boiling and bubbling in his head. The marrow is boiling in his bones. Hear how it screams. It beats its head against the roof of the oven. It stamps its little feet against the floor of the oven. You can see on the face of this little child what you see on the faces of all in hell—despair, desperate and horrible.”

There! Is that dish peppery enough for Sunday-school children? Well, you can hardly object to it, if you indorse the dreadful dogma of endless misery for a large portion of the human family.”—Bible Banner.