My First Lesson about Eternal Torment
By William Covert
WHEN I was about ten years of age, a neighbor of ours, who had spent his life in sin, died, and was buried in a lone cemetery not far from our home. Shortly after the funeral services were over, a playmate of mine told me that the man had been sent away to be punished with burning in a great lake of roasting brimstone, and that he would remain there through the endless ages. My parents had never told me about such a place as my young friend described, and so I was not quite willing to accept his version of the situation. I told him that I saw the man put in a coffin, and that he was dead, and that the coffin was fastened very tight, and buried deep down in the ground. I did not believe a dead man could possibly get out of his grave. I believed that if the dead man's grave should be opened, he would be found there just as he had been left when the ground was placed upon him. When I had stated my objections to the theory which my friend had been advocating, he admitted that the dead man's body was yet in the grave, but he said the man had a soul which left the body while he was dying, and it went away to that lake of fire and brimstone faster than a bullet could fly. When I asked him how he knew about a soul that had gone away to be burned, and to live in a great fire, he said it had been told to him by people who knew it to be so. But I thought that if what he had declared about the case of our neighbor was true, then my mother would know of it. I therefore went to her very soon to learn what she had to say about the matter. I stated to her the substance of what my friend had said of our dead neighbor's soul now being in a lake of burning brimstone, and I desired her to tell me what she thought about it. When I had finished my recital of the conversation between us, she said the boy had got hold of a false theory about the dead and about future punishment. She said she had heard these things many times, but that they were contrary to the teachings of God's word. Then she told me that the wicked were not now suffering punishment, nor had the righteous yet gone to their reward. She also spoke of a judgment to come, and the resurrection from the dead, and how the cases of all classes of people would be determined by the Lord in the judgment, and that God would do all things just right with every one. And this, the first lesson that I received from my mother upon the great theme of man's nature and destiny, has served as a balance in my hope and in my study for more than sixty years.