[To follow the History from the beginning, click on "First Entry"]

***

My friend, J.J., may he rest in peace, is one of the few mortal men I've ever known who could write almost as well as I do.  (Note that I said "almost." J.J. lacks my historical sweep, my broad multicultural appeal, my razor-sharp wit.  J.J. was more along the lines of "serious Irish Catholic."  But J.J. is not untalented.  He has a way with words.  If the holy Ghost were able to write half as well as J.J., then the Holy Bible might have been something!)

I have borrowed the ensuing description of Hell from J.J., who stole it, wholesale, from the early Church fathers.  If you think that J.J.'s sermon goes on a little long, well! – that's good, because then maybe you'll understand what your pastor and your Christian friends have been trying to tell you for all these years:  eternal damnation is scheduled to last for a very long time.

So please, my brothers and sisters, before you laugh at another Jesus joke, or smoke another cigarette, or take the Lord's name in vain, and before you leave BobShakespeare.com to look instead at another unseemly photograph of a Sports Illustrated model in a skimpy bathing suit, I think you should read J.J.'s lecture on Hell, a small fragment of which follows here below, with my thoughtful interlined commentary:

 – "Hell has enlarged its soul and opened its mouth without any limits" – words taken, my dear little brothers [and sisters] in Christ Jesus, from the book of Isaias, fifth chapter, fourteenth verse. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the holy Ghost. Amen.

 – Adam and Eve, my dear boys, were, as you know, our first parents, and you will remember that they were created by God in order that the seats in Heaven left vacant by the fall of Lucifer and his rebellious angels might be filled again. Lucifer, we are told, was a son of the morning, a radiant and mighty angel; yet he fell: he fell, and there fell with him a third part of the host of Heaven. [J.J. is exaggerating a bit there, kids; most of the others angels actually chickened out.  Belial, Bubba and I were left holding the bag.]  Lucifer fell and was hurled with his rebellious angels into Hell.  What his sin was we cannot say. Theologians consider that it was the sin of pride, the sinful thought conceived in an instant: "Non serviam": I will not serve. That instant was his ruin.

He offended the majesty of God by the sinful thought of one instant, and God cast him out of Heaven into Hell forever.

[I ask you, my brothers and sisters, was that a fair and just punishment for a single "sinful thought"? 

Okay, so it was not just a simple sinful thought of an instant.  I lost my cool.  I did.  I admit that. So did Beelzebub and Belial.  We ought not to have been rude or disrespectful, especially not to Dad.  When the Father, Son, and holy Ghost retired for a consultation, or a lunch break, or whatever it was They used to do in that back room up there, Bubba, Belial, and I stopped singing. We stepped forward and sat down upon the Trinity's three great White Thrones.  A hush fell over the angelic choirs.  And when the Trinity came back out to investigate the buzz, we three archangels—Beelzebub, Belial, and I‚ with the entire host of heaven looking on, delivered God a smiling one-finger salute, shouting, in unison, "Non cantiam.  I will not sing!"  Our raised middle fingers may have been pushing the envelope just a bit.  But still, I think the Lord over-reacted.  He could have just said, "Boys, boys," He didn't have to kick us out of Heaven.  We didn't mean anything personal by it, we were just tired of singing those stupid hymns of praise. —L.]

 – Adam and Eve were then created by God and placed in Eden, in the plain of Damascus, that lovely garden resplendent with sunlight and colour, teeming with luxuriant vegetation. The fruitful earth gave them her bounty: beasts and birds were their willing servants: they knew not the ills our flesh is heir to, disease and poverty and death: all that a great and generous God could do for them was done. But there was one condition imposed on them by God: obedience to His word. They were not to eat of the fruit of the forbidden tree.

 – Alas, my dear little boys, they too fell. The devil, once a shining angel, a son of the morning, now a foul fiend [Oh, lay off it, J.J.!], came in the shape of a serpent, the subtlest of all the beasts of the field.  He envied them. He, the fallen great one, could not bear to think that man, a being of clay, should possess the inheritance which he by his sin had forfeited forever. He came to the woman, the weaker vessel, and poured the poison of his eloquence into her ear, promising her – O, the blasphemy of that promise! – that if she and Adam ate of the forbidden fruit they would become as gods, nay as God Himself.  [Read your Bible, J.J., Gen. 3:22-23, I was telling her the exact truth.] Eve yielded to the wiles of the arch-tempter. She ate the [banana] and gave it also to Adam who had not the moral courage to resist her. The poison tongue of Satan had done its work. They fell.

[Boys and girls, J.J. is laying it on a little thick in that last paragraph.  I acknowledge the tongue – but it was not "poisonous" and it did no harm.  My tongue does "do its work" now and then, I admit that, but I certainly heard no complaints from Eve.]

 – And then the voice of God was heard in that garden, calling His creature man to account: and Michael, prince of the heavenly host, with a sword of flame in his hand, appeared before the guilty pair and drove them forth from Eden into the world, the world of sickness and striving, of cruelty and disappointment, of labour and hardship, to earn their bread in the sweat of their brow. But even then, how merciful was God! He took pity on our poor degraded parents and promised that in the fullness of time He would send down from Heaven One who would redeem them, make them once more children of God and heirs to the kingdom of Heaven: and that One, that Redeemer of fallen man, was to be God’s only begotten Son, the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, the Eternal Word.

 – He came. He was born of a virgin pure, Mary the virgin mother. He was born in a poor Cowhouse in Judea and lived as a humble carpenter for thirty years until the hour of His mission had come. And then, filled with love for men, He went forth and called to men to hear the new Gospel.

 – Did they listen? Yes, they listened but would not hear. He was seized and bound like a common criminal, mocked at as a fool, set aside to give place to a public robber, scourged with five thousand lashes ["5000 lashes?" Not to argue, but try "forty." (J.J., I think you have been watching too many Mel Gibson movies!)], crowned with a crown of thorns, hustled through the streets by the Jewish rabble and the Roman soldiery, stripped of his garments and hanged upon a gibbet and His side was pierced with a lance and from the wounded body of our Lord water and blood issued continually.

[To my Jewish readers:  pardon the antisemitic slur, "the Jewish rabble," back there: J.J. didn't mean anything by it, that's just the way all Catholics talk.  But if modern-day Jews could have seen the naked Son of God up there, with nails in his wrists and ankles, and a spear stuck in him, and blood and water squirting out all over the place, I think maybe they would understand why J.J., and the Pope, and other Roman Catholics still feel so sore about it.]

 – Yet even then, in that hour of supreme agony, our Merciful Redeemer had pity for mankind. Yet even there, on the hill of Calvary, He founded the holy Catholic church against which, it is promised, the gates of Hell shall not prevail. He founded it upon the rock of ages, and endowed it with His grace, with sacraments and sacrifice, and promised that if men would obey the word of His Church they would still enter into eternal life; but if, after all that had been done for them, they still persisted in their wickedness, there remained for them an eternity of torment: Hell.

[Yada yada.  Next comes the juicy part...]

 – Now let us try for a moment to realize, as far as we can, the nature of that abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has called into existence for the eternal punishment of sinners. Hell is a strait and dark and foul-smelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke. The straitness of this prison house is expressly designed by God [who, by the way, is a self-righteous, egotistical prick] to punish those who refused to be bound by His laws. In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in the gloomy yard of his prison. Not so in Hell. There, by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, Saint Anselm, writes in his book on Similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it.  [Imagine an everlasting Auschwitz for all humanity (exempting only the lucky, born-again few), and you will have the Christian God's philosophy of child-discipline, in a fiery nutshell.)]

 – They lie in exterior darkness. For, remember, the fire of Hell gives forth no light. As, at the command of God, the fire of the Babylonian furnace lost its heat but not its light, so, at the command of God, the fire of Hell, while retaining the intensity of its heat, burns eternally in darkness. It is a never-ending storm of darkness, dark flames and dark smoke of burning brimstone, amid which the bodies are heaped one upon another without even a glimpse of air. Of all the plagues with which the land of the Pharaohs were smitten, one plague alone, that of darkness, was called "horrible." What name, then, shall we give to the darkness of Hell, which is to last not for three days alone but for all eternity?

[Another good question:  "Hey, does anyone down here have a match?"]

 – The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The brimstone, too, which burns there in such prodigious quantity, fills all Hell with its intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential odour that, as Saint Bonaventure says, "one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world." The very air of this world, that pure element, becomes foul and unbreathable when it has been long enclosed. Consider, then, what must be the foulness of the air of Hell. Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of Hell.

 – But this stench is not, horrible though it is, the greatest physical torment to which the damned are subjected. The torment of fire is the greatest torment to which the tyrant has ever subjected his fellow creatures. Place your finger for a moment in the flame of a candle and you will feel the pain of fire. But our earthly fire was created by God for the benefit of man, to maintain in him the spark of life and to help him in the useful arts, whereas the fire of Hell is of another quality and was created by God to torture and punish the unrepentant sinner. Our earthly fire also consumes more or less rapidly according as the object which it attacks is more or less combustible, so that human ingenuity has even succeeded in inventing chemical preparations to check or frustrate its action. But the sulphurous brimstone which burns in Hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn forever and forever with unspeakable fury. Moreover, our earthly fire destroys at the same time as it burns, so that the more intense it is, the shorter is its duration; but the fire of Hell has this property, that it preserves that which it burns, and, though it rages with incredible intensity, it rages forever.

 – Our earthly fire again, no matter how fierce or widespread it may be, is always of a limited extent; but the lake of fire in Hell is boundless, shoreless and bottomless. It is on record that the devil himself, when asked the question by a certain soldier, was obliged to confess that if a whole mountain were thrown into the burning ocean of Hell it would be burned up In an instant like a piece of wax. [Boys and girls, J.J. is winging it.  I never said any such thing.] And this terrible fire will not afflict the bodies of the damned only from without, but each lost soul will be a Hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals. O, how terrible is the lot of those wretched beings! The blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast glowing and bursting, the bowels a red-hot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls.

[J.J. forgot to mention it, but I've heard it said that one particular lava-pool in Hell will contain hundreds of thousands of un-born-again babies – unnamed, unwanted, and aborted fetuses – who will boil eternally like tomato soup that has been left unattended in a microwave oven going full tilt, and that no power in Heaven or Hell will be great enough to forgive the souls of those dead babies, or to ease their pain; and don't blame God, blame Roe v. Wade.]

 – And yet what I have said as to the strength and quality and boundlessness of this fire is as nothing when compared to its intensity, an intensity which it has as being the instrument chosen by divine design for the punishment of soul and body alike. It is a fire which proceeds directly from the ire of God, working not of its own activity but as an instrument of Divine vengeance. As the waters of baptism cleanse the soul with the body, so do the fires of punishment torture the spirit with the flesh. Every sense of the flesh is tortured and every faculty of the soul therewith: the eyes with impenetrable utter darkness, the nose with noisome odours, the ears with yells and howls and execrations, the taste with foul matter, leprous corruption, nameless suffocating filth, the touch with redhot goads and spikes, with cruel tongues of flame. And through the several torments of the senses the immortal soul is tortured eternally in its very essence amid the leagues upon leagues of glowing fires kindled in the abyss by the offended majesty of the Omnipotent God and fanned into everlasting and ever-increasing fury by the breath of the anger of the Godhead.

[And let's just see what your cocky mother Eve has to say THEN about eating a piece of fruit without forewarning God, and against His express command!]

 – Consider finally that the torment of this infernal prison is increased by the company of the damned themselves. Evil company on earth is so noxious that the plants, as if by instinct, withdraw from the company of whatsoever is deadly or hurtful to them. In Hell all laws are overturned – there is no thought of family or country, of ties, of relationships. The damned howl and scream at one another, their torture and rage intensified by the presence of beings tortured and raging like themselves. All sense of humanity is forgotten. The yells of the suffering sinners fill the remotest corners of the vast abyss. The mouths of the damned are full of blasphemies against God and of hatred for their fellow sufferers and of curses against those souls which were their accomplices in sin. In olden times it was the custom to punish the parricide, the man who had raised his murderous hand against his father, by casting him into the depths of the sea in a sack in which were placed a cock, a monkey, and a serpent. The intention of those lawgivers who framed such a law, which seems cruel in our times, was to punish the criminal by the company of hurtful and hateful beasts. But what is the fury of those dumb beasts compared with the fury of execration which bursts from the parched lips and aching throats of the damned in Hell when they behold in their companions in misery those who aided and abetted them in sin, those whose words sowed the first seeds of evil thinking and evil living in their minds, those whose immodest suggestions led them on to sin, those whose eyes tempted and allured them from the path of virtue. They turn upon those accomplices and upbraid them and curse them. But they are helpless and hopeless: it is too late now for repentance.

 – Last of all, consider the frightful torment to those damned souls, tempters and tempted alike, of the company of the devils. These devils will afflict the damned in two ways, by their presence and by their reproaches. We can have no idea of how horrible these devils are. Saint Catherine of Siena once saw a devil and she has written that, rather than look again for one single instant on such a frightful monster, she would prefer to walk until the end of her life along a track of red coals. [J.J. isn't getting his facts straight there.  What Saint Catherine of Siena saw that day was a friar named Brother Tomas who flashed open his robe and showed Catherine his bolt-upright wanger.  The incident had nothing to do with me, and Friar Tomas was subsequently disciplined; but poor Catherine swooned at the sight of it.]  These devils, who were once beautiful angels, have become as hideous and ugly as they once were beautiful.  [Lay off it, J.J. Get yourself a monacle.  You wouldn't know a fallen angel from your own mother.  In fact, come to think of it, neither would half the blokes in the Rathgar neighbourhood of Dublin.] They mock and jeer at the lost souls whom they dragged down to ruin. It is they, the foul demons, who are made in Hell the voices of conscience. Why did you sin? Why did you lend an ear to the temptings of friends? Why did you turn aside from your pious practices and good works? Why did you not shun the occasions of sin? Why did you not leave that evil companion? Why did you not give up that lewd habit, that impure habit?  [In case you were wondering:  Yes, J.J. really is talking there about masturbation.  Sometimes, his prose can be profoundly introspective.] Why did you not listen to the counsels of your confessor? Why did you not, even after you had fallen the first or the second or the third or the fourth or the hundredth time, repent of your evil ways and turn to God who only waited for your repentance to absolve you of your sins?  [Yes, that's right, he's still harping on it.]  Now the time for repentance has gone by. Time is, time was, but time shall be no more! Time was to sin in secrecy [J.J.:  Can we move on to another topic?  Thank you!], to indulge in that sloth and pride, to covet the unlawful, to yield to the promptings of your lower nature, to live like the beasts of the field, nay worse than the beasts of the field, for they, at least, are but brutes and have no reason to guide them: time was, but time shall be no more. God spoke to you by so many voices, but you would not hear. You would not crush out that pride and anger in your heart, you would not restore those ill-gotten goods, you would not obey the precepts of your holy church nor attend to your religious duties, you would not abandon those wicked companions, you would not avoid those dangerous temptations. Such is the language of those fiendish tormentors, words of taunting and of reproach, of hatred and of disgust. Of disgust, yes! For even they, the very devils, when they sinned, sinned by such a sin as alone was compatible with such angelical natures, a rebellion of the intellect [Okay, J.J., you're right, for once:  I, Lucifer, think too much.] and they, even they, the foul devils, must turn away, revolted and disgusted, from the contemplation of those unspeakable sins by which degraded man outrages and defiles the temple of the holy Ghost, defiles and pollutes himself [Yeah, J.J., we get the point: boys do that other thing too much.].

 – O, my dear little brothers in Christ, may it never be our lot to hear that language! May it never be our lot, I say! In the last day of terrible reckoning I pray fervently to God that not a single soul of those who are [reading] today may be found among those miserable beings whom the Great Judge shall command to depart forever from His sight, that not one of us may ever hear ringing in his ears the awful sentence of rejection: "Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels!"

– [....] Last and crowning torture of all the tortures of that awful place is the eternity of Hell. Eternity! O, dread and dire word. Eternity! What mind of man can understand it? And remember, it is an eternity of pain. Even though the pains of Hell were not so terrible as they are, yet they would become infinite, as they are destined to last forever. But while they are everlasting they are at the same time, as you know, intolerably intense, unbearably extensive. To bear even the sting of an insect for all eternity would be a dreadful torment. What must it be, then, to bear the manifold tortures of Hell forever? Forever! For all eternity! Not for a year or for an age but forever. Try to imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore.  How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny little grains go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play.  Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the Earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness; and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of the air: and imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand.  How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all?  Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended.  At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun. And if that mountain rose again after it had been all carried away, and if the bird came again and carried it all away again grain by grain, and if it so rose and sank as many times as there are stars in the sky, atoms in the air, drops of water in the sea, leaves on the trees, feathers upon birds, scales upon fish, hairs upon animals, at the end of all those innumerable risings and sinkings of that immeasurably vast mountain not one single instant of eternity could be said to have ended; even then, at the end of such a period, after that eon of time the mere thought of which makes our very brain reel dizzily, eternity would scarcely have begun.

[You may wonder why God would go to such extremes, but ask yourself this question:  What thoughtful human being would donate one dime to Christianity if it were true that "When you're dead, you're dead"?  Eternal damnation is necessary, so that people will love the Lord, or else!]

– [....] O, what a dreadful punishment! An eternity of endless agony, of endless bodily and spiritual torment, without one ray of hope, without one moment of cessation, of agony limitless in intensity, of torment infinitely varied, of torture that sustains eternally that which it eternally devours, of anguish that everlastingly preys upon the spirit while it racks the flesh, an eternity, every instant of which is itself an eternity of woe. Such is the terrible punishment decreed for those who die in mortal sin by an almighty and a just God.

– Yes, a just God! Men, reasoning always as men, are astonished that God should mete out an everlasting and infinite punishment in the fires of Hell for a single grievous sin [and J.J. isn't just talking about masturbation, for once: there are other sins out there, just as bad as that one]. They reason thus because, blinded by the gross illusion of the flesh and the darkness of human understanding, they are unable to comprehend the hideous malice of mortal sin. They reason thus because they are unable to comprehend that even venial sin is of such a foul and hideous nature that even if the omnipotent Creator could end all the evil and misery in the world, the wars, the diseases, the robberies, the crimes, the deaths, the murders, on condition that he allowed a single venial sin to pass unpunished, a single venial sin, a lie, an angry look, a moment of willful sloth, he, the great omnipotent God, could not do so because sin, be it in thought or deed, is a transgression of his Law and God would not be God if he did not punish the transgressor.

 – A sin, an instant of rebellious pride of the intellect, made Lucifer and a third part of the cohort of angels fall from their glory. A sin, an instant of folly and weakness, drove Adam and Eve out of Eden and brought death and suffering into the world. To retrieve the consequences of that sin the Only Begotten Son of God came down to Earth, lived and suffered and died a most painful death, hanging for three hours on the cross.  [Actually, from "the third hour" to the "ninth hour" totals six hours, not three. Mathematics was never J.J.'s strong suit.  But you can trust what J.J. says about Hell and eternal damnation, because he took his information straight out of the Bible and the early Church patriarchs.]

 – O, my dear little brethren in Christ Jesus, will we then offend that good Redeemer and provoke his anger?  Will we trample again upon that torn and mangled corpse? Will we spit upon that face so full of sorrow and love? Will we too, like the cruel Jews and the brutal soldiers, mock that gentle and compassionate Saviour who trod alone for our sake the awful winepress of sorrow?  Every word of sin is a wound in his tender side. Every sinful act is a thorn piercing his head. Every impure thought, deliberately yielded to, is a keen lance transfixing that sacred and loving heart. No, no. It is impossible for any human being to do that which offends so deeply the divine majesty, that which is punished by an eternity of agony, that which crucifies again the Son of God and makes a mockery of him.

– He calls you to him. You are his.  He made you out of nothing. He loved you as only a God can love.  His arms are open to receive you even though you have sinned against him. Come to him, poor sinner, poor vain and erring sinner. Now is the acceptable time. Now is the hour.

[Soundtrack:  "Just as I am, without one plea..."]

AND NOW, PLEASE STAY TUNED FOR A MESSAGE FROM THE BILLY GRAHAM EVANGELISTIC ASSOCIATION:

"If you have just made a commitment to Christ, please let us know. We'd like to send you Bible study materials to help you grow in your faith."

Click here:

<https://www.billygraham.org/commitment.asp>

NOT YET CONVINCED?  THEN HEAR THE WORDS OF JESUS:  "I have come to inflict fire upon the Earth, and lo, how I wish it were already kindled! [...] If anyone comes to me, and hates not his father and mother, and wife and children, and brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple [...] I say unto you, while many come from the east and west to sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of Heaven, the children of the kingdom [i.e., the Jews] shall be cast out into outer darkness. [...] Just as weeds are gathered and burned in the fire, so shall it be in the end of this world. The Son of Man will send forth his angels, and they will gather even from his own kingdom all who have offended, and everyone who sins, and he shall cast them into a fiery furnace, where there shall be endless wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then shall the truly righteous shine forth like the sun, in the kingdom of their Father.  Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear!" (Luke 12:49, 14:26; Matt. 8:11-12, 13:40-43).

Some additional vituperation about your eternal destiny in Hell, if you don't change your ways, p.d.q.:  Deut. 32:22, Mal. 4:1, Matt. 3:7-12, 5:21-30, 7:19-23, 10:28, 11:21-24, 13:30-51, 18:7-9, 22:7, 23:7-15, 24:4-51, 25:41; Mark 9:43-49; Luke 3:9-17, 12:5, 12:28, 12:49, 16:23-24, 17:29; John15:6; 2 Thes. 1:7-10, 2:8-12; Heb. 10:31; Jude 6-7; Rev. 14:9-11, 16:8-11, 19:20-21, 20:10-15.