There is a place deep, wondrous deep, below,
Which genuine night and horror does o'erflow;
No bound controls th' unwearied space, but Hell,
Endless as those dire pains that in it dwell.*
Here no clear glimpse of the Sun's lovely face
Strikes through the solid darkness of the place;
No dawning morn does her kind reds display;

One slight weak beam would here be thought the day.

In a previous Ode-The Plagues of Egypt-Cowley has this passage upon the fate of Pharaoh :

What blindness or what darkness did there e'er
Like this undocil King's appear?

What e'er but that which now does represent,
And paint the crime out in the punishment.
From the deep baleful caves of hell below,t
Where the old mother Night does grow,

into which the sea discharges itself, as rivers do into the sea, all which maintain a perpetual circulation of water, like that of blood in a man's body; for to refer the originality of all fountains to condensation, and afterwards dissolution of vapours upon the earth, is one of the most unphilosophical opinions in all Aristotle. And this abyss of waters is very agreeable to the Scriptures. Jacob blesses Joseph with the blessings of the heavens above, and with the blessings of the deep beneath; that is, with the dew and rain of heaven, and with the fountains and rivers that arise from the deep; and Esdras, conformably to this, asks, what habitations are in the heart of the sea, and what veins in the root of the abyss? So at the end of the Deluge, Moses says that God stopt the windows of heaven, and the fountains of the abyss.

And undisturb'd by moons in silence sleep. For I suppose the moon to be the principal if not the sole cause of the ebbing and flowing of the sea, but to have no effect upon the waters that are beneath the sea itself.

* This must be taken in a poetical sense; for else, making Hell to be in the centre of the earth, it is far from infinitely large or deep; yet, on my conscience, wherever it be, it is not so strait, as that crowding and sweating should be one of the torments of it, as is pleasantly fancied by Bellarmin. Lessius, in his book De Morib. Divinis, as if he had been there to survey it, determines the diameter to be just a Dutch mile. But Ribera, (upon and out of the Apocalypse,) allows Pluto a little more elbow-room, and extends it to 1,600 furlongs, that is 200 Italian miles. Virgil, (as good a divine for this matter as either of them,) says, it is twice as deep as the distance betwixt heaven and earth. Hesiod is more moderate. Statius puts it very low, but he is not so punctual in the distance: he finds out a hell beneath the vulgar one, which Eschylus mentions also. The Scripture terms it Utter Darkness.

The room in St. James's Palace, formerly appropriated to the game of Hazard, was remarkably dark, and conventionally called by the inmates of the palace, "Hell"; whence, and not as generally supposed, from their own demerits, the term became applied to gaming-houses generally.

Chap. v. 21. Even darkness that may be felt. The Vulgar, Tam densa (tenebra) ut palpari queant. Whether this darkness was really in the air, or only in their eyes, which might be blinded for the time;

The Wheel of Eternal Punishment.

Substantial Night, that does declaim

Privation's empty name,

Through secret conduits monstrous shapes arose,
Such as the Sun's whole force could not oppose,
They with a solid cloud

All heaven's eclipsed face did shroud.

Seem'd with large wings spread o'er the sea and earth,
To brood up a new chaos his deformed birth.

And every lamp and every fire,

Did at the dreadful sight wink and expire,

To the empyrean source all streams of light seem'd to retire.
The living men were in their standard houses buried;

But the long night no slumber knows,

But the short death finds no repose.

Ten thousand terrors through the darkness fled,
And ghosts complain'd, and spirits murmured;
And fancie's multiplying sight

View'd all the scenes invisible of night.

THE WHEEL OF ETERNAL PUNISHMENT.

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As the wicked (says Drexelius,) delight to consume their days in a circle of pleasure, God will appoint them a circle, but it shall be a circle of torments, which will never have an end. This was foretold by holy David: "Thine arrows," says he, "went abroad; the voice of thunder was heard round about." (Ps. lxxvii. 17, 18.) Famine, war, pestilence, disease, calamities, death, and all other afflictions, under which we often languish in this life, are the arrows of the Lord; these, however, soon fly over us; they swiftly pass from one another; but the voice of His thunder, the voice of His anger and heavy displeasure, like a wheel that is always in motion, shall sound about the infernal regions from everlasting to everlasting.*

or whether a suspension of light from the act of illumination in that country; or whether it were by some black, thick, and damp vapour which possessed the air; it is impossible to determine. I fancy that the darkness of hell below, which is called Utter Darkness, arose, and overshadowed the land; and I am authorised by the Wisdom of Solomon, chap. xvii. v. 14, where he calls it as Night that came upon them out of the bottom of inevitable hell; and, therefore, was the more proper to be (as he says after) as an image of that darkness which should afterwards receive them.

Hence the mythological fable of the punishment of Ixion, the son of Phlegyas, King of Thessaly, who treacherously murdered his fatherin-law. For this crime he was abhorred and shunned by the neighbouring princes, when Jupiter, from pity, took him up to heaven. Provoked at his ingratitude and criminality, the sovereign of Olympus struck him to Tartarus by lightning, and ordered Mercury to tie him with serpents to a wheel, which, turning continually round, rendered his punishment eternal:

Ixion and Pirithous I could name,

And more Thessalian chiefs of mighty fame.
Dryden's Virgil.

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This wheel, as if filled with gunpowder, when once it takes fire, shall burn to all eternity. A fire is kindled in mine anger, and shall burn unto the lowest hell." (Deut. xxxii. 22.) There is another circle which is likewise eternal,- -a continual changing from the extremes of heat and cold. "Drought and heat consume the snow-waters, and so does the grave those which have sinned." (Job xxiv. 19.) This is more expressly intimated to us by the 'weeping and gnashing of teeth," which are mentioned by St.

Matthew.

Upon the above passage the Rev. H. P. Dunster, the editor of D. Dunster's translation of the Reflections on Eternity of Jeremiah Drexelius, notes:

"That a continual changing from the extremes of heat and cold forms a portion of the punishment of the damned is a very common notion among the old writers, and is founded upon one or two passages in holy writ." The idea has been beautifully embodied by Milton, in Paradise Lost, b. ii. :

Thither by harpy-footed fairies hal'd

At certain revolutions, all the damn'd

Are brought; and feel by turns the bitter change
Of fierce extremes, extremes by change more fierce,
From beds of raging fire to starve in ice

Their soft ethereal warmth, and there to pine

Immoveable, in fix'd and frozen round,

Periods of time, thence hurried back to fire.

Shakspeare also describes the same, in Measure for Measure, Act iii.:

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice.

THE FALLEN ANGEL.

With admirable union of pathos and sublimity has Milton represented the fallen angel exclaiming,

The Crucifixion of Our Lord.

CRUCIFIXION was the common mode of punishment among the Persians, Carthaginians, and Romans; and the latter, at the urgent and tumultuous solicitations of the Jews, were the executioners in the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

The cross was the punishment inflicted by the Romans-on servants who had perpetrated crimes; on robbers; assassins; and rebels; among which last Jesus was reckoned, on the ground of his making himself King or Messiah (Luke xxiii. 1—5, 13—15).

The words in which the sentence was given, were as follows: "Thou shalt go to the cross." The person to be punished, was deprived of all his clothes, excepting something around the loins. In this state of nudity, he was beaten, sometimes with rods, but more generally with whips. Such was the severity of this flagellation that numbers died under it. Jesus was crowned with thorns, and made the subject of mockery; but nothing of this kind could be legally done, or, in other words, insults of this kind were not among the ordinary attendants of crucifixion. They were owing in this case, solely to the petulant spirit of the Roman soldiers.

The criminal having been beaten, was subjected to the further suffering of being obliged to carry the cross himself to the place of punishment, which was commonly a hill near the public way, and out of the city. The place of crucifixion at Jerusalem was a hill to the north-west of the city.

The cross, a post, otherwise called the unpropitious or infamous tree, consisted of a piece of wood erected perpendicularly, and intersected by another at right angles near the top, so as to resemble the letter T. The crime for which the person suffered, was inscribed on the transverse piece near the top of the perpendicular one. There is no mention made in ancient writers of anything on which the feet of the person crucified rested. Near the middle, however, of the perpendicular beam, there projected a piece of wood, on which he sat, and which served as a support to the body; the weight of which might otherwise have torn away the hands from the nails driven through them. Here we see the ground of certain phrases-as "To ride upon the cross; "to be borne upon the cross; "to rest upon the sharp cross," &c. The cross, which was erected at the place of punishment, and

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firmly fixed in the ground, rarely exceeded 10 feet in height. The nearly naked victim was elevated to the small projection in the middle; the hands were then bound by a rope round the transverse beam, and nailed through the palms. Hence the expressions: "to mount upon the cross; "to leap upon the cross;" "to bring one upon the cross," &c.

The Jews, in the times of which we are speaking, viz. whilst they were under the jurisdiction of the Romans, were in the habit of giving the criminal, before the commencement of his sufferings, a medicated drink of wine and myrrh. (Prov. xxxi. 6.) The object of this was to produce intoxication, and thereby render the pains of crucifixion less sensible to the sufferer. This beverage was refused by the Saviour, for the obvious reason that he chose to die with the faculties of his mind undisturbed and unclouded. It should be remarked that this sort of drink, which was, probably, offered out of kindness, was different from the vinegar, which was subsequently offered to the Saviour, by the Roman soldiers. The latter was a mixture of vinegar and water, denominated posca, and was a common drink for soldiers in the Roman army.

The degree of anguish was gradual in its increase, and the crucified person was able to live under it, commonly till the third, and sometimes till the seventh day. Pilate, therefore, being surprised at the speedy termination of the Saviour's life, inquired in respect to the truth of it of the centurion himself, who commanded the soldiers. In order to bring their life to a more speedy termination, so that they might be buried on the same day, the bones of the two thieves were broken with mallets; and in order to ascertain whether Jesus was really dead, or whether he had merely fallen into a swoon, a soldier thrust his lance into his side, (undoubtedly his left side,) but no signs of life appeared. If he had not been previously dead, a wound of this kind in his side would have put a period to his life, as has been shown, both by the physician Eschenbach, and by Gruner. The part pierced was the pericardium hence lymph and blood flowed out.

There is sufficient proof that the physical cause of the death of our blessed Saviour was the rupture of His sacred heart, caused by mental agony. Dr. Macbride, in his Lectures on the Diatessaron, quotes from the Evangelical Register of 1829 some observations of a physician, who considers the record concerning the blood and water as explaining (at least to a mere scientific age) that the real cause of the death of Jesus was rupture of the heart, occasioned by mental agony. Such rupture, it is stated, is usually attended by instant death, without previous exhaustion, and by the effusion into the pericardium of blood, which, in this particular case, though scarcely in any other, separates into its two constituent parts, so as to present the appearance commonly termed blood and water. Thus the prophecy, "Reproach hath broken my heart"