What Christ Teaches Concerning Future Retribution 89 , former must be symbolical of the unutterable sufferings of hell. One can no more presume to dogmatize on the one than the other, but it requires no vivid stretch of the imagination to conceive an accusing conscience acting like the undying worm, and insatiable desires like the unquenchable fire. In our Lord’s parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the former is represented as being “in torments” and “in anguish” even in “Hades,” and, that memory survives the present life and ac companies us beyond the grave, is clear from Abraham’s words to him: “Son, remember” (Luke 16:23-25). Could any material torments be worse than the moral torture of an acutely sharpened conscience, in which memory becomes re morse as it dwells upon misspent time and misused talents, upon omitted duties and committed sins, upon opportunities lost both of doing and of getting good, upon privileges neg lected and warning rejected? It is bad enough here, where memory is so defective, and conscience may be so easily drugged; but what must it be hereafter, when no expedients will avail to banish recollection and drown remorse? The poet Starkey stimulates our imagination in the awful lines: “All that hath been that ought not to have been, That might have been so different; that now Cannot but be irrevocably past. Thy gangrened heart, Stripped of its self-worn mask, and spread at last Bare, in its horrible anatomy, Before thine own excruciated gaze:” while Cecil puts the matter in a nutshell when he writes:
“Hell is the truth seen too late.”
Again, what material pain could equal the moral torment of intensified lusts and passions finding no means of gratifi cation, insatiable desires that can have no provision for their indulgence, or if indulged, all the pleasure gone while the power remains? Surely, such expressions as the undying worm and the unquenchable fire represent, not pious fictions,
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