What is Hell?

The awful night was spreading her wings—Oh, how I dreaded its settling! Every renewed darkness brought new agony, new despair. 

And as soon as the light had vanished entirely, hell was swept of everything with which imagination had endowed it, towns, castles, houses, parks, churches, clubs and all places of amusement—everything had vanished, leaving a desert void and souls unclothed of aught, but bare being.

Hell was then like a vast dungeon where man and woman, rich and poor, crawled about in utter loneliness.

While the light lasted, dusky though at best it was, one could arrange oneself according to one's fancy, having everything one listed, unreal though it was, mere shadows of thought, still, it was a kind of occupation to surround oneself with imagined possessions, but this terrible night admitted of no such jugglery. 

It left me naked, poor, forsaken, homeless, friendless—a prey to bitter reality.

I shrank, together within my miserable self, not knowing where I was or who might be near me. 

Nor did I care to know, filled with the one thought that I was in the place of lost souls—lost myself. 

Evil thoughts kept settling round my heart, beleaguering it as the ruthless Romans did the unhappy city of David. This siege, too, ended with a terrible destruction, an agony of suffering, the like of which the world has never seen. 

As before, I passed the long night shuddering, trembling for outward cold, but with a horrible fire within.

You say in the world, and say truly, that there are conflicts in which even strong men fail—alas, the hardest conflict now seemed a happy condition, for here struggling was at an end as being too good for hell!

There is only raving and madness here—a kind of spiritual suicide even, but no struggling for victory. 

The soul here is a victim forsaken by the powers of good. Every little devil is permitted to fasten his miserable claws on the helpless mind.

Understand me, it is a figure of speech.

There are no devils in this place save our own evil desires, passions and sinful thoughts. Satan at times is here, but thanks be to God, not yet has he final power over the soul.

In this very night he was present, come to look on the miserable beings he delights in considering his. 

Though not always, yet generally, he chooses darkness for his visits. As a sudden whirlwind, felt, but not seen, he was among us, and hell was frozen with horror. 

All the millions of souls then shrank together in an agony of unutterable fear, knowing that one was among them who never knew pity and truth—the great destroyer, ready to destroy them. 

And this was the dreadful thing, that though certain of his presence—ay, feeling it, not one of us could say—

See here! see there!

You hear a crackling as of fire, serpents of flame keep darting across the tenebrous space, showing his path, but where was he, the dread enemy? His consuming eye at this very moment might be upon you, gloating over your trembling soul.

I will be silent—I cannot dwell on these horrors.

Be it enough to say that again and again, I felt myself in the very grasp of the evil one, who seemed to dally with my anguish. It took all manner of forms, suffice it to give one—I suddenly felt as though I were a bottomless ocean in which my sins were swimming about like fish. And the devil sat on the shore, grinning and throwing his lines, using now, this evil desire, now, that, as a bait.

He was an expert, catching fish upon fish.

Suddenly, the float disappeared, dragged down into the deep—a good catch, no doubt. He brought it up triumphantly, it was horrible, horrible!

Let me drop the veil.

This, too, is imagination, of course—or at worst, Satan's own evil pastime with the hopeless mind. 

But, nevertheless, what is there more real than death? and I suffered a hundred deaths in that night.

At last, at last, I know not after what length of time, hell was given up again to its own state of misery, rising to it with a gasp as out of a fearful dream. Then I felt it a relief almost to be but a prey once more to my own evil thoughts. Bad as it was to be left to myself seemed gain.

As before, the whole of my past life was unrolled to my sight—sin upon sin, failure upon failure, gnawing at my heart until it was but a single festering wound.

Letters from Hell