When I was a boy there was an old, tall, craggy-faced priest from Scotland who used to preach on Sundays at the parish church in Tunapuna in Trinidad. I enjoyed his sermons. They were loud with thunder and denunciation and terrible warnings. I remember he was particularly strong on Hell.
This was a place of eternal fire and raging torment, described by him in vivid and frightening detail. He used no soft soap. Eternal damnation meant just that – a man was cursed and tortured forever for the sins he had committed.
What, I wonder, has happened to that sort of Hell? What has happened to Milton’s molten gulfs and fiery chasms? What has happened to Dante’s steep descending Inferno of lost-forever souls? Does anyone preach any more a full-blooded sermon on eternal punishment?
Until not so long ago the fearsome doctrine of everlasting damnation for those who failed the test at the
