I. The locality of hell, and the reality of the fire thereof, have been

controverted from the time of Origen. That father, in his treatise Περι
Αρχαν, interpreting the scripture account metaphorically, makes hell to
consist not in eternal punishments, but in the conscience of sinners,
the sense of their guilt, and the remembrance of their past pleasures.
St. Augustine mentions several of the same opinion in his time; and
Calvin, and many of his followers, have embraced it in ours.

The retainers to the contrary opinion, who are much the greatest part of
mankind, are divided as to situation, and other circumstances of this
horrible scene. The Greeks, after Homer, Hesiod, &c. conceived hell,
τοπον τινα ὐπο την γην μεγσν, &c. a large and dark place under the
earth.—Lucian, _de Luctu_; and Eustathius, _on Homer_.

Some of the Romans lodged in the subterranean regions directly under the
lake Avernus, in Campania, which they were led to from the consideration
of the poisonous vapours emitted by that lake. Through a dark cave, near
this lake, Virgil makes Æneas descend to hell.

Others placed hell under Tenarus, a promontory of Laconia; as being a
dark frightful place, beset with thick woods, out of which there was no
finding a passage. This way, Ovid says, Orpheus descended to hell.
Others fancied the river or fountain of Styx, in Arcadia, the
spring-head of hell, by reason the waters thereof were mortal.

But these are all to be considered as only fables of poets; who,
according to the genius of their art, allegorizing and personifying
every thing, from the certain death met withal in those places, took
occasion to represent them as so many gates, or entering-places into the
other world.

The primitive Christians conceiving the earth a large extended plain,
and the heavens an arch drawn over the same, took hell to be a place in
the earth, the farthest distant from the heavens; so that their hell was
our antipodes.

Tertullian, _De Anima_, represents the Christians of his time, as
believing hell to be an abyss in the centre of the earth: which opinion
was chiefly founded on the belief of Christ’s descent into _hades_,
hell, Matt. xii. 40.

Mr. Wiston has lately advanced a new opinion. According to him, the
comets are to be conceived as so many hells, appointed in the course of
their trajectories, or orbits, alternately to carry the damned into the
confines of the sun, there to be scorched by his flames, and then to
return them to starve in the cold, dreary, dark regions, beyond the orb
of Saturn.

The reverend and orthodox Mr. T. Surnden, in an express _Inquiry into
the nature and place of Hell_, not contented with any of the places
hitherto assigned, contends for a new one. According to him, the sun
itself is the _local hell_.

This does not seem to be his own discovery: it is probable he was led
into it by that passage in Rev. xvi. 8, 9. Though it must be added, that
Pythagoras seems to have the like view, in that he places hell in the
sphere of fire; and that sphere in the middle of the universe. Add, that
Aristotle mentions some of the Italic or Pythagoric school, who placed
the sphere of fire in the sun, and even called it Jupiter’s Prison.—_De
Cælo_, lib. ii.

To make way for his own system, Mr. Swinden undertakes to remove hell
out of the centre of the earth, from these two considerations:—1. That a
fund of fuel or sulphur, sufficient to maintain so furious and constant
a fire, cannot be there supposed; and, 2. That it must want the nitrous
particles in the air, to sustain and keep it alive. And how, says he,
can such fire be eternal, when by degrees the whole substance of the
earth must be consumed thereby?

It must not be forgot, however, that Tertullian had long ago obviated
the former of these difficulties, by making a difference between
_arcanus_ and _publicus ignis_, secret and open fire: the nature of the
first, according to him, is such, as that it not only consumes, but
repairs what it preys upon. The latter difficulty is solved by St.
Augustine, who alleges, that God supplies the central fire with air, by
a miracle.

Mr. Swinden, however, proceeds to shew, that the central parts of the
earth are possessed by water rather than fire; which he confirms by what
Moses says of _water under the earth_, Exod. xx. from Psalm xxiv. 2, &c.

As a further proof, he alleges, that there would want room in the centre
of the earth, for such an infinite host of inhabitants as the fallen
angels and wicked men.

Drexelius, we know, has fixed the dimensions of hell to a German cubic
mile, and the number of the damned to an hundred thousand millions: _De
Damnator_, _Carcer_, &c. Rogo. But Mr. Swinden thinks he need not to
have been so sparing in his number, for that there might be found an
hundred times as many; and that they must be insufferably crowded in any
space he could allow them on our earth. It is impossible, he concludes,
to stow such a multitude of spirits in such a scanty apartment, without
a penetration of dimensions, which, he doubts, in good philosophy, even
in respect of spirits: “If it be (he adds,) why God should prepare, _i.
e._ make, a prison for them, when they might all have been crowded
together into a baker’s oven.” p. 206.

His arguments for the sun’s being the local hell are: 1. Its capacity.
Nobody will deny the sun spacious enough to receive all the damned
conveniently; so that there will be no want of room. Nor will fire be
wanting, if we admit of Mr. Swinden’s argument against Aristotle,
whereby he demonstrates, that the sun is hot, p. 208, _et seq._ The good
man is “filled with amazement to think what Pyrenian mountains of
sulphur, how many Atlantic oceans of scalding bitumen, must go to
maintain such mighty flames as those of the sun; to which our Ætna and
Vesuvius are mere glow-worms.” p. 137.

2. Its distance and opposition to the empyreum, which has usually been
looked upon as the local heaven: such opposition is perfectly answerable
to that opposition in the nature and office of a place of angels and
devils, of elect and reprobate, of glory and horror, of hallelujahs and
cursings; and the distance quadrates well with Dives seeing Abraham
_afar off, and the great gulph between them_; which this author takes to
be the solar vortex.

3. That the empyreum is the highest, and the sun the lowest place of the
creation; considering it as the centre of our system; and that the sun
was the first part of the visible world created; which agrees with the
notion of its being primarily intended or prepared to receive the
angels, whose fall he supposes to have immediately preceded the
creation.

4. The early and almost universal idolatry paid to the sun; which suits
well with the great subtilty of that spirit, to entice mankind to
worship his throne.