MEDITATION XLVI.
MEDITATION XLVI.
ON ONE CURSING AND SWEARING AT AN AFFRONT.
Spithead, July 10, 1758.
This discloses to me the dreadful confusion and deplorable rage which the wicked shall be put into at the final judgment! Listen to that poor wretch—for a matter of no importance—roaring, raging, foaming, and blaspheming! What surprising, chilling, and vile oaths pursue one another in his fiendlike fury! Scarcely can he tell what troubles him for belching out hideous, horrid, and vicious oaths, protestations, and imprecations—not to be allowed to return ever into the memory again but in a way of deploration.
Now, if such be the language of sinners on earth, what shall be their dialect in hell, when they shall turn their blasphemies against the blessed—but tremendous Avenger himself! when their kindling eyes shall swell with fury! Here they curse others, or invoke damnation on themselves.
But then and there, they shall blaspheme God for his burning indignation, and, in perpetual rage and fury, rise up against incensed Omnipotence itself. And this shall increase their torment—that they madly oppose their feeble power, and unsubdued enmity, against the infinite Afflicter, whereby they, as it were, approve of their old rebellion against their rightful Lord, and make it evident that he is just when he condemns and punishes his foes.
But O! what a countenance will they put on, what passion, what revenge, what anguish, what rage, what horror, what burning envy in their soul, what rolling eyes, and trembling joints, what tormenting confusion of thought, what terrible derangement, and consummate despair—will tear and prey on them forever! Against whom will they stamp, frown, storm, and foam, like this desperado? Whom will they threaten? God, their eternal foe, is far above their reach, holds them down in chains of everlasting wrath, and roars against them with the thunders of his right hand forever!
Now, as I heard such vile cursings, and oaths to me entirely new (which I pray may never grate my ear again) from hence I infer, that the blasphemies of the damned, now past all hope, and filled with unrelenting enmity, are so extremely and inconceivably dreadful, so excessively horrid, that the most abandoned swearer, the master of the newest and blackest blasphemies on earth, cannot now imagine them; just as the sharpest pains we feel in time, bear no proportion to the excruciating torments of the damned.
This desperado's rage assuages little by little, and he becomes more calm by degrees. But in hell, their passion and tumult ever grows, even against God. Their soul abhors him, and his soul also loathes them! O then to be wise, and learn wisdom from everything I see!
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