in my visions is that of a beautiful and well-regulated city, and the
different degrees of glory to which the elect are raised are
demonstrated by the magnificence of their palaces, or the wonderful
fruit and flowers with which the gardens are embellished. Hell is shown
to me under the same form, but all within it is, on the contrary,
close, confused, and crowded; every object tends to fill the mind with
sensations of pain and grief; the marks of the wreath and vengeance of
God are visible everywhere; despair, like a vulture, gnaws every heart,
and discord and misery reign around. In the Heavenly Jerusalem all is
peace and eternal harmony, the beginning, fulfilment, and end of
everything being pure and perfect happiness; the city is filled with
splendid buildings, decorated in such a manner as to charm every eye
and enrapture every sense; the inhabitants of this delightful abode are
overflowing with rapture and exultation, the gardens gay with lovely
flowers, and the trees covered with delicious fruits which give eternal
life. In the city of Hell nothing is to be seen but dismal dungeons,
dark caverns, frightful deserts, fetid swamps filled with every
imaginable species of poisonous and disgusting reptile. In Heaven you
behold the happiness and peaceful union of the saints; in Hell,
perpetual scenes of wretched discord, and every species of sin and
corruption, either under the most horrible forms imaginable, or
represented by different kinds of dreadful torments. All in this dreary
abode tends to fill the mind with horror; not a word of comfort is
heard or a consoling idea admitted; the one tremendous thought, that
the justice of an all-powerful God inflicts on the damned nothing but
what they have fully deserved is the absorbing tremendous conviction
which weighs down each heart. Vice appears in its own grim disgusting
colours, being stripped of the mask under which it is hidden in this
world, and the infernal viper is seen devouring those who have
cherished or fostered it here below. In a word, Hell is the temple of