On the Eternity of Punishments and on the Fire of Hell

Three short and rigorously dialectical commentaries by the Roman College theologian Carlo Passaglia, sent to press, as his preface says, because the question of the eternity of punishments and the fire of hell was breaking out afresh in England, France, and Germany. The first proves the eternity of punishments from the Scriptures in seven theorems: from the texts that call those punishments eternal, that say they endure unto ages of ages, that expressly deny them an end, that set them against the duration of the reward, that take away all hope of liberation from damned men and from the evil angels, and that show a ransom of infinite price was needed — answering along the way the objections drawn from the Hebrew and Greek words for “age” and “eternal.” The second, in eleven theorems, weighs the doctrine by the judgment of reason alone: that God may fix a term to pardon, that the term is this present life, and that punishments perpetual, both privative and positive, contain nothing reason can condemn. The third, a biblical dissertation in eight theorems, shows that the fire of hell is no metaphor — from Christ's sentence against the reprobate, from both Testaments, and from the name Gehenna — and in what respects it differs from the fire we know. With the author's own synopsis of the theorems, linked to each. Rome, 1855. In English for the first time.