"My brothers and sisters," he began, "I have come to-night to give you a warning, and this warning is given to you not as the expression of a personal opinion but as the declaration of an assumed fact.Disregard it or not as you please, but I shall have done my duty in pointing out to you the sure and certain meaning of my message.""I, a sinner like the rest of you, live nevertheless in the fear of hell fire.Hell fire has become, I think, to many of the present generation a mockery and a derision.I come to tell you that it is no mockery, that it as surely lies there, a blazing furnace, in front of us as though we saw it with our own eyes..."With his own eyes he had surely seen it.They were fixed now in a frenzy of realisation upon some distant vision, and, with a shiver, the Chapel followed his gaze.It is easy enough to laugh at bare and conventional words stripped of the atmosphere and significance of their original surroundings.The merest baby in this twentieth century can laugh at the flames of hell and advance a string of easy arguments against the probability of any such melodramatic fulfilment of the commonplace and colourless lives that the majority of us lead, but Maggie was in no mood to laugh that night.
Before five minutes had passed she found herself shivering where she sat.The Chapel was convicted of Sin, and of Sin of no ordinary measure.The head that rested like a round ball on the surface of the desk thrust conviction into every heart: "You think that you may escape, you look at your neighbours, every one of you, and say, 'He is worse than I.I am safe,' but I tell you that not one man or woman here shall be secure unless he turn instantly now to God and beg for mercy..."As he continued he did indeed bear the almost breathless urgency of one who has been sent on in advance to announce the imminence of some awful peril.No matter what the peril might be; simply through the Chapel there passed the breath of some coming danger.Impossible to watch him and not realise that here was a man who had seen something with his own eyes that had changed in a moment the very fabric of his life.Thurston might be a charlatan who played with the beliefs of his dupes, Warlock might be a mystic whose vision was in the future and not in the past--Crashaw knew.
He painted, quietly, without fine words but with assurance and conviction, his belief in the punishment of mankind.God was almost now upon the threshold of their house.He was at the very gates of their city, and with Him was coming a doom as sure and awful as the sentence of the earthly judge on his earthly victim.
"Punishment! Punishment!...We have grown in this careless age to laugh at punishment.A future life? There is no future life.God?