situation; but only by the company: as that it shall be where such wicked men were, as God in former times, in extraordinary and miraculous manner, had destroyed from off the face of the earth: as for example, that they are in Inferno, in Tartarus, or in the bottomless pit; because Corah, Dathan, and Abiron, were swallowed up alive into the earth. Not that the writers of the Scripture would have us believe there could be in the globe of the earth, which is not only finite, but also, compared to the height of the stars, of no considerable magnitude, a pit without a bottom, that is, a hole of infinite depth, such as the Greeks in their “demonology” (that is to say, in their doctrine concerning “demons”), and after them the Romans, called Tartarus; of which Virgil ( Aen. VI 578, 579) says,
Bis patet in praeceps tantum, tenditque sub umbras, Quantus ad aetherium coeli suspectus Olympum:
for that is a thing the proportion of earth to heaven cannot bear: but that we should believe them there, indefinitely, where those men are on whom God inflicted that exemplary punishment.
Again, because those mighty men of the earth, that lived in the time of Noah before the flood, (which the Greeks called “heroes,” and the Scripture “giants,” and both say were begotten by copulation of the children of God with the children of men,) were for their wicked life destroyed by the general deluge; the place of the damned is therefore also sometimes marked out by the company of those deceased giants; as Proverbs 21:16, “The man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain in the congregation of the giants”: and Job 26:5, “Behold the giants groan under water, and they that dwell with them.” Here the place of the damned is under the water. And Isaiah 14:9, “Hell is troubled how to meet thee (that is, the king of Babylon) and will displace the giants for thee”: and here again the place of the damned, if the sense be literal, is to be under water. Thirdly, because the