“Turn about then,” said the devil, and there was a fellow sitting in a chair, all alone; never a devil near him; no fire or frost; no heat or cold, or anything else, that I could perceive, to torment him; and yet crying and roaring out the most hideously of anything I had yet heard in hell; tearing his flesh, and beating his body, like a bedlam; and his heart, all the while, bleeding at his eyes. Good Lord, thought I, what ails this wretch, to yell out thus when nobody hurts him! So I went up to him. “Friend,” said I, “what’s the meaning of all this fury and transport? for, so far as I can see, there’s nothing to trouble you.” “No, no,” says he with a horrid outcry, and with all the extravagances of a man in rage and despair, “you do not see my tormentors; but the all-searching eye of the Almighty sees my pains as well as my transgressions, and with a severe and implacable justice has condemned me to suffer punishments answerable to my crimes.” (Which words he uttered with redoubled clamours.) “My executioners are in my soul, and all the plagues of hell in my conscience. My memory serves me instead of a cruel devil. The remembrance of the good I should have done, and omitted; and of the ill I should not have done, and did. The remembrance of the wholesome counsels I have rejected, and of the ill example I have given. And for the aggravation of my misery; where my memory leaves afflicting me, my understanding begins: showing me the glories and beatitudes I have lost, which others enjoy, who have gained heaven with less anxiety and pain than I have endured to compass my damnation. Now am I perpetually meditating on the comforts, beauties, felicities, and raptures of paradise, only to enflame and exasperate my despair in hell; begging in vain but for one moment’s interval of ease, without obtaining any; for my will is also as inexorable as either my memory or my understanding. And these (my friend of the other world) are the three faculties of my soul, which Divine Justice, for my sins, has converted into three tormentors, that torture me without noise; into three flames, that burn me without consuming. And if I chance at any time to have the least remission or respite, the worm of my conscience gnaws my soul, and finds it, to an insatiable hunger, an immortal aliment and entertainment.” At that word, turning towards me with a hellish yell, “Mortal,” says he, “learn, and be assured from me, that all those that either bury or misemploy their talents, carry a hell within themselves, and are damned even above ground.” And so he returned to his usual clamours. Upon this, I left him, miserably sad and pensive. Well, thought I, what a weight of sin lies upon this creature’s conscience! Whereupon the devil observing me in a muse, told me in my ear, that this fellow had been an atheist, and believed neither God nor devil. “Deliver me then,” said I, “from that unsanctified wisdom, that serves us only for our further condemnation.”