Luke 16:24

24. Father Abraham He reminds the great father of his descent from him. And he who sat at the banquet once, and refused the crumb to the beggar, now sees the beggar at the banquet, and is refused his supplication.

Dip… cool my tongue… this flame That tongue which had so often been pampered with sensual gratifications, is now parched with the terrible deprivation. Those licentious passions which had heated his blood will now, in the atmosphere of the new world, kindle to a flame. Besides, the effeminacy which he had cultivated induces him to magnify his new sufferings, and he is perfectly miserable. But all these miseries are, it may be, rather natural than penal. This is the intermediate state, after death, but before the judgment-day. Sentence has not yet been pronounced, and penalty is not yet in its full sense now inflicted. So that we have here, perhaps, the natural sorrow of the lost spirit on leaving the body. Accommodation to his condition may enable his wretched excitement to subside into a permanent state of quiet, settled, and, perhaps, even contented consciousness of badness and woe. This poor wretch prays not to God but to a holy father. The result is a poor encouragement for praying to dead saints.

Flame Are the damned tormented by a real material fire? We might, perhaps, answer the visible fire may be but a material emblem of an immaterial power. The element of the very lake of fire may be to the human soul what the fire is to the visible human body.