Yama

according to Hindus, was the first of mortals, and thus the first to enter the dread land, tended by his dogs (see Dog), to become the lord of death. In later Puranas this Vedik idea is enlarged, and men were told ‘‘that there existed for all a capacious hell, with walls a hundred miles thick, wherein they would lie to all eternity, ever suffering new and indescribable torments.” Luther and Calvin accepted the picture that they found in the Gospels; but the majority of Christians were glad to find refuge in that mitigation of horror presented to them by the Romanist doctrine of Purgatory, though the Protestants rightly said it was “ unscriptural.” Broad Churchmen waxed bolder in denial when, in 1863, Canon Farrar (who quotes Psalms vi, 5; Ixxxvili, 10-12, as representing the older ideas) called “God to witne that, so far from regretting p2 the po ible lo of eons of bli ,... I would on my knees ask God that I might die as the beasts that perish, and forever cease to be, rather than my worst enemy should endure the tortures ascribed by Tertullian, or Minucius Felix, Jonathan Edwards, Dr Pusey, Me rs Furni , Moody, or Spurge on, for a single year ”—to which most good and reasonable men say Amen. 251