Verse 18. — 'He shall pay for all the things he did, yet shall he not be consumed.' — The damned always die, never to be consumed by death. — For he pays out in torment those desires which here he unlawfully kept; and, delivered up to avenging flames, he always dies, because he is always kept in death. For he is not consumed in death, because if the life of the dying man were consumed, the punishment also would end with the life. But that he may be tortured without end, he is compelled to live without end in punishment, so that he whose life was here dead in guilt, there his death may live in punishment. Let it therefore be said: 'He shall pay for all the things he did, yet shall he not be consumed,' because he is tortured, and not extinguished; he dies, and lives; he fails, and subsists; he is always ended, and is without end.
These things are very terrible by hearing alone; how much more by suffering! But because the multitude of his iniquity demands that he can never be free from punishments, fittingly is it subjoined: