Hell Is More Than a Choice

Early in the year 1633, a rural Anglican priest named George Herbert lay dying of tuberculosis in the village of Bemerton, England. He was not quite 40 years old. Herbert entrusted a friend with a handwritten manuscript of religious and devotional poems. He asked him to deliver the manuscript to their mutual friend Nicholas Ferrar. Ferrar could burn it if he wished. Or, if he thought the poems might help others, he could publish them. Herbert had never before published his English poetry; he wrote his poems for God and kept them to himself, though he seems to have…