infernalisms

Noun

infernalism (countable and uncountable, plural infernalisms)

1. Belief in the existence of hell, especially as a place of eternal and conscious torment after death.
   • To these conceptions Protestant churches will gradually yield, and while still nominally the same in their faith, its infernalism will disappear, and the idea of future punishment will become a rational instead of a diabolical picture of Divine justice.1853 August, “The Onward Movement”, in Joseph R. Buchanan, editor, Buchanan’s Journal of Man, volume 4, number 8, page 228
2. (dated) Hellishness.
   • It is because worship has been slavishly bestowed on the personification of the worst of the human qualities magnified to infernalism, that it has been considered a degrading, or at least a pusilanimous thing […]1860, Calvin Blanchard, The Religion of Science; or The Art of Actualizing Liberty […], page 128
3. (dated) An infernal thing or act.
   • Is not the State an infernal institution? Why expect from it, then, anything but infernalisms?1886 September 18, Benjamin R. Tucker, “Why Expect Justice from the State?”, in Instead of a Book by a Man Too Busy to Write One: A Fragmentary Exposition of Philosophical Anarchism, published 1893...