A Bad Conscience is Hell

I am able reliably to testify what a bad conscience is and what this driver, the Law, is able to do in the conscience. For I have in part experienced it myself. Then, too, I have seen and heard some who were vexed and tortured most miserably by a sense of sin....Why waste many words? A bad conscience is hell. This created by the rod of the oppressor, the Law. When this oppressor bears down on a man, when it severely drubs and drives with club and cudgel, then no soundness remains in the flesh and in the bones. The soul of the conscience is tortured as if it were in hell.

Source: Quoted in Ewald M. Plass, What Luther Says, A Practical In-home Theology for the Active Christian. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House. 1959 Edition, 10th Printing (1994), p. 336.