The adverse party, who were either philosophers or reformers, received all such information with great suspicion. Anthony Cornelius, a lawyer in the sixteenth century, wrote a small tract, which was so effectually suppressed, as a monster of atheism, that a copy is now only to be found in the hands of the curious. This author ridiculed the absurd and horrid doctrine of _infant damnation_, and was instantly decried as an atheist, and the printer prosecuted to his ruin! Cælius Secundus Curio, a noble Italian, published a treatise _De Amplitudine beati Regni Dei_, to prove that _Heaven_ has more inhabitants than _Hell_,--or, in his own phrase, that the _elect_ are more numerous than the _reprobate_. However we may incline to smile at these works, their design was benevolent. They were the first streaks of the morning light of the Reformation. Even such works assisted mankind to examine more closely, and hold in greater contempt, the extravagant and pernicious doctrines of the domineering papistical church. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 60: One of the most horrible of these books was the work of the Jesuit Pinamonti; it details with frightful minuteness the nature of hell-torments, accompanied by the most revolting pictures of the condemned under various refined torments. It was translated in an abbreviated form, and sold for a few pence as a popular religious book in Ireland, and may be so still. It is divided into a series of meditations for each day in the week, on hell and its torments.] THE ABSENT MAN. The character of Bruyère's "Absent Man" has been translated in the Spectator, and exhibited on the theatre. It is supposed to be a fictitious character, or one highly coloured. It was well known, however, to his contemporaries, to be the Count de Brancas. The present anecdotes concerning the same person were unknown to, or forgotten by, Bruyère; and are to the full as extraordinary as those which characterise _Menalcas_, or the Absent Man. The count was reading by the fireside, but Heaven knows with what degree of attention, when the nurse brought him his infant child. He throws down the book; he takes the child in his arms. He was playing with her, when an important visitor was announced. Having forgot he had quitted his book, and that it was his child he held in his hands, he hastily flung the squalling innocent on the table.