These are all extravagant fictions in the “Golden legend.” Among other gross and equally absurd impositions to deceive the mob, Oldham also attacks them for certain publications on topics not less singular. The tales he has recounted, says Oldham, are only baits for children like toys at a fair; but they have their profounder and higher matters for the learned and the inquisitive. One undertakes by scales of miles to tell The bounds, dimensions, and extent of hell; How many German leagues that realm contains! How many hell each year expends In coals, for roasting Hugonots and friends! Another frights the rout with useful stories Of wild chimeras, limbos, PURGATORIES! Where bloated souls in smoky durance hung Like a Westphalia gammon or neat’s tongue, To be redeemed with masses and a song. Topographical descriptions of HELL, PURGATORY, and even HEAVEN, were once favourite researches among certain orthodox and zealous defenders of the papish church, who exhausted their materials in fabricating a hell to their own ideas, or for their particular purpose. There is a treatise of Cardinal Bellarmin, a jesuit, on _Purgatory_, wherein he appears to possess all the knowledge of a land-measurer among the secret tracts and formidable divisions of “the bottomless pit.” This jesuit informs us that there are beneath the earth four different places, or a place divided into four parts; the deepest of which is hell: it contains all the souls of the damned, where will be also their bodies after the resurrection, and likewise all the demons. The place nearest hell is _purgatory_, where souls are purged, or rather where they appease the anger of God by their sufferings. The same fires and the same torments, he says, are alike in both places, the only difference between _hell_ and _purgatory_ consisting in their duration. Next to _purgatory_ is the _limbo_ of those _infants_ who die without having received the sacrament; and the fourth place is the limbo of the _Fathers_; that is to say, of those _just men_ who died before the death of Christ. But since the days of the Redeemer this last division is empty, like an apartment to let. A later Catholic theologist, the famous Tillemont, condemns all the _illustrious pagans to the eternal torments of hell_! because they lived before the time of Jesus, and, therefore, could not be benefited by the redemption! Speaking of young Tiberius, who was compelled to fall on his own sword, Tillemont adds, “Thus by his own hand he ended his miserable life, _to begin another, the misery of which will never end_!” Yet history records nothing bad of this prince. Jortin observes, that he added this _reflection_ in his later edition, so that the good man as he grew older grew more uncharitable in his religious notions. It is in this matter too that the Benedictine editor of Justin