I frankly avow I would as soon believe the Buddhist _Jataka_ as such a wholly irrational account of the ways of God with man. Just think of the palaeolithic man, who had no glimmering of moral discernment; think of the cave-men whose skulls we possess in scores, that bear eloquent testimony to their deplorable degradation--think of such creatures dying, and their mental and moral status stereotyped for ever. "Death ends our probation!" A precious revelation this! Where and what are these men now? When Newman visited Greece in the thirties what impressed him, or rather oppressed him, as he stood above the glorious bay of Salamis, over which once rode the hundreds and thousands of galleys and triremes which transported the unnumbered hosts of Xerxes to Greece, was the awful thought that all those million men, including the proud monarch who reviewed them from the spot on which he then stood, were "_still alive_". Alive! And where were they, and what were they doing? I cannot conceive anything more appallingly depressing, nay, maddening, than to believe that all that heavenly orchestration is going on while Xerxes is possibly in an Apocalyptic hell, and his hosts either bearing him company or wandering aimlessly about in the same stupid, stolid, unmoral, unspiritual condition in which they were the moment they were engulfed in those blue waters. Why, Nero fiddling while Rome was burning is a pleasant memory compared with it! But we have not reached the end yet. "Deep calleth unto deep," and the extreme deductions from the perverse notion that the act of dying is the signal for the infliction of an everlasting mental and moral sterility, finally convince us of the groundlessness of this feckless theology. According to these deductions of which I speak, one grievous offence against Divine or ecclesiastical law--such, for instance, as grave scandal or the omission to attend at mass--is sufficient to condemn a man to eternal reprobation. If it be supposed that death cuts the offender off before he has the opportunity to make confession of his fault or otherwise express his sorrow, we are soberly asked to believe that the horrors of Tartarus are his eternal doom. Surely the mediaeval authorities who formulated this precious teaching must have been bereft of the most elementary notions of ethical law. One act, or a dozen such acts, do not stamp the delinquent as habitually bad, still less as one irredeemably wicked. Habits are only generated by a constant repetition of corresponding acts, just as good habits are formed with difficulty, and only after persevering and resolute attention on the part of our wills. So, also, an evil disposition is only the outcome of a deliberate surrender of our moral nature to perverse inclinations.