Farther, fifty female victims are forced to fill up with water a cask, whose bottom is riddled. Indeed, there is no sort of torment that was not invented by legislators, mystagogues, poets, and philosophers, to frighten the people, under the false assumption of making them better; but the truth is that it was rather to keep them down in subjection. Those terrifying pictures were painted on the walls of the temple of Delphos. Those fables were repeated to infants by nurses and mothers. Thus their souls grew weak and pusillanimous, for strong and durable are the first impressions, and more especially, when the general opinion, the example of the credulity of others, the authority of philosophers, of poets, of learned Hierophants, and the sight of pompous rites, and ceremonies in the overpowering sacredness of sanctuaries; when the monuments of arts, music, statues, and pictures, in short, when all tends to insinuate in the soul, through the senses stricken with hope and terror, a great error presented as a sacred truth revealed by the gods themselves for man's bliss. Such was the general teaching and belief of the Pagans in regard to future punishment, before the coming of Jesus Christ, and the preaching of his Gospel. As to the Jewish nation, not the slightest vestiges of any kind of belief regarding future punishment, can be traced out, neither in the Old Testament, nor in Josephus, nor in the writings of other historians, at least before the captivity of Babylon, which took place in the year 598 before the Christian era. Afterwards the Jews divided into four sects, the Essenes, the Sadducees, the Samaritans, who denied the existence of any future punishment, and the Pharisees, who, according to the testimony of Josephus, adopted the belief of Metempsychosis, or transmigration of the souls. ARTICLE III. _Did the Christians of the First Centuries believe in Endless Hell?_