being regarded as a deity of infinite power and infinite condescension, those Catholic writers who in their devotional writings have spoken the most strongly of her power, have merely said that God will never refuse her anything she asks, and that she will never ask anything inconsistent with his Providence. Mr. Lecky shows in many other places the grossest ignorance of Catholic theology. He quotes, in evidence of the present belief of the Roman Church in demoniacal possession, a ritual which, he says, "is used in the diocese of Tarbes." He need not have gone to an obscure provincial ritual for proof of his assertion; he will hardly find any Catholic theologian who denies it; and the most used, and best known of our modern theological writers has devoted a special chapter to the subject (Perrone, De Deo Creatore, Part I., c. v.) The doctrine of punishment by a material fire "still lingers," he tells us, "in the Roman Catholic manuals for the poor." If by this he meant that it does not remain also among theologians, this is not true; Perrone, one of the most moderate, calls it, "sententia communiter reccpta." (De Deo Creatore, Part III., c. vi. a. 3.) In the latter part of his chapter "on the Developments of Rationalism," Mr. Lecky has put forward an opinion that the doctrine of the material character of the penal fire is closely connected with the ancient opinion, that the soul is in some sense material. The doctrine of a material fire became, he says, the foundation of all opinion that the soul is of a material nature; and he refers to Tertullian, citing De Anima, c. viii. This assertion is, however, utterly without foundation. It nowhere appears that this was the chief foundation on which this error was rested. Far from making this material conception of punishment the chief ground of his argument, Tertullian, in the passage quoted by Mr. Lecky, does not argue from the materiality of the fire at all. {82} What he does argue from is the corporeal manner in which Abraham, Dives, and Lazarus, are represented in the Gospel; from Abraham's bosom the tongue or Dives, and the finger of Lazarus; and he mentions the "ignis" merely in an incidental manner, and not to argue from its material nature, but to found his reasoning on the general proposition that whatever is susceptible of "fovela" or of "passio" must be corporeal. It is, of course, quite conceivable that a writer, who believed the soul to be of a material nature, might argue from the commonly received opinion of a material fire; but the origin of this opinion was in fact quite different. Some of those who held it even believed the "fire" of hell to be metaphorical. But before the advent of Christianity the minds of the people had been constantly and persistently directed to the sensible and the material; from the ranks of the people Christianity was recruited; and it is not wonderful if somewhat of their former habits of thought clung to those who were converted. It was