only by degrees, and after a patient and silent opposition to prevailing habits of thought, that Christianity succeeded in spiritualizing religious conceptions; and the time which elapsed before this had been effected--a period of more than three hundred years--was one of no little confusion in this regard. But no one seems to have been led into the error of supposing the human soul to be material by the notion of a material fire. Some believed this to be the case because they could not see how it could possibly be otherwise; they were unable to rise to the idea of a spirit, properly so called; they could not conceive anything to be real, and not material. That this was the case, in particular, with Tertullian, cannot be doubted, whether we consider his way of speaking in the whole book _De Anienâ_, in the book _Adv. Praxeam_, c. xi., and in the _De Carne Christi_, c. xi., or the pre-eminently sensuous and realistic character of his mind. The Platonic philosophy was another foundation of this opinion respecting the human soul. Some writers who were especially attached to Platonism, as Origen, explained the Platonic doctrine of emanation as meaning that God alone is a pure Spirit, all beings proceeding from God having a trace of materiality greater or less as they are more or less removed from him. They therefore believed all created spirits to be in some sense material; and forms of expression which may seem properly to belong to this opinion remained, as is often the case, long after the opinion itself had vanished. But the source of the whole error was, as is evident, the materialized method of conception of pre-Christian times. But Mr. Lecky goes much further than this. He tells us that this opinion of the materiality of the human soul--which, if we except at most two or three writers, had certainly died out in the sixth, if not in the fifth century--was the dominant opinion in the middle ages: "Under the influence of mediaeval habits of thought, every spiritual conception was materialized, and what at an earlier and a later period was generally deemed the language of metaphor, was universally regarded as the language of fact. The realizations of the people were all derived from paintings, sculpture, or ceremonies that appealed to the senses, and all subjects were therefore reduced to palpable images. The angel in the last judgment was constantly represented weighing the souls in a literal balance, while devils clinging to the scales endeavored to disturb the equilibrium. Sometimes the soul was portrayed as a sexless child, rising out of the mouth of the corpse. But, above all, the doctrine of purgatory arrested and enchained the imagination. ... Men who believed in a physical soul readily believed in a physical punishment, men who materialized their view of the punishment, materialized their view of the sufferers.