An instance of this occurs in his treatment of the subject of eternal punishment. The general organization and want of order which pervades his work is quite insufficient to account for the pertinacity with which he again and again recurs to the subject. Like the whole anti-Christian party, and very naturally, he detests the doctrine with his whole spirit; and he allows this detestation to color his whole views of the middle ages. He attributes to its influence whatever he finds, or imagines himself to have found, of a hard, cruel, and repulsive character in their theory and practice. He begins by misrepresenting the character of the doctrine itself. He separates it from the conditioning doctrines which were taught along with it, and which regulated and directed its influence. He dwells almost entirely on the terrible side of the then existing Christianity, and almost altogether neglects the operation of the concurring principle of love, the opposite pole of the Christian motives. And then he concludes that to its influence was due the severity of punishments in the middle ages. A universal terrorism was produced. The sense of the divine mercy was destroyed. The sufferings of the lost were at first regarded with horror; but as men became more used to the thing, the horror was changed to indifference, and the indifference to a barbarous delight in the contemplation and even the infliction of pain. It will not require many arguments to show that such a method of treatment is monstrous. Mr. Lecky ought to have noticed that the causes which in the middle ages led to peculiar stress being laid on the doctrine of eternal punishment, were causes external to, and mostly in direct opposition, to the church; and that their tendency was met by a corresponding realization of an opposite pole of Christian feeling. We cannot better introduce what we have to say on the severity of punishments, and the alleged callousness of disposition in mediaeval times, and, indeed, on Mr. Lecky's whole criticism of the subject of eternal punishment, than by a passage from a most able writer: