Nor has Mr. Lecky fairly represented the doctrine of eternal punishment in itself. To contemplate the infliction of pain naturally produces, he says, a callousness and hardness of feeling. This statement embodies only a half truth, and the reasoning founded on it is in the highest degree fallacious. When the Catholics of ancient times contemplated the anguish of the lost, the habits which they endeavoured to form were habits of horror for the sin which entailed that anguish. There is a great difference between thus actively contemplating suffering, and beholding it merely in a passive manner, and with a view to some other end. The surgical operator, the public executioner, the soldier, who look at it in this latter light, may and do in time become hardened and indifferent. But it is far otherwise in the former case; and there is a great difference between reflecting on the pains of others, and reflecting on the pains which may one day be our own. It is reasonable and natural to suppose, and is found to be in reality the case, that one who contemplates the sufferings of others merely and purely as of others, and habitually avoids referring them in any way to himself, will in the end become hard and cruel. {90} But the very essence of sympathy consists in an unconscious association of ourselves with others in their sufferings. The Calvinist, therefore, the believer in "assurance," who fancies himself to be one of the elect, and from his security safely thinks of all the torments of the reprobate as things in which it would be sinful for him even for a moment to imagine that he can have part, may but grow callous at the thought of hell--may even delight to think of it, and revel in the representation of the anguish there. But such a spirit is altogether opposed to the whole bent of Catholic meditation on that subject. The Catholic, when he meditates on these torments, thinks of them as of others, only that the thought may more vividly come home to himself; he thinks of them as of what he may one day have to endure. And again, the thought of our own personal suffering can make us hard and firm only when we consider it as a thing not to be avoided, but to be braved. It is almost a truism to say, that those men are of all the most soft and timid, who are continually representing to themselves means of escape from vividly imagined dangers. And no Catholic would meditate on these torments that he might nerve himself to brave them, but that he might seek means to avoid them. Catholics, of course, accept, on the ground of God's Word, that awful doctrine of our faith which we are now contemplating. So far as they argue for it from reason at all, they say that this doctrine is the necessary sanction of the moral law; and the force of that argument will be felt by none more strongly than by Catholics themselves, who, from holding the existence both of a future temporal and of a future eternal punishment for sin, are better able to judge what