were immediately created, in full maturity of perfection, and endowed with all the natural and supernatural gifts suitable for their high destination, to be transmitted to their offspring. Their disobedience and fall entailed on themselves and their descendants the loss of the supernatural destiny and of all the gifts and privileges connected with it. Nevertheless, the human race was restored again by another dispensation, which is that of the Redeemer Jesus Christ. All those who receive from him the grace which he merited by his atonement, and do not wilfully and finally reject this grace, obtain in the end a complete resurrection to the glory and beatitude of heaven. The rest of mankind are for ever excluded from the kingdom of heaven. This is a summary of first principles and fundamental truths pertaining to the very essence of Christianity. In so far as the destiny of mankind is concerned, the first constitution of human nature in the person of the common progenitor of the race in the state of grace and integrity, with a right to the kingdom of heaven; the ruin of the whole human race by the sin of Adam; the redemption of the race through Jesus Christ; are the sum of the teaching of the Old and New Testaments, of the traditional doctrine concurrent with it, and of the common belief of all generations of men who have professed to make this doctrine their rule of faith, especially those who have lived in the full light of Christianity. It is idle to pretend to call any doctrine different from this by the name of Christianity, for the whole world knows that this is of the very essence of the genuine, historical religion which acknowledges Jesus Christ as its founder. Those who reject it, and yet call themselves Christians, are only philosophers, professing a merely natural religion, partly constructed from materials borrowed from Christianity and altered to suit their own private notions, but really in its fundamental principles and distinctive character nothing more than a system of rationalism. The traditional and orthodox Christianity has invariably taught that all men naturally descending from Adam and Eve need salvation, and can receive it only through an act of gratuitous mercy on account of the merits of the divine Redeemer. No man is entitled by the rights of his natural birth to heaven, or capable of obtaining a right to it by any exertion of his natural powers. All are under a doom of exclusion from the kingdom of heaven. That future state, with all its circumstances of locality and other adjuncts and environments, to which all are destined by virtue of this doom, is called in the authorized language of the Catholic Church _Infernum_, in the English language, _Hell_. The doctrine of hell as an eternal state is therefore necessarily the shadow which must accompany the doctrine of heaven. It is impossible for any one to believe in salvation by grace through Jesus Christ, without