'Give us a millstone,' say the damned, 'as large as the whole earth, and so wide in circumference as to touch the sky all around and let a little bird come once in a hundred thousand years and pick off a small particle of the stone, not larger than the tenth part of a grain of millet, and after another hundred thousand years let him come again, so that in ten hundred thousand years he would pick off as much as a grain of millet, we wretched sinners would desire nothing but that the stone might have an end, and thus our pains also; yet even that cannot be.'** * Summæ Suppl. qu 97. ** Quoted in Hagenbach's History of Doctrines, 210, vol. ii., p. 152 The work of Father Pinamonti, entitled _Hell Opened to Christians_, has been for over two hundred years one of the most popular among Catholic Christians. It has also circulated among Protestants. An English version, with horrible pictures of the torments of the damned, has gone through many editions. We recommend its purchase to those who complain of the illustrations in the _Freethinker_, or who desire to see how savage the Christian religion is at bottom. The Christian Father of course accepts the literal meaning of hell fire. He says (p. 28): "Every one that is damned will be like a lighted furnace, which has its own flames in itself; all the filthy blood will boil in the veins, the brains in the skull, the heart in the breast, the bowels within the unfortunate body, surrounded with an abyss of' fire out of which it cannot escape." _The Sight of Hell_, by the Rev. J. Fumiss, C.S.S.R., is another popular work issued "permissu superiorum" among "Books for Children and Young Persons." A more atrocious composition it is difficult to conceive. The agony is piled on as though the imagination of the writer revelled in the description of torture. One specimen, a mild one, will suffice:-- Perhaps at this moment, seven o'clock in the evening, a child is just going into Hell. To-morrow evening at seven o'clock, go and knock at the gates of Hell and ask what the child is doing. The devils will go and look. Then they will come back again and say, _the child is burning!_ Go in a week and ask what the child is doing; you will get the same answer--_it is burning!_ Go in a year and ask, the same answer comes--_it is burning!_ Go in a million of years and ask the same question; the answer is just the same--_it is burning!_ So if you go for ever and ever, you will always get the same answer--_it is burning in the fire!_ I declare I would rather put into the hands of any young child Boccaccio's _Decameron_, or any of the works put on the Roman _Index Librorum Prohibitorum_, with which I am acquainted, than this pious work by a Christian Father.