With this impression, I shall allow myself to notice an opinion but little known, which, moreover, if I had not met with it in writers who, in this province of inquiry, are of the highest authority, I should scarcely have ventured to adduce. In this department of spiritual knowledge, a man would much rather confine himself to the simple primary truth than call attention to mere opinions. The opinion I allude to is to be found in St. Jerome, _i.e._, in that very Father who, for theological judgment, is acknowledged by all to be the first and the greatest. It was held also by St. Francis de Sales, that holy saint of spiritual love, and who, even on that account, is so superior to the many hundreds of the schoolmen before him, as also to so many ideologists after him. Lastly, it occurred to Leibnitz, who, of all philosophers, was most possessed of a true and fine intellectual tact to perceive and discover all the most secret, delicate traits of a great system, even though most remote in character from his own. But still, with this array of great authorities, it remains nothing more than a wholly problematical opinion, on which, as an article of positive faith, nothing is or ever can be decided. Now this opinion is, that in the revolt of the rebellious spirits, while those who remained in their state of innocence and in their allegiance rallied only the closer round their Creator, a considerable number, fearful and undecided, vacillated between good and evil, and, as we might justly say, with the weakness of the human character, remained neutral in the conflict, and thereby lost their original place in the hierarchy of the heavenly host, without, however, being counted among the utterly lost. As a fourth authority for this opinion, I might adduce Dante. He is indeed a poet, but still a theological poet, and deeply versed in theology, who would never have arbitrarily devised or invented, or even adopted such a notion, had he not found it existing among others before him, and had he not been able to adduce a good and valid authority for it. As a good Ghibelline, he was, moreover, no friend of neutral spirits, either in this world or the other; and he passes the most severe sentence upon those beings whom, as he says, heaven has cast out, and hell would not receive.[36]