As early even as the eighth century, we find so great a man as Beda condescending to admit into his ecclesiastical history, such melancholy evidence of Manichæan materialism as the vision of Drihthelm. He tells how such a man in Northumbria, lying at the point of death, had fallen into a trance, recovering from which and being restored to health, he had entered the monastery of Melrose, in which he continued till his death. During his trance he had seen visions which he afterwards communicated to Hamgisl a priest, Aldfríð king of the Northumbrians, and others. He related that on being released from the body his soul had been led by one, bright of aspect, gloriously clothed, towards the east, into a valley wide and deep and of a length that seemed infinite: one side glowed terribly with flames, the other was filled with furious hail and freezing snow. Either side was full of human souls which were tossed from left to right as by a tempest. For when they could not bear the violence of the immense heat, they rushed wretchedly into the midst of the dreadful cold; and when they could find no rest there, they sprung back again, again to burn in the midst of inextinguishable flames. When Drihthelm saw them thus eternally tormented by a crowd of deformed demons, he thought within himself, “This is surely hell, of whose intolerable tortures I have often heard tell!” But his companion said, “This is not the hell thou thinkest!” and proceeding further, he beheld how the darkness began to thicken around and fill the whole space before him. Suddenly in this deep night he perceived globes of dusky fire cast up from what seemed to be a vast well, into which they fell again, without intermission. In the midst of these horrors his conductor left him. On looking more intently, he now perceived that the tongues of fire were all full of human souls, tossed aloft like sparks in smoke, and then dragged back into the abyss. And an incomparable stench, which bubbled up with the vapours, filled all those abodes of darkness. Around him sounded the shouts and taunts of fiends, like a vulgar mob exulting over a captive enemy: suddenly a host of evil spirits dragged through the darkness five souls, one of a laic, one of a woman, one tonsured like a cleric, and plunged them into the abyss amidst a confused roar of lamentation and laughter. Then certain malignant spirits ascending from the deep, surrounded the trembling spectator, terrifying him with their flaming eyes and the fire which burst from their mouths and noses, and threatening to seize him with fiery pincers which they held in their hands. From this danger he was rescued by the return of his companion, who conducted him to two corresponding regions of eternal bliss, every one of whose details is in the strongest contrast to those already described, but just as material, as gross and sensual. The moral of this is too important to be given in any but Beda’s own words. “And when, on