But we have already quoted this passage in the article on "Purgatory," which doctrine is here expressed clearly enough; nor could the kinsfolks of that day obtain from the pagan priests an indulgence to abridge their sufferings for ready money. The ancients were much more severe and less simoniacal than we are notwithstanding that they imputed so many foolish actions to their gods. What would you have? Their theology was made up of contradictions, as the malignant say is the case with our own. When their purgation was finished, these souls went and drank of the waters of Lethe, and instantly asked that they might enter fresh bodies and again see daylight. But is this a resurrection? Not at all; it is taking an entirely new body, not resuming the old one; it is a metempsychosis, without any relation to the manner in which we of the true faith are to rise again. The souls of the ancients did, I must acknowledge, make a very bad bargain in coming back to this world, for seventy years at most, to undergo once more all that we know is undergone in a life of seventy years, and then suffer another thousand years' discipline. In my humble opinion there is no soul that would not be tired of this everlasting vicissitude of so short a life and so long a penance. SECTION IV. _Resurrection of the Moderns._ Our resurrection is quite different. Every man will appear with precisely the same body which he had before; and all these bodies will be burned for all eternity, excepting only, at most, one in a hundred thousand. This is much worse than a purgatory of ten centuries, in order to live here again a few years. When will the great day of this general resurrection arrive? This is not positively known; and the learned are much divided. Nor do they any more know how each one is to find his own members again. Hereupon they start many difficulties. 1. Our body, say they, is, during life, undergoing a continual change; at fifty years of age we have nothing of the body in which our soul was lodged at twenty. 2. A soldier from Brittany goes into Canada; there, by a very common chance, he finds himself short of food, and is forced to eat an Iroquois whom he killed the day before. This Iroquois had fed on Jesuits for two or three months; a great part of his body had become Jesuit. Here, then, the body of a soldier is composed of Iroquois, of Jesuits, and of all that he had eaten before. How is each to take again precisely what belongs to him? and which part belongs to each? 3. A child dies in its mother's womb, just at the moment that it has received a soul. Will it rise again fœtus, or boy, or man? 4. To rise again--to be the same person as you were--you must have your memory perfectly fresh and present; it is memory that makes your identity. If your memory be lost, how will you be the same man?