established, according to which, in the last act of the Human Comedy, the sinners one and all will be reinstated in integrum.  It is only Protestants, with their obstinate belief in the Bible, who cannot be induced to give up eternal punishment in hell.  If one were spiteful, one might say, “much good may it do them,” but it is consoling to think that they really do not believe the doctrine; they leave it alone, thinking in their hearts, “It can’t be so bad as all that.”

The rigid and systematic character of his mind led Augustine, in his austere dogmatism and his resolute definition of doctrines only just indicated in the Bible and, as a matter of fact, resting on very vague grounds, to give hard outlines to these doctrines and to put a harsh construction on Christianity:  the result of which is that his views offend us, and just as in his day Pelagianism arose to combat them, so now in our day Rationalism does the same.  Take, for example, the case as he states it generally in the De Civitate Dei, Bk. xii. ch. 21.  It comes to this:  God creates a being out of nothing, forbids him some things, and enjoins others upon him; and because these commands are not obeyed, he tortures him to all eternity with every conceivable anguish; and for this purpose, binds soul and body inseparably together, so that, instead, of the torment destroying this being by splitting him up into his elements, and so setting him free, he may live to eternal pain.  This poor creature, formed out of nothing!  At least, he has a claim on his original nothing:  he should be assured, as a matter of right, of this last retreat, which, in any case, cannot be a very evil one:  it is what he has inherited.  I, at any rate, cannot help sympathizing with him.  If you add to this Augustine’s remaining doctrines, that all this does not depend on the man’s own sins and omissions, but was already predestined to happen, one really is at a loss what to think.  Our highly educated Rationalists say, to be sure, “It’s all false, it’s a mere bugbear; we’re in a state of constant progress, step by step raising ourselves to ever greater perfection.”  Ah! what a pity we didn’t begin sooner; we should already have been there.

In the Christian system the devil is a personage of the greatest importance.  God is described as absolutely good, wise and powerful; and unless he were counterbalanced by the devil, it would be impossible to see where the innumerable and measureless evils, which predominate in the world, come from, if there were no devil to account for them.  And since the Rationalists have done away with the devil, the damage inflicted on the other side has gone on growing, and is becoming more and more palpable; as might have been foreseen, and was foreseen, by the orthodox.  The fact is, you cannot take away one pillar from a building without endangering the rest of it.  And this confirms the view, which has been established on other grounds, that Jehovah is a transformation of Ormuzd, and Satan of the Ahriman who must be taken in connection with him.  Ormuzd himself is a transformation of Indra.