substantially recognize these realities of things, however strange the forms in which they clothe their conceptions.  The doctrines of predestination, of original sin, of the innate depravity of man and the evil fate of the greater part of the race, of the primacy of Satan in this world, of the essential vileness of matter, of a malevolent Demiurgus subordinate to a benevolent Almighty, who has only lately revealed himself, faulty as they are, appear to me to be vastly nearer the truth than the “liberal” popular illusions that babies are all born good, and that the example of a corrupt society is responsible for their failure to remain so; that it is given to everybody to reach the ethical ideal if he will only try; that all partial evil is universal good, and other optimistic figments, such as that which represents “Providence” under the guise of a paternal philanthropist, and bids us believe that everything will come right (according to our notions) at last.

...I am a very strong believer in the punishment of certain kinds of actions, not only in the present, but in all the future a man can have, be it long or short.  Therefore in hell, for I suppose that all men with a clear sense of right and wrong (and I am not sure that any others deserve such punishment) have now and then “descended into hell” and stopped there quite long enough to know what infinite punishment means.  And if a genuine, not merely subjective, immortality awaits us, I conceive that, without some such change as that depicted in the fifteenth chapter of Corinthians, immortality must be eternal misery.  The fate of Swift’s Struldbrugs seems to me not more horrible than that of a mind imprisoned for ever within the flammantia moenia of inextinguishable memories.

Such were the shapes into which the Christian theologians had fashioned a number of moral truths when they annexed the house of human morality.  But what is the basis of certitude on which these interpretations rest?  If Adam was not an historical character, if the story of the Fall be whittled down into a “type” which is typical of no underlying reality, the basis of Pauline theology is shaken, and practical deductions drawn from it are shaken also.  In fact, “the Demonology of Christianity shows that its founders knew no more about the spiritual world than anybody else, and Newman’s doctrine of ‘Development’ is true to an extent of which the Cardinal did not dream.”  And as to the argument that the successful spread of Christianity attests the truth of the New Testament story, he replied to his questioner with the general propositions:—­

    1.  The Church founded by Jesus has not made its way; has
    not permeated the world; but did become extinct in the
    country of its birth—­as Nazarenism and Ebionism.