and his.  And when the time of judgement shall draw near, when the present face of our globe shall be about to perish, he will return to it in visible form, thence to withdraw the good, transplanting them, it may be, into the sun, and to punish here the wicked with the demons that have allured them; then the globe of the earth will begin to burn and will be perhaps a comet.  This fire will last for aeons upon aeons.  The tail of the comet is intended by the smoke which will rise incessantly, according to the Apocalypse, and this fire will be hell, or the second[134] death whereof Holy Scripture speaks.  But at last hell will render up its dead, death itself will be destroyed; reason and peace will begin to hold sway again in the spirits that had been perverted; they will be sensible of their error, they will adore their Creator, and will even begin to love him all the more for seeing the greatness of the abyss whence they emerge.  Simultaneously (by virtue of the harmonic parallelism of the Realms of Nature and of Grace) this long and great conflagration will have purged the earth’s globe of its stains.  It will become again a sun; its Presiding Angel will resume his place with the angels of his train; humans that were damned shall be with them numbered amongst the good angels; this chief of our globe shall render homage to the Messiah, chief of created beings.  The glory of this angel reconciled shall be greater than it was before his fall.

  Inque Deos iterum factorum lege receptus
  Aureus aeternum noster regnabit Apollo.

The vision seemed to me pleasing, and worthy of a follower of Origen:  but we have no need of such hypothesis or fictions, where Wit plays a greater part than Revelation, and which even Reason cannot turn to account.  For it does not appear that there is one principal place in the known universe deserving in preference to the rest to be the seat of the eldest of created beings; and the sun of our system at least is not it.

19.  Holding then to the established doctrine that the number of men damned eternally will be incomparably greater than that of the saved, we must say that the evil could not but seem to be almost as nothing in comparison with the good, when one contemplates the true vastness of the city of God.  Coelius Secundus Curio wrote a little book, De Amplitudine Regni Coelestis, which was reprinted not long since; but he is indeed far from having apprehended the compass of the kingdom of heaven.  The ancients had puny ideas on the works of God, and St. Augustine, for want of knowing modern discoveries, was at a loss when there was question of explaining the prevalence of evil.  It seemed to the ancients that there was only one earth inhabited, and even of that men held the antipodes in dread:  the remainder of the world was, according to them, a few shining globes and a few crystalline spheres.  To-day, whatever bounds are given or not given to the universe, it