that very few will be found righteous and attain salvation, and that only in consequence of the gift of grace, and because they are predestined to be saved; whilst the remainder will be overwhelmed by the perdition they have deserved, viz., eternal torment in hell.  Taken in its ordinary meaning, the dogma is revolting, for it comes to this:  it condemns a man, who may be, perhaps, scarcely twenty years of age, to expiate his errors, or even his unbelief, in everlasting torment; nay, more, it makes this almost universal damnation the natural effect of original sin, and therefore the necessary consequence of the Fall.  This is a result which must have been foreseen by him who made mankind, and who, in the first place, made them not better than they are, and secondly, set a trap for them into which he must have known they would fall; for he made the whole world, and nothing is hidden from him.  According to this doctrine, then, God created out of nothing a weak race prone to sin, in order to give them over to endless torment.  And, as a last characteristic, we are told that this God, who prescribes forbearance and forgiveness of every fault, exercises none himself, but does the exact opposite; for a punishment which comes at the end of all things, when the world is over and done with, cannot have for its object either to improve or deter, and is therefore pure vengeance.  So that, on this view, the whole race is actually destined to eternal torture and damnation, and created expressly for this end, the only exception being those few persons who are rescued by election of grace, from what motive one does not know.

Putting these aside, it looks as if the Blessed Lord had created the world for the benefit of the devil! it would have been so much better not to have made it at all.  So much, then, for a dogma taken sensu proprio.  But look at it sensu allegorico, and the whole matter becomes capable of a satisfactory interpretation.  What is absurd and revolting in this dogma is, in the main, as I said, the simple outcome of Jewish theism, with its “creation out of nothing,” and really foolish and paradoxical denial of the doctrine of metempsychosis which is involved in that idea, a doctrine which is natural, to a certain extent self-evident, and, with the exception of the Jews, accepted by nearly the whole human race at all times.  To remove the enormous evil arising from Augustine’s dogma, and to modify its revolting nature, Pope Gregory I., in the sixth century, very prudently matured the doctrine of Purgatory, the essence of which already existed in Origen (cf.  Bayle’s article on Origen, note B.).  The doctrine was regularly incorporated into the faith of the Church, so that the original view was much modified, and a certain substitute provided for the doctrine of metempsychosis; for both the one and the other admit a process of purification.  To the same end, the doctrine of “the Restoration of all things” [Greek:  apokatastasis] was