is capable of doing such a thing at once bursts forth; nay, we even tremble at the mere conception of atorture inflicted on either a human being or an animal, and suffer untold misery when hearing of a positively proved fact of this kind. But we are still far from feeling as universally and as distinctly with regard to the mental agonies and the atrocity of their infliction.Christianity has practised them on a gigantic scale and still goes on preaching this kind of torture, nay, it quite innocently laments of apostasy and lukewarmness if it meets a state free from such agonies—all this to the effect that even now mankind looks on the spiritual death by fire, the spiritual torture and instrument of torture with the same anxious patience and indecision with which it formerly faced the cruelties inflicted on the bodies of man or beast. Hell, indeed, has not remained a mere word: and a new kind of pity accompanies the newly created real anxieties, a terrible and ponderous pity, unknown to former ages, with people "irrevocably doomed to hell," as expressed by the stony knight to Don Juan, and which, in the Christian era, has often made stones weep. Plutarch gives a gloomy picture of the state of mind of & superstitious person in paganism : this picture pales when looked at side by side with that of the mediæval Christian, whoguesses that nothing can save him from “eternaltorment." Horrible omens appear to him: perhaps a stork, holding a snake in its beak and hesitating to
