ard Mar.
We have become accustomed of late years to seeing most of our pet illusions Swept away, and our old historical landmarks removed and set aside as poetical allegories, to being told that Shakespeare did not write his plays, and that King Arthur and his Round Table Knights never existed,—but it has been reserved for the latter end of the Ninoteenth Century to bring to light a theory, which, if generally acknowledged, will rob "Hot-Gospellers" of much the terrifying force of their perorations, and deprive.a smothered curse of a large amount of its maleficent intention. So many of the black sheep of our childhood have been whitewashed and set up on pedestals by Latter-Day reformers, that it is not surprising that the refining process should be applied to places as well, and that we should now find ourselves on the brink of discovering that a region whose existence we have hitherto been inclined to ignore in polite conversation, should turn out not to be of quite such a sombre hue as it has previously been painted, Dante's Inferno, that dread place of " thunderous sounds and plaints innumerable," that empire of sorrow where no light shines and whose climate is "ever vexed with storms," has been consigned to the dim and distant realm of medieval superstition, and Erebus up to date is presented to our notice as a very desirable spot indeed, and is shorn of all its former terrors. The tendency of the rabid reformers of past ages has been to discuss the abode of torment to which they liberally condemned all save an elect few, with a Zolaesque fidelity of treatment that invested it with multitudinous terrors; whilst recently there has been strong inclination on the part of a certain section of Orthodox Christians to deny its existence altogether. But to acknowledge it as a living reality, and to introduce it to our wondering gaze, as a place to which we need have no qualms about mentally consigning our dotes noires and less intimate friends, is to us, we must confess, a novel view of the ease; the iden of " Happiness in Hell" appearing at first sight to contain a contradiction in terms, that might confuse the most learned' theologian, Nevertheless these very words are the title of a most interesting article of Nineteenth Century for December, acd Mr. St. George Mivart, appearing in the.
we may perhaps venture to reproduce a few extracts from it here, in order to show the very able manner in which the author transforms black into white.
Mr. St. George Mivart, who writes from the point of view of one " whose
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.