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Thames Star, Volume XII, Issue 3785, 14 February 1881, Page 3

(To the Editor.of the Evening Stab.)

g lE> —There are people so credulous and «c» devoid of common 9ense as to believe any new doctrine, however incoherent, that may be preached to them plausibly, and demonstrated by specious arguments nnd earnest eloquence. Hell and the J3evil are being made free use of to frighten the timid and unthinking crowds fibo flock nightly to be deceived and excited by a kind of anxious and pleasing feat. It was the priests who first contrived a hell or subterranean place, to which they asserted the spirits of the tricked go down for the purpose of being everlastingly tormented. .Now the word hell in its original sense imports no more than a dark and deep place. The, poets invented it as the opposite to the residence of the blessed, which they represented as high and bright. This is the •xacV signification of the Latin terms, infe^us and inferi, and the Greek Hades, any dark place such as a sepulchre or whatever wag fearful, from its depth and obscurity. The whole spring from the imagination of the poets and the knavery of the priests, the former knowing how to make an impression in this way just as popular preachers in the present day know how to make impressions on weak, timid, and melancholy miriafi the preacher having, generally, immediately- or remotely substantial reasons fe continuing the delusion. I hare in wrs*& letters explained how the notion pf spirit^ came to be introduced among men* and proved that they were merely phantoms which existed in their disordered imagination, Neither the first or present instructors of mankind have been very explicit in their lessons to the million as to the nature either of hell or the devil. It is, however, certain that the Greeks invented them. From that people they passed, by means of their colonies, into Asia, Egypt, and Italy. In this way the Jews, who were dispersed in Alexandria and elsewhere, became acquainted with them. They made the «aue happy use of them as other nations did, and as,our revivalist preachers do in the present day, with iaje ditference, that unlike the Greeks they! did not call tSiem devils or regard them as good or bad spirits indifferently. They considered them as'all bad with one single exception to whom they gave the name of Spirit or God and they termed those men prophets who'said they were inspired by the good spirit; thus they viewed as the operation of the Divine Spirit whatever they conBidered as blessing, and on the other hand they looked upon whatever they thought to be evil as proceeding from some cacodemon or evil spirit. This distinction between good and evil led them to., the use of the'appellation demoniacs which they