A CORRECTION.
[To the Editor of the SrEerATort.]
Sin,—Your issue of March 9th, 1912, contained, under the heading of " Damnation of Infants," a letter quoting from " Father Furness (S.J.) " a very terrible description of infant damnation which implied that the victim was in hell in virtue of " its " want of baptism. In a recent article in the Hibbert Journal (July, 1922) I quoted this statement as from your columns, with definite date but with no farther reference ; the book, in fact, was not to be found in the University Library. Several correspondents presently wrote to correct
me ; the anther was Furness, and not a Jesuit but a Redemp- torist Father ; and the child, though he always speaks of " it " and " its little feet," is in fact described elsewhere as old enough to have known and committed mortal sin. I offered the correspondent who urged this most strongly upon inc to correct my statement in the next issue of the Hibbert Journal ; he boggled so long over the terms in which I pro- posed to make this correction that the time went by, and the editor has suggested very naturally that you, on whose authority the mistake had been made, would be good enough
to print the correction. .
I wish to make it clear that my fault is not excused, but only palliated, by the fact that the original book was not within my reach for a verification of the reference. It is only with difficulty, through the generosity of a correspondent in Ireland, that I have at last secured a copy for the University Library ; and I am still advertising without success for another copy for private use. But there is one excellent side to this ; the " somewhat lurid eschatology " of this priest who, not a century ago, sold " more than four millions of his booklets throughout English-speaking countries " (I quote from the friendly biography in the Catholic Encyclopaedia) is evidently out of date now ; and it even seems that his booklets have been systematically destroyed. Lecky, I find, pilloried the author in his History of European Morals. Meanwhile, my blunder does not weaken the main argument of my article ; the correct facts actually strengthen it. But my critics have now led me to trace the doctrine of infant damnation through the most orthodox post-Reformation sources—I had hitherto collected only mediaeval evidence at first hand—and I have embodied the two together in a pamphlet which will be found advertised in this issue of the Spectator.—I am, Sir, &e.,
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