Neither Moses nor Christ made the slightest mention of it, and the single passage which is cited from Maccabees is insufficient.

Besides, this book was declared apocryphal by the Council of Laodicea and the holy Catholic Church accepted it only later.

Neither have the pagan religions anything like it.

The oft-quoted passage in Virgil, _Aliae panduntur inanes_, [55] which probably gave occasion for St.Gregory the Great to speak of drowned souls, and to Dante for another narrative in his _Divine Comedy_, cannot have been the origin of this belief.

Neither the Brahmins, the Buddhists, nor the Egyptians, who may have given Rome her Charon and her Avernus, had anything like this idea.