These changes seem to have been wrought out, first, by continual assimilations of Christianity to paganism,1 both in doctrine and ceremony, to win over the heathen; and, secondly, by modifications and growths to meet the exigencies of doctrinal consistency and practical efficiency, exigencies repeatedly arising from philosophical discussion and political opposition.

The degree in which papal Christianity was conformed to the prejudices and customs of the heathen believers, whose allegiance was sought, is astonishing. It extended to hundreds of particulars, from the most fundamental principles of theological speculation to the most trivial details of ritual service. We shall mention only a few instances of this kind immediately belonging to the subject we are treating. In the first place, the hierophant in the pagan Mysteries, and the initiatory rites, were the prototypes of the Roman Catholic bishop and the ceremonies under his direction.2 Christian baptism was made to be the same as the pagan initiation: both were supposed to cleanse from sin and to secure for their subject a better fate in the future life: they were both, therefore, sometimes delayed until just before death.3 The custom of initiating children into the Mysteries was also common, as infant baptism became.4 When the public treasury was low, the magistrates sometimes raised a fund by recourse to the initiating fees of the Mysteries, as the Christian popes afterwards collected money from the sale of pardons.

In the second place, the Roman Catholic canonization was the same as the pagan apotheosis. Among the Gentiles, the mass of mankind were supposed to descend to Hades at death; but a few favored ones were raised to the sky, deified, and a sort of worship paid to them. So the Roman Church taught that nearly all souls passed to the subterranean abodes, but that martyrs and saints were admitted to heaven and might lawfully be prayed to.5

Thirdly, the heathen under world was subdivided into several regions, wherein different persons were disposed according to their deserts. The worst criminals were in the everlasting penal fire of Tartarus; the best heroes and sages were in the calm meadows of Elysium; the hapless children were detained in the dusky borders outside the grim realm of torture; and there was a purgatorial place where those not too guilty were cleansed from their stains. In like manner, the Romanist theologians divided the under world into four parts: hell for the final abode of the stubbornly wicked; one limbo for the painless, contented tarrying of the good patriarchs who died before the advent of Christ had made salvation possible, and another limbo for the sad and pallid resting place of those children who died unbaptized; purgatory, in which expiation is offered in agony for sins committed on earth and unatoned for.6

1 Middleton, Letter from Rome, showing an exact conformity between Popery and Paganism.

2 Lobeck, Aglaophamus, lib. i. sect. 6. Mosheim's Comm., ch. i. sect. 13.

3 Warburton, Div. Leg., book ii. sect. 4.

4 Terence, Phormio, act i scene 1.

5 Council of Trent, sess. vi. can. xxx. Sess. xxv.: Decree on Invocation of Saints.

6 See Milman, Hist. Latin Christianity, book xiv. ch. ii.

Before proceeding further, we must trace the prevalence and progress of the doctrine of purgatory a little as it was known before its embodiment in mediaval mythology, and then as it was embodied there. The fundamental doctrine of the Hindu hell was that a certain amount of suffering undergone there would expiate a certain amount of guilt incurred here. When the disembodied soul had endured a sufficient quantity of retributive and purifying pain, it was loosed, and sent on earth in a new body. It was likewise a Hindu belief that the souls of deceased parents might be assisted out of this purgatorial woe by the prayers and offerings of their surviving children.7 The same doctrine was held by the Persians. They believed souls could be released from purgatory by the prayers, sacrifices, and good deeds of righteous surviving descendants and friends. "Zoroaster said he could, by prayer, send any one he chose to heaven or to hell." 8 Such representations are found obscurely in the Vendidad and more fully in the Bundehesh. The Persian doctrine that the living had power to affect the condition of the dead is further indicated in the fact that, from a belief that married persons were peculiarly happy in the future state, they often hired persons to be espoused to such of their relatives as had died in celibacy.9 The doctrine of purgatory was known and accepted among the Jews too. In the Second Book of Maccabees we read the following account: "Judas sent two thousand pieces of silver to Jerusalem to defray the expense of a sin offering to be offered for the sins of those who were slain, doing therein very well and honestly, in that he was mindful of the resurrection. For if he had not hoped that they who were slain should rise again, it had been superfluous and vain to pray for the dead. Whereupon he made an atonement for the dead, that they might be delivered from sin."10 The Rabbins taught that children by sin offerings could help their parents out of their misery in the infernal world.11 They taught, furthermore, that all souls except holy ones, like those of Rabbi Akiba and his disciples, must lave themselves in the fire river of Gehenna; that therein they shall be like salamanders; that the just shall soon be cleansed in the fire river, but the wicked shall be lastingly burned.12 Again, we find this doctrine prevailing among the Romans. In the great Forum was a stone called "Lapis Manalis," described by Festus, which was supposed to cover the entrance to hell. This was solemnly lifted three times a year, in order to let those souls flow up whose sins had been purged away by their tortures or had been remitted in consideration of the offerings and services paid for them by the living. Virgil describes how souls are purified by the action of wind, water, and fire.13 The feast day of purgatory observed by papal Rome corresponds to the Lemuria celebrated by pagan Rome, and rests on the same doctrinal basis. In the Catholic countries of Europe at the present time, on All Saints' Day, festoons of sweet smelling flowers are hung on the tomb stones, and the people kneeling there repeat the prayer prescribed for releasing the souls of their relatives and friends from the plagues of purgatory. There is a notable coincidence between the Buddhist

7 See references to "Sraddha" in index to Vishnu Purana.

8 Atkinson's trans. of the Shah Nameh, p. 386.

9 Richardson, Dissertation on the Language, Literature, and Manners of the Eastern Nations, p. 347.

10 Cap. xii. 42-45.

11 Eisenmenger, Entdecktes Judenthum, th. ii. kap. vi. s. 357.

12 Kabbala Denudata, tom ii. pars. i. pp. 108, 109, 113.

13 Aneid, lib. vi. 1. 739.

and the Romanist usages. Throughout the Chinese Empire, during the seventh moon of every year, prayers are offered up accompanied by illuminations and other rites for the release of souls in purgatory. At these times the Buddhist priests hang up large pictures, showing forth the frightful scenes in the other world, to induce the people to pay them money for prayers in behalf of their suffering relatives and friends in purgatory.14

Traces of belief in a purgatory early appear among the Christians. Many of the gravest Fathers of the first five centuries naturally conceived and taught, as is indeed intrinsically reasonable, that after death some souls will be punished for their sins until they are cleansed, and then will be released from pain. The Manichaans imagined that all souls, before returning to their native heaven, must be borne first to the moon, where with good waters they would be washed pure from outward filth, and then to the sun, where they would be purged by good fires from every inward stain.15 After these lunar and solar lustrations, they were fit for the eternal world of light. But the conception of purgatory as it was held by the early Christians, whether orthodox Fathers or heretical sects, was merely the just and necessary result of applying to the subject of future punishment the two ethical ideas that punishment should partake of degrees proportioned to guilt, and that it should be restorative. Jeremy Taylor conclusively argues that the prayers for the dead used by the early Christians do not imply any belief in the Papal purgatory.16 The severity and duration of the sufferings of the dead were not supposed to be in the power of the living, either their relatives or the clergy, but to depend on the moral and physical facts of the case according to justice and necessity, qualified only by the mercy of God.

Pope Gregory the Great, in the sixth century, either borrowing some of the more objectionable features of the purgatory doctrine previously held by the heathen, or else devising the same things himself from a perception of the striking adaptedness of such notions to secure an enviable power to the Church, constructed, established, and gave working efficiency to the dogmatic scheme of purgatory ever since firmly defended by the papal adherents as an integral part of the Roman Catholic system.17 The doctrine as matured and promulgated by Gregory, giving to the representatives of the Church an almost unlimited power over purgatory, rapidly grew into favor with the clergy and sank with general conviction into the hopes and fears of the laity. Venerable Bede, in the eighth century, gives a long account of the fully developed doctrine concerning purgatory, hell, paradise, and heaven. It is narrated in the form of a vision seen by Drithelm, who, in a trance, visits the regions which, on his return, he describes. The whole thing is gross, literal, horrible, closely resembling several well known descriptions given under similar circumstances and preserved in ancient heathen writers.18 The Church, seeing how admirably this instrument was calculated to promote her interest and deepen her power, left hardly any means untried to enlarge its sweep and intensify its operation. Accordingly, from the ninth to the sixteenth century, no doctrine was so central, prominent, and effective in the common teaching and

14 Asiatic Journal, 1840, p. 210, note.

15 Mosheim, Comm., III. Century, sect. 49, note 3.

16 Dissuasive from Popery, part ii. book ii. sect. 2.

17 Edgar, Variations of Popery, ch. xvi.

18 Hist. Ecc., lib. v. cap. xii. See also lib. iii. cap. xix.

practice of the Church, no fear was so widely spread and vividly felt in the bosom of Christendom, as the doctrine and the fear of purgatory.

The Romanist theory of man's condition in the future life is this, in brief. By the sin of Adam, heaven was closed against him and all his posterity, and the devil acquired a right to shut up their disembodied souls in the under world. In consequence of the "original sin" transmitted from Adam, every human being, besides suffering the other woes flowing from sin, was helplessly doomed to the under world after death. In addition to this penalty, each one must also answer for his own personal sins. Christ died to "deliver mankind from sin," "discharge the punishment due them," and "rescue them from the tyranny of the devil." He "descended into the under world," "subdued the devil," "despoiled the depths," "rescued the Fathers and just souls," and "opened heaven."19 "Until he rose, heaven was shut against every child of Adam, as it still is to those who die indebted." "The price paid by the Son of God far exceeded our debts." The surplus balance of merits, together with the merits accruing from the supererogatory good works of the saints and from the Divine sacrifice continually offered anew by the sacrament of the mass, constituted a reserved treasure upon which the Church was authorized to draw in behalf of any one she chose to favor. The localities of the future life were these:20 Limbus Patrum, or Abraham's Bosom, a place of peace and waiting, where the good went who died before Christ; Limbus Infantum, a mild, palliated hell, where the children go who, since Christ, have died unbaptized; Purgatory, where all sinners suffer until they are purified, or are redeemed by the Church, or until the last day; Hell, or Gehenna, whither the hopelessly wicked have always been condemned; and Heaven, whither the spotlessly good have been admitted since the ascension of Jesus. At the day of judgment the few human souls who have reached Paradise, together with the multitudes that crowd the regions of Gehenna, Purgatory, and Limbo, will reassume their bodies: the intermediate states will then be destroyed, and when their final sentence is pronounced all will depart forever, the acquitted into heaven, the condemned into hell. In the mean time, the poor victims of purgatory, by the prayers of the living for them, by the transfer of good works to their account, above all, by the celebration of masses in their behalf, may be relieved, rescued, translated to paradise. The words breathed by the spirit of the murdered King of Denmark in the ears of the horror stricken Hamlet paint the popular belief of that age in regard to the grisly realm where guilty souls were plied with horrors whereof, but that they were forbidden:

"To tell the secrets of their prison house, They could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, Thy knotted and combined locks to part, And each particular hair to stand on end Like quills upon the fretful porcupine."

19 Catechism of the Council of Trent.

20 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologia, pars Suppl. Quast. 69.

A few specimens of the stories embodying the ideas and superstitions current in the Middle Age may better illustrate the characteristic belief of the time than much abstract description. An unquestioning faith in the personality, visibility, and extensive agency of the devil was almost universal. Ascetics, saints, bishops, peasants, philosophers, kings, Gregory the Great, Martin Luther, all testified that they had often seen him. The mediaval conception of the devil was sometimes comical, sometimes awful. Grimm says, "He was Jewish, heathenish, Christian, idolatrous, elfish, titanic, spectral, all at once." He was "a soul snatching wolf," a "hell hound," a "whirlwind hammer;" now an infernal "parody of God" with "a mother who mimics the Virgin Mary," and now the "impersonated soul of evil."21 The well known story of Faust and the Devil, which in so many forms spread through Christendom, is so deeply significant of the faith and life of the age in which it arose that a volume would be required to unfold all its import. There was an old tradition that the students of necromancy or the black art, on reaching a certain pitch of proficiency, were obliged to run through a subterranean hall, where the devil literally caught the hindmost unless he sped so swiftly that the arch enemy could only seize his shadow, and in that case, a veritable Peter Schlemihl, he never cast a shadow afterwards! A man stood by his furnace one day casting eyes for buttons. The devil came up and asked what he was doing. "Casting eyes," replied the man. "Can you cast a pair for me?" quoth the devil. "That I can," says the man: "will you have them large or small?" "Oh, very large," answered the devil. He then ties the fiend on a bench and pours the molten lead into his eyes. Up jumps the devil, with the bench on his back, flees howling, and has never been seen since! There was also in wide circulation a wild legend to the effect that a man made a compact with the devil on the condition that he should secure a new victim for hell once in a century. As long as he did this he should enjoy life, riches, power, and a limited ubiquity; but failing a fresh victim at the end of each hundred years his own soul should be the forfeit. He lived four or five centuries, and then, in spite of his most desperate efforts, was disappointed of his expected victim on the last night of the century; and when the clock struck twelve the devil burst into his castle on a black steed and bore him off in a storm of lightning amidst the crash of thunders and the shrieks of fiends. St. Britius once during mass saw the devil in church taking account of the sins the congregation were committing. He covered the parchment all over, and, afraid of forgetting some of the offences, seized the scroll in his teeth and claws to stretch it out. It snapped, and his head was smartly bumped against the wall. St. Britius laughed aloud. The officiating priest rebuked him, but, on being told what had happened, improved the accident for the edification of his hearers.22 On the bursting of a certain glacier on the Alps, it is said the devil was seen swimming down the Rhone, a drawn sword in one hand, a golden ball in the other: opposite the town of Martigny, he cried, "Rise," and instantly the obedient river swelled above its banks and destroyed the town.

Ignes fatui, hovering about marshes and misty places, were thought to be the spirits of unbaptized children endeavoring to guide travellers to the nearest water. A kindred fancy

21 Deutsche Mythologie, cap. xxxiii.: Teufel.

22 Quarterly Review, Jan. 1820: Pop. Myth. of the Middle Ages.

also heard a spectral pack, called "yell hounds," afterwards corrupted to "hell hounds," composed of the souls of unbaptized children, which could not rest, but roamed and howled through the woods all night.23 A touching popular myth said, the robin's breast is so red because it flies into hell with drops of water in its bill to relieve the children there, and gets scorched.

In 1171, Silo, a philosopher, implored a dying pupil of his to come back and reveal his state in the other world. A few days after his death the scholar appeared in a cowl of flames covered with logical propositions. He told Silo that he was from purgatory, that the cowl weighed on him worse than a tower, and said he was doomed to wear it for the pride he took in sophisms. As he thus spoke he let fall a drop of sweat on his master's hand, piercing it through. The next day Silo said to his scholars, "I leave croaking to frogs, cawing to crows, and vain things to the vain, and hie me to the logic which fears not death."

"Linquo coax ranis, cras corvis, vanaque vanis, Ad logicen pergo qua mortis non timet ergo." 24

In the long, quaint poem, "Vision of William concerning Piers Ploughman," written probably by Robert Langland about the year 1362, there are many things illustrative of our subject. "I, Trojanus, a true knight, after death was condemned to hell for dying unbaptized. But, on account of my mercy and truth in administering the laws, the pope wished me to be saved; and God mercifully heard him and saved me without the help of masses."25 "Ever since the fall of Adam, Age has shaken the Tree of Human Life, and the devil has gathered the fruit into hell."26 The author gives a most spirited account of Christ's descent into the under world after his death, his battle with the devils there, his triumph over them, his rescue of Adam, and other particulars.27 In this poem, as in nearly all the extant productions of that period, there are copious evidences of the extent and power of the popular faith in the devil and in purgatory, and in their close connection with the present life, a faith nourishingly embodied in thousands of singular tales. Thomas Wright has collected many of these in his antiquarian works. He relates an amusing incident that once befell a minstrel who had been borne into hell by a devil. The devils went forth in a troop to ensnare souls on earth. Lucifer left the minstrel in charge of the infernal regions, promising, if he let no souls escape, to treat him on the return with a fat monk roasted, or a usurer dressed with hot sauce. But while the fiends were away St. Peter came, in disguise, and allured the minstrel to play at dice, and to stake the souls which were in torture under his care. Peter won, and carried them off in triumph. The devils, coming back and finding the fires all out and hell empty, kicked the hapless minstrel out, and Lucifer swore a big oath that no minstrel should ever darken the door of hell again!

The mediaval belief in a future life was practically concentrated, for the most part, around the ideas of Satan, purgatory, the last judgment, hell. The faith in Christ, God,

23 Allies, Antiquities of Worcestershire, 2d ed. p. 256.

24 Michelet, Hist. de France, livre iv. chap. ix.

25 Vision of Dowell, part iii.

26 Vision of Dobet, part ii.

27 Ibid., part iv.

heaven, was much rarer and less influential. Neander says, "The inmost distinction of mediaval experience was an awful sense of another life and an invisible world." A most piteous illustration of the conjoined faith and fear of that age is furnished by an old dialogue between the "Soul and the Body" recently edited by Halliwell, an expression of humble trust and crouching horror irresistibly pathetic in its simplicity.28 A flood of revealing light is given as to the energy with which the doctrine of purgatory impressed itself on the popular mind, by the two facts, first, that the Council of Auxerre, in 1578, prohibited the administration of the eucharist to the dead; and, secondly, that in the eleventh and twelfth centuries "crosses of absolution" that is, crosses cut out of sheet lead, with the formula of absolution engraved on them were quite commonly buried with the dead.29 The eager sincerity of the mediaval belief in another life is attested, too, by the correspondence of the representations of the dead in their legends to the appearance, disposition, and pursuits they had in life. No oblivious draught, no pure spiritualization, had freed the departed souls from earthly bonds and associations. Light pretexts drew them back to their wonted haunts. A buried treasure allowed them no rest till they had led some one to raise it. An unfinished task, an uncancelled obligation, forced them again to the upper world. In ruined castles the ghosts of knights, in their accustomed habiliments, held tournaments and carousals. The priest read mass; the hunter pursued his game; the spectre robber fell on the benighted traveller.30 It is hard for us now to reproduce, even in imagination, the fervid and frightful earnestness of the popular faith of the Middle Age in the ramifying agency of the devil and in the horrors of purgatory. We will try to do it, in some degree, by a series of illustrations aiming to show at once how prevalent such a belief and fear were, and how they became so prevalent.

First, we may specify the teaching of the Church whose authority in spiritual concerns bore almost unquestioned sway over the minds of more than eighteen generations. By the logical subtleties of her scholastic theologians, by the persuasive eloquence of her popular preachers, by the frantic ravings of her fanatic devotees, by the parading proclamation of her innumerable pretended miracles, by the imposing ceremonies of her dramatic ritual, almost visibly opening heaven and hell to the over awed congregation, by her wonder working use of the relics of martyrs and saints to exorcise demons from the possessed and to heal the sick, and by her anathemas against all who were supposed to be hostile to her formulas, she infused the ideas of her doctrinal system into the intellect, heart, and fancy of the common people, and nourished the collateral horrors, until every wave of her wand convulsed the world. In a pastoral letter addressed to the Carlovingian prince Louis, the grandson of Charlemagne, a letter probably composed by the famous Hincmar, bearing date 858, and signed by the Bishops of Rheims and Rouen, a Gallic synod authoritatively declared that Charles Martel was damned; "that on the opening of his tomb the spectators were affrighted by a smell of fire and the aspect of a horrid dragon, and that a saint of the times was indulged with a pleasant vision of the soul and body of this great hero burning to all eternity in the abyss of hell."

28 Early English Miscellanies, No. 2.

29 London Antiquaries' Archaologis, vol. xxxv. art. 22.

30 Thorpe, Northern Mythology, vol. i., appendix.

A tremendous impulse, vivifying and emphasizing the eschatological notions of the time, an impulse whose effects did not cease when it died, was imparted by that frightful epidemic expectation of the impending end of the world which wellnigh universally prevailed in Christendom about the year 1000. Many of the charters given at that time commence with the words, "As the world is now drawing to a close." 31 This expectation drew additional strength from the unutterable sufferings famine, oppression, pestilence, war, superstition then weighing on the people. "The idea of the end of the world," we quote from Michelet, "sad as that world was, was at once the hope and the terror of the Middle Age. Look at those antique statues of the tenth and eleventh centuries, mute, meager, their pinched and stiffened lineaments grinning with a look of living suffering allied to the repulsiveness of death. See how they implore, with clasped hands, that desired yet dreaded moment when the resurrection shall redeem them from their unspeakable sorrows and raise them from nothingness into existence and from the grave to God."

Furthermore, this superstitious character of the mediaval belief in the future life acquired breadth and intensity from the profound general ignorance and trembling credulousness of that whole period on all subjects. It was an age of marvels, romances, fears, when every landscape of life "wore a strange hue, as if seen through the sombre medium of a stained casement." While congregations knelt in awe beneath the lifted Host, and the image of the dying Savior stretched on the rood glimmered through clouds of incense, perhaps an army of Flagellants would march by the cathedral, shouting, "The end of the world is at hand!" filling the streets with the echoes of their torture as they lashed their naked backs with knotted cords wet with blood; and no soul but must shudder with the infection of horror as the dreadful notes of the "Dies Iioe" went sounding through the air. The narratives of the desert Fathers, the miracles wrought in convent cells, the visions of pillar saints, the thrilling accompaniments of the Crusades, and other kindred influences, made the world a perpetual mirage. The belching of a volcano was the vomit of uneasy hell. The devil stood before every tempted man, Ghosts walked in every nightly dell. Ghastly armies were seen contending where the aurora borealis hung out its bloody banners. The Huns under Attila, ravaging Southern Europe, were thought to be literal demons who had made an irruption from the pit. The metaphysician was in peril of the stake as a heretic, the natural philosopher as a magician. A belief in witchcraft and a trust in ordeals were universal, even from Pope Eugenius, who introduced the trial by cold water, and King James, who wrote volumes on magic, to the humblest monk who shuddered when passing the church crypt, and the simplest peasant who quaked in his homeward path at seeing a will o' the wisp. "Denounced by the preacher and consigned to the flames by the judge, the wizard received secret service money from the Cabinet to induce him to destroy the hostile armament as it sailed before the wind." As a vivid writer has well said, "A gloomy mist of credulity enwrapped the cathedral and the hall of justice, the cottage and the throne. In the dank shadows of the universal ignorance a thousand superstitions, like foul animals of night, were propagated and nourished."

31 Hallam, Middle Ages, ch. ix.

The beliefs and excitements of the mediaval period partook of a sort of epidemic character, diffusing and working like a contagion.32 There were numberless throngs of pilgrims to famous shrines, immense crowds about the localities of popular legends, relics, or special grace. In the magnetic sphere of such a fervid and credulous multitude, filled with the kindling interaction of enthusiasm, of course prodigies would abound, fables would flourish, and faith would be doubly generated and fortified. In commemoration of a miraculous act of virtue performed by St. Francis, the pope offered to all who should enter the church at Assisi between the eve of the 1st and the eve of the 2d of August each year that being the anniversary of the saint's achievement a free pardon for all the sins committed by them since their baptism. More than sixty thousand pilgrims sometimes flocked thither on that day. Every year some were crushed to death in the suffocating pressure at the entrance of the church. Nearly two thousand friars walked in procession; and for a series of years the pilgrimage to Portiuncula might have vied with that to the temple of Juggernaut.33

Nothing tends more to strengthen any given belief than to see it everywhere carried into practice and to act in accordance with it. Thus was it with the mediaval doctrine of the future life. Its applications and results were constantly and universally thrust into notice by the sale of indulgences and the launching of excommunications. Early in the ninth century, Charlemagne complained that the bishops and abbots forced property from foolish people by promises and threats: "Suadendo de coelestis regni beatitudine, comminando de oeterno supplicio inferni."34 The rival mendicant orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, acquired great riches and power by the traffic in indulgences. They even had the impudence to affirm that the members of their orders were privileged above all other men in the next world. Milton alludes to those who credited these monstrous assumptions: "And they who, to be sure of Paradise, Dying, put on the weeds of Dominic, Or in Franciscan think to pass disguised."

The Council of Basle censured the claim of the Franciscan monks that their founder annually descended to purgatory and led thence to heaven the souls of all those who had belonged to his order. The Carmelites also asserted that the Virgin Mary appeared to Simon Stockius, the general of their order, and gave him a solemn promise that the souls of such as left the world with the Carmelite scapulary upon their shoulders should be infallibly preserved from eternal damnation. Mosheim says that Pope Benedict XIV. was an open defender of this ridiculous fiction.35

If any one would appreciate the full mediaval doctrine of the future life, whether with respect to the hair drawn scholastic metaphysics by which it was defended, or with respect to the concrete forms in which the popular apprehension held it, let him read the Divina Commedia of Dante; for it is all there. Whoso with adequate insight and sympathy peruses

32 Hecker, Epidemics of the Middle Ages.

33 Quarterly Review, July, 1819: article on Monachism.

34 Perry, History of the Franks, p. 467.

35 Eccl. Hist., XIII. Century, part ii. ch. 2, sect. 29.

the pages of the immortal Florentine at whom the people pointed as he walked the streets, and said, "There goes the man who has been in hell" will not fail to perceive with what a profound sincerity the popular breast shuddered responsive to ecclesiastical threats and purgatorial woes.

The tremendous moral power of this solitary work lies in the fact that it is a series of terrific and fascinating tableaux, embodying the idea of inflexible poetic justice impartially administered upon king and varlet, pope and beggar, oppressor and victim, projected amidst the unalterable necessities of eternity, and moving athwart the lurid abyss and the azure cope with an intense distinctness that sears the gazer's eyeballs. The Divina Commedia, with a wonderful truth, also reflects the feeling of the age when it was written in this respect, that there is a grappling force of attraction, a compelling realism, about its "Purgatory" and "Hell" which are to be sought in vain in the delineations of its "Paradise." The mediaval belief in a future life had for its central thought the day of judgment, for its foremost emotion terror.36

The roots of this faith were unquestionably fertilized, and the development of this fear quickened, to a very great extent, by deliberate and systematic delusions. One of the most celebrated of these organized frauds was the gigantic one perpetrated under the auspices of the Dominican monks at Berne in 1509, the chief actors in which were unmasked and executed. Bishop Burnet has given an extremely interesting account of this affair in his volume of travels. Suffice it to say, the monks appeared at midnight in the cells of various persons, now impersonating devils, in horrid attire, breathing flames and brimstone, now claiming to be the souls of certain sufferers escaped from purgatory, and again pretending to be celebrated saints, with the Virgin Mary at their head. By the aid of mechanical and chemical arrangements, they wrought miracles, and played on the terror and credulity of the spectators in a frightful manner.37 There is every reason to suppose that such deceptions miracles in which secret speaking tubes, asbestos, and phosphorus were indispensable38 were most frequent in those ages, and were as effective as the actors were unscrupulous and the dupes unsuspicious. Here is revealed one of the foremost of the causes which made the belief of the Dark Age in the numerous appearances of ghosts and devils so common and so intense that it gave currency to the notion that the swarming spirits of purgatory were disembogued from dusk till dawn. So the Danish monarch, revisiting the pale glimpses of the moon, says to Hamlet, "I am thy father's spirit, Doom'd for a certain time to walk the night, And for the day confined to fast in fires, Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature Are burnt and purged away."

36 If any one would see in how many forms the faith in hell and in the devil appeared, let him look over the pages of the "Dictionnaire Infernal," by J. Collin de Plancy.

37 Maclaine's trans, of Mosheim's Eccl. Hist., vol. ii. p. 10, note.

38 Manufactures of the Ancients, pub. by Harper and Brothers, 1845, part iv. ch. 3.

When the shadows began to fall thick behind the sunken sun, these poor creatures were thought to spring from their beds of torture, to wander amidst the scenes of their sins or to haunt the living; but at the earliest scent of morn, the first note of the cock, they must hie to their fire again. Midnight was the high noon of ghostly and demoniac revelry on the earth. As the hour fell with brazen clang from the tower, the belated traveller, afraid of the rustle of his own dress, the echo of his own footfall, the wavering of his own shadow, afraid of his own thoughts, would breathe the suppressed invocation, "Angels and ministers of grace defend us!" as the idea crept curdling over his brain and through his veins, "It is the very witching time of night, When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out Contagion to this world."

Working in alliance with the foregoing forces of superstition was the powerful influence of the various forms of insanity which remarkably abounded in the Middle Age. The insane person, it was believed, was possessed by a demon. His ravings, his narratives, were eagerly credited; and they were usually full of infernal visions, diabolical interviews, encounters with apparitions, and every thing that would naturally arise in a deranged and preternaturally sensitive mind from the chief conceptions then current concerning the invisible world.39

The principal works of art exposed to the people were such as served to impress upon their imaginations the Church doctrine of the future life in all its fearfulness, with its vigorous dramatic points. In the cathedral at Antwerp there is a representation of hell carved in wood, whose marvellous elaborateness astonishes, and whose painful expressiveness oppresses, every beholder. With what excruciating emotions the pious crowds must have contemplated the harrowingly vivid paintings of the Inferno, by Orcagna, still to be seen in the Campo Santo of Pisa! In the cathedral at Canterbury there was a window on which was painted a detailed picture of Christ vanquishing the devils in their own domain; but we believe it has been removed. However, the visitor still sees on the fine east window of York Cathedral the final doom of the wicked, hell being painted as an enormous mouth; also in the west front of Lincoln Cathedral an ancient bas relief representing hell as a monstrous mouth vomiting flame and serpents, with two human beings walking into it. The minster at Freyburg has a grotesque bas relief over its main portal, representing the Judgment. St. Nicholas stands in the centre, and the Savior is seated above him. On the left, an angel weighs mankind in a huge pair of scales, and a couple of malicious imps try to make the human scale kick the beam. Underneath, St. Peter is ushering the good into Paradise. On the right is shown a devil, with a pig's head, dragging after him a throng of the wicked. He also has a basket on his back filled with figures whom he is in the act of flinging into a reeking caldron stirred by several imps. Hell is typified, on one side, by the jaws of a monster crammed to the teeth with reprobates, and Satan is seen sitting on his throne above them. A recent traveller writes from

39 De Boismont, Rational Hist. of Hallucivatious, ch. xiv.

Naples, "The favorite device on the church walls here is a vermilion picture of a male and a female soul, respectively up to the waist [the waist of a soul!] in fire, with an angel over each watering them from a water pot. This is meant to get money from the compassionate to pay for the saying of masses in behalf of souls in purgatory." Ruskin has described some of the church paintings of the Last Judgment by the old masters as possessing a power even now sufficient to stir every sensibility to its depths. Such works, gazed on day after day, while multitudes were kneeling beneath in the shadowy aisles, and clouds of incense were floating above, and the organ was pealing and the choir chanting in full accord, must produce lasting effects on the imagination, and thus contribute in return to the faith and fear which inspired them.

Villani as also Sismondi gives a description of a horrible representation of hell shown at Florence in 1304 by the inhabitants of San Priano, on the river Arno. The glare of flames, the shrieks of men disguised as devils, scenes of infernal torture, filled the night. Unfortunately, the scaffolding broke beneath the crowd, and many spectators were burned or drowned, and that which began as an entertaining spectacle ended as a direful reality. The whole affair is a forcible illustration of the literality with which the popular mind and faith apprehended the notion of the infernal world.

Another means by which the views we have been considering were both expressed and recommended to the senses and belief of the people was those miracle plays that formed one of the most peculiar features of the Middle Age. These plays, founded on, and meant to illustrate, Scripture narratives and theological doctrines, were at first enacted by the priests in the churches, afterwards by the various trading companies or guilds of mechanics. In 1210, Pope Gregory "forbade the clergy to take any part in the plays in churches or in the mummings at festivals." A similar prohibition was published by the Council of Treves, in 1227. The Bishop of Worms, in 1316, issued a proclamation against the abuses which had crept into the festivities of Easter, and gives a long and curious description of them.40 There were two popular festivals, of which Michelet gives a full and amusing description, one called the "Fete of the Tipsy Priests," when they elected a Bishop of Unreason, offered him incense of burned leather, sang obscene songs in the choir, and turned the altar into a dice table; the other called the "Fete of the Cuckolds," when the laymen crowned each other with leaves, the priests wore their surplices wrong side out and threw bran in each others' eyes, and the bell ringers pelted each other with biscuits. There is a religious play by Calderon, entitled "The Divine Orpheus," in which the entire Church scheme of man's fall the devil's empire, Christ's descent there, and the victorious sequel is embodied in a most effective manner. In the priestly theology and in the popular heart of those times there was no other single particular one tenth part so prominent and vivid as that of Christ's entrance after his death into hell to rescue the old saints and break down Satan's power.41

40 Early Mysteries and Latin Poems of the XII. and XIII. Centuries, edited by Thomas Wright. See the eloquent sermon on this subject preached by Luis de Granada in the sixteenth century. Ticknor's Hist. Spanish Lit., vol. iii. pp. 123-127.

Peter Lombard says, "What did the Redeemer do to the despot who had us in his bonds? He offered him the cross as a mouse trap, and put his blood on it as bait." 42 About that scene there was an incomparable fascination for every believer. Christ laid aside his Godhead and died. The devil thought he had secured a new victim, and humanity swooned in grief and despair. But, lo! the Crucified, descending to the inexorable dungeons, puts on all his Divinity, and suddenly "The captive world awakt, and founde The pris'ner loose, the jailer bounde!" 43

A large proportion of the miracle plays, or Mysteries, turned on this event. In the "Mystery of the Resurrection of Christ" occurs the following couplet: "This day the angelic King has risen, Leading the pious from their prison." 44

The title of one of the principal plays in the Towneley Mysteries is "Extractio Animarum ab Inferno." It describes Christ descending to the gates of hell to claim his own. Adam sees afar the gleam of his coming, and with his companions begins to sing for joy. The infernal porter shouts to the other demons, in alarm, "Since first that hell was made and I was put therein, Such sorrow never ere I had, nor heard I such a din. My heart begins to start; my wit it waxes thin; I am afraid we can't rejoice, these souls must from us go. Ho, Beelzebub! bind these boys: such noise was never heard in hell."

Satan vows he will dash Beelzebub's brains out for frightening him so. Meanwhile, Christ draws near, and says, "Lift up your gates, ye princes, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall come in." The portals fly asunder. Satan shouts up to his friends, "Dyng the dastard down;" but Beelzebub replies, "That is easily said." Jesus and the devil soon meet, face to face. A long colloquy ensues, in the course of which the latter tells the former that he knew his Father well by sight! At last Jesus frees Adam, Eve, the prophets, and others, and ascends, leaving the devil in the lowest pit, resolving that hell shall soon be fuller than before; for he will walk east and he will walk west, and he will seduce thousands from their allegiance. Another play, similar to the foregoing, but much more extensively known and acted, was called the "Harrowing of Hell." Christ and Satan appear on the stage and argue in the most approved scholastic style for the right of possession in the human race. Satan says, "Whoever purchases any thing, It belongs to him and to his children. Adam, hungry, came to me;

42 Sententia, lib. iii. distinctio 19.

43 Hone, Ancient Mysteries.

44 "Resurrexit hodie Rex angelorum Ducitur de tenebris turba piorum."

I made him do me homage: For an apple, which I gave him, He and all his race belong to me." But Christ instantly puts a different aspect on the argument, by replying, "Satan! it was mine, The apple thou gavest him. The apple and the apple tree Both were made by me. As he was purchased with my goods, With reason will I have him." 45

In a religious Mystery exhibited at Lisbon as late as the close of the eighteenth century, the following scene occurs. Cain kicks his brother Abel badly and kills him. A figure like a Chinese mandarin, seated in a chair, condemns Cain and is drawn up into the clouds. The mouth of hell then appears, like the jaws of a great dragon: amid smoke and lightning it casts up three devils, one of them having a wooden leg. These take a dance around Cain, and are very jocose, one of them inviting him to hell to take a cup of brimstone coffee, and another asking him to make up a party at whist. Cain snarls, and they tumble him and themselves headlong into the squib vomiting mouth.

Various books of accounts kept by the trading companies who celebrated these Mysteries of the expenses incurred have been published, and are exceedingly amusing. "Item: payd for kepyng of fyer at hellmothe, four pence." "For a new hoke to hang Judas, six pence." "Item: payd for mendyng and payntyng hellmouthe, two pence." "Girdle for God, nine pence." "Axe for Pilatte's son, one shilling." "A staff for the demon, one penny." "God's coat of white leather, three shillings." The stage usually consisted of three platforms. On the highest sat God, surrounded by his angels. On the next were the saints in Paradise, the intermediate state of the good after death. On the third were mere men yet living in the world. On one side of the lowest stage, in the rear, was a fearful cave or yawning mouth filled with smoke and flames, and denoting hell. From this ever and anon would issue the howls and shrieks of the damned. Amidst hideous yellings, devils would rush forth and caper about and snatch hapless souls into this pit to their doom.46 The actors, in their mock rage, sometimes leaped from the pageant into the midst of the laughing, screaming, trembling crowd. The dramatis personoe included many queer characters, such as a "Worm of Conscience," "Deadman," (representing a soul delivered from hell at the descent of Christ,) numerous "Damned Souls," dressed in flame colored garments, "Theft," "Lying," "Gluttony." But the devil himself was the favorite character; and often, when his personified vices jumped on him and pinched and cudgelled him till he roared, the mirth of the honest audience knew no bounds. For there were in the Middle Age two sides to the popular idea of the devil and of all appertaining to him. He was a soul harrowing bugbear or a rib shaking jest according to the hour and one's

45 Halliwell's edition of the Harrowing of Hell, p. 18.

46 Sharp, Essay on the Dramatic Mysteries, p. 24.

humor. Rabelais's Pantagruel is filled with irresistible burlesques of the doctrine of purgatory. The ludicrous side of this subject may be seen by reading Tarlton's "Jests" and his "Newes out of Purgatorie." 47 Glimpses of it are also to be caught through many of the humorous passages in Shakspeare. Dromio says of an excessively fat and greasy kitchen wench, "If she lives till doomsday she'll burn a week longer than the whole world!" And Falstaff, cracking a kindred joke on Bardolph's carbuncled nose, avows his opinion that it will serve as a flaming beacon to light lost souls the way to purgatory! Again, seeing a flea on the same flaming proboscis, the doughty knight affirmed it was "a black soul burning in hell fire." In this element of mediaval life, this feature of mediaval literature, a terrible belief lay under the gay raillery. Here is betrayed, on a wide scale, that natural reaction of the faculties from excessive oppression to sportive wit, from deep repugnance to superficial jesting, which has often been pointed out by philosophical observers as a striking fact in the psychological history of man.

One more active and mighty cause of the dreadful faith and fear with which the Middle Age contemplated the future life was the innumerable and frightful woes, crimes, tyrannies, instruments of torture, engines of persecution, insane superstitions, which then existed, making its actual life a hell. The wretchedness and cruelty of the present world were enough to generate frightful beliefs and cast appalling shadows over the future. If the earth was full of devils and phantoms, surely hell must swarm worse with them. The Inquisition sat shrouded and enthroned in supernatural obscurity of cunning and awfulness of power, and thrust its invisible daggers everywhere. The facts men knew here around them gave credibility to the imagery in which the hereafter was depicted. The flaming stakes of an Auto da Fe around which the victims of ecclesiastical hatred writhed were but faint emblems of what awaited their souls in the realm of demons whereto the tender mercies of the Church consigned them. Indeed, the fate of myriads of heretics and traitors could not fail to project the lurid vision of hell with all its paraphernalia into the imaginations of the people of the Dark Age. The glowing lava of purgatory heated the soil they trod, and a smell of its sulphur surcharged the air. A stupendous revelation of terror, bearing whole volumes of direful meaning, is given in the single fact that it was a common belief of that period that the holy Inquisitors would sit with Christ in the judgment at the last day.48 If king or noble took offence at some uneasy retainer or bold serf, he ordered him to be secretly buried in the cell of some secluded fortress, and he was never heard of more. So, if pope or priest hated or feared some stubborn thinker, he straightway, "Would banish him to wear a burning chain In the great dungeons of the unforgiven, Beneath the space deep castle walls of heaven."

It was an age of cruelty, never to be restored, when the world was boiling in tempest and men rode on the crests of fear.

47 Recently edited by Halliwell and published by the Shakspeare Society.

48 Hagenbach, Dogmengeschichte, sect. 205.

Researches made within the last century among the remains of famous mediaval edifices, both ecclesiastic and state, have brought to light the dismal records of forgotten horrors. In many a royal palace, priestly building, and baronial castle, there were secret chambers full of infernal machinery contrived for inflicting tortures, and under them concealed trap doors opening into rayless dungeons with no outlet and whose floors were covered with the mouldering bones of unfortunate wretches who had mysteriously disappeared long ago and tracelessly perished there. Sometimes these trap doors were directly above profound pits of water, in which the victim would drown as he dropped from the mangling hooks, racks, and pincers of the torture chamber. There were horrible rumors current in the Middle Age of a machine called the "Virgin," used for putting men to death; but little was known about it, and it was generally supposed to be a fable, until, some years ago one of the identical machines was discovered in an old Austrian castle. It was a tall wooden woman, with a painted face, which the victim was ordered to kiss. As he approached to offer the salute, he trod on a spring, causing the machine to fly open, stretch out a pair of iron arms, and draw him to its breast covered with a hundred sharp spikes, which pierced him to death.49

Ignorance and alarm, in a suffering and benighted age, surrounded by sounds of superstition and sights of cruelty, must needs breed and foster a horrid faith in regard to the invisible world. Accordingly, the common doctrine of the future life prevailing in Christendom from the ninth century till the sixteenth was as we have portrayed it. Of course there are exceptions to be admitted and qualifications to be made; but, upon the whole, the picture is faithful. Fortunately, intellect and soul could not slumber forever, nor the mediaval nightmares always keep their torturing seat on the bosom of humanity. Noble men arose to vindicate the rights of reason and the divinity of conscience. The world was circumnavigated, and its revolution around the sun was demonstrated. A thousand truths were discovered, a thousand inventions introduced. Papacy tottered, its prestige waned, its infallibility sunk. The light of knowledge shone, the simplicity of nature was seen, and the benignity of God was surmised. Thought, throwing off many restrictions and accumulating much material, began to grow free, and began to grow wise. And so, before the calm, steady gaze of enlightened and cheerful reason, the live and crawling smoke of hell, which had so long enwreathed the mind of the time with its pendent and breathing horrors, gradually broke up and dissolved, "Like a great superstitious snake, uncurled From the pale temples of the awakening world."

49 The Kiss of the Virgin, in the Archaologia published by the Antiquaries of London, vol. xxviii.

CHAPTER III.

MODERN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.

THE folly and paganism of some of the Church dogmas, the rapacious haughtiness of its spirit, the tyranny of its rule, and the immoral character of many of its practices, had often awakened the indignant protests and the determined opposition of men of enlightened minds, vigorous consciences, and generous hearts, both in its bosom and out of it. Many such men, vainly struggling to purify the Church from its iniquitous errors or to relieve mankind from its outrageous burdens, had been silenced and crushed by its relentless might. Arnold, Wickliffe, Wessel, Savonarola, and a host of others, are to be gratefully remembered forever as the heroic though unsuccessful forerunners of the mighty monk of Wittenberg.1 The corruption of the mediaval Church grew worse, and became so great as to stir a very extensive disgust and revulsion. Wholesale pardons for all their sins were granted indiscriminately to those who accepted the terms of the papal officials; while every independent thinker, however evangelical his faith and exemplary his character, was hopelessly doomed to hell. Especially were these pardons given to pilgrims and to the Crusaders. Bernard of Clairvaux, exhorting the people to undertake a new Crusade, tells them that "God condescends to invite into his service murderers, robbers, adulterers, perjurers, and those sunk in other crimes; and whosoever falls in this cause shall secure pardon for the sins which he has never confessed with contrite heart."2 At the opening of "Piers the Ploughman's Crede" a person is introduced saying, "I saw a company of pilgrims on their way to Rome, who came home with leave to lie all the rest of their lives!" Nash, in his "Lenten Stuff," speaks of a proclamation which caused "three hundred thousand people to roam to Rome for purgatorie pills." Ecclesiasticism devoured ethics. Allegiance to morality was lowered into devotion to a ritual. The sale of indulgences at length became too impudent and blasphemous to be any longer endured, when John Tetzel, a Dominican monk, travelled over Europe, and, setting up his auction block in the churches, offered for sale those famous indulgences of Leo X. which promised, to every one rich enough to pay the requisite price, remission of all sins, however enormous, and whether past, present, or future!3 This brazen but authorized charlatan boasted that "he had saved more souls from hell by the sale of indulgences than St. Peter had converted to Christianity by his preaching." He also said that "even if any one had ravished the Mother of God he could sell him a pardon for it!" The soul of Martin Luther took fire. The consequence to which a hundred combining causes contributed was the Protestant Reformation. This great movement produced, in relation to our subject, three important results. It noticeably modified the practice and the popular preaching of the Roman Catholic Church.

1 Ullmann, Reformatoren vor der Reformation.

2 Epist. CCCLXIII. ad Orientalis Francia Clerum et Populum.

3 D'Aubigne, Hist. Reformation, book iii.

The dogmas of the Romanist theology remained as they were before. But a marked change took place in the public conduct of the papal functionaries. Morality was made more prominent, and mere ritualism less obtrusive. Comparatively speaking, an emphasis was taken from ecclesiastic confession and indulgence, and laid upon ethical obedience and piety. The Council of Trent, held at this time, says, in its decree concerning indulgences, "In granting indulgences, the Church desires that moderation be observed, lest, by excessive facility, ecclesiastical discipline be enervated." Imposture became more cautious, threats less frequent and less terrible; the teeth of persecution were somewhat blunted; miracles grew rarer; the insufferable glare of purgatory and hell faded, and the open traffic in forgiveness of sins, or the compounding for deficiencies, diminished. But among the more ignorant papal multitudes the mediaval superstition holds its place still in all its virulence and grossness. "Heaven and hell are as much a part of the Italian's geography as the Adriatic and the Apennines; the Queen of Heaven looks on the streets as clear as the morning star; and the souls in purgatory are more readily present to conception than the political prisoners immured in the dungeons of Venice."

A second consequence of the Reformation is seen in the numerous dissenting sects to which its issues gave rise. The chief peculiarities of the Protestant doctrines of the future life are embodied in the four leading denominations commonly known as Lutheran, Calvinistic, Unitarian, and Universalist. Each of these includes a number of subordinate parties bearing distinctive names, (such as Arminian, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Restorationist, and many others;) but these minor differences are too trivial to deserve distinctive characterization here. The Lutheran formula is that, through the sacrifice of Christ, salvation is offered to all who will accept it by a sincere faith. Some will comply with these terms and secure heaven; others will not, and so will be lost forever. Luther's views were not firmly defined and consistent throughout his career; they were often obscure, and they fluctuated much. It is true he always insisted that there was no salvation without faith, and that all who had faith should be saved. But, while he generally seems to believe in the current doctrine of eternal damnation, he sometimes appears to encourage the hope that all will finally be saved. In a remarkable letter to Hansen von Rechenberg, dated 1522, he says, in effect, "Whoso hath faith in Christ shall be saved. God forbid that I should limit the time for acquiring this faith to the present life! In the depths of the Divine mercy, there may be opportunity to win it in the future state."

The Calvinistic formula is that heaven is attainable only for those whom the arbitrary predestination of God has elected; all others are irretrievably damned. Calvin was the first Christian theologian who succeeded in giving the fearful doctrine of unconditional election and reprobation a lodgment in the popular breast. The Roman Catholic Church had earnestly repudiated it. Gotteschalk was condemned and died in prison for advocating it, in the ninth century. But Calvin's character enabled him to believe it, and his talents and position gave great weight to his advocacy of it, and it has since been widely received. Catholicism, Lutheranism, Calvinism, all agreed in the general proposition that by sin physical death came into the world, heaven was shut against man, and all men utterly lost. They differed only in some unessential details concerning the condition of that lost state. They also agreed in the general proposition that Christ came, by his incarnation, death, descent to hell, resurrection, and ascension, to redeem men from their lost state. They only differed in regard to the precise grounds and extent of that redemption. The Catholic said, Christ's atonement wiped off the whole score of original sin, and thus enabled man to win heaven by moral fidelity and the help of the Church. The Lutheran said, Christ's atonement made all the sins of those who have faith, pardonable; and all may have faith. The Calvinist said, God foresaw that man would fall and incur damnation, and he decreed that a few should be snatched as brands from the burning, while the mass should be left to eternal torture; and Christ's atonement purchased the predestined salvation of the chosen few. Furthermore, Lutherans and Calvinists, in all their varieties, agree with the Romanist in asserting that Christ shall come again, the dead be raised bodily, a universal judgment be held, and that then the condemned shall sink into the everlasting fire of hell, and the accepted rise into the endless bliss of heaven.

The Socinian doctrine relative to the future fate of man differed from the foregoing in the following particulars. First, it limited the redeeming mission of Christ to the enlightening influences of the truths which he proclaimed with Divine authority, the moral power of his perfect example, and the touching motives exhibited in his death. Secondly, it asserted a natural ability in every man to live a life conformed to right reason and sound morality, and promised heaven to all who did this in obedience to the instructions and after the pattern of Christ. Thirdly, it declared that the wicked, after suffering excruciating agonies, would be annihilated. Respecting the second coming of Christ, a physical resurrection of the dead, and a day of judgment, the Socinians believed with the other sects.4 Their doctrine scarcely corresponds with that of the present Unitarians in any thing. The dissent of the Unitarian from the popular theology is much more fundamental, detailed, and consistent than that of the Socinian was, and approaches much closer to the Rationalism of the present day.

The Universalist formula every soul created by God shall sooner or later be saved from sin and woe and inherit everlasting happiness has been publicly defended in every age of the Christian Church.5 It was first publicly condemned as a heresy at the very close of the fourth century. It ranks among its defenders the names of Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and several other prominent Fathers. Universalism has been held in four forms, on four grounds. First, it has been supposed that Christ died for all, and that, by the infinite efficacy of his redeeming merits, all sins shall be cancelled and every soul be saved. This was the scheme of those early Universalist Christians whom Epiphanius condemns as heretics; also of a few in more modern times. Secondly, it has been thought that each person would be punished in the future state according to the deeds done in the body, each sin be expiated by a proportionate amount of suffering, the retribution of some souls being severe and long, that of others light and brief; but, every penalty being at

4 Flugge gives a full exposition of these points with references to the authorities. Lehre vom Zustande, u. s. f., abth. ii. ss. 243-260.

5 Dietelmaier, Commenti Fanatici [non-ASCII characters omitted] Hist. Antiquar.

length exhausted, the last victim would be restored. This was the notion of Origen, the basis of the doctrine of purgatory, and the view of most of the Restorationists. Thirdly, it has been imagined that, by the good pleasure and fixed laws of God, all men are destined to an impartial, absolute, and instant salvation beyond the grave: all sins are justly punished, all moral distinctions equitably compensated, in this life; in the future an equal glory awaits all men, by the gracious and eternal election of God, as revealed to us in the benignant mission of Christ. This is the peculiar conception distinguishing some members of the denomination now known as Universalists. Finally, it has been believed that the freedom and probation granted here extend into the life to come; that the aim of all future punishment will be remedial, beneficent, not revengeful; that stronger motives will be applied for producing repentance, and grander attractions to holiness be felt; and that thus, at some time or other, even the most sunken and hardened souls will be regenerated and raised up to heaven in the image of God. Almost all Universalists, most Unitarians, and large number of individual Christians outwardly affiliated with other denominations, now accept and cherish this theory.

One important variation from the doctrine of the dominant sects, in connection with the present subject, is worthy of special notice. We refer to the celebrated controversy waged in England, in the first part of the eighteenth century, in regard to the intermediate state of the dead. The famous Dr. Coward and a few supporters labored, with much zeal, skill, and show of learning, to prove the natural mortality of the soul. They asserted this to be both a philosophical truth proved by scientific facts and a Christian doctrine declared in Scripture and taught by the Fathers. They argued that the soul is not an independent entity, but is merely the life of the body. Proceeding thus far on the principles of a materialistic science, they professed to complete their theory from Scripture, without doing violence to any doctrine of the acknowledged religion.6 The finished scheme was this. Man was naturally mortal; but, by the pleasure and will of God, he would have been immortally preserved alive had he not sinned. Death is the consequence of sin, and man utterly perishes in the grave. But God will restore the dead, through Christ, at the day of the general resurrection which he has foretold in the gospel.7 Some of the writers in this copious controversy maintained that previous to the advent of Christ death was eternal annihilation to all except a few who enjoyed an inspired anticipatory faith in him, but that all who died after his coming would be restored in the resurrection, the faithful to be advanced to heaven, the wicked to be the victims of unending torture.8 Clarke and Baxter both wrote with extreme ability in support of the natural immortality and separate existence of the soul. On the other hand, the learned Henry Dodwell cited, from the lore of three thousand years, a plausible body of authorities to show that the soul is in itself but a mortal breath. He also contended, by a singular perversion of figurative phrases from the New Testament and from some of the Fathers, that,

6 Coward, Search after Souls.

7 Hallet, No Resurrection, no Future State.

8 Coward, Defence of the Search after Souls. Dodwell, Epistolary Discourse. Peckard, Observations. Fleming, Survey of the Search after Souls. Law, State of Separate Spirits. Layton, Treatise of Departed Souls.

in counteraction of man's natural mortality, all who undergo baptism at the hands of the ordained ministers of the Church of England the only true priesthood in apostolic succession thereby receive an immortalizing spirit brought into the world by Christ and committed to his successors. This immortalizing spirit conveyed by baptism would secure their resurrection at the last day. Those destitute of this spirit would never awake from the oblivious sleep of death, unless as he maintained will actually be the case with a large part of the dead they are arbitrarily immortalized by the pleasure of God, in order to suffer eternal misery in hell! Absurd and shocking as this fancy was, it obtained quite a number of converts, and made no slight impression at the time. One of the writers in this controversy asserted that Luther himself had been a believer in the death or sleep of the soul until the day of judgment.9 Certain it is that such a belief had at one period a considerable prevalence. Its advocates were called Psychopannychians. Calvin wrote a vehement assault on them. The opinion has sunk into general disrepute and neglect, and it would be hard to find many avowed disciples of it. The nearly universal sentiment of Christendom would now exclaim, in the quaint words of Henry More,

"What! has old Adam snorted all this time Under some senselesse clod, with sleep ydead?" 10

John Asgill printed, in the year 1700, a tract called "An argument to prove that by the new covenant man may be translated into eternal life without tasting death." He argues that the law of death was a consequence of Adam's sin and was annulled by Christ's sacrifice. Since that time men have died only because of an obstinate habit of dying formed for many generations. For his part, he has the independence and resolution to withstand the universal pusillanimity and to refuse to die. He has discovered "an engine in Divinity to convey man from earth to heaven." He will "play a trump on death and show himself a match for the devil!"

While treating of the various Protestant views of the future life, it would be a glaring defect to overlook the remarkable doctrine on that subject published by Emanuel Swedenborg and now held by the intelligent, growing body of believers called after his name. It would be impossible to exhibit this system adequately in its scientific bases and its complicated details without occupying more space than can be afforded here. Nor is this necessary, now that his own works have been translated and are easily accessible everywhere. His "Heaven and Hell," "Heavenly Arcana," "Doctrine of Influx," and "True Christian

9 Blackburne, View of the Controversy Concerning an Intermediate State: appendix. It is probable that the great Reformer's opinion on this point was not always the same. For he says, distinctly, "The first man who died, when he awakes at the last day, will think he has been asleep but an hour" Beste, Dr. M. Luther's Glaubenslehre, cap. iv.: Die Lehre von den Letzen Dingen. Yet. J. S. Muller seems conclusively to prove the truth of the proposition which forms the title of his book, "Dass Luther die Lehre vom Seelenschlafe nie geglaubt habe."

10 The controversy concerning the natural immortality of the soul has within a few years raged afresh. The principal combatants were Dobney, Storrs, White, Morris, and Hinton. See Athanasia, by J. H. Hinton, London, 1849.

Religion," contain manifold statements and abundant illustrations of every thing important bearing on his views of the theme before us. We shall merely attempt to present a brief synopsis of the essential principles, accompanied by two or three suggestions of criticism.

Swedenborg conceives man to be an organized receptacle of truth and love from God. He is an imperishable spiritual body placed for a season of probation in a perishable material body. Every moment receiving the essence of his being afresh from God, and returning it through the fruition of its uses devoutly rendered in conscious obedience and joyous worship, he is at once a subject of personal, and a medium of the Divine, happiness. The will is the power of man's life, and the understanding is its form. When the will is disinterested love and the understanding is celestial truth, then man fulfils the end of his being, and his home is heaven; he is a spirit frame into which the goodness of God perpetually flows, is humbly acknowledged, gratefully enjoyed, and piously returned. But when his will is hatred or selfishness and his understanding is falsehood or evil, then his powers are abused, his destiny inverted, and his fate hell. While in the body in this world he is placed in freedom, on probation, between these two alternatives.

The Swedenborgian universe is divided into four orders of abodes. In the highest or celestial world are the heavens of the angels. In the lowest or infernal world are the hells of the demons. In the intermediate or spiritual world are the earths inhabited by men, and surrounded by the transition state through which souls, escaping from their bodies, after a while soar to heaven or sink to hell, according to their fitness and attraction. In this life man is free, because he is an energy in equilibrium between the influences of heaven and hell. The middle state surrounding man is full of spirits, some good and some bad. Every man is accompanied by swarms of both sorts of spirits, striving to make him like themselves. Now, there are two kinds of influx into man. Mediate influx is when the spirits in the middle state flow into man's thoughts and affections. The good spirits are in communication with heaven, and they carry what is good and true; the evil spirits are in communication with hell, and they carry what is evil and false. Between these opposed and reacting agencies man is in an equilibrium whose essence is freedom. Deciding for himself, if he turns with embracing welcome to the good spirits, he is thereby placed and lives in conjunction with heaven; but if he turns, on the contrary, with predominant love to the bad spirits, he is placed in conjunction with hell and draws his life thence. From heaven, therefore, through the good spirits, all the elements of saving goodness flow sweetly down and are appropriated by the freedom of the good man; while from hell, through the bad spirits, all the elements of damning evil flow foully up and are appropriated by the freedom of the bad man.

The other kind of influx is called immediate. This is when the Lord himself, the pure substance of truth and good, flows into every organ and faculty of man. This influx is perpetual, but is received as truth and good only by the true and good. It is rejected, suffocated, or perverted by those who are in love with falsities and evils. So the light of the sun produces colors varying with the substances it falls on, and water takes forms corresponding to the vessels it is poured into.

The whole invisible world heaven, hell, and the middle state is peopled solely from the different families of the human race occupying the numerous material globes of the universe. The good, on leaving the fleshly body, are angels, the bad, demons. There is no angel nor demon who was created such at first. Satan is not a personality, but is a figurative term standing for the whole complex of hell. In the invisible world, time and space in one sense cease to be; in another sense they remain unchanged. They virtually cease because all our present measures of them are annihilated;11 they virtually remain because exact correspondences to them are left. To spirits, time is no longer measured by the revolution of planets, but by the succession of inward states; space is measured not by way marks and the traversing of distances, but by inward similitudes and dissimilitudes. Those who are unlike are sundered by gulfs of difference. Those who are alike are together in their interiors. Thought and love, forgetfulness and hate, are not hampered by temporal and spatial boundaries. Spiritual forces and beings spurn material impediments, and are united or separate, reciprocally visible or invisible, mutually conscious or unconscious, according to their own laws of kindred or alien adaptedness.

The soul the true man is its own organized and deathless body, and when it leaves its earthly house of flesh it knows the only resurrection, and the cast off frame returns to the dust forever. Swedenborg repeatedly affirms with emphasis that no one is born for hell, but that all are born for heaven, and that when any one comes into hell it is from his own free fault. He asserts that every infant, wheresoever born, whether within the Church or out of it, whether of pious parents or of impious, when he dies is received by the Lord, and educated in heaven, and becomes an angel. A central principle of which he never loses sight is that "a life of charity, which consists in acting sincerely and justly in every function, in every engagement, and in every work, from a heavenly motive, according to the Divine laws, is possible to every one, and infallibly leads to heaven." It does not matter whether the person leading such a life be a Christian or a Gentile. The only essential is that his ruling motive be divine and his life be in truth and good.

The Swedenborgian doctrine concerning Christ and his mission is that he was the infinite God incarnate, not incarnate for the purpose of expiating human sin and purchasing a ransom for the lost by vicarious sufferings, but for the sake of suppressing the rampant power of the hells, weakening the influx of the infernal spirits, setting an example to men, and revealing many important truths. The advantage of the Christian over the pagan is that the former is enlightened by the celestial knowledge contained in the Bible, and animated by the affecting motives presented in the drama of the Divine incarnation. There is no probation after this life. Just as one is on leaving the earth he goes into the spiritual world. There his

11 Philo the Jew says, (vol. i. p. 277, ed. Mangey,) "God is the Father of the world: the world is the father of time, begetting it by its own motion: time, therefore, holds the place of grandchild to God." But the world is only one measure of time; another, and a more important one, is the inward succession of the spirit's states of consciousness. Between Philo and Swedenborg, it may be remarked here, there are many remarkable correspondences both of thought and language. For example, Philo says, (vol. i. p. 494,) "Man is a small kosmos, the kosmos is a grand man."

ruling affection determines his destiny, and that affection can never be extirpated or changed to all eternity. After death, evil life cannot in any manner or degree be altered to good life, nor infernal love be transmuted to angelic love, inasmuch as every spirit from head to foot is in quality such as his love is, and thence such as his life is, so that to transmute this life into the opposite is altogether to destroy the spirit. It were easier, says Swedenborg, to change a night bird into a dove, an owl into a bird of paradise, than to change a subject of hell into a subject of heaven after the line of death has been crossed. But why the crossing of that line should make such an infinite difference he does not explain; nor does he prove it as a fact.

The moral reason and charitable heart of Swedenborg vehemently revolted from the Calvinistic doctrines of predestination and vicarious atonement, and the group of thoughts that cluster around them. He always protests against these dogmas, refutes them with varied power and consistency; and the leading principles of his own system are creditable to human nature, and attribute no unworthiness to the character of God. A debt of eternal gratitude is due to Swedenborg that his influence, certainly destined to be powerful and lasting, is so clearly calculated to advance the interests at once of philosophic intelligence, social affection, and true piety. The superiorities of his view of the future life over those which it seeks to supplant are weighty and numerous. The following may be reckoned among the most prominent.

First, without predicating of God any aggravated severity or casting the faintest shadow on his benevolence, it gives us the most appalling realization of the horribleness of sin and of its consequences. God is commonly represented in effect, at least as flaming with anger against sinners, and forcibly flinging them into the unappeasable fury of Tophet, where his infinite vengeance may forever satiate itself on them. But, Swedenborg says, God is incapable of hatred or wrath: he casts no one into hell; but the wicked go where they belong by their own election, from the inherent fitness and preference of their ruling love. The evil man desires to be in hell because there he finds his food, employment, and home; in heaven he would suffer unutterable agonies from every circumstance. The wicked go into hell by the necessary and benignant love of God, not by his indignation; and their retributions are in their own characters, not in their prison house. This does not flout and trample all magnanimity, nor shock the heart of piety; and yet, showing us men compelled to prefer wallowing in the filth and iniquities of hell, clinging to the very evils whose pangs transfix them, it gives us the direst of all the impressions of sin, and beneath the lowest deep of the popular hell opens to our shuddering conceptions a deep of loathsomeness immeasurably lower still.

Secondly, the Swedenborgian doctrine of the conditions of salvation or reprobation, when compared with the popular doctrine, is marked by striking depth of insight, justice, and liberality. Every man is free. Every man has power to receive the influx of truth and good from the Lord and convert it to its blessed and saving uses, piety towards God, good will towards the neighbor, and all kinds of right works. Who does this, no matter in what land or age he lives, becomes an heir of heaven. Who perverts those Divine gifts to selfishness and unrighteous deeds becomes a subject of hell. No mere opinion, no mere profession, no mere ritual services, no mere external obedience, not all these things together, can save a man, nor their absence condemn him; but the controlling motive of his life, the central and ruling love which constitutes the substance of his being, this decides every man's doom. The view is simple, reasonable, just, necessary. And so is the doctrine of degrees accompanying it; namely, that there are in heaven different grades and qualities of exaltation and delight, and in hell of degradation and woe, for different men according to their capacities and deserts. A profoundly ethical character pervades the scheme, and the great stamp of law is over it all.

Thirdly, a manifest advantage of Swedenborg's doctrine over the popular doctrine is the intimate connection it establishes between the present and the future, the visible and the invisible, God and man. Heaven and hell are not distant localities, entrance into which is to be won or avoided by moral artifices or sacramental subterfuges, but they are states of being depending on personal goodness or evil. God is not throned at the heart or on the apex of the universe, where at some remote epoch we hope to go and see him, but he is the Life feeding our lives freshly every instant. The spiritual world, with all its hosts, sustains and arches, fills and envelops us. Death is the dropping of the outer body, the lifting of an opaque veil, and we are among the spirits, unchanged, as we were before. Judgment is not a tribunal dawning on the close of the world's weary centuries, but the momentary assimilation of a celestial or an infernal love leading to states and acts, rewards and retributions, corresponding. Before this view the dead universe becomes a live transparency overwritten with the will, tremulous with the breath, and irradiate with the illumination of God.

We cannot but regret that the Swedenborgian view of the future life should be burdened and darkened with the terrible error of the dogma of eternal damnation, spreading over the state of all the subjects of the hells the pall of immitigable hopelessness, denying that they can ever make the slightest ameliorating progress. We have never been able to see force enough in any of the arguments or assertions advanced in support of this tremendous horror to warrant the least hesitation in rejecting it. For ourselves, we must regard it as incredible, and think that God cannot permit it. Instruction, reformation, progress, are the final aims of punishment. Aspiration is the concomitant of consciousness, and the authentic voice of God. Surely, sooner or later, in the boonful eternities of being, every creature capable of intelligence, allied to the moral law, drawing life from the Infinite, must begin to travel the ascending path of virtue and blessedness, and never retrograde again.

Neither can we admit in general the claim made by Swedenborg and by his disciples that the way in which he arrived at his system of theology elevates it to the rank of a Divine revelation. It is asserted that God opened his interior vision, so that he saw what had hitherto been concealed from the eyes of men in the flesh, namely, the inhabitants, laws, contents, and experiences of the spiritual world, and thus that his statements are not speculations or arguments, but records of unerring knowledge, his descriptions not fanciful pictures of the imagination, but literal transcripts of the truth he saw. This, in view of the great range of known experience, is not intrinsically probable, and we have seen no proof of it. Judging from what we know of psychological and religious history, it is far more likely that a man should confound his intangible reveries with solid fact than that he should be inspired by God to reveal a world of mysterious truths. Furthermore, while we are impressed with the reasonableness, probability, and consistency of most of the general principles of Swedenborg's exposition of the future life, we cannot but shrink from many of the details and forms in which he carries them out. Notwithstanding the earnest avowals of able disciples of his school that all his details are strictly necessitated by his premises, and that all his premises are laws of truth, we are compelled to regard a great many of his assertions as purely arbitrary and a great many of his descriptions as purely fanciful. But, denying that his scheme of eschatology is a scientific representation of the reality, and looking at it as a poetic structure reared by co working knowledge and imagination on the ground of reason, nature, and morality, whose foundation walls, columns, and grand outlines are truth, while many of its details, ornaments, and images are fancy, it must be acknowledged to be one of the most wonderful examples of creative power extant in the literature of the world. No one who has mastered it with appreciative mind will question this. There are, expressed and latent, in the totality of Swedenborg's accounts of hell and heaven, more variety of imagery, power of moral truth and appeal, exhibition of dramatic justice, transcendent delights of holiness and love, curdling terrors of evil and woe, strength of philosophical grasp, and sublimity of emblematic conception, than are to be found in Dante's earth renowned poem. We say this of the substance of his ideas, not of the shape and clothing in which they are represented. Swedenborg was no poet in language and form, only in conception.

Take this picture. In the topmost height of the celestial world the Lord appears as a sun, and all the infinite multitudes of angels, swarming up through the innumerable heavens, wherever they are, continually turn their faces towards him in love and joy. But at the bottom of the infernal world is a vast ball of blackness, towards which all the hosts of demons, crowding down through the successive hells, forever turn their eager faces away from God. Or consider this. Every thing consists of a great number of perfect leasts like itself: every heart is an aggregation of little hearts, every lung an aggregation of little lungs, every eye an aggregation of little eyes. Following out the principle, every society in the spiritual world is a group of spirits arranged in the form of a man, every heaven is a gigantic man composed of an immense number of individuals, and all the heavens together constitute one Grand Man, a countless number of the most intelligent angels forming the head, a stupendous organization of the most affectionate making the heart, the most humble going to the feet, the most useful attracted to the hands, and so on through every part.

With exceptions, then, we regard Swedenborg's doctrine of the future life as a free poetic presentment, not as a severe scientific statement, of views true in moral principle, not of facts real in literal detail. His imagination and sentiment are mathematical and ethical instead of asthetic and passionate. Milk seems to run in his veins instead of blood, but he is of truthfulness and charity all compact. We think it most probable that the secret of his supposed inspiration was the abnormal frequent or chronic turning of his mind into what is called the ecstatic or clairvoyant state. This condition being spontaneously induced, while he yet, in some unexplained manner, retained conscious possession and control of his usual faculties, he treated his subjective conceptions as objective realities, believed his interior contemplations were accurate visions of facts, and took the strange procession of systematic reveries through his teeming brain for a scenic revelation of the exhaustive mysteries of heaven and hell. "Each wondrous guess beheld the truth it sought, And inspiration flash'd from what was thought."

This hypothesis, taken in conjunction with the comprehensiveness of his mind, the vastness of his learning, the integral correctness of his conscience, and his disciplined habits of thought, will go far towards explaining the unparalleled phenomenon of his theological works; and, though it leaves many things unaccounted for, it seems to us more credible than any other which has yet been suggested.

The last of the three prominent phenomena which as before said followed the Protestant Reformation was rationalism, an attempt to try all religious questions at the tribunal of reason and by the tests of conscience. The great movement led by Luther was but one element in a numerous train of influences and events all yielding their different contributions to that resolute rationalistic tendency which afterwards broke out so powerfully in England, France, and Germany, and, spreading thence into every country in Christendom, has been, in secret and in public, with slow, sure steps, irresistibly advancing ever since. In the history of scholasticism there were three distinct epochs. The first period was characterized by the servile submission and conformity of philosophy to the theology dictated by the Church. The second period was marked by the formal alliance and attempted reconciliation of philosophy and theology. The third period saw an ever increasing jealousy and separation between the philosophers and the theologians.12 Many an adventurous thinker pushed his speculations beyond the limits of the established theology, and deliberately dissented from the orthodox standards in his conclusions. Perhaps Abelard, who openly strove to put all the Church dogmas in forms acceptable to philosophy, and who did not hesitate to reject in many instances what seemed to him unreasonable, deserves to be called the father of rationalism. The works of Des Cartes, Leibnitz, Wolf, Kant's "Religion within the Bounds of Pure Reason," together with the influence and the writings of many other eminent philosophers, gradually gave momentum to the impulse and popularity to the habits of free thought and criticism even in the realm of theology. The dogmatic scheme of the dominant Church was firmly seized, many errors shaken out to the light and exposed, and many long received opinions questioned and flung into doubt.13 The authenticity of many of the popular doctrines regarding the future life could not fail to be denied as soon as it was attempted as was extensively done about the middle of the eighteenth century to demonstrate them by mathematical methods, with all the array of axioms, theorems, lemmas, doubts, and solutions. Flugge has historically illustrated the employment of this method at considerable length.14

12 Cousin, Hist. Mod. Phil., lect. ix.

13 Staudlin, Geschichte des Rationalismus. Saintes, Histoire Critique du Rationalisme en Allemagne, Eng. trans. by Dr. Beard.

14 Geschichte des Glaubens an Unsterblichkeit, u. s. f., th. iii. abth. ii. ss. 281-289.

The essence of rationalism is the affirmation that neither the Fathers, nor the Church, nor the Scriptures, nor all of them together, can rightfully establish any proposition opposed to the logic of sound philosophy, the principles of reason, and the evident truth of nature. Around this thesis the battle has been fought and the victory won; and it will stand with spreading favor as long as there are unenslaved and cultivated minds in the world. This position is, in logical necessity, and as a general thing in fact, that of the large though loosely cohering body of believers known as "Liberal Christians;" and it is tacitly held by still larger and ever growing numbers nominally connected with sects that officially eschew it with horror. The result of the studies and discussions associated with this principle, so far as it relates to the subject before us, has been the rejection of the following popular doctrines: the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures as an ultimate authority in matters of belief; unconditional predestination; the satisfaction theory of the vicarious atonement; the visible second coming of Christ, in person, to burn up the world and to hold a general judgment; the intermediate state of souls; the resurrection of the body; a local hell of material fire in the bowels of the earth; the eternal damnation of the wicked. These old dogmas,15 scarcely changed, still remain in the stereotyped creeds of all the prominent denominations; but they slumber there to an astonishing extent unrealized, unnoticed, unthought of, by the great multitude of common believers, while every consciously rational investigator vehemently repudiates them. To every candid mind that has really studied their nature and proofs their absurdity is now transparent on all the grounds alike of history, metaphysics, morals, and science.

The changes of the popular Christian belief in regard to three salient points have been especially striking. First, respecting the immediate fate of the dead, an intermediate state. The predominant Jewish doctrine was that all souls went indiscriminately into a sombre under world, where they awaited a resurrection.

The earliest Christian view prevalent was the same, with the exception that it divided that place of departed spirits into two parts, a painful for the bad, a pleasant for the good. The next opinion that prevailed the Roman Catholic was the same as the foregoing, with two exceptions: it established a purgatory in addition to the previous paradise and hell, and it opened heaven itself for the immediate entrance of a few spotless souls. Pope John XXII., as Gieseler shows, was accused of heresy by the theological doctors of Paris because he declared that no soul could enter heaven and enjoy the beatific vision until after the resurrection. Pope Benedict XII. drew up a list of one hundred and seventeen heretical opinions held by the Armenian Christians. One of these notions was that the souls of all deceased adults wander in the air until the Day of Judgment, neither hell, paradise, nor heaven being open to them until after that day. Thomas Aquinas says, "Each soul at death immediately flies to its appointed place, whether in hell or in heaven, being without the body until the resurrection, with it afterwards."16 Then came the

15 They are defended in all their literal grossness in the two following works, both recent publications. The World to Come; by the Rev. James Cochrane. Der Tod, das Todtenreich, und der Zustand der abgeschiedenen Seelen; von P. A. Maywahlen.

16 Summa iii. in Suppl. 69. 2.

dogma of the orthodox Protestants, slightly varying in the different sects, but generally agreeing that at death all redeemed souls pass instantly to heaven and all unredeemed souls to hell.17 The principal variation from this among believers within the Protestant fellowship has been the notion that the souls of all men die or sleep with the body until the Day of Judgment, a notion which peeps out here and there in superstitious spots along the pages of ecclesiastical history, and which has found now and then an advocate during the last century and a half. The Council of Elvin, in Spain, forbade the lighting of tapers in churchyards, lest it should disturb the souls of the deceased buried there. At this day, in prayers and addresses at funerals, no phrases are more common than those alluding to death as a sleep, and implying that the departed one is to slumber peacefully in his grave until the resurrection. And yet, at the same time, by the same persons contrary ideas are frequently expressed. The truth is, the subject, owing to the contradictions between their creed and their reason, is left by most persons in hopeless confusion and uncertainty. They have no determinately reconciled and conscious views of their own. Rationalism sweeps away all the foregoing incongruous medley at once, denying that we know any thing about the precise localities of heaven and hell, or the destined order of events in the hidden future of separate souls; affirming that all we should dare to say is simply that the souls whether of good or of bad men, on leaving the body, go at once into a spiritual state of being, where they will live immortally, as God decrees, never returning to be reinvested with the vanished charnel houses of clay they once inhabited.