rather earlier than the former; nor is the mode of its birth quite so obscure. When at length both had become the accredited doctrine of the church, a brisk commerce between the visible and invisible worlds was carried on, and in this traffic the clergy were the brokers and the gainers-the gainers to an incalculable amount.'

13

13 Not only the doctrine of Purgatory, but the practical abuses of it, stand forth almost in the grossest form in the writings of Gregory the Great; and it would be really hard to choose between the faith of the Christian Pope, on this subject, and that of his contemporaryMohammed;—both announcing eternal damnation as the doom of the uninstructed mass of mankind; and both preaching a purgatorial state to those whose religious advantages were of the highest kind. Assuredly the Koran is more free from suspicion of a sinister purpose on this point than are the Dialogues of Gregory:-if indeed these dialogues can be trusted to as the unaltered productions of the writer to whom they are attributed;-or are his productions at all-a point deemed questionable.

A service perhaps might be rendered to sincere and candid Romanists if the history of this doctrine-a capital article in his belief, and one which he knows to be of high antiquity, could be satisfactorily traced. Our materials, it is to be feared, are too scanty to sustain the inquiry; for between the close of the apostolic age and the time of Cyprian or Tertullian, more is wanted than actually exists to enable us to give a good account of the state of the opinion as we find it in the pages of those two writers. The expression, so often quoted by the Romanists, from Tertullian, Oblationes pro defunctis, pro natalitiis annua die facimus (de Corona) is not of itself conclusive; but becomes so as compared with other passages. Dic mihi soror, in pace præmisisti virum tuum? Quid respondebit? An in discordia? Ergo hoc magis ei vincta est, cum quo habet apud Deum causam..... Enimvero et pro anima ejus orat, et refrigerium interim adpostulat ei, et in prima resurrectione consortium, et offert annuis diebus dormitionis ejus. (De Monogam.) Every one has seen quotations to the same effect from Cyprian, Clemens Alexandrinus, and Cyril of Jerusalem. But in these, and similar instances, the true import of certain phrases is to be gathered from each writer's general strain on those topics which are most nearly allied to the opinion in question: especially on the subject of repentance and remission of sins. The

The idea of future expiatory torments having lodged itself firmly in all serious and devout minds, no other consequence could be looked for but the practice of penitentiary inflictions, having for their motive the hope of abating the demands of justice in the region of chastisement. The most excessive abstinence, a shirt of haircloth, a bed of straw, continued watchings, perpetual silence, sanguinary flagellations, and positive tortures, were willingly resorted to as assuagements of the dread which the belief of purgatory inspired; and if we are to wonder at all in looking at these severities, our amazement must be, not that men could be found who were willing to submit heartily and permanently to the rule of St. Benedict, or St. Dominic; but rather that the miseries of the monastic life were not carried to a much greater extent than we actually find them ordinarily to have reached. It would not have seemed strange if sincere believers in the doctrine of purgatory had gone the length of the ancient worshippers of Baal, or of the modern devotees of Indian divinities.11

doctrine of purgatory, it is pretty evident, sprang out of an early corruption of those principal articles. Here we find a confusion of notions, and a perverted exposition of Scripture, in almost the earliest of the Christian writers.

14 The Romish writers use no reserve in describing the pains of the purgatorial state; and as they have, in the doctrine itself, supplied to the Church an article on which Scripture is silent; so, in furnishing the particulars, have they drawn largely upon that special knowledge of the infernal regions which their privileged commerce with invisibles has supplied. "A soul," says the Rev. Alban Butler, "for

It is in the glare of a doctrine such as this that we should peruse the rules of the ascetic life, and the blood-stained story of the monastery. Is it any wonder that men who first had tortured themselves at the instigation of this belief should think it a light matter to ply the rack and the brand upon others?-The fanaticism of austerity was proper parent of the fanaticism of cruelty. But the mild and meditative spirit of Christianity happily came in to moderate, in some degree, that extravagance into which the human mind naturally runs when highly excited by a ferocious theology.-The Christian flagellist might, it is probable, draw as much blood from his back in a year, as did the frantic priest of Moloch from his sides and arms;-or perhaps more; but yet it were better done with the Scourge than with the Knife. The Romish fanaticism did not rise to a horrid and murderous pitch until after it had become the instrument of sacerdotal rancour, and had been directed against the heretic.

The derivation of fanatical cruelty from fanatical austerity it is by no means difficult to trace: nor is the line of descent far extended.

one venial sin shall suffer more than all the pains of distempers, the most violent colics, gout, and stone, joined in complication; more than all the most cruel torments undergone by malefactors, or invented by the most barbarous tyrants; more than all the tortures of the martyrs summed up together. This is the idea which the fathers give us of purgatory, and how long many souls may have to suffer there we know not."-Lives of the Saints, Novem. 2.

Often indeed has the one generated the other in the same bosom; or if the history of the Church is looked to it will be seen that, within the circuit of a century, or more, those outrages upon human nature which had been going on in the cells of the monastery, and those preposterous sentiments which the ascetic life enkindled, reached their proper consummation when the friar and the inquisitor took in hand to rid the Church of her enemies. Far was any such consequence from the minds of the early and illustrious promoters of the monastic system: but though not foreseen by them, it demands to be attentively regarded by us, since the instruction which history conveys is drawn from considering, rather the commencements than the issues, rather the germs than the fruits, of whatever excites admiration or surprise upon the stage of the world's affairs.

And so, if it be intended to receive in the most efficacious manner those lessons of practical wisdom which spring from the contemplation of individual character, we must select as specimens, not the most distorted instances; but those rather wherein the peculiar tendency we have in view is moderated by fine qualities of the heart, or lost almost amid the splendour of rare mental powers and accomplishments. For inasmuch as it is only when so recommended that spurious virtues produce extensive ill effects, our caution against the evil should be

drawn from examples of that very order. Let the sardonic historian, whose rule it is to exhibit human nature always as an object of mockery, crowd his pages with whatever is most preposterous in its kind.-A better motive will lead us to bring forward the worthiest exemplars; and yet not as if the illustrious dead were to be exhibited that it might be said of themHow little were the great! but rather that the admonition, of whatever kind, which the instance presents may come with the fullest force.

Forgetting then the frenzied anchorets of the Egyptian deserts, of the rocks of Sinai, and of the solitudes of Syria, and leaving unnamed the savage heroes of the Romish calendar,15 let us

15 No literary enterprise can well be named, or perhaps thought of, more undesirable--more humiliating—at least if a man retains any feeling of self-respect, than that which the worthy and learned author of the Lives of the Saints has executed.-The Romish Church is rich in the boast of upwards of a thousand saints—a number so large that she is able to allot as many as three or four glorious patrons, on an average, to each day of the year! Now most men would think it a formidable task to undertake merely a cold apology of every one of any thousand frail human beings that could be brought together in a list. But what must it be, not simply to excuse, but to commend every one of a thousand? And what, not only to commend but to find proof that every one is a fit object of adoration, and an efficacious mediator between God and man! Yet such is the achievement that signalizes the name of Alban Butler! A thousand saints, one after another, to be hoisted upon the pedestal of canonization, or defended there! Truly one of the loftiest of these enviable standing places should be reserved for the author himself! Those who, without a cause to serve, or a Church to prop (or to pull down) look calmly at human nature as it is, and who read history for themselves, will, with a sort of mournful contempt bring into comparison the foolish