Purgatory, Mary Anne Madden Sadlier [books to get back into reading .txt] 📗

who wanted so much to know everything, wherever he may be now there is an end to that. I follow him into the three abodes; I stop at that of bliss; I pass on to the place of suffering, the gulf of fire. My God, my God, not so! Let not my brother be there, let him not! He is not there. What! his soul, the soul of Maurice, among the reprobate! ... Horrible dread, no! But in Purgatory, perhaps, where one suffers, where one expiates the weaknesses of the heart, the doubts of the soul, the half-inclinations to evil. Perhaps my brother is there, suffering and calling to us in his pangs as he used to do in bodily pain, 'Relieve me, you who love me!' Yes, my friend, by prayer. I am going to pray. I have prayed so much, and always shall. Prayer? Oh, yes, prayers for the dead, they are the dew of Purgatory."

All Souls' - How different this day is from all others, in church, in the soul, without, within. It is impossible to tell all one feels, thinks, sees again, regrets. There is no adequate expression for all this except in prayer.... I have not written here, but to some one to whom I have promised so long as I live, a letter on All Souls'....

O my friend, my brother, Maurice! Maurice! art thou far from me? dost thou hear me? What are they, those abodes that hold thee now? ... Mysteries of another life, how profound, how terrible ye are - sometimes, how sweet!


PASSAGES FROM THE VIA MEDIA.

[Written while Cardinal Newman was still an Anglican]

Now, as to the punishments and satisfactions for sins, the texts to which the minds of the early Christians seem to have been principally drawn, and from which they ventured to argue in behalf of these vague notions, were these two: 'The fire shall try every man's work,' etc., and 'He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.' These passages, with which many more were found to accord, directed their thoughts one way, as making mention of fire, whatever was meant by the word, as the instrument of trial and purification; and that, at some time between the present time and the Judgment, or at the Judgment. As the doctrine, thus suggested by certain striking texts, grew in popularity and definiteness, and verged towards its present Roman form, it seemed a key to many others. Great portions of the books of Psalms, Job, and the Lamentations, which express the feelings of religious men under suffering, would powerfully recommend it by the forcible and most affecting and awful meaning which they received from it. When this was once suggested, all other meanings would seem tame and inadequate.

To these may be added various passages from the prophets, as that in the beginning of the third chapter of Malachi, which speaks of fire as the instrument of purification, when Christ comes to visit His Church.

Moreover, there were other texts of obscure and indeterminate meaning, which seem on this hypothesis to receive a profitable meaning; such as Our Lord's words in the Sermon on the Mount, "Verily, I say unto thee, thou shalt by no means come out thence till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing;" and St. John's expression in the Apocalypse, that, "no man in heaven, nor in earth, neither under the earth, was able to open the book." - Via Media, pp. 174-177.

Most men, to our apprehensions, are too little formed in religious habits either for heaven or for hell; yet there is no middle state when Christ comes in judgment. In consequence, it is obvious to have recourse to the interval before His coming, as a time during which this incompleteness may be remedied, as a season, not of changing the spiritual bent and character of the soul departed, whatever that be, for probation ends with mortal life, but of developing it in a more determinate form, whether of good or evil. Again, when the mind once allows itself to speculate, it will discern in such a provision a means whereby those who, not without true faith at bottom, yet have committed great crimes, or those who have been carried off in youth while still undecided, or who die after a barren, though not immoral or scandalous life, may receive such chastisement as may prepare them for heaven, and render it consistent with God's justice to admit them thither. Again, the inequality of the sufferings of Christians in this life compared one with another, leads the mind to the same speculations; the intense suffering, for instance, which some men undergo on their death-bed, seeming as if but an anticipation in their case of what comes after death upon others, who, without greater claims on God's forbearance, live without chastisement and die easily. The mind will inevitably dwell upon such thoughts, unless it has been taught to subdue them by education or by the fear of the experience of their dangerousness. -
Via Media, pp. 174-177 .


ALL SOULS.

FROM THE FRENCH.

November is come; and the pleasant verdure that the groves and woods offered to our view in the joyous spring is fast losing its cheerful hue, while its withered remains lie trembling and scattered beneath our feet. The grave and plaintive voice of the consecrated bell sends forth its funereal tones, and, recalling the dead to our pensive souls, implores, for them the pity of the living. Oh! let us hearken to its thrilling call; and may the sanctuary gather us together within its darkened walls, there to invoke our Eternal Father, and breathe forth cherished names in earnest prayer!

When the solemn hour of the last farewell was come for those we loved, and their weakened sight was extinguished forever, it seemed as if our hearts' memory would be eternal, and as if those dear ones would never be forgotten. But time has fled, their memory has grown dim, and other thoughts reign paramount in our forgetful hearts, which barely give them from time to time a pious recollection.

Nevertheless, they loved us, perhaps too well, lavish of a love that Heaven demanded. How devoted was their affection; and shall we now requite it by a cruel forgetfulness? Oh! if they suffer still on our account; if, because of their weakness, they still feel the wrath of God's justice, shall we not pray, when their voices implore our help, when their tears ascend towards us?

Alas! in this life what direful contamination clings to the steps of irresolute mortals! Who has not wavered in the darksome paths into which the straight road so often deviates?

The infinite justice of the God of purity perhaps retains them in the dungeons of death. Alas! for long and long the Haven of eternal life may be closed against them! Oh, let us pray; our voices will open the abode of celestial peace unto the imprisoned soul. The God of consolation gave us prayer, that love might thus become eternal. -
The Lamp , Nov. 5, 1864.


AN ANGLICAN BISHOP PRAYING FOR THE DEAD.

Foremost among later Anglican divines in piety, in learning, and in the finer qualities of head and heart, stands the name of Reginald Heber, Bishop of the Establishment, whose gentle memory, - embalmed in several graceful and musical poems, chiefly on religious subjects, - is still revered and cherished by his co-religionists, respected and admired even by those who see in him only the man and the poet - not the religious teacher. I am happy to lay before my readers the following extract from a letter of Bishop Heber, in which that amiable and accomplished prelate expresses his belief in the efficacy of prayers for the departed:

"Few persons, I believe, have lost a beloved object, more particularly by sudden death, without feeling an earnest desire to recommend them in their prayers to God's mercy, and a sort of instinctive impression that such devotions might still be serviceable to them.

* * * * *

"Having been led attentively to consider the question, my own opinion is, on the whole, favorable to the practice, which is, indeed, so natural and so comfortable, that this alone is a presumption that it is neither unpleasing to the Almighty nor unavailing with Him.

"The Jews, so far back as their opinions and practices can be traced since the time of Our Saviour, have uniformly recommended their deceased friends to mercy; and from a passage in the Second Book of Maccabees, it appears that, from whatever source they derived it, they had the same custom before His time. But if this were the case, the practice can hardly be unlawful, or either Christ or His Apostles would, one should think, have, in some of their writings or discourses, condemned it. On the same side it may be observed that the Greek Church, and all the Eastern Churches, pray for the dead; and that we know the practice to have been universal, or nearly so, among the Christians a little more than one hundred and fifty years after Our Saviour. It is spoken of as the usual custom by Tertullian and Epiphanius. Augustine, in his Confessions , has given a beautiful prayer which he himself used for his deceased mother, Monica; and among Protestants, Luther and Dr. Johnson are eminent instances of the same conduct. I have, accordingly, been myself in the habit, for some years, of recommending on some occasions, as, after receiving the sacrament, etc., my lost friends by name to God's goodness and compassion, through His Son, as what can do them no harm, and may, and I hope will, be of service to them."


THE "PURGATORY" OF DANTE.

MARIOTTI.

In the course of his remarks upon the Divina Comedia of Dante, a bitter opponent of the Holy See and of everything Catholic, Mariotti, [1] an apostle of United Italy, expresses his views upon the ancient doctrine of Purgatory. These views are but an instance of how its beauty and truthfulness to nature strike the minds of those who have strayed from the centre of Christian unity.

[Footnote 1: Mariotti, author of "Italy Past and Present," an unscrupulous opponent of the Papacy and of the Church.]

"To say nothing of its greatness and goodness, the poem of Dante," says Mariotti, "is the most curious of books. The register of the past, noting down every incident within the compass of man's nature.... Dante is the annalist, the interpreter, the representative of the Middle Ages.... The ideas of mankind were in those ' dark ' ages perpetually revolving upon that 'life beyond life,' which the omnipresent religion of that fanatical age loved to people with appalling phantoms and harrowing terrors. Dante determined to anticipate his final doom, and still, in the flesh, to break through the threshold of eternity, and explore the kingdom of death.... No poet ever struck upon a subject to which every fibre in the heart of his contemporaries more readily responded than Dante. It is not for me to test the soundness of the Roman Catholic doctrine of Purgatory, or to inquire which of the Holy Fathers first dreamt of its existence. It was, however, a sublime contrivance, unscriptural though it may be - a conception full of love and charity, in so far as it seemed to arrest the dead on the threshold of eternity; and making his final welfare partly dependent on the pious exertions of those who were left behind,