been overwhelmed with the blackness of despair. Men could not
live, if they felt they could not expiate their sins. Who could
smile or joke or eat or sleep or have any pleasure, if he thought
seriously there would be no cessation or release from endless
pains? Who could discharge his ordinary duties or perform his
daily occupations, if his father or his mother or his sister or his
brother or his wife or his son or his daughter might not be finally
forgiven for the frailties of an imperfect nature which he had
inherited? The Catholic Church, in its benignity,--at what time I
do not know,--opened the future of hope amid the speculations of
despair. She saved the Middle Ages from universal gloom. If
speculation or logic or tradition or scripture pointed to a hell of
reprobation, there must be also a purgatory as the field of
expiation, for expiation there must be for sin, somewhere, somehow,
according to immutable laws, unless a mantle of universal
forgiveness were spread over sinners who in this life had given no
sufficient proofs of repentance and faith. Expiation was the great
element of Mediaeval theology. It may have been borrowed from
India, but it was engrafted on the Christian system. Sometimes it
was made to take place in this life; when the sinner, having
pleased God, entered at once upon heavenly beatitudes. Hence
fastings, scourgings, self-laceration, ascetic rigors in dress and
food, pilgrimages,--all to purchase forgiveness; which idea of
forgiveness was scattered to the winds by Luther, and replaced by
grace,--faith in Christ attested by a righteous life. I allude to
this notion of purgatory, which early entered into the creeds of
theologians, and which was adopted by the Catholic Church, to show
how powerful it was when human consciousness sought a relief from
the pains of endless physical torments.