and takes to himself a body. So great a
body does he become, that he amuses himself in breaking with stones
the bell of the convent of St. Benedict. More and more fleshly is he
made to appear, by way of frightening the plunderers of ecclesiastical
goods. People are taught to believe that sinners will be tormented not
in the spirit only, but even bodily in the flesh; that they will
suffer material tortures, not those of ideal flames, but in very deed
such exquisite pangs as burning coals, gridirons, and red-hot spits
can awaken.

This conception of the torturing devils inflicting material agonies on
the souls of the dead, was a mine of gold to the Church. The living,
pierced with grief and pity, asked themselves "if it were possible to
redeem these poor souls from one world to another; if to these, too,
might be applied such forms of expiation, by atonement and compromise,
as were practised upon earth?" This bridge between two worlds was
found in Cluny, which from its very birth, about 900, became at once
among the wealthiest of the monastic orders.

So long as God Himself dealt out his punishments, _making heavy his
hand_, or striking _with the sword of the Angel_, according to the
grand old phrase, there was much less of horror; if his hand was heavy
as that of a judge, it was still the hand of a Father. The Angel who
struck remained pure and clean as his own sword. Far otherwise is it
when the execution is done by filthy demons, who resemble not the
angel that burned up Sodom, but the angel that first went forth
therefrom. In that place they stay, and their hell is a kind of Sodom,
wherein these spirits, fouler than the sinners yielded into their
charge, extract a horrible joy from the tortures they are inflicting.
Such was the teaching to be found in the simple carvings hung out at
the doors of churches. By these men learned the horrible lesson of the
pleasures of pain. On pretence of punishing, the devils wreaked upon
their victims the most outrageous whims. Truly an immoral and most
shameful idea was this, of a sham justice that befriended the worse
side, deepening its wickedness by the present of a plaything, and
corrupting the Demon himself!

* * * * *

Cruel times indeed! Think how dark and low a heaven it was, how
heavily it weighed on the head of man! Fancy the poor little children
from their earliest years imbued with such awful ideas, and trembling
within their cradles! L