ay that the idea of purgatory
is good, holy, and rational. It perpetuates the union of those who
were and those who are, leading thus to greater purity of life. The
evil is in its abuse.

"But let us now see where Catholicism got this idea, which does not
exist in the Old Testament nor in the Gospels. Neither Moses nor Christ
made the slightest mention of it, and the single passage which is
cited from Maccabees is insufficient. Besides, this book was declared
apocryphal by the Council of Laodicea and the holy Catholic Church
accepted it only later. Neither have the pagan religions anything
like it. The oft-quoted passage in Virgil, _Aliae panduntur inanes_,
[55] which probably gave occasion for St. Gregory the Great to speak
of drowned souls, and to Dante for another narrative in his _Divine
Comedy_, cannot have been the origin of this belief. Neither the
Brahmins, the Buddhists, nor the Egyptians, who may have given Rome
her Charon and her Avernus, had anything like this idea. I won't speak
now of the religions of northern Europe, for they were religions of
warriors, bards, and hunters, and not of philosophers. While they yet
preserve their beliefs and even their rites under Christian forms,
they were unable to accompany the hordes in the spoliation of Rome
or to seat themselves on the Capitoline; the religions of the mists
were dissipated by the southern sun. Now then, the early Christians
did not believe in a purgatory but died in the blissful confidence
of shortly seeing God face to face. Apparently the first fathers of
the Church who mentioned it were St. Clement of Alexandria, Origen,
and St. Irenaeus, who were all perhaps influenced by Zarathustra's
religion, which still flourished and was widely spread throughout
the East, since at every step we read reproaches against Origen's
Orientalism. St. Irenaeus proved its existence by the fact that
Christ remained 'three days in the depths of the earth,' three days
of purgatory, and deduced from this that every soul must remain there
until the resurrection of the body, although the '_Hodie mecum eris in
Paradiso_' [56] seems to contradict it. St. Augustine also speaks of
purgatory and, if not affirming its existence, yet he did not believe
it impossible, conjecturing that in another existence there might
continue the punishments that we receive in this life for our sins."

"The devil with St. Augustine!" ejaculated Don Filipo. "He wasn't
satisfied with what we suffer