t
affects spirits separate from the body--perhaps Heaven and Hell, as
opposed to Purgatory, were felt to be picturable because not only
spirits, but the risen bodies too are conceived in them.

"Bede's account of the Ayrshire seer's vision gives Purgatory in words
very like Dante's description of the second stormy circle in Hell; and
the angel which ultimately saves the Scotchman from the fiends comes
through hell, 'quasi fulgor stellae micantis inter tenebras'--'qual sul
presso del mattino Per gli grossi vapor Marte rosseggia.' Bede's name
was great in the middle ages. Dante meets him in Heaven, and, I like
to hope, may have been helped by the vision of my fellow-countryman
more than six hundred years before."]

56. Neither do I know nor care to know--at what time the notion of
Justification by Faith, in the modern sense, first got itself
distinctively fixed in the minds of the heretical sects and schools of
the North. Practically its strength was founded by its first authors
on an asceticism which differed from monastic rule in being only able
to destroy, never to build; and in endeavouring to force what severity
it thought proper for itself on everybody else also; and so striving
to make one artless, letterless, and merciless monastery of all the
world. Its virulent effort broke down amidst furies of reactionary
dissoluteness and disbelief, and remains now the basest of popular
solders and plasters for every condition of broken law and bruised
conscience which interest can provoke, or hypocrisy disguise.

57. With the subsequent quarrels between the two great sects of the
corrupted church, about prayers for the Dead, Indulgences to the
Living, Papal supremacies, or Popular liberties, no man, woman, or
child need trouble themselves in studying the history of Christianity:
they are nothing but the squabbles of men, and laughter of fiends
among its ruins. The Life, and Gospel, and Power of it, are all
written in the mighty works of its true believers: in Normandy and
Sicily, on river islets of France and in the river glens of England,
on the rocks of Orvieto, and by the sands of Arno. But of all, the
simplest, completest, and most authoritative in its lessons to the
active mind of North Europe, is this on the foundation stones of
Amiens.

58. Believe it or not, reader, as you will: understand only how
thoroughly it _was_ once believed; and that all beautiful things were
made, and all brave deeds done in the strengt