inction is maintained in the New Testament, which throughout assigns
the wicked to hell (Gehenna or Tartarus), while the righteous dwell
sometimes on the renovated earth, sometimes in the heavenly
regions.[180]

+86+. The Jewish and Christian books mentioned above content themselves
with the general statement that the punishment of the wicked will be
torture by fire and cold. Succeeding Christian books elaborated the
picture of torture with great ingenuity; the _Apocalypse of Peter_,
following and expanding the description of Plato and Enoch, has an
elaborate barbarous apparatus of punishment, and this scheme, continued
through a series of works,[181] has its culmination in Dante's Inferno,
where, however, the ethical element is pronounced, though colored by the
poet's likes and dislikes.

+87+. _Purgatory._ The wicked dead were not always left hopeless in
their place of punishment. Kindly human feeling (shown in early stages
by pious care for the well-being of the dead) and the analogy of earthly
procedures, civil and religious, led to the view that, after the
expiation of faults by suffering, the evildoer might be freed from his
prison and gain a place of happiness. Pardon and purification were
effected on earth by punishments (scourging, imprisonment, etc.) or by
ritual processes (ablution, fastings, etc.)--why not in the other life?
In some systems of transmigration the man, forced after death to assume
a lower form, may rise by good conduct to a higher form. In Plato's
imaginative construction of the Underworld[182] those who have lived
neither well nor ill are purified in the Acherusian lake and then
receive rewards according to their deserts; and those who have committed
great but not unpardonable crimes may come to the lake (after having
suffered the pains of Tartarus) and be freed from trouble if they obtain
pardon from those they have wronged. But as here, so hereafter, certain
offenses were regarded as unpardonable. The purgatorial conception
passed into patristic and Roman and Eastern Christianity and Talmudic
and Medieval Judaism.[183]

+88+. _Resurrection._ The doctrine of the resurrection of the dead,
which has been fully developed only by the Persians and the Jews (and
from them taken by Christianity and Islam), appears to have grown from
simple beginnings. It is the expression of the conviction that the
perfect man is made up of soul and body, and its full form is found only
in periods of high ethica