onounce a
definitive judgment, from which there will be no appeal. But, in
attending this memorable judgment, what will become of the souls of
men, separated from their bodies, which have not yet been
resuscitated? The souls of the just will go directly to enjoy the
blessings of Paradise; but what is to become of the immense crowd of
souls imbued with faults or crimes, and on whom the infallible
parsons, who are so well instructed in what is passing in another
world, cannot speak with certainty as to their fate? According to some
of these wiseacres, God will place the souls of such as are not wholly
displeasing to him in a place of punishment, where, by rigorous
torments, they shall have the merit of expiating the faults with which
they may stand chargeable at death. According to this fine system, so
profitable to our spiritual guides, God has found it the most simple
method to build a fiery furnace for the special purpose of tormenting
a certain proportion of souls who have not been sufficiently purified
at death to enter Paradise, but who, after leaving them some years
united with the body, and giving them time necessary to arrive at that
amendment of life by which they may become partakers of the supreme
felicity of heaven, ordains that they shall expiate their offences in
torment. It is on this ridiculous notion that our priests have
bottomed the doctrine of _purgatory_, which every good Catholic is
obliged to believe for the benefit of the priests, who reserve to
themselves, as is very reasonable, the power of compelling by their
prayers a just and immutable God to relax in his sternness, and
liberate the captive souls, which he had only condemned to undergo
this purgation in order that they might be made meet for the joys of
Paradise.

With respect to the Protestants, who are, as every one knows, heretics
and impious, you will observe that they pretend not to those lucrative
views of the Roman doctors. On the contrary, they think that, at the
instant of death, every man is irrevocably judged; that he goes
directly to glory or into a place of punishment, to suffer the award
of evil by the enduring of punishments for which God had eternally
prepared both the sufferer and his torments! Even before the reunion
of soul and body at the final judgment, they fancy that the soul of
the wicked (which, on the principle of all souls being _spirits_,
must be the same in essence as the soul of the elect,) will, though
deprive