first four general
councils laid down any doctrine whatever concerning the everlasting
misery of the wicked. Yet the question had been most vehemently
disputed.'[263] Throughout the Middle Ages, religious terrorism in its
barest and most material form was an universal, and sometimes no doubt a
very efficient instrument of moral control; but small consideration is
needed to perceive how these fears must have been at once tempered and
partly neutralised by the belief in purgatory--tempered by the hope that
pains preceding judgment might take the place of ultimate penalties, and
almost neutralised by the superstitious idea that such purgatorial
sufferings might be lightened and shortened by extraneous human agencies
independent of the purification and renewal of the sinful soul.
Throughout the earlier period of the Reformation, and especially in
England, the protest of Protestantism was mainly against specific abuses
in the Church, and against the Papal supremacy. Two or three generations
had to pass away before habits of thought engrained for ages in the
popular mind were gradually effaced. In spite of the rapid growth of
Puritanism, and of the strong hold gained by an extreme form of
Calvinism on some of the leading Churchmen of Queen Elizabeth's time,
the faith of the mass of the people was still a combination, in varied
proportions, of the old and the new. The public mind had utterly
revolted against the system of indulgences; but it would be very rash to
assume that men's ideas of the eternal state were not largely and widely
modified by an undefined tradition of purifying fires. Although this may
not have been the case with the clergy and others who were familiar with
controversy, there was certainly among them also a strong disinclination
to pronounce any decided or dogmatical opinion about that unknown
future. This is traceable in the various writings elicited by the
omission of the latter part of the third article in the Revision under
Archbishop Parker; and is more palpably evident in the entire excision
of the forty-second article, which for ten years had committed the
Church of England to an express opinion as to the irreparable state of
the condemned. But long before the seventeenth century had closed,
orthodox opinion seems to have set almost entirely in the direction of
the sternest and most hopeless interpretation possible. Bishop Rust of
Dromore, who died in 1670, ardently embraced Origen's view.[264] So als