il just before death.3
The custom of initiating children into the Mysteries was also
common, as infant baptism became.4 When the public treasury was
low, the magistrates sometimes raised a fund by recourse to the
initiating fees of the Mysteries, as the Christian popes
afterwards collected money from the sale of pardons.

In the second place, the Roman Catholic canonization was the same
as the pagan apotheosis. Among the Gentiles, the mass of mankind
were supposed to descend to Hades at death; but a few favored ones
were raised to the sky, deified, and a sort of worship paid to
them. So the Roman Church taught that nearly all souls passed to
the subterranean abodes, but that martyrs and saints were admitted
to heaven and might lawfully be prayed to.5

Thirdly, the heathen under world was subdivided into several
regions, wherein different persons were disposed according to
their deserts. The worst criminals were in the everlasting penal
fire of Tartarus; the best heroes and sages were in the calm
meadows of Elysium; the hapless children were detained in the
dusky borders outside the grim realm of torture; and there was a
purgatorial place where those not too guilty were cleansed from
their stains. In like manner, the Romanist theologians divided the
under world into four parts: hell for the final abode of the
stubbornly wicked; one limbo for the painless, contented tarrying
of the good patriarchs who died before the advent of Christ had
made salvation possible, and another limbo for the sad and pallid
resting place of those children who died unbaptized; purgatory, in
which expiation is offered in agony for sins committed on earth
and unatoned for.6

1 Middleton, Letter from Rome, showing an exact conformity between
Popery and Paganism.

2 Lobeck, Aglaophamus, lib. i. sect. 6. Mosheim's Comm., ch. i.
sect. 13.

3 Warburton, Div. Leg., book ii. sect. 4.

4 Terence, Phormio, act i scene 1.

5 Council of Trent, sess. vi. can. xxx. Sess. xxv.: Decree on
Invocation of Saints.

6 See Milman, Hist. Latin Christianity, book xiv. ch. ii.

Before proceeding further, we must trace the prevalence and
progress of the doctrine of purgatory a little as it was known
before its embodiment in mediaval mythology, and then as it was
embodied there. The fundamental doctrine of the Hindu hell was
that a certain amount of suffering undergone there would expiate a
certain amount of guilt incurred here. When the disembodied soul