ed by papal Rome corresponds to the
Lemuria celebrated by pagan Rome, and rests on the same doctrinal
basis. In the Catholic countries of Europe at the present time, on
All Saints' Day, festoons of sweet smelling flowers are hung on
the tomb stones, and the people kneeling there repeat the prayer
prescribed for releasing the souls of their relatives and friends
from the plagues of purgatory. There is a notable coincidence
between the Buddhist

7 See references to "Sraddha" in index to Vishnu Purana.

8 Atkinson's trans. of the Shah Nameh, p. 386.

9 Richardson, Dissertation on the Language, Literature, and
Manners of the Eastern Nations, p. 347.

10 Cap. xii. 42-45.

11 Eisenmenger, Entdecktes Judenthum, th. ii. kap. vi. s. 357.

12 Kabbala Denudata, tom ii. pars. i. pp. 108, 109, 113.

13 Aneid, lib. vi. 1. 739.

and the Romanist usages. Throughout the Chinese Empire, during the
seventh moon of every year, prayers are offered up accompanied by
illuminations and other rites for the release of souls in
purgatory. At these times the Buddhist priests hang up large
pictures, showing forth the frightful scenes in the other world,
to induce the people to pay them money for prayers in behalf of
their suffering relatives and friends in purgatory.14

Traces of belief in a purgatory early appear among the Christians.
Many of the gravest Fathers of the first five centuries naturally
conceived and taught, as is indeed intrinsically reasonable, that
after death some souls will be punished for their sins until they
are cleansed, and then will be released from pain. The Manichaans
imagined that all souls, before returning to their native heaven,
must be borne first to the moon, where with good waters they would
be washed pure from outward filth, and then to the sun, where they
would be purged by good fires from every inward stain.15 After
these lunar and solar lustrations, they were fit for the eternal
world of light. But the conception of purgatory as it was held by
the early Christians, whether orthodox Fathers or heretical sects,
was merely the just and necessary result of applying to the
subject of future punishment the two ethical ideas that punishment
should partake of degrees proportioned to guilt, and that it
should be restorative. Jeremy Taylor conclusively argues that the
prayers for the dead used by the early Christians do not imply any
belief in the Papal purgatory.16 The severity and duration of the
sufferi