to make their anxious way through the flames enveloping a guilty world, and that, from this awful passage, every one who came out unsinged would be completely cleansed from the pollution of iniquity 24.

Nor did our distant ancestry abandon that principle, established among heathen speculators, which accounted for the kindling of this mighty conflagration. The globe will sink, they thought, amidst an all-devouring mass of flame, because it long has fostered impiety and moral disobedience. Even the embers of this all-prevailing fire, it was imagined, will not be suffered to deform the face of renovated nature. No sooner will combustion cease, than an overwhelming flood will cover all the ground. This, in its ebbing tide, will carry downwards into the caverns of the great abyss every vestige of that defilement which has for ages tainted and profaned the perfect workmanship of a holy God. Thus, "the first heaven and the first earth having passed away," will arise “a new heaven and a new earth"," fitted for the ransomed of the Lord, wholly, therefore, free from all that can ensnare the senses or engender moral contagion 25.

From the prevailing practice of allowing

s Rev. xxi. 1.

this dangerous licence to an excursive fancy, religious persons of a visionary temperament naturally extracted food adapted to their peculiar habits of hallucination. Thus Fursey, truly eminent as a missionary to East Anglia, gained new admiration, by declaring himself to have been admitted, amidst the troubled slumbers of a sick man's couch, to a view of miseries in store for disembodied souls. The morbid imagination of Drighthelm, a Northumbrian ascetic, afforded a dream of equal celebrity". One of these pictures, however, is evidently based in allegory; and neither of them, it is worthy of remark, represents the purgatorial fire as any ground for universal apprehension. Its torturing operation, the visions paint, awaits those only whose impenitence has reached to the very end of life, and who have, hence, been unable to compensate for their sins by proportionate austerities. Here we may detect an ample reason for the circulation industriously given to these well-told instances of a distempered body's operation upon an enthusiastic mind. Our ancient clergy laboured anxiously to enforce that penitential discipline, which was deemed of incalculable importance to the soul. What was more likely to second effectually such endeavours than vivid pictures of agonizing,

purgatorial sufferings reserved for those who should leave the world under a load of unexpiated sin ?

That the spirits of such infatuated offenders would indeed pay their moral debts with usury and rigour inconceivable is asserted, at considerable length, in a homily written, it seems, after the millenary year. It is there maintained, that some members of the great human family, on departure from the world, go immediately to rest, some, again, to eternal misery, and others to temporary punishment in expiating fires. It is not, however, the more heinous transgressions to which this intermediate agony is threatened. It is only for sins of a less revolting character that men are allowed to calculate upon thus escaping from the horrors of eternal death".

Individual divines, then, appear to have taught our ancestry, through the whole Saxon period, that human souls pass immediately, by death, some to heaven, others to hell, others to paradise, while a fourth sort, those, namely, of the less grievous sinners, who repented truly at the end of life, but not before, go for a time to a place of fiery punishment and purgation. These opinions differ from those eventually erected into articles of faith by the councils of Florence and Trent",

in the mention of paradise, in the denial of heaven to all who died not truly contrite, in offering no hope of purgatorial amendment to the most heinous offenders, and in positively deciding upon fire as the destined instrument of punishment and purification. The most essential point, however, in which these two systems disagree consists in this, that Anglo-Saxon speculations generally would exempt a very considerable number of human souls from the fear of purgatory, Romish doctrines hardly any. For who is there so perfect, upon the bed of death, as to be wholly free from certain venial sins, from an unhappy leaven of corruption? While the soul yet lingers in its earthly tabernacle it rarely fails to exhibit some traces of the flesh. An exceedingly small minority of mankind can, then, upon Romish principles, leave the world with any reasonable hope of escaping purgatorial rigours. The theorists of ancient England, however, encouraged extensive expectations of such a happy deliverance. Would men, they taught, lead religious, virtuous lives, and compensate penitentially for their iniquities, their souls would pass, by death, immediately to a place of rest and refreshment. But this fact, though of some importance in controversy, affects not materially the main

object of our enquiry. We are concerned to ask, whether a belief in a state of punishment and purgation for the disembodied soul was entertained, among the spiritual guides of ancient England, from the first, uninterruptedly and definitely, as an article of faith? To such questions must undoubtedly be returned a negative reply. How can it be rationally maintained, that the earliest of our country's religious authorities inculcate the Romish doctrine of purgatory, when it is known that they merely treat expectations of a future cleansing fire, operating upon light offences, as involving no violation of probability? And why did writers especially called upon by their subjects to mention this purgatorial flame omit all mention of it? Why did others notice it in a brief, confused, unsatisfactory manner? Why, again, was its credit mainly supported by alleged revelations, confessedly vouchsafed to men of ascetic habits, while their senses were locked in sleep, and their bodies laboured under indisposition? How came it also that some considered the soul's agonizing purgation as consequent immediately upon its release from humanity, while others, and those perhaps by no means the minority, expected not the kindling of this purifying flame until that awful day