ngs of the dead were not supposed to be in the power of the
living, either their relatives or the clergy, but to depend on the
moral and physical facts of the case according to justice and
necessity, qualified only by the mercy of God.

Pope Gregory the Great, in the sixth century, either borrowing
some of the more objectionable features of the purgatory doctrine
previously held by the heathen, or else devising the same things
himself from a perception of the striking adaptedness of such
notions to secure an enviable power to the Church, constructed,
established, and gave working efficiency to the dogmatic scheme of
purgatory ever since firmly defended by the papal adherents as an
integral part of the Roman Catholic system.17 The doctrine as
matured and promulgated by Gregory, giving to the representatives
of the Church an almost unlimited power over purgatory, rapidly
grew into favor with the clergy and sank with general conviction
into the hopes and fears of the laity. Venerable Bede, in the
eighth century, gives a long account of the fully developed
doctrine concerning purgatory, hell, paradise, and heaven. It is
narrated in the form of a vision seen by Drithelm, who, in a
trance, visits the regions which, on his return, he describes. The
whole thing is gross, literal, horrible, closely resembling
several well known descriptions given under similar circumstances
and preserved in ancient heathen writers.18 The Church, seeing how
admirably this instrument was calculated to promote her interest
and deepen her power, left hardly any means untried to enlarge its
sweep and intensify its operation. Accordingly, from the ninth to
the sixteenth century, no doctrine was so central, prominent, and
effective in the common teaching and

14 Asiatic Journal, 1840, p. 210, note.

15 Mosheim, Comm., III. Century, sect. 49, note 3.

16 Dissuasive from Popery, part ii. book ii. sect. 2.

17 Edgar, Variations of Popery, ch. xvi.

18 Hist. Ecc., lib. v. cap. xii. See also lib. iii. cap. xix.

practice of the Church, no fear was so widely spread and vividly
felt in the bosom of Christendom, as the doctrine and the fear of
purgatory.

The Romanist theory of man's condition in the future life is this,
in brief. By the sin of Adam, heaven was closed against him and
all his posterity, and the devil acquired a right to shut up their
disembodied souls in the under world. In consequence of the
"original sin" transmitted from Adam, e