The burlesque of
the religious ceremonies was greater than ever; and the history of Madrid
never recorded a day on which was consumed so great a quantity of wine
and _escabeche_ (a kind of pickle of different sorts of fish), being the
classical refreshments with which the people of Madrid honour that
ceremony in taking leave of the carnival, and furnish themselves with
strength to bear up against the fastings of Lent.

CHAPTER VII.

PURGATORY--Deliverance from by devotions of survivors--Those devotions
described--Difference between dogma of purgatory and other dogmas--Modes
of drawing out souls--Masses for the dead--Legacies to pay for
them--External representations of images and pictures--Day of All Souls
and its practices--The Andalusian Confraternity of Souls--_Mandas
piadosas_--Debtor and creditor account between the church and
purgatory--How balanced--Bull of
Composition--Soul-days--_Responsos_--_Cepillo_, or alms-box--Financial
operation--Origin of bills of exchange and clearing house--Wax
Candles--Their efficacy--Cenotaphs--Summary of funds, and reflections on
their misapplication.

In the year 1802, the Inquisition of Granada celebrated an _auto-de-fe_
against a teacher of languages, who lived at Malaga, for having said and
written that the true purgatory was the purse of the friars and clergy.
All persons who have considered the immense gains which the Spanish
clergy have drawn, and continue to draw, from the belief in purgatory,
will agree that the unhappy professor did not wander far from the truth.
According to the doctrine, generally admitted among the Roman Catholic
clergy, upon this dogma, which the Roman Catholic Church alone receives,
the liberation of souls suffering the torments of fire in purgatory, or,
what is much the same, their admission to the joys of the celestial
state, does not depend so much on the culpability of the defunct
individual as on the devotion of those who survive. It is taught in the
catechism, it is preached in the pulpit, and enforced in the comments of
theological works, that the souls of those condemned to purgatory can be
ransomed and drawn out by means of prayer, penance, alms, and religious
rites; and that one of the works of charity, most meritorious in the eyes
of the Almighty, is the use of those means to abbreviate the duration of
punishment of the sufferers. Hence it is that what is called in Spain
devotion, with reference to souls in purgatory, is one