of the most
striking characteristics of religious life in that country. Nobody there
has hitherto ventured to examine whether this belief is or is not
conformable to the sacred Scripture, and to the doctrines of the first
centuries of Christianity.

Purgatory in Spain, and in all Roman Catholic countries, is a dogma as
sacred as that of the Incarnation and that of the Trinity, with this
difference,--that the latter mysteries, and all those relative to the
Saviour, place man in a position of immense inferiority with respect to
their object, whilst purgatory, on the contrary, gives him an effective
power, the object of which is nothing less than the salvation of souls.
It is scarcely possible to conceive that to a being so weak as man could
ever be attributed a power equal to that of Divinity itself. This
creature, man, whom we see occupied in his business or his diversions,
impregnated with profane ideas, and perhaps on the very point of
committing crime, or of abandoning himself to criminal excesses, is
supposed to be capable, even in these very acts, to open the gates of
heaven to the soul of a relative or of a friend, and this, too, without
any effort of his conscience or his will, but simply by taking out a
piece of money from a purse, laying it on the plate of the sanctuary, or
saying a paternoster.

Many and various are the methods which have been invented "to draw out
souls from purgatory." The principal of these is "the mass of the dead;"
and it constitutes one of the most lucrative sources from which the Roman
Catholic clergy derive their revenues. As a general rule, when a
testator makes his will, he bequeathes a certain sum of money to be laid
out in masses, which are to be said as suffrages for his soul. These
sums are sometimes more than sufficient to pay for a thousand, or even
two thousand, masses. The relatives or friends pay for other masses for
the same object, and many devout persons contribute large sums to draw
out, indiscriminately, those souls which are most ready to avail
themselves of such generosity. In all acts of devotion, including the
daily and common mass, a prayer is introduced in favour of departed
souls; and in order to exalt the imaginations of the faithful, by means
of external representations, which, as we have seen in preceding
chapters, form the grand arm of Roman Catholicism, they present, in
painting, or engraving, or in statuary, figures of human beings
surrounded by fla