Purgatory.—It is evident that the Roman Catholics are indebted to Plato for their purgatory. That great philosopher divided souls into three classes,—the pure, the curable, and the incurable. The first returned, by refusion, to the universal soul of the world, or the divinity, from which they had emanated; the second went to hell, where they passed in review every year before the judges of that dark empire, who suffered them to return to light when they had sufficiently expiated their faults; the incurables remained in Tartarus, where they were to suffer eternal torment. Plato, as well as Christian casuists, described the crimes, faults, &e., which merit those different degrees of punishment. Protestant divines, jealous probably of the riches of the Catholic clergy, have imprudently rejected the doctrine of a purgatory, whereby they have much diminished their own credit. It would, perhaps, have been wiser to have rejected the doctrine of a hell, whence souls can never be released, than that of purgatory, which is more reasonable, and from which the clergy can deliver souls by means of that all-powerful agent, Money.
(Article in the London Investigator 1855)
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