"Purgatory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sense, that he withdraweth his grace from man; and grace withdrawn, he cannot but sin. These articles with the following make up the whole charge, (1.) That auricular confession is not necessary to salvation. (2.) That actual penance cannot purchase the remission of sin. (3.) That there is no purgatory, and that the holy patriarchs were in heaven before Christ's passion. (4.) That the pope is Antichrist, and that every priest hath as much power as he.——For these articles, and because he refused to abjure them, he was condemned ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... that for them death was more hopeful than life for the heathen. If the new daylight discovered their vile tortures, there had lingered in the darkness some dim memory that they were tortures of Purgatory and not, like those which Parisian and Prussian diabolists showed shameless in the sunshine, of naked hell. They claimed a truth not yet disentangled from human nature; for indeed earth is not even earth without heaven, as a landscape is not a landscape ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... Androvsky, "Now you can pray," she had passed into a region where self had no existence. Her whole soul was intent upon this man to whom she had given all the treasures of her heart and whom she knew to be writhing as souls writhe in Purgatory. He had spoken at last, he had laid bare his misery, his crime, he had laid bare the agony of one who had insulted God, but who repented his insult, who had wandered far away from God, but who could ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... the other; "those must perish who go among the dead when they come out of their graves. I've heard that if you get into their clutches, you must stay in purgatory for a hundred years, and no priest can ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... there was nothing left for me but to wait and to hope. And there is nothing further from my character: in love and in war, I am all for the forward movement; and these days of waiting made my purgatory. It is a fact that I loved her a great deal better at the end of them, for love comes, like bread, from a perpetual rehandling. And besides, I was fallen into a panic of fear. How, if she came no more, how was I to continue to endure my ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... comes to see, and I'll teach Aleck to read, for nobody is here to see, at least nobody whose seeing I mind; and I'll teach every other creature that wants to learn. I haven't much more than a week to remain in this blessed purgatory, in that last week perhaps I may teach the boy enough to go on alone when ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... (as usual) gently reproached me for not going to mass, Agricola's mother said to me these words, so touching in her simple and believing mouth, 'Luckily, I pray for you and myself too, my poor girl; the good God will hear me, and you will only go, I hope, to Purgatory.' ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... rearranged, How oft thy members changed! Couldst thou but see thyself aright, And turn thy vision to the light, Thy likeness thou would'st find In some sick man reclined; On couch of down though he be pressed, He seeks and finds not any rest, But turns and turns again, To ease him of his pain. Purgatory: Canto VI: Shadwell's Translation. ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... undertaken. Their efforts of charity were not limited to this world. Their days were spent in hard bodily labour, in study, or in visiting the sick. At night they were on the stone-floors of their chapels, holding up their withered hands to heaven, interceding for the poor souls who were suffering in purgatory. ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... that thou mayest be My standard-bearer. And even as in the day of My death I descended into hell and brought out thence all souls that I found there by reason of these My Stigmata: even so do I grant to thee that every year on the day of thy death thou shalt go to Purgatory, and in virtue of thy Stigmata shalt bring out thence all the souls of thy three Orders,—to wit, Minors, Sisters, Continents,—and likewise others that shall have had a great devotion for thee, and shalt lead them unto the glory of Paradise, to the end that thou mayest be confirmed ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... successful with his clergy. Some of them laughed at his pretensions to be a saint, and called him an ambitious schemer. Again, amongst the laity, many did not quite understand his habit of celebrating two Masses every day. He answered that he never celebrated without releasing a soul from purgatory, and that there had been saints who celebrated nine Masses every day, and, moreover, that he was Pope in his own diocese. This cut the ground from under the feet of his detractors, for in a town of the calibre of Asuncion the people looked on a service in a church as a welcome means of getting ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... the Guardian Angel 5.06 Washed the servant of the High Priest and put carmine on his cheeks 2.04 Renewed Heaven, adjusted ten stars, gilded the sun and cleaned the moon 8.02 Reanimated the flames of Purgatory and restored some souls 3.06 Revived the flames of Hell, put a new tail on the devil, mended his left hoof and did several odd jobs for the damned 4.10 Put new spatter-dashes on the son of Tobias and dressing on his sack 2.00 Rebordered ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... PURGATORY, in the creed of the Church of Rome a place in which the souls of the dead, saved from hell by the death of Christ, are chastened and purified from venial sins, a result which is, in great part, ascribed to the prayers of the faithful and the sacrifice of the Mass. The creed ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Christ is to raise his mother's soul from purgatory, and she will become the Virgin Mary. A spirit rapping in the house, which began shortly after his mother's death, is her spirit and his ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... On pouring out its poison"—one could pray That the day's end might see the madness done And saner souls rise with the morrow's sun. But this incarnate hell that yawns before Your bright, brave soul keyed to the fighter's clench— This purgatory that men call the "trench"— This modern "Black Hole" of a modern war! Yea, Love! yet naught I say can save you, so I lay my heart in yours ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... civilization!)—I was saying, they send us these love-tokens, no doubt (we shall have to weigh out the crumbs, if each is to have his fair share) that we may the better estimate their state of bliss by passing some hours in purgatory. This, as far as I can apportion it without weights and scales, is your share, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... out of purgatory," she said; "and it is something to be on a pedestal; I should not like to come down. It is a cheap victory, but so are most of the victories ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... fairly inscribed on a label, never to be thumbed or greased by students, nor bound to everlasting chains of darkness in a library, but when the fulness of time is come shall happily undergo the trial of purgatory in ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... and ritual is in progress in the Anglican Church which can only be described as a revolution. He asserts that the 'Real Presence, the sacrifice of the Mass, offered for the living and the dead, no infrequent reservation of the Sacrament, regular auricular confession, Extreme Unction, Purgatory, prayers for the dead, devotions to Our Lady, to her Immaculate Conception, the use of her Rosary, and the invocation of saints, are doctrines taught and accepted, with a growing desire and relish for them, in the ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... the three vows, theologians compare them to martyrdom. They maintain that, as a man who lays down his life for the faith enters heaven immediately, without any detention in purgatory, so also does a religious who dies immediately after taking his vows. Whatever temporal punishment was due to him on account of His sins, is entirely cancelled by that one act. And the reason they give ...
— The Happiness of Heaven - By a Father of the Society of Jesus • F. J. Boudreaux
... ceremony with him seems to favour), whom, being anxious to convert to her own faith, she thought to deceive, by the "cunningly devised fable" of a spirit with a burning hand, into the Papistical tenet of purgatory? and, that by a confusion of real circumstances with her original fiction, is derived the remarkable family tradition recorded? Leaving this speculation for the private rumination of our readers, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various
... Cassidy, charged with the murder of the old farmer at Spring Bank on Monday last. All efforts to draw a confession from Cassidy had failed, and the detectives had come to the conclusion that he was either very innocent or very guilty—there was no purgatory for Terrence; it was heaven or the hot place, according to the detectives. For once the detectives were right. Terrence was very innocent. It appears that the tramp who was killed on the Wabash last ...
— Snow on the Headlight - A Story of the Great Burlington Strike • Cy Warman
... turning, looked across the veldt to the four gray walls surrounding the clump of trees a mile away. His hand tightened on the curb, and he straightened in the saddle, as the Captain led the way into the purgatory beyond, an orderly purgatory, but crossed with leaden ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... DIVINE COMEDY with the morality of Ibsen's GHOSTS, we shall see all that modern ethics have really done. No one, I imagine, will accuse the author of the INFERNO of an Early Victorian prudishness or a Podsnapian optimism. But Dante describes three moral instruments—Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell, the vision of perfection, the vision of improvement, and the vision of failure. Ibsen has only one—Hell. It is often said, and with perfect truth, that no one could read a play like GHOSTS and remain indifferent to the necessity ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... her best to banish it under all other circumstances. She certainly succeeded; for she led her poor old widow-mother and their single servant such a life as to give them a lively foretaste of what Purgatory—to say ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... day following the ball, the bride-elect of Sir Victor Catheron had dwelt in a sort of earthly purgatory, had lived stretched on a sort of daily rack. "How blessings brighten as they take their flight." She had given up Charley—had cast him off, had bartered herself in cold blood—for a title and an income. And now that he held her at her true value, that his ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... hollowed out of the bowels of the earth, rendered solid by masonry and divided into various compartments. No windows were there to admit the pure light of day; an artificial luster, provided by lamps and tapers, prevailed eternally in that earthly purgatory. ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... In Lamaism there is also the tiara-crowned pope, and the transubstantiation theory; the reverence to Virgin and Child, confessions, fasts, purgatory, abbots, cardinals, etc. Compare David's Hibbert ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... is not too much to ask out of a lifetime of misery—one little day of bliss! Just one day in which there shall be no yesterday, and no to-morrow—one day of Elysium against years of Purgatory! Let us have our idyl, dear, as my mother and father had theirs—even though it must be as brief as a butterfly's existence, let us not deny ourselves that much. I ask ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... [lowering the stick]. I accept your apology; but don't do it again. And now tell me one thing before I let you go home to bed. Which would you say this counthry was: hell or purgatory? ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... immure, Wall'd round, and made a spirit-jail secure, By the mere horror of blank Naught-at-all, Whose circumambience doth these ghosts enthral. A lurid thought is growthless, dull Privation, Yet that is but a Purgatory curse; Hell knows a fear far worse, A ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... Francis I. in the money-questions to which the treaty gave rise. Of the Italian states, Venice was most sacrificed in this accommodation between the kings. "The city of Cambrai," said the doge, Andrew Gritti, "is the purgatory of the Venetians; it is the place where emperors and kings of France make the Republic expiate the sin of having ever entered into alliance with them." Francis went to Bordeaux to meet his sons and his new wife. At Bordeaux, Cognac, Amboise, Blois, and Paris, galas, both at court and ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... It has been the practice in the Church for anyone to introduce any teaching he saw fit; for example, the monks and priests have daily produced new saints, pilgrimages, special prayers, works and sacrifices in the effort to blot out sin, redeem souls from purgatory, and so on. They who make up things of this kind are not such as put their trust in God through Christ, but rather such as defy God and Christ. Into the hearts of men, where Christ alone should be, they shove the filth and write the lies of the ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... mumbling little slices of stale bread, and looking with malignant envy at the children eating big hunches of heavy cake. It was impossible to give her any pleasure, and she had no sort of intention of pleasing anyone else. It was so difficult to see what kind of effect this dismal purgatory was meant to have on any human soul. She was not improved by suffering—she grew daily more callous and spiteful before one's eyes. One of her few pleasures was to sit in the garden pretending to be asleep, when all the family were out, and tell tales of the gardener ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... fruitful land to which the eyes of philosophers and poets in Europe were fondly turned, as realizing the pictures of the golden age. So true it is, that the fairest Elysium fancy ever devised would be turned into a purgatory by the passions ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... party guests. Satan was there, too; which was proper, for it was on account of his efforts that the funerals had happened. Nikolaus had departed this life without absolution, and a collection was taken up for masses, to get him out of purgatory. Only two-thirds of the required money was gathered, and the parents were going to try to borrow the rest, but Satan furnished it. He told us privately that there was no purgatory, but he had contributed in order ...
— The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... of his poems, written perhaps not long after Henry's death, represents him as he sees him in imagination just on the borderland of purgatory. The King is not in suffering, for as he has done no particular good, so he has done no great harm. He appears "as a man of simple life, spending his time singing ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... at his pleasure. Many persons, however, were disposed to deny him this power, since his decisions would be anticipatory of the judgment-day, which would thus be rendered needless. After the time of Gregory the Great, the doctrine of purgatory met with general acceptance. A resting-place was provided for ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... in the recess. For the first time, since the fatal evening when she and Grace Roseberry had met in the French cottage, Mercy Merrick looked back into the purgatory on earth of her past life, and told her sad story simply ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... knew not well how to reconcile the epistle of St. James to the doctrine of justification by faith alone, and so he could not allow it to be divine. The Papists bring all their Apocrypha into their Bible, and stamp divinity upon it, for they can fancy purgatory is there, and they find prayers for the dead. But they leave out the second commandment because it forbids the worship of images. Others suppose the Mosaic history of the creation, and the fall ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... cause, gave the Church great power, because the failure to partake of this sacrament imperiled one's chances of future salvation. It was also supposed that the benefits of the ceremony in purifying from sin might be enjoyed by the dead in Purgatory; hence masses were often said for the ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... first game we have come across in two months. Even the buzzards and coyotes knew better than to go out in into the country where the cursed Mormon saint sent us numbskulls." Another said that while they had been seeking a heaven on earth they had passed through purgatory, or perhaps a worse place still nearer the one from which sulphurous fumes arise, and now they hoped that there might be a somewhat more heavenly place beyond the snow. One who had been silent seemed awakened by inspiration and spoke in impromptu lines somewhat as follows, as ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... transfiguration; and that he had worked miracles during his life. The climax of the apotheosis was reached in 1486, when a monk, preaching at Paris, seriously maintained that St. Francis was in very truth a second Christ, the second Son of God; and that after his death he descended into purgatory, and liberated all the spirits confined there who had the good fortune to be ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... schism, as distinguished from heresy. To deny the supremacy of the Pope and admit the supremacy of the King were almost its sole tests of doctrine. All the ancient teaching in relation to the Seven Sacraments, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the Real Presence, Purgatory, and Prayers for the Dead, were scrupulously retained. Subsequently, the necessity of auricular confession, the invocation of Saints, and the celibacy of the clergy came to be questioned, but they were not dogmatically assailed during this reign. The common people, where English ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... "Don't you fret about them," he said. "They're as dead as they can be, all of 'em, and in purgatory or a worse place, and you can't get 'em out no matter how hard you pray. Come on; let's go look ...
— The Italian Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... her story of Nelson's home life was crammed with pathetic truths of domestic misery. Nelson corroborates this by a letter to Emma almost immediately after his wife's ludicrous exit. The letter is the outpouring of an embittered soul that had been freed from purgatory and was entering into a new joy. It is a sickening effusion of unrestrained love-making that would put any personage of penny-novel fame to the blush. I may as well give the full dose. Here ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... with a great serpent twisted round his legs, surrounded by a crowd of devils. Messer Biagio complained to the Pope, who asked him where he was placed? "In hell," was the reply. "Then I can do nothing to help you," said the Pope; "had the painter sent you to purgatory I would have used my best efforts to get you released, but I exercise no influence in hell, ubi nulla est redemptio." Some years afterwards Paul IV. objected to the naked figures, and employed Daniele da Volterra ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... ugliness as a dilettante objects to the mediocre in art. Pierre Pilleux was conscious of social ugliness. Having become aware of it, he was a potent rebel. He began to write in French, spreading his revolutionary doctrine of facile spiritual reward. He splintered purgatory into fragments; what he offered was an earthly paradise—humanity given eternal absolution, freed of fear, prejudice, hatred—above all, of fear—and ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... white dove? my little unspotted darling, that never wilfully sinned against God and holy Church? Child, if our holy Father the Pope were to tell me himself that she was there, I would not believe him. Do the angels go to Purgatory? Nay, I do verily believe that, seeing her infirmity, Christ our Lord did all the work of salvation for her, and that she sings now ...
— Our Little Lady - Six Hundred Years Ago • Emily Sarah Holt
... I doubt whether they were subjected to the ignominy which I endured. I was only seven, and I think that boys at seven are now spared among their more considerate seniors. I was never spared; and was not even allowed to run to and fro between our house and the school without a daily purgatory. No doubt my appearance was against me. I remember well, when I was still the junior boy in the school, Dr. Butler, the head-master, stopping me in the street, and asking me, with all the clouds of Jove upon his brow and ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... heavens many and not a few hells. But unlike the places of reward and punishment connected with Christianity, they represent nothing final. They are more like the purgatory of the Catholics, and represent only steps in the progress ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... be the Cardinal's, then! He is still in purgatory, and there will wait the arrival of the Bourgeois, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... in purgatory. It was plain to be seen that Henry expected him to show some desire to go fishing, or to want some other sport which required solitude, or only the company of Madame Imogen—and his afternoon looked as if it were not going to be a thing of joy. The result ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... was responsible for the accident did not enter into the question; no one was consigned to everlasting torture in the deepest depths of purgatory; a calm, dispassionate presentation of an abstraction was all that greeted my ears. The practice of thoughtlessness was condemned as a thing entirely apart from the practitioner, and as a tendency needing correction. Inwardly, I know he swore; outwardly, ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... gold; for it is written in his journal, "Gold is the most precious of all substances; gold constitutes treasure; he who possesses it has all the needs of this world as well as the price for rescuing souls from Purgatory and introducing them into Paradise." If gold could do all that, who would not ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... entirely upset her mind, and, in an excess of craziness, she had thrown herself into the deep and rapid waters of the St. Lawrence. Many searches were made to find her body, but all in vain; many public and private prayers were offered to God to help her to escape from the flames of Purgatory, where she might be condemned to suffer for many years, and much money was given to the priest to sing high masses, in order to extinguish the fires of that burning prison, where every Roman Catholic believes he must go to be ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... bitten, ere exempt From human taint. There I with those abide, Who the three holy virtues put not on, But understood the rest, and without blame Follow'd them all. But if thou know'st and canst, Direct us, how we soonest may arrive, Where Purgatory ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... river of my life," muttered Warwick, "shrunk into this stagnant pool? Happy the man who hath never known what it is to taste of fame,—to have it is a purgatory, to ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and Haidee! they were So loving and so lovely—till then never, Excepting our first parents, such a pair Had run the risk of being damn'd for ever; And Haidee, being devout as well as fair, Had, doubtless, heard about the Stygian river, And hell and purgatory—but forgot Just in the very crisis ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... topographical descriptions of HELL, PURGATORY, and even HEAVEN, were once the favourite researches among certain zealous defenders of the Romish Church, who exhausted their ink-horns in building up a Hell to their own taste, or for their particular purpose.[60] ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... would build his sole piazza to the north. But March don't last forever; patience, and August comes. And then, in the cool elysium of my northern bower, I, Lazarus in Abraham's bosom, cast down the hill a pitying glance on poor old Dives, tormented in the purgatory of his piazza to ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... damnation: the consolations of the church here, and the joys of heaven hereafter, were promised those who voted for an emancipation candidate; but the darkness of excommunication in this life, and the gloom of purgatory first, and then the pains of hell, were denounced against those who voted for an anti-Catholic. The associated barrister and the political priest travelled the country together in order to propagate the common creed; the one by threats ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... teaching and what the Church taught. That year a certain papal agent, Tetzel by name, was disposing of indulgences in the great archbishopric of Mainz. An indulgence, according to Catholic theology, was a remission of the temporal punishment in purgatory due to sin, and could be granted only by authority of the Church; the grant of indulgences depended upon the contrition and confession of the applicant, and often at that time upon money-payments. ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... of the Ursulines, the corner of a nun's apron was carried off by a cannon-shot as she passed through her chamber. The sisterhood began a novena, or nine days' devotion, to St. Joseph, St. Ann, the angels, and the souls in purgatory; and one of their number remained day and night in prayer before the images of the Holy Family. The bishop came to encourage them; and his prayers and his chants were so fervent that they thought their last hour was come. [Footnote: Recit d'une Religieuse Ursuline, ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... practice of the primitive Church, and the doctrinal schismatic points of Roman Catholic faith relating to the canons of Scripture, seven sacraments, sacrifice of the mass, private and solitary mass, communion in one kind, transubstantiation, image worship, purgatory, indulgences, confession and penance, absolution, &c., are clearly established as being in direct opposition to the opinions of the early fathers, and the ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... They are of a uniform dirty brown hue. But the colors have lost their gripe. When the rags shall have been submitted to the grinding and washing in pure water, as we shall see them presently, they are easily whitened. The lime bath is the purgatory ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various
... secret to all save her navigators, strained ever onward, panting, groaning, quivering from stem to stern ... like an enchanted thing doomed to perpetual labours, striving vainly to break bonds invisible that transfixed her to one spot forever-more, in the midst of that bleak purgatory of shadow and moonshine ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... even so. Brother Filippo saw him stand last night In solitary vigil till the dawn Lept o'er the Arno, and his face was such As men may wear in Purgatory—nay, E'en in the inmost core ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... Prince, the name given on the card, and various letters and credentials submitted to the Rev. Mr. Crammer, paced the somewhat severe apartment known publicly as the "reception parlor," and privately to the pupils as "purgatory." His keen eyes had taken in the various rigid details, from the flat steam "radiator," like an enormous japanned soda-cracker, that heated one end of the room, to the monumental bust of Dr. Crammer, that hopelessly chilled the other; from the ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... attach himself to their Confession. It was the grand union of these biblical scholars among the bishops, which in the Convocation of 1536 undertook to carry through the work of drawing their church nearer that of Germany. Latimer opened the war by a fervent sermon against image-worship, indulgences, purgatory, and other doctrines or rites which were at variance with the Bible. Cranmer proved that Holy Scripture contains all that is necessary for man to know for the salvation of his soul, and that tradition is not needed. The ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... annuity-monger of the sixteenth century, was asked the value of an office which he had purchased in the Court of Wards, he replied:—"Some thousands to any one who wishes to get to heaven immediately; twice as much to him who does not mind being in purgatory; and nobody knows what to him who is not afraid ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... If purgatory could hold worse torture than life held on that last evening Lady Bridget spent at Moongarr, then neither she nor her husband would have been required to do any long expiation there. It would be difficult to say which of the two suffered the most. Probably ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... was full the voyage was begun, while from the suffering blacks below, unused to seafaring under any circumstances, and desperately sick in their stifling quarters, there arose cries and moans as if the cover were taken off of purgatory. The imagination recoils from the thought of ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... place of shadows called "Ondera" during the period of an entire mononthour. A mononthour is four hundred and twenty-six millions of our years. But God deigned to pardon the guilty after five thousand years, and their ondera was only a purgatory. ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... you something that came to me one night when we were in London," she said. "It was a miserable time that—before I found you up in the orchestra there! and then hell became purgatory, for there was hope in it. I saw so many miserable things! I seemed always to come upon the miserable things. It was as if my eyes were made only to see miserable things—bad things and suffering everywhere. The terrible city was full of them. I longed to help, but had to wait ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... to share, the stupid credulity and the savage passions of the populace, had exchanged smiles and compliments with the perjured informers, had roared down the arguments feebly stammered forth by the prisoners, and had not been ashamed, in passing the sentence of death, to make ribald jests on purgatory and the mass. As soon as the butchery of Papists was over, the butchery of Whigs had commenced; and the judges had applied themselves to their new work with even more than their old barbarity. To ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... with him that the prevalence in our time of the opposite opinion has fashioned so intolerable a yoke for the neck of any one who has had the misfortune to pass from the sweet paradise of obscurity into the vulgar purgatory of Fame, that it almost behoves a man of genius to avoid, if he can, passing ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... doctrine of th' immortal soul Discovered makes the hungry Furies howl, And teare their snakey haire, with grief appaled To see their error-leading doctrine quailed, Hell undermined and Purgatory ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... that on the instant she hears a summons that breaks the spell of anger as no threat of purgatory would have done. A moment she hesitates, the old hands sink unclenching, the fierceness fades from her eyes, and once again with wondering uplifted look Molly Regan turns to the things beyond, which ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... heart on this marriage. (He and his sister agree upon this point.) He told me, last night, that he would sing 'Nunc dimittis,' could he but see the two children happy; and that he should lie easier in purgatory if that could be ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... you, your face, your thoughts, uncertain on which side you will strike, and his distracted mind frames thousands of plans in an instant, but he is still afraid to speak, afraid of giving himself away! This purgatory of the spirit, this animal thirst for self-preservation, these humiliating moments of the human soul, are awful, and sometimes arouse horror and compassion for the criminal even in the lawyer. And this was what we all ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... mediocrity such a chance as in England. The second-rate writer, the second-rate painter meets with an almost universal and immediate recognition. When good mediocrities die, if they do not go straight to heaven (from a country where the existence of Purgatory is denied by Act of Parliament), at least they run a very fair chance of burial in Westminster Abbey. 'De mortuis nil nisi bonus,' in the shape of royalties, is the real test by which we estimate the authors who have just passed away. A few of our great writers—Ruskin and Tennyson, for example—have ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... against self-destruction and had taken the tablets, just as they intended and evidently desired him to do. But he would not take his own life. He would go on suffering for years before he would send his soul to purgatory by such an act. He believed in damnation. He had lived an honourable, upright life and he maintained that his soul was entitled to the salvation his body had earned for it by its resistance to the evils of the flesh. What, said he, ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... a saying on the Continent that "England is a paradise for women, a prison for servants, and a hell or purgatory for horses." The society was very simple compared with the complex condition of ours, and yet it had more striking contrasts, and was a singular mixture of downrightness and artificiality; plainness and rudeness of speech went with the utmost artificiality of dress and manner. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... affirmatively their church may be proved, by a child of ten years old, contradictory to it, in their most important points. My second question is, if they think St. Peter and St. Paul knew the true Christian religion? The constant reply is, O yes. Then say I, purgatory, transubstantiation, invocation of saints, adoration of the Virgin, relics (of which they might have had a cartload), the observation of Lent, is no part of it, since they neither taught nor practised ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... dramas, The Wonder-working Magician, and Life's a Dream. The mystical dramas, which form the seventh division, are more numerous, but of these five are at present known to us only by name. Those that remain are Day-break in Copacabana, The Chains of the Demon, The Devotion of the Cross, The Purgatory of St. Patrick, The Sibyl of the East, The Virgin of the Sanctuary, and The Two Lovers of Heaven. The editor, Sr. D. P. De La Escosura, seems to think it necessary to offer some apology for not including The Two Lovers of ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... ownership of territory, but it is more likely that the Kiowa territory adjoined the Comanche on the northwest. In fact Pope[61] definitely locates the Kiowa in the valley of the Upper Arkansas, and of its tributary, the Purgatory (Las Animas) River. This is in substantial accord with the statements of other writers of about the same period. Schermerhorn (1812) places the Kiowa on the heads of the Arkansas and Platte. Earlier still they appear upon the headwaters of the Platte, which ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... It was of no use to remove elsewhere; after examining the other hotels it was thought best to remain at the Telegrafo, on the principle adopted by the Irishman, who, though not inclined to believe in Purgatory, yet accepted this item of faith lest he should go further and fare worse. There is the San Carlos Hotel, near the wharves, which is more of a family than a travelers' resort; the Hotel Pasaje, in Prado Street, quite central; Hotel Europe, in La Plaza de San Francisco; and ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... away. In vain the Fathers sought Some trace or token that might tell his story; Some thought him dead, or, like Elijah, caught Up to the heavens in a blaze of glory. In this surmise some miracles were wrought On his account, and souls in purgatory Were thought to profit from his intercession; In brief, his absence ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... great power of our mother Church, Ends not with this poor bubble of a world, Of which we are but dust, as Jerome saith, For if the sinner doth repentant die, Our prayers and holy masses much avail To bring the guilty soul from purgatory. ...
— The Duchess of Padua • Oscar Wilde
... in blank verse. It is. The fallen angels speak not in rhyme—nor Eve nor Adam. So Milton willed. But Dante's Purgatory, and Hell, and Heaven, are in rhyme—ay, and in difficult rhyme, too—terza rima. Yet the damned speak it naturally—so do the blessed. How dreadful from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... peculiar to themselves about purgatory, the creation of souls, and some of our mysteries. They repeat baptism every year, they retain the practice of circumcision, they observe the Sabbath, they abstain from all those sorts of flesh which are forbidden by the law. Brothers espouse ...
— A Voyage to Abyssinia • Jerome Lobo
... saved; but hardly; for he had to spend five hundred years in Purgatory catechizing such heretics and pagans as got there, and instructing them in the true faith. And with the more muscular ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... the "En avant, mes amis!" of the French, the stern "Vorwarts!" of the Germans, and the occasional wild, weird, frenzied scream of some stricken charger echoing shrilly in the distance, like the wail of a lost soul in purgatory—the whole realised a mad riot of destruction and carnival of blood, the essence of whose moving spirit appeared to take possession of each one engaged, rendering him unaccountable for his actions for ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... History, and Prophecy. They could controul the winds and waters, and the stellar influences. They could cause earthquakes, induce diseases or cure them, accomplish all vast mechanical undertakings, and release souls out of Purgatory. They could influence the passions of the mind, procure the reconciliation of friends or of foes, engender mutual discord, induce mania, melancholy, or direct the force and objects of human affection. Such was the Demonology taught by its orthodox professors. Yet other ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... wealthiest fraternities obtained their estates in this simple and cheap manner, and once when Henry VIII of England sent an officer to confiscate certain vast possessions which a fraternity of monks held by frankalmoigne, "What!" said the Prior, "would you master stay our benefactor's soul in Purgatory?" "Ay," said the officer, coldly, "an ye will not pray him thence for naught he must e'en roast." "But look you, my son," persisted the good man, "this act hath rank as robbery of God!" "Nay, nay, good father, my master the king doth but deliver ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... prevented the return of explorers. A way, however, was at length discovered through a narrow passage, the course evidently, at one time, of a stream, up which they can climb over the mud, and save themselves from being drowned or starved. This passage has appropriately been called "Purgatory." In one part the river expands into a lake, the gloomy effect of whose dark waters, lost in the darkness, is indescribable. Leaving Echo River, they enter another cavern, known as Cleveland Cabin—a fairy region. ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... resemblance day by day, though it often caused me almost as much pain as pleasure,—but when I heard her sing, that was too much,—it was more than I could bear,—it was like compelling some lost soul in purgatory to listen ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... his dry periods a purgatory to him; and no sooner did he hear from Mr. Mordacks of a promising job under water than he drew breath enough for a ten-fathom dive, and bursting from long despair, made a great slap at the flies beneath his collar-bone. ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... too, and beggars also. In 1330, the poor, the "poverail" of Greenwich, complain that alms are no longer bestowed on them as formerly, to the great detriment, say they, of the souls of the benefactors of the place "who are in Purgatory."[415] Convents claim privileges that time has effaced; servants ask for their wages; the barber of Edward II. solicits the maintenance of favours granted by a prince he had bled and shaved ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... Mine was lost one hundred and ten years ago. The Mohawks, my wards, then brought me through the forest to this spot. Faith! I was full of gout and humors, and took a drink from a gourd. One night in the year I walk from purgatory and quench my thirst at this font. The rest of the year I limp in the agonies ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... merits of what its author declares to be "perhaps a better translation" than any other. He says that "the whole Divine Comedy of which these ten cantos are a specimen will appear in due time." If the specimen be a fair one, the translation of the "Purgatory" and the "Paradise" will not appear until after the publication of Dr. Carlyle's prose version, for which we may yet have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... reformation abroad, which had every where been attended with the abolition of the monastic orders, gave them reason to apprehend like consequences in England; and though the king still maintained the doctrine of purgatory, to which most of the convents owed their origin and support, it was foreseen, that, in the progress of the contest, he would every day be led to depart wider from ancient institutions, and be drawn nearer the tenets of the reformers, with whom his political interests naturally induced him to unite. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... punishment and torment and all that other side of futurity, who could even think of the mildest purgatory as suitable to those poor flipperty-gibbet inanities who broke the seventh commandment as gaily as a child breaks his indiarubber ball, and were as incapable of passion and crime as they were incapable of ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... a short time, little son. And only those who are never fit for heaven go down with Satan. But you are not one of those," he hastily added, straining the boy to him. "And the Masses which the good priests say for us will lift us out of purgatory and into heaven, where the streets are pure gold and the gates are pearl. And there we will all ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... fixing the mind on the fair and the pleasant, it intermingled other ideas with them of a sad and painful nature; that it spoke of tears before joy, a cross before a crown; that it laid the foundation of heroism in penance; that it made the soul tremble with the news of Purgatory and Hell; that it insisted on views and a worship of the Deity, which to their minds was nothing else than mean, servile, and cowardly. The notion of an All-perfect, Ever-present God, in whose sight we are less than atoms, and who, while He deigns to ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... from the far light an angel clothed with the brilliancy of the sun. With the speed of lightning he plunged far down the purgatory fire; his brightness was so great that Alvira could follow him even through the flames. There the angel found a young, beautiful soul, deep in agony, clothed with crimson fire. A smile of ineffable joy lit up the countenance ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... it," said Grant. "It's a spook. It's the wail of a lost spirit, loosed temporarily from the horrors of purgatory. It's sent as a warning to repent you of your sins, and it's howling because it hates to go back. What you going to ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... on his shoulder, exclaimed in a voice broken by sobs, "Oh, tell me, where may I go to become an anchorite! There's no other safety! I'll give all my portion, and spend all my time in prayer for my father and the other poor souls in purgatory." ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... now for the repose of his soul. Hoping you're well and not in hell. Nice change of air. Out of the fryingpan of life into the fire of purgatory. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... are thousands of people in this city of New Orleans to whom society gives the ten commandments of God with all the nots rubbed out! Ah! good gentlemen! if God sends the poor weakling to purgatory for leaving the right path, where ought some of you to go who strew it ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... said Ruster, for it was like a purgatory to look through the beautiful child eyes to the unspotted ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... there—such as divine worship; alms for the orders; dowries for poor Spanish, Indian, and mestiza girls, and for those of the Cavite shore; alms for the self-respecting poor; hospitals and prisons; and suffrages for the blessed souls in purgatory—which are perennial. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... little Respect to the Image of the crucify'd Jesus, as I pass'd by it in such a Street, naming it? I made Answer, that I had, or ought to have him always in my Heart crucified. To that he made no Reply: But proceeding in his Interrogatories, question'd me next, whether I believ'd a Purgatory? I evaded the Question, as I took it to be ensnaring; and only told him, that I should be willing to hear him offer any Thing that might convince me of the Truth, or Probability of it. Truth? He reply'd in ...
— Military Memoirs of Capt. George Carleton • Daniel Defoe
... of stretching and yawning comfortably as he bade her good night; and sometimes a yawn caught him in the middle of a word, and he talked while he yawned. She hated this. She was passing through that hard middle ground, that purgatory between maidenhood and wifehood in the course of which married folk find each other only human, after all. And she had not yet come to accept this condition, and to glory in it. She had always thought of Joel as a hero, a protector, a fine, stalwart, ...
— All the Brothers Were Valiant • Ben Ames Williams
... due form to his diocesan, and was brought to trial on the 4th of February; a series of articles being alleged against him by Foxford, the bishop's vicar-general. The articles were of the usual kind. The prisoner was accused of having used unorthodox expressions on transubstantiation, on purgatory, pilgrimages, and confession. It does not appear whether any witnesses were produced. The vicar-general brought his accusations on the ground of general rumour, and failed to maintain them. Whether there were witnesses or not, neither the particular offences, nor even ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... that poor old woman into the dismals, and she has the pains of purgatory on her already. I shall ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... worse: sitting gorging there for over an hour, with nobody but a damned fool of a fashionable woman to talk to! I tell you, Pickering, never again for me. No more artificial duchesses. The whole thing has been simple purgatory. ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... a room more squalid than her own, Vardri was also enduring his own private Purgatory. Hers was physical, his mental. That was ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... really and truly believed that she had seen a ghost, no doubt the ghost of the murdered Sobriente, according to Larry's story. WHY he should appear with only his head above ground puzzled her, although it suggested the Catholic idea of purgatory, and he was a Catholic! Perhaps he would have risen entirely but for that stupid Starbuck's presence; perhaps he had a message for HER alone. The idea pleased Polly, albeit it was a "fearful joy" and attended ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... often misguided and uninformed. Some suffragists insist that if woman suffrage became universal "it would set in motion the machinery of an earthly paradise." It was a woman of high standing in the literary and journalistic field who answered, "It is my opinion it would let loose the wheels of purgatory." ... Suffragists frequently ask the question, "If we want to vote why should other people object?" If it is wrong they should not ask it any more than they should ask the privilege of committing a crime. If it is a wrong against the State every other man and woman has a right to object ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... and Liberty; and were there rational Grounds to expect, that any Numbers of them cou'd be so, I shou'd be against using Severities and Distinctions upon Account of Religion. For a Papist is not dangerous, nor ought to be ill us'd by any body, because he prays to Saints, believes Purgatory, or the real Presence in the Eucharist, and pays Divine Worship to an Image or Picture (which are the common Topicks of our Writers of Controversy against the Papists;) but because Popery sets up a foreign Jurisdiction paramount ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman
... in his conduct in regard to the sex than might be supposed from his platonical aspirations," heedless of the great confessions implied in the swoon at Francesca's story, and the passage through the fire at the end of the seventh circle of Purgatory. But when he comes to things like "Dolce color d'oriental zaffiro," and "Era gia l'ora," it is hardly possible to do more justice to the subject. The whole description of his Italian sojourn in the Autobiography is an example of the best kind of such writing. Again, of all the people who have rejoiced ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... Wolseley Preface Elzevirs Ballade of the Real and Ideal Curiosities of Parish Registers The Rowfant Books To F. L. Some Japanese Bogie-books Ghosts in the Library Literary Forgeries Bibliomania in France Old French Title-pages A Bookman's Purgatory Ballade of ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... patience and protracted reward, to bear up manfully against injustice, and not to despond because his rewards are slow. It would be very easy for an author to make everybody good, or, if any were bad, to dismiss them, out of hand, to purgatory and places even worse. But it would be a thankless toil to read the writings of such an author. His characters would fail in vraisemblance, and his incidents would lack in interest. The world is a sort of vast ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... what those doctrines consisted in. One day he asked how grievous sins were to be forgiven which were committed after baptism, whether by faith, or not at all in this life. He was answered that the Articles said nothing on the subject; that the Romish doctrine of pardon and purgatory was false; and that it was well to avoid both curious questions and ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... it was just this, then, your honor. Ould Father McGrave, rest to his sowl, who was the parish praste at Bully Bannon, when I was a wee bit spalpeen of a boy, used to tell me that in 'forrin' places like this, where the sun was as hot as purgatory all the year round, there was a great plinty of tigers and illifonts, [meaning probably—elephants,] and sarpints, and all other kinds of savage bastes. Now I jest thought, master Henry, if that was the case here, I would just cut a couple of "shillalahs," one for each of us, off of yonder tree, ...
— Blackbeard - Or, The Pirate of Roanoke. • B. Barker
... always, as my countryman observed, by having too much wit that I blunder. The deuce take me if I sport a single bon mot more this night. This is only my seventh detection, I have an eighth blunder still to the good; and if I can but keep my wit to myself till I am out of purgatory, then I shall be in heaven, and may sing Io Triumphe in spite of ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth |
