1.02. Limbo, or an Apology for the Middle State

Limbo, or an Apology for the Middle State AT the outset we may he permitted to explain why we employ the word t apology’ for the vindication of the subject at issue. The ancient Fathers of the Church were described as the apologists, and therefore the defenders, of Christianity. Even Henry VIII. received from the Pope the title of Apologist, or Defender of the Faith, for writing a vindication of the seven Sacraments of the Church against Martin Luther of unhappy memory, which title, by a strange misnomer, is still engraven on the coin of the realm, albeit defender of the nonCatholic faith. We have seen the manuscript in the Vatican Library at Korne, and we record the circumstance, which is matter of history. We, however, use the word in the patristic sense, as a vindication of the middle state. Many a glorious saint, as well as eloquent sinner, has been characterised as the malleus hareticorum the sledge-hammer of heresiarchs. We ambition not to be the formidable malleus; rather let us aspire to be the lowly apologist.

Before entering upon an argument so interesting in itself and so important in its bearings, some brief explanation appears desirable. We must go back to the commencement of all creation, and begin at the very beginning. We must try to see our way, and to ascertain as well as we are able the sacred relations which subsist between the Creator and the creature. Certain it is, the Almighty rejoiceth not in the destruction of the living. Hence it never could have entered into the designs of God’s providence that man should have been made to die that he should have been made subject to a temporal, much less eternal, death. On the contrary, it was the intention of the Great Creator that man should live for ever that the Garden of Eden should be a field of merit for the creature, the terrestrial being a foretaste of the celestial paradise. The creature, after having accomplished the end of his creation, was to be ushered into the realms of a blissful immortality.

One thing alone could prevent the attainment of that end one thing alone could blight those fair prospects, and exchange happiness for misery everlasting; that dismal fatal thing was sin. Yet sin did come. * By one man sin entered into the world, and by sin death’ (Romans 5:12). Sin was the cause of ruin, and sin brought the infliction of punishment. But the sin was deliberate, the act was a rebellion against the sovereignty of the Most High. The most emphatic warning had been given against violating the divine command, ’ In whatsoever day thou shalt eat of the tree of knowledge thou shalt die the death’ (Genesis 2:17). Spiritual death immediately followed the temporal chastisement instantly followed the crime. Adam in consequence became mortal, and Adam therefore was doomed to die. The saddest change came over, shall we say, the spirit of his day-drearns; the murkiest cloud, like the pall of death, hung over the past, present, future; Adam was overwhelmed with melancholy; Eve was bleeding at the heart’s core; Paradise was converted into a howling wilderness the house of joy was changed into the habitation of sorrow; with desolation was the whole land laid desolate. Such was the state of darkness and despair after the fall. Suddenly a ray of light shot across the horizon by the announcement of a Redeemer. The Divine Son presented Himself to the Eternal Father as a victim of atonement. He offered to become the second Adam, that the first Adam might be forgiven. This promise, however, so readily made, was not so quickly performed. Long ages were to pass by before the Saviour was to overshadow the earth; generation after generation was to come and to go before Jesus should be born of His immaculate Mother Mary, who while He was to be the second Adam, she was to be the second Eve. Blessed be God, He did come. He took upon Himself the sins of the whole world; He purchased for all men a plentiful redemption. His coming had a retrospective, as well as a prospective, character. It had reference to all men that were ever born, and that should ever be born; so that by His infinitely precious atonement all men, without exception, can be saved. But let us proceed to the law and the testimony; let us refer to the authorised exposition of the Church upon this point, as defined in the Canons of the celebrated Council which was anterior to that of the Vatican.

Both parts of the proposition are strictly of faith, as the Church has clearly defined in a Canon of the illustrious Council of Trent, sess. xxv.: ’ The Catholic Church, instructed by the Holy Spirit, has taught in her Councils, from the sacred writings, and the ancient traditions of the Fathers, and this Synod has now recently declared, that there is a Purgatory, and that the souls there detained are helped by the suffrages of the faithful, but principally by the acceptable sacrifice of the altar.’ To demonstrate what is here advanced, let us, first of all, scan the pages of the Old Testament. We shall there find abundant evidence corroborative of our position, which necessarily presupposes the belief of a middle state. For, be it observed, and let it be constantly borne in mind, that during the period of the old law, none ascended into heaven, ’the way of the holies,’ as the Apostle says, ’ being not yet made open.’ Christ Himself was to * dedicate that new and living way,’ and begin the entrance in His own person, and by His passion and death to unlock the gates which had been closed against Adam, and all his posterity: ’ He alone was found worthy to open the seals and to read the book.’ Hence the language used in the Old Testament with regard to even the best of men is, that dying, they went down ad inferos, or ad infernum the lower hell so that they descended not to the grave, which received only their bodies, but ad inferos, ’ into hell’ the common receptacle for their souls. As exemplifying our meaning, let us bring a few instances in point.

We read, in the book of Genesis, that Jacob, while lamenting the loss of his son Joseph, whom he thought a wild beast had devoured, cried out in the bitterness of his grief, ’ I will go down to my son into hell mourning.’ The royal Psalmist also makes continual allusion to such a belief. In one of his Canticles he declares, ’ Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell;’ and in another he exclaims, ’ Thou hast delivered, Lord, my soul from the lower hell;’ and again, he asks, ’ Shall he deliver his soul from the hand of hell?’ Now, that the hell mentioned here cannot be the abode of Satan and the wicked spirits, is indubitably certain; since it is incredible that Jacob could have supposed that the soul of his young almost infant son, Joseph, had been consigned to that dungeon. And David would neither have said, ’ Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell,’ had it been the hell of the damned; since out of that dreadful region there is no coming forth; nor would he have spoken of his soul’s deliverance from the ( lower hell,’ unless he believed that there was a ’ lowest hell.’

St. Jerome, speaking of the Patriarchs and Prophets, says, ‘If Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were in hell, who were in the kingdom of heaven?’ Again, he writes, ’ Before the coming of Christ, Abraham was in hell; after His coming, the thief was in Paradise. ’Lest it, then, might be urged that Lazarus, being in Abraham’s bosom, beheld the rich glutton afar off in hell, and that therefore both Abraham and Lazarus seem to have been in heaven, the same holy Doctor dilutes entirely the difficulty by observing, that these also were in hell, but in a place of rest and refreshment; and therefore at an immense distance from the wretched glutton who lay in torments in the lowest hell the hell of the damned. To elude this distinction of ’ lower’ and f lowest’ hell, which savoured not a little of a middle state, and was therefore auxiliary in sustaining the Catholic dogma of Purgatory, the so-called Reformers did not scruple to destroy the native force of the original by a shamefully incorrect translation. Hence, in the Reformed Bibles, printed in the years 1562, 1577, and 1579, whenever the Hebrew word SHEOL, the Greek adhj of the Septuagint, and the ’ Infernus’ of the Latin Vulgate, appeared to favour the doctrine of Purgatory, these words were rendered into English by ’ grave,’ regardless of the absurdity which necessarily follows from such a translation. Thus, in the Reformed Bible, Jacob is made to say, ’ I will go down into the grave unto my son,’ as if the holy Patriarch believed that his son Joseph had been buried in a grave, when, on the contrary, he declared, ’ It is my son’s coat, an evil wild beast hath eaten him, a beast hath devoured Joseph.’ The Catholic translation is in conformity with the original, ’ I will go down to my son in hell.’ In the same manner, wherever the word ’ hell’ occurs, meaning the place, ’ Limbus Patmm, 9 where the holy Fathers of the old law reposed previous to the coming of the Redeemer, it is rendered ’ grave,’ a word wholly at variance with the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin expression. No plea can be advanced as palliative of this violent distortion of the sacred text, except that of a wretched dishonesty; the true and only genuine translation would not tally with their reforming propensities, and hence the sacred text was to be corrupted, to suit their new schools of thought.

Moreover, there is a passage in the Book of Ecclesiasticus which seems to harmonise with our ideas of a middle state. In chap. vii. v. 37, we read, ’ And restrain not thy favour from the dead.’ Now, we may be permitted to ask, what favour is this, which can be conferred upon the dead? It is to no purpose, in good sooth, to praise them it is no favour to erect a monument to eternise their memory, since they receive no possible advantage the only favour is the suffrages which the living offer up in their behalf. The learned commentator, Estius, in his Scriptural Annotations, explains the citation in this sense, and gives it as a probable opinion that Ecclesiasticus recommended prayers and oblations for the dead a practice very prevalent among the Jews, in opposition to the heresy of the Sadducees, who denied the resurrection. It would appear that Ecclesiasticus was contemporary with the Maccabees, and the writings of the latter serve to throw an additional light upon the passage in question, thereby corroborating this interpretation. Now, no argument could possibly be more luminous, or cogent, in attesting the Catholic dogma of a middle state, than what is derived from the second book of the Maccabees. We there read that the valiant Judas Maccabeus, ’making a gathering, sent twelve thousand drachms of silver to Jerusalem for sacrifice to be offered for the sins of the dead, thinking well and religiously concerning the resurrection It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may he loosed from their sins.’ Here is an unquestionable proof of the practice of praying for the dead, under the old law, by God’s chosen people. From this extract, we have the most minute and circumstantial evidence that the custom of praying for the dead obtained among the Jews for more than a century and a half anterior to the coming of our blessed Saviour; that such a custom was not confined to any particular sect, but was practised by the whole Jewish nation, being observed by the people as well as by the priesthood an especial sacrifice being appointed for that purpose to be offered up in the temple of Jerusalem; and, finally, that this sacrifice, and these supplications, were expiatory, since the end for which they were instituted was, that the dead might be loosed from their sins. The Jews therefore believed, as is obvious from their practice, that the dead could be succoured by the prayers of the living, and, to use their own language, ’ be loosed from their sins.’ So irrefragably strong was the argument, deducible from these words, in favour of the Catholic doctrine of a middle state, that our modern religionists, finding every expedient unavailing to elude their force, have resorted to the last extremity by denying the canonicity of the book itself! But most unwarrantably have they done so; for this book is ranked among the Canonical Scriptures by the Apostolical Constitutions, by Tertullian, St. Cyprian, St. Hilary, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, the Third Council of Carthage held anno 253 not to speak of the more recent general Councils of Florence and Trent. Besides, it stands upon the same groundwork of Canonicity as the other Books of Scripture. Its authenticity is guaranteed by the Catholic Church, and it is alone upon the authority of the Holy Ancient Church that the authenticity of all Scripture is guaranteed. But prescinding entirely from the question of its canonicity, it must, at least, in candour be admitted, that it contains wholesome and edifying doctrine; for in the Sixth of the Thirtynine Articles, the Church of England doth read it, for example of life and instruction of manners.