PURGATORY, according to the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, a state or place in which the souls of those who depart this life in the grate of God suffer for a time, in ex piation of their venial transgressions or in un dergoing the penalty due to mortal sins, the guilt and eternal punishment of which have been remitted. Hence purgatory is not a place or state of probation: for the souls in purga tory the time of probation is past, and they are already assured of their everlasting bliss in heaven, though as yet they are not sufficiently pure and holy to be admitted to the vision of God. The dogmatic teaching of the Church goes only so far as to declare that, (1) there is a purgatorium (place of purification), and (2) that the souls therein are aided by the prayers of their brethren on earth. But though the definitive teaching of the Church stops here, the speculations of divines, the meditations of spiritual men and the beliefs of the general mass of the faithful go much further, and have developed an idea of purgatory which is very much more definite. Thomas Aquinas and Suarez, among the greatest lights of the theo logical schools, teach that instantly after passing out of the present life, the faithful souls are cleansed from the stains of all venial sin by their turning with perfect love to God; at the same time the debt of the temporal penalties of sin, whether mortal or venial, has still to be paid. Theologians formerly taught that the
purgation was by material fire, but this view has been widely modified. While confessedly the doctrine of purgatory is not clearly and unequivocally deducible from any passage of the universally accepted books either of the Hebrew or the Christian Scriptures (for Mac cabees is not received by all as canonical, and passages of the New Testament which Catholics believe to point decisively to this doctrine have no such signification for Protestants), it is ad mitted on all sides that in the very earliest church liturgies that are extant are found forms of prayer for the dead, and that the existence of an intermediate state after death is taught by the fathers both Eastern and Western with practical unanimity, so far at least as to admit that the dead can be aided by the prayers of the living. Buddhists, Theosophists and many others teach of a region where discarnate souls are purified before they can go higher.