An entire literature of visions describing the torments of hell, was soon produced by the industry of the monks. The apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, which purported to describe the descent of Christ into the lower world, contributed to foster it, and St. Gregory the Great has related many visions in a more famous work, which professed to be compiled with scrupulous veracity from the most authentic sources, and of which it may be confidently averred, that it scarcely contains a single page which is not tainted with grotesque and deliberate falsehood. Men, it was said, passed into a trance or temporary death, and were then carried for a time to hell. Among others, a certain man named Stephen, from whose lips the saint declares that he had heard the tale, had died by mistake. When his soul was borne to the gates of hell, the Judge declared that it was another Stephen who was wanted; the disembodied spirit, after inspecting hell, was restored to its former body, and the next day it was known that another Stephen had died.2 Volcanoes were the portals of hell, and a hermit had seen the soul of the Arian emperor Theodoric, as St. Eucherius afterwards did the soul of Charles Martel, carried down that in the Island of Lipari. The craters in Sicily, it was remarked, were continually agitated and continually increasing, and this, as St. Gregory observes, was probably due to the are perplexed about it, on account of the vision of another saint, who afterwards asked whether Trajan was saved, and received for answer, 'I wish men to rest in ignorance of this subject, that the Catholics may become stronger. For this emperor, though he had great virtues, was an unbaptised infidel.' The whole subject of the vision of St. Gregory is discussed by Champagny, Les Antonins, tome i. pp. 372-373. This devout writer says, 'Cette légende fut acceptée par tout le moyen-âge, indulgent pour les païens illustres et tout disposé à les supposer chrétiens et sauvés.'

1 See the solemn asseveration of the care which he took in going only to the most credible and authorised sources for his materials, in the Preface to the First Book of Dialogues.

2 Dial. iv. 36.

3 Dial. iv. 30.

impending ruin of the world, when the great press of lost souls would render it necessary to enlarge the approaches to their prisons.1

But the glimpses of hell that are furnished in the 'Dialogues' of St. Gregory appear meagre and unimaginative, compared with those of some later monks. A long series of monastic visions, of which that of St. Fursey, in the seventh century, was one of the first, and which followed in rapid succession, till that of Tundale, in the twelfth century, professed to describe with the most detailed accuracy the condition of the lost. It is impossible to conceive more ghastly, grotesque, and material conceptions of the future world than they evince, or more hideous calumnies against that Being who was supposed to inflict upon His creatures such unspeakable misery. The devil was represented bound by red-hot chains, on a burning gridiron in the centre of hell. The screams of his never-ending agony made its rafters to resound; but his hands were free, and with these he seized the lost souls, crushed them like grapes against his teeth, and then drew them by his breath down the fiery cavern of his throat. Dæmons with hooks of red-hot iron plunged souls alternately into fire and ice. Some of the lost were hung up by their tongues, other were sawn asunder,

1 Dial. iv. 35.

2 The fullest collection of these visions with which I am acquainted, is that made for the Philobiblon Society (vol. ix.), by M. Delepierre, called L'Enfer décrit par ceux qui l'ont vu, of which I have largely availed myself. See, too, Wright's Purgatory of St. Patrick, and an interesting collection of visions given by Mr. Longfellow, in his translation of Dante. In an older work, Rusca De Inferno, there is, I believe, a complete collection of these visions, but it has not come in my way. The Irish saints were, I am sorry to say, prominent in producing this branch of literature. St. Fursey, whose vision is one of the earliest, and Tondale, or Tundale, whose vision is one of the most detailed, were both Irish. The English historians contain several of these visions. Bede relates two or three-William of Malmesbury that of Charles the Fat; Mathew Paris three visions of purgatory.

others gnawed by serpents, others beaten together on an anvil and welded into a single mass, others boiled and then strained through a cloth, others twined in the embraces of dæmons whose limbs were of flame. The fire of earth, it was said, was but a picture of that of hell. The latter was so immeasurably more intense, that it alone could be called real. Sulphur was mixed with it, partly to increase its heat, and partly, too, in order that an insufferable stench might be added to the misery of the lost, while, unlike other flames, it emitted, according to some visions, no light, that the horror of darkness might be added to the horror of pain. A narrow bridge spanned the abyss, and from it the souls of sinners were plunged into the darkness that was below.'

Such catalogues of horrors, though they now awake in an educated man a sentiment of mingled disgust, weariness, and contempt, were able for many centuries to create a degree of panic and of misery we can scarcely realise. With the exception of the heretic Pelagius, whose noble genius, anticipating the discoveries of modern science, had repudiated the theological notion of death having been introduced into the world on account of the act of Adam, it was universally held among Christians, that all the forms of suffering and dissolution that are manifested on earth were penal inflictions. The destruction of the world was generally believed to be at hand. The minds of men were filled with the images of the approaching catastrophe, and innumerable legends of visible dæmons were industriously circulated. It was the custom then, as it is the custom now, for Catholic

1 The narrow bridge over hell (in some visions covered with spikes), which is a conspicuous feature in the Mohammedan pictures of the future world, appears very often in Catholic visions. See Greg. Tur. iv. 33; St. Greg. Dial. iv. 36; and the vision of Tundale, in Delepierre.

priests to stain the imaginations of young children by ghastly pictures of future misery, to imprint upon the virgin mind atrocious images which they hoped, not unreasonably, might prove indelible. In hours of weakness and of sickness their overwrought fancy seemed to see hideous beings hovering around, and hell itself yawning to receive its victim. St. Gregory describes how a monk, who though apparently a man of exemplary and even saintly piety, had been accustomed secretly to eat meat, saw on his deathbed a fearful dragon twining its tail round his body, and with open jaws sucking his breath;2 and how a little boy of five years old, who had learnt from his

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1 Few Englishmen, I imagine, are aware of the infamous publications written with this object, that are circulated by the Catholic priests among the poor. I have before me a tract for children and young persons,' called The Sight of Hell, by the Rev. J. Furniss, C.S.S.R., published, 'permissu superiorum,' by Duffy (Dublin and London). It is a detailed description of the dungeons of hell, and a few sentences may serve as a sample. 'See! on the middle of that red-hot floor stands a girl; she looks about sixteen years old. Her feet are bare. She has neither shoes nor stockings. . . . Listen! she speaks. She says, I have been standing on this red-hot floor for years. Day and night my only standing-place has been this red-hot floor. . . . Look at my burnt and bleeding feet. Let me go off this burning floor for one moment, only for one single short moment. . . . The fourth dungeon is the boiling kettle . . . in the middle of it there is a boy. . . . His eyes are burning like two burning coals. Two long flames come out of his ears. . . . Sometimes he opens his mouth, and blazing fire rolls out. But listen! there is a sound like a kettle boiling. . . . The blood is boiling in the scalded veins of that boy. The brain is boiling and bubbling in his head. The marrow is boiling in his bones. The fifth dungeon is the red-hot oven. . . . The little child is in this red-hot oven. Hear how it screams to come out. See how it turns and twists itself about in the fire. It beats its head against the roof of the oven. It stamps its little feet on the floor. . . . God was very good to this child. Very likely God saw it would get worse and worse, and would never repent, and so it would have to be punished much more in hell. So God in his mercy called it out of the world in its early childhood.' If the reader desires to follow this subject further, he may glance over a companion tract by the same reverend gentleman, called A Terrible Judgment on a Little Child; and also a book on Hell, translated from the Italian of Pinamonti, and with illustrations depicting the various tortures.

2 St. Greg. Dial. iv. 38.

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father to repeat blasphemous words, saw, as he lay dying, exulting dæmons who were waiting to carry him to hell.1 To the jaundiced eye of the theologian, all nature seemed stricken and forlorn, and its brightness and beauty suggested no ideas but those of deception and of sin. The redbreast, according to one popular legend, was commissioned by the Deity to carry a drop of water to the souls of unbaptised infants in hell, and its breast was singed in piercing the flames.2 In the calm, still hour of evening, when the peasant boy asked why the sinking sun, as it dipped beneath the horizon, flushed with such a glorious red, he was answered, in the words of an old Saxon catechism, because it is then looking into hell.3

It is related in the vision of Tundale, that as he gazed upon the burning plains of hell, and listened to the screams of ceaseless and hopeless agony that were wrung from the sufferers, the cry broke from his lips, Alas, Lord, what truth is there in what I have so often heard -the earth is filled with the mercy of God?'4 It is indeed one of the most curious things in moral history, to observe how men who were sincerely indignant with Pagan writers for attributing to their divinities the frailties of an occasional jealousy or an occasional sensuality, for

1 Ibid. iv. 18.

2 Alger's History of the Doctrine of a Future Life (New York, 1866), p. 414. The ignis fatuus was sometimes supposed to be the soul of an unbaptised child. There is, I believe, another Catholic legend about the redbreast, of a very different kind-that its breast was stained with blood when it was trying to pull out the thorns from the crown of Christ.

3

s Wright's Purgatory of St. Patrick, p. 26. M. Delepierre quotes a curious theory of Father Hardouin (who is chiefly known for his suggestion that the classics were composed by the mediæval monks) that the rotation of the earth is caused by the lost souls trying to escape from the fire that is at the centre of the globe, climbing, in consequence, on the inner crust of the earth, which is the wall of hell, and thus making the whole revolve, as the squirrel by climbing turns its cage! (L'Enfer décrit par ceux qui l'ont vu, p. 151.) Delepierre, p. 70.