'totos infusa per artus
Mens agitat molem, et toto se corpore miscet;'
to mark the universal soul of the world, which he believed with the greater part of the philosophers of his time.
"Again, it was a common error amongst the pagans, to believe that the souls of those who died before they were of their proper age, which they placed at the end of their growth, wandered about until the time came when they ought naturally to be separated from their bodies. Plato, more penetrating and better informed than the others, although like them mistaken, said, that the souls of the just who had obeyed virtue ascended to the sky; and that those who had been guilty of impiety, retaining still the contagion of the earthly matter of the body, wandered incessantly around the tombs, appearing like shadows and phantoms.
"For us, whom religion teaches that our souls are spiritual substances created by God, and united for a time to bodies, we know that there are three different states after death.
"Those who enjoy eternal beatitude, absorbed, as the holy doctors say, in the contemplation of the glory of God, cease not to interest themselves in all that concerns mankind, whose miseries they have undergone; and as they have attained the happiness of angels, all the sacred writers ascribe to them the same privilege of possessing the power, as aërial bodies, of rendering themselves visible to their brethren who are still upon earth, to console them, and inform them of the Divine will; and they relate several apparitions, which always happened by the particular permission of God.
"The souls whose abominable crimes have plunged them into that gulf of torment, which the Scripture terms hell, being condemned to be detained there forever, without being able to hope for any relief, care not to have permission to come and speak to mankind in fantastic forms. The Scripture clearly set forth the impossibility of this return, by the discourse which is put into the mouth of the wicked rich man in hell, introduced speaking to Abraham; he does not ask leave to go himself, to warn his brethren on earth to avoid the torments which he suffers, because he knows that it is not possible; but he implores Abraham to send thither Lazarus, who was in glory. And to observe en passant how very rare are the apparitions of the blessed and of angels, Abraham replies to him, that it would be useless, since those who are upon earth have the Law and the Prophets, which they have but to follow.
"The story of the canon of Rheims, in the eleventh century, who, in the midst of the solemn service which was being performed for the repose of his soul, spoke aloud and said, That he was sentenced and condemned,[[664]] has been refuted by so many of the learned, who have shown that this circumstance is clearly supposititious, since it is not found in any contemporaneous author; that I think no enlightened person can object it against me. But even were this story as incontestable as it is apocryphal, it would be easy for me to say in reply, that the conversion of St. Bruno, who has won so many souls to God, was motive enough for the Divine Providence to perform so striking a miracle.
"It now remains for me to examine if the souls which are in purgatory, where they expiate the rest of their crimes before they pass to the abode of the blessed, can come and converse with men, and ask them to pray for their relief.
"Although those who have desired to maintain this popular error, have done their endeavors to support it by different passages from St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and St. Thomas, it is certain that all these fathers speak only of the return of the blessed to manifest the glory of God; and of St. Augustine says precisely, that if it were possible for the souls of the dead to appear to men, not a day would pass without his receiving a visit from Monica his mother.
"Tertullian, in his Treatise on the Soul, laughs at those who in his time believed in apparitions. St. John Chrysostom, speaking on the subject of Lazarus, formally denies them; as well as the law glossographer, Canon John Andreas, who calls them phantoms of a sickly imagination, and all that is reported about spirits which people think they hear or see, vain apparitions. The 7th chapter of Job, and the song of King Hezekiah, reported in the 38th chapter of Isaiah, are all full of the witnesses which the Holy Spirit seems to have desired to give us of this truth, that our souls cannot return to earth after our death until God has made them angels.