15 Wright, St. Patrick's Purgatory: an Essay on the Legends of Paradise, Hell, and Purgatory, current during the Middle Ages.
16 Patuzzi, De Sede inferni in Terris quarenda.
a solid central sphere of fire the flaming nucleus of Gehenna two thousand miles in diameter. Secondly, there shall roll around this central ball on all sides an ignited ocean of liquid fire two thousand miles in depth, the peculiar residence of the wicked, the sulphurous lake spoken of in the Apocalypse. Thirdly, around this infernal sea a vast spherical arch will hang, a thousand miles thick, a massive and unbroken shell, through which there are no spiracles, and whose external surface, beautiful beyond conception, becomes the heaven of the redeemed, where Christ himself, perfect man as well as perfect God, fixes his residence and establishes the local sovereignty of the Universal Archangel." 17 A comfortable thought it must be for the saints, as they roam the flowery fields, basking in immortal bliss, to remember that under the crust they tread, a soundless sea of fire is forever plunging on its circular course, all its crimson waves packed with the agonized faces of the damned as thick as drops! The whole scheme is without real foundation. Science laughs at such a theory. Its scriptural supports are either ethnic figments or rhetorical tropes. Reason, recollecting the immateriality of the soul, dissipates the ghastly dream beyond the possibility of restoration to belief.
Following the historic locations of the abode of departed souls, we next ascend from the interior of the earth, and above the surface of the earth, into the air and the lofty realms of ether. The ancient Caledonians fixed the site of their spirit world in the clouds. Their bards have presented this conception in manifold forms and with the most picturesque details. In tempests the ghosts of their famous warriors ride on the thunderbolts, looking on the earth with eyes of fire, and hurling lances of lightning. They float over the summits of the hills or along the valleys in wreaths of mist, on vapory steeds, waving their shadowy arms in the moonlight, the stars dimly glimmering through their visionary shapes. The Laplanders also placed their heaven in the upper air, where the Northern Lights play. They regarded the auroral streamers as the sport of departed spirits in the happy region to which they had risen. Such ideas, clad in the familiar imagery furnished by their own climes, would naturally be suggested to the ignorant fancy, and easily commended to the credulous thoughts, of the Celts and Finns. Explanation and refutation are alike unnecessary.
Plutarch describes a theory held by some of the ancients locating hell in the air, elysium in the moon.18 After death all souls are compelled to spend a period in the region between the earth and the moon, the wicked in severe tortures and for a longer time, the good in a mild discipline soon purging away all their stains and fitting them for the lunar paradise. After tarrying a season there, they were either born again upon the earth, or transported to the divine realm of the sun. Macrobius, too, says, "The Platonists reckon as the infernal
17 Part iv. chap. ix. p. 417. Dr. Cumming (The End, Lect. X.) teaches the doctrine of the literal resurrection of the flesh, and the subsequent residence of the redeemed on this globe as their eternal heaven under the immediate rule of Christ. Quite a full detail of the historic and present belief in this scheme may be found in the recent work of its earnest advocate, D. T. Taylor, The Voice of the Church on the Coming of the Redeemer, or a History of the Doctrine of the Reign of Christ on Earth.
18 In his Essay on the Face in the Orb of the Moon.
region the whole space between the earth and the moon."19 He also adds, "The tropical signs Cancer and Capricorn are called the gates of the sun, because there he meets the solstice and can go no farther. Cancer is the gate of men, because by it is the descent to the lower regions; Capricorn is the gate of gods, because by it is a return for souls to the rank of gods in the seat of their proper immortality." 20 The Manicheans taught that souls were borne to the moon on leaving their bodies, and there washed from their sins in water, then taken to the sun and further cleansed in fire. They described the moon and sun as two splendid ships prepared for transferring souls to their native country, the world of perfect light in the heights of the creation.21
The ancient Hebrews thought the sky a solid firmament overarching the earth, and supporting a sea of inexhaustible waters, beyond which God and his angels dwelt in monopolized splendor. Eliphaz the Temanite says, "Is not God in the height of heaven? And behold the stars, how high they are; but he walketh upon the arch of heaven!" And Job says, "He covereth the face of his throne, and spreadeth his clouds under it. He hath drawn a circular bound upon the waters to the confines of light and darkness." From the dazzling realm above this supernal ocean all men were supposed, until after the resurrection of Christ, to be excluded. But from that time the belief gradually spread in Christendom that a way was open for faithful souls to ascend thither. Ephraim the Syrian,22 and Ambrose, located paradise in the outermost East on the highest summit of the earth, stretching into the serene heights of the sky. The ancients often conceived the universe to form one solid whole, whose different provinces were accessible from each other to gods and angels by means of bridges and golden staircases. Hence the innumerable paradisal legends associated with the mythic mountains of antiquity, such as Elborz, Olympus, Meru, and Kaf. Among the strange legends of the Middle Age, Gervase of Tilbury preserves the following one, illustrative of this belief in a sea over the sky: "One Sunday the people of an English village were coming out of church, a dark, gloomy day, when they saw the anchor of a ship hooked to one of the tombstones, the cable, tightly stretched, hanging down the air. Presently they saw a sailor sliding down the rope to unfix the anchor. When he had just loosened it the villagers seized hold of him; and, while in their hands, he quickly died, as though he had been drowned!" There is also a famous legend called "St. Brandon's Voyage." The worthy saint set sail from the coast of Ireland, and held on his way till he arrived at the moon, which he found to be the location of hell. Here he saw Judas Iscariot in execrable tortures, regularly respited, however, every week from Saturday eve till Sunday eve!
The thought so entirely in accordance with the first impression made by the phenomenon of the night sky on the ignorant senses and imagination that the stars are set in a firm revolving dome, has widely prevailed; and the thought that heaven lies beyond that solid arch, in the unknown space is a popular notion lingering still. The scriptural image declaring that the convulsions of the last day will shake the stars from their sockets in the