Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/448

 gans at times rebukingly asked the Christians why they had no certain representations,” because “one of the councils in Spain, the one at Elvira, which took place in the year 305, in its 36th rule directly forbade the use of images in temples. But: (a) first of all this rule incontestably proves that images were then in use in the churches; (b) this rule forbade men to represent upon the walls of the temples that which the Christians worshipped (quod colitur et adoratur), that is, as is assumed, to represent God in his substance, which is invisible and unrepresentable; (c) not improbable is another guess, which is, that the rule was enunciated in conformity with the conditions of place and time: in Spain just then raged the Diocletian persecution, and the Pagans, who frequently broke into the temples, desecrated the holy representations of the Lord and his saints, and so, in order to avoid that, this rule was adopted for a certain time.” (p. 584.)

257. Retribution to sinners: (a) their punishment in hell. “The sinners, suddenly after death and the private judgment, depart with their souls to a place of sorrow and grief.” (p. 584.)

Proofs from Holy Scripture. The place to which they depart is called the extreme darkness, a fiery furnace. Not all agree where that Gehenna is, but there are several subdivisions in hell: “It may be assumed that hell has its separate abodes, lockups, and dungeons of the souls, its separate divisions, of which one is properly called Hell, another Gehenna, a third Tartarus, a fourth a Fiery Lake, and so forth. At least there is in Revelation a passage where hell and the lake of fire are distinguished (Rev. xx. 13, 14). These unequal torments of the sinners in hell after the private judgment are not full and complete, but only anticipatory.”

Proofs from Holy Scripture.

258. (b) The possibility which some sinners have of receiving alleviation, and even immunity from the pun-