Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/57

Rh The Prussian Government also exercises a certain control over the appointment of the professors. As an illustration of the sort of knowledge and intellectual discipline acquired in this academy, which has nearly five hundred students and about fifty professors, we may cite a course of lectures delivered in the summer semester of 1897 by Prof. Joseph Bautz on Die Lehre von den letzten Dingen, or the doctrine of the last day, including the dogmas of the Romish Church concerning the final judgment, purgatory, heaven, and hell. On each of these subjects Professor Bautz has already published a little volume, issued at Mainz with the approbation of the bishop, and therefore containing views accepted by the highest ecclesiastical authorities as orthodox. His positive knowledge of the topography of the infernal, purgatorial, and celestial regions is most remarkable, and can hardly fail to excite the amazement and admiration of the young candidates for holy orders who listen to his academical lectures. Purgatory, he tells us, is three stories high and all aglow with flames, which, however, are rather light-colored and pinkish in contrast with the dark-red and lurid fires of hell. The lower story of purgatory borders on hell, while the upper story is near the gates of heaven. Thus the same fire, although in different intensity, serves to torture the damned and to purge the just. This arrangement, he adds, is such as we should naturally expect from the all-wise God, who avoids superfluities and chooses the simplest and most economical way of accomplishing his eternal purposes; and it is also confirmed by the testimony of Mechthild of Magdeburg, St. Brigitta, and of a vision recorded by the Venerable Bede. The professor's so-called "facts" which he is constantly and copiously citing in proof of his theses consist almost wholly of what he terms "visions and private revelations" or what the carnal-minded scientist would dismiss with contempt as the wild dreams and morbid imaginations and "airy nothings" of ecstatic saints and hysterical nuns. Thus, as regards the duration of purgatory, he says, Catharine Emmerich speaks of souls compelled to remain in that place for centuries; according to Marina of Escobar, the average time seems to be at least from ten to twenty and fifty years or more; but Francisca of the Holy Sacrament was visited by pious Carmelite nuns, who had been in purgatorial fires for sixty years and expected to abide there much longer. A little girl, who died when she was eight years old, had been in purgatory sixteen years when last heard from through "the apparition of 1870"; this same authority, frequently adduced by the learned professor, states that some souls are not released from purgatorial punishment until the end of the world.

How material fire can affect disembodied spirits, and whether