The Doctrine of Purgatory by C. M. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Dec 10, 1914

The Doctrine of Purgatory

By C. M. S.

“Rome Never Changes”—No. 5

The Doctrine of Purgatory

The old hymn reads:—

“There is a fountain filled with blood,     Drawn from Immanuel’s veins; And sinners plunged beneath that flood     Lose all their guilty stains.”

The sentiment of the hymn is true. It is in harmony with this scripture:—

“If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.” 1 John 1:7.

There is no limitation placed upon the power of that blood to cleanse. The death of Christ—the just for the unjust—makes possible the salvation of every soul that has ever entered this world. If all are not saved, that does not argue the insufficiency of that fountain of cleansing. The acceptance of that cleansing is not compulsory, and they who do not choose to accept are lost.

The precious blood shed on Calvary is able to wash out all sin; but the sinner must choose its cleansing if it is to be efficacious in his behalf. No other sacrifice is necessary, and no other sacrifice can be either acceptable to God or effective in removing the stain of sin.

All through the old dispensation the blood of bulls, of goats, and of lambs prefigured the shedding of the blood of Jesus Christ, the sacrificial Lamb of God. Those victims pointed forward to him. While their blood could not take away sin, it could speak of that all-sufficient Sacrifice, and of the blood of that Sacrifice, which was to be shed for the remission of the sins of the race.

The text declares that the blood of Jesus “cleanseth us from all sin.” The writer of Hebrews declares: “Now once

at the end of the ages hath he [Jesus] been manifested to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.” Heb. 9:26. The Bible does not divide sin into “venial” (insignificant) and “mortal” (aggravated), as does the Roman Church. With the great Judge, sin is sin. Christ was sacrificed “to put away sin,” all sin; and his blood was shed in order that those who desire to accept its washing may be cleansed from “all sin.”

The Word of God recognizes no other Saviour than Jesus, no other sin-cleansing blood than his, no other sacrifice for the removal of sin than his sacrifice. “In that day,” says the prophet, “there shall be a fountain opened to the house of David and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, for sin and for uncleanness.” Zech. 13:1. That means a place of cleansing, and that fountain is the blood of the Lamb of God, slain, in symbol, from the days of Adam. That is the true purgatory; for purgatory means a place of cleansing.

In such a purgatory, in such a fountain, the apostolic church believed and trusted for cleansing, and the Inspired Record tells us of no other. It was several hundred years this side of the cross that the purgatory in which all the heathen world believed began to be brought into the Christian church.

Today the doctrine of purgatory as a place of fearful torment is one of the fundamental tenets of the Roman Catholic Church. On the subject of purgatory the Council of Trent (1545-63) decreed as follows:—

If any one saith that, after the grace of justification has been received, to every penitent sinner the guilt is remitted, and the debt of eternal punishment is blotted out in such wise that there remains not any debt of temporal punishment to be discharged either in this world or in the next in purgatory, before the entrance to the kingdom of heaven can be opened (to him); let him be anathema.—Council of Trent, sess. vi, can. 30.

That is to say: if after you have confessed your sin to God, as he invites you to do, you claim to be fully and completely forgiven, as God declares you are, the Roman Catholic Church declares that you are cursed (anathema); and she pronounces her curse upon you. Cardinal O’Connell, of Boston, in his book “The Catholic Church the True Church of the Bible,” makes this declaration concerning purgatory:—

It is of faith that there is a place, which we call purgatory, where petty faults, or the temporal punishment due to sin, are expiated.—Page 178.

If “it is of faith,” as the cardinal says, then it is necessary for every soul to believe it, or be classed as a heretic and suffer whatever penalty the Church of Rome may feel itself able to inflict. Cardinal Bellarmine considers a belief in the purgatory of the Roman Church so important that its denial can be expiated only amid the flames of hell. See “The Papacy” (Wylie), page 349.

If it be true that Rome never changes, then we should expect to find that the belief in purgatory, as now held by the Roman Church, had been held by that church from its earliest days. But what are the facts in reference to this tenet of the Roman creed?

There is no text of Scripture which can be even tortured into teaching the doctrine of purgatory as held by the Roman Church. The apostolic writers have nothing to say of it. The early Fathers of the Catholic Church are silent in reference to such a doctrine. Somewhere between the days of the last apostle and our day the Church of Rome brought in that doctrine, and when she did that, she made a most radical change. It will be interesting at this point to note a rather frank and somewhat startling admission by Roman authorities in reference to this matter. The Benedictine editors of the works of Bishop Ambrose (who lived A. D. 340-397) make the following acknowledgment:—

It is not surprising that Ambrose should have written as he has about the state of departed souls; but it seems to be almost incredible how uncertain and how various the holy Fathers have been upon the same question from the very time of the apostles to the pontificate of Gregory XI [A. D. 1370], and the Council of Florence [A. D. 1439]—that is, the period of almost fourteen hundred years. For not only does one Father differ from another, as in questions not yet defined by the church was likely to happen, but they are not even found to be consistent with themselves.—“Works of St. Ambrose,” Vol. I, page 385, Admonitio ad Lectorem. Edit. Bened. Parisiis, 1686.

Then, according to this admission, there was a period of nearly fourteen hundred years during which there was no definite ground taken, no generally accepted teaching of the Roman Church, in the matter of purgatory or the state of the dead. Origen put forth the theory that all, including the apostles and even the devil, would go through a fire and be ultimately saved; but the Fifth General Council (A. D. 553) condemned his theory. The purgatory idea was then beginning to work itself into the church. St. Augustine denounced that innovation in the following words:—

The Catholic faith, resting on divine authority, believes the first place the kingdom of heaven, and the second hell. A third place we are wholly ignorant of; yea, we shall find in Scripture that it is not.—Aug. Hypog. 1. 5. Tom. VII. Basil, 1529.

No teacher of the Catholic Church kept nearer to the Scripture, in his teaching, than did Augustine. He could not find the third place—purgatory—in the Bible, and therefore rejected the idea, and opposed the efforts of others to fasten that doctrine upon the church. That brings the church well into the fifth century, on Augustine’s testimony, without any semblance of a purgatory such as Rome, under threat of a curse, forces her members to believe in today; and the testimony of the Benedictine editors of St. Ambrose’s Works proves that there was no certainty concerning it up to the time of Pope Gregory XI (A. D. 1370), and no acceptance of it as a doctrine of the church until the Council of Florence acted upon it in the year 1439. Thus for fourteen hundred years the Roman Catholic Church, according to Roman Catholic testimony, did not have the doctrine of purgatory as one of the tenets of its faith. Now any who do not believe in it are cursed with a curse. What about the millions of Roman Catholics who died during those first fourteen hundred years, refusing to believe in purgatory? Logically we must conclude that they are all in that place to which Cardinal Bellarmine consigns such unbelievers, and resting under the curse which the Council of Trent pronounces upon them.

The testimony of the Benedictine editors, previously quoted, is of great importance in this question of the unchangeableness of Rome. Note again their declaration: “It seems to be almost incredible how uncertain and how various the holy Fathers have been. . . . For not only does one Father [pope] differ from another, . . . but they are not even found to be consistent with themselves.” Certainly there is no “unanimous consent of the ‘Fathers’” there, which is held to be so essential to the establishment of doctrine; and that admission proves at the same time that Rome was continually changing, upon this question at least, from the days of her first Fathers until 1439.

The acceptance of the heathen belief in purgatory as a tenet of Catholic faith came as one of those disastrous climaxes of the policy of the Roman Church in the Dark Ages. Shut away from the Bible as a dangerous book, and surrounded by the multifarious beliefs and cults of heathenism, it is not strange that heathenism should sweep into the church as an overwhelming flood. That is what did take place, until the doctrines of the heathen world became crystallized into ecclesiastical dogmas, and practically every striking belief of heathendom was sprinkled with holy water and given a Christian name—a pseudonym.

Thus in the matter of purgatory Rome did change. It was a most radical change, so radical that she cursed with a curse the belief of her own founders. What they believed she anathematizes; what they did not believe she exalts into a dogma of the church and forces belief in it under threat of damnation. If the Roman Church is founded upon Peter

and every Pope is a successor of Peter, then Peter has been of very uncertain opinion and of very changeable faith since he was “given the keys of the kingdom of heaven.” But the apostle Peter is in no way responsible for this. While he sleeps, awaiting the call to life of his blessed Master, the enemy has been sowing tares in his name, and charging the crop to him. C. M. S.