I regret it, because should any of his friends read that call after the interment of a respected and lamented friend, the feeling which it must create, will be to them unpleasant, and such as I would not desire to produce. I trust they will accept this explanation.

With the deceased prelate I had never the honor of an acquaintance, to him I bore no feeling of unkindness, I sympathize with his afflicted. relatives; but from his own act he made it necessary for me in the course of my previous letters to address many of my observations to him, as the leader of an host by which my Church was, as I conceive, without foundation or necessity assailed, by the recommendation of White's libelous production, as an accurate portrait of Catholicism, to the perusal of the Protestants of America. I am bound in charity to believe that Bishop Kemp in doing what deeply wounded a large and respectable portion of his fellow-citizens, acted according to his knowledge and conviction, and sense of duty. And when I an humble individual knew that knowledge to be delusion, that conviction to be unfounded, and that sense of duty to be erroneous; I did appeal to him for the correction of my statements, if in his power, the subversion of my principles, if they were not tenable, and the disproving of my conclusions, if they could be destroyed. I did so with freedom, and I hope without disrespect; I did so plainly, because the position which he had volunteered to occupy was that of a direct and open assailant of the line in which I am marshalled, and upon a post which I feel bound to defend. But although in the haste of furnishing these generally unrevised and uncorrected letters for publication, many expressions have escaped me, which I would upon a review suppress, and some of those be more harsh than I should desire to use, still I trust that at no moment has there been in my heart one movement towards this lamented individual which was inconsistent with kind and charitable feeling. He has passed away; called before a just and merciful God; who I should hope regarded him with that compassion which each of us would desire for himself; of course his name shall no more appear in these letters. Dr. Wilmer too, whose signature first stood at the head of the list is no more; I shall therefore in any appeal which I might feel it proper henceforth to make, address the survivors as a body, rather than select an individual as their representative. I felt it, if not required, to be at least a relief to myself to make this explanation, and shall now resume my task.

I have shown that the doctrines of the existence of Purgatory and of the power of the living to aid the souls therein detained by their suffrages, were held by the true Church of the Jews. I proceed now to show that the existence of Purgatory was held by the Gentiles, and

was one of the original doctrines of revelation. Previous to my entering upon this proof, I feel it necessary to lay down a few principles and to explain and exemplify them by facts.

My first principle is that since a true revealed religion existed before the art of writing was invented, revealed doctrines and their sufficient evidence might exist without having been committed to writing, and therefore we are not to reject a doctrine as not revealed upon the mere plea that it is not found testified in a written record. It is evident that previous to the days of Moses there were a variety of doctrines revealed by heaven, and believed by religious men; amongst others that of the immortality of the soul, and of a future state of rewards and punishments: Noe and his sons believed those doctrines, so did Abraham, so did Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and hundreds of others who never saw a book of Scripture.

I will next observe that those doctrines did not cease to be true, and revealed articles of faith, because at a subsequent period other truths were revealed and written, though these earlier articles should not have been written. I look upon this proposition to be so plain as to need no argument for its proof, because surely the truth of a fact or of a doctrine cannot depend upon the mere circumstance of its being written, otherwise none of the doctrines of our blessed Saviour Jesus Christ would have been true until from seven to ten years after his death, when St. Matthew wrote his Gospel; and several others would not have been true for about fifty years more, as there are several in the Gospel of St. John which had not been previously committed to writing. The finding of a doctrine written upon a proper and sufficient record is good evidence of its truth, but it is not the only sort of good evidence, otherwise the doctrines of Christ were preached by the Apostles without good evidence, and the revealed doctrines which were believed before the days of Moses were received by the faithful of that day without good evidence; whereas we know distinctly that those men who never saw a book of the Scriptures had sound faith and believed the revelation of God upon sufficient evidence, both previous to the time of Moses and from the death of Christ to the writing of the Gospels.

I will also state that it was not from the Pentateuch the Jewish people derived the knowledge of the immortality of the soul and of the rewards and punishments of a future state, and of a variety of the other essential and fundamental doctrines of religion, which had been revealed ages before the days of Moses, and believed by the people of Israel before his birth. He who would seek to find all those in the Pentateuch would return disappointed, for they had been revealed and

believed before it was written, and therefore were doctrines of early faith, and several of them were not written in that book, but did not cease therefore to be true, and to be a portion of revelation: but they were preserved in evidence, though not on the book, yet in the same manner that the evidence was preserved that the contents of the book were originally true and had been preserved unchanged.

I again assert that the great features of revealed religion, as it existed previous to the dispersion of Babel are to be found in all the various systems of Paganism to the coming of Christ. The Patriarchal race and others who were true and pure worshippers of God preserved them unaltered; the heathens only disfigured the doctrines, corrupted the practice of morality, and misapplied the ceremonial of worship, to which also they added much superstition. What I mean by the great features of revealed religion, are the existence of a Supreme Providential Being who ought to receive our homage, and who views our conduct, and will in a future state reward or punish us according to our desserts. The Heathen multiplied deities, and worshipped devils and not God: he assimilated the punishments of that future state and its rewards to what he found painful or pleasing here below: his principle that God ought to be worshiped by sacrifice, and so forth, was correct; but in applying the principle he erred. As regarded offences, they did not blend all transgressors into one heap for promiscuous damnation, but they made a classification of crimes, and of criminals, and according to this distinction, they as well as the Jew believed that there was to be eternal punishment for great delinquents, and only a temporary purgation for others. We find this distinction held by the Gentile world as far up as we can trace any satisfactory evidence upon the subject. I shall if required state many particulars of that evidence: at present, I merely exhibit the principle of the argument, and from a book lying before me I refer for the Greeks to Plato, in Phaedo, and Gorgias, where he gives the description of those who having lived in piety and justice, are immediately after death transported to the islands of the blessed; of those who having committed expiable offences are held in punishment until the guilt is cleared away; and of those whose crimes are incurable and who are cast into Tartarus to be punished for ever, but whose affliction profits nothing to themselves; but they are examples to others: and for the Romans to Cicero, Som. Scipionis, in fine, where he mentions a place of purgation. Claudian too gives us Purgatory.

Quos ubi per varios amnes per mille figuras,

Egit Lethaeo purgatos flumine.

In Ruffin. Book ii, v. 491.

In the sixth book of the Aeneid 37 we have very fine descriptions by Virgil of the three states, and corresponding pretty accurately with the doctrine of Plato. I shall merely give a short passage respecting each.

HELL.

"Dux inclyte Teucrum,

Nulli fas casto sceleratum insistere limen;

Sed me, cum lucis Hecate praefecit Avernis,

Ipsa Deum poenas docuit, perque omnia duxit.

Gnossius haec Rhadamanthus habet durissima regna,
Castigatque, auditque dolos: subigitque fateri
Quae quis apud superos, furto laetatus inani,
Distulit in seram commisso piacula mortem.
Continuo sontes ultrix accinta flagello
Tisiphone quatit insultans: torvosque sinistra
Intentans angues, vocat agmina saeva sororum.

Ne quaere doceri

Quam poenam; aut quae forma viros fortunave mersit.
Saxum ingens volvunt alii, radiisve rotarum

Districti pendent; sedet, aeternumque sedebit
Infelix Theseus; Phlegyasque miserrimus omnes
Admonet, et magna testatur voce per umbras:

'Discite justitiam moniti, et non temnere Divos.' "'

DRYDEN'S Translation.

The chaste, the holy race

Are all forbidden this polluted place,
But Hecate, when she gave to rule the woods,
Then led me trembling through the dire abodes,
And taught the tortures of the avenging Gods.
These are the realms of unrelenting fate;
And awful Rhadamanthus rules the State:
He hears and judges each committed crime;
Inquires into the manner, place, and time.
The conscious wretch must all his acts reveal:
Loth to confess, unable to conceal:
From the first moment of his vital breath,

To his last hour of unrepenting death.

Straight, o'er the guilty ghost, the fury shakes
The sounding whip, and brandishes her snakes;
And the pale sinner with her sisters takes.

Some roll a stone, rebounding down the hill,

Some hang suspended on the whirling wheel;
There Theseus groans in pains that ne'er expire,
Chained down for ever in a chair of fire;
There Phlegyas feels unutterable woe,
And roars incessant through the shades below:
Be just; ye mortals! by these torments awed,
These dreadful torments, not to scorn a God.

HEAVEN.

His demum exactis perfecto munere divae,
Devenere locos laetos, et amoena vireta
Fortunatorum nemorum, sedesque beatas.
Largior hic campos aether et lumine vestit
Purpuroe; Solemque suum, sua sidera norunt.

Hic manus, ob patriam pugnando vulnera passi,
Quique sacerdotes casti, dum vita manebat,
Quique pii vates, et Phoebo digna locuti,
Inventas ant qui vitam excoluere per artes,
Quique sui memores alios fecere merendo:
Omnibus his nivea cinguntur tempora vitta.

PITT's Translation.

These rites complete, they reach the flowery plains,
The verdant groves where endless pleasure reigns.
Here growing ether shoots a purple ray,
And o'er the region pours a double day,
From sky to sky the unwearied splendor runs,
And nobler planets roll round brighter suns.

DRYDEN'S Translation.

Here patriots live, who for their country's good,
In fighting fields were prodigal of blood;
Priests of um blemish'd lives here made abode,
And poets worthy their inspiring God:
And searching wits, of more mechanic parts,
Who grac'd their age with new invented arts,
Those who to worth their bounty did extend;
And those who knew that bounty to commend.
The heads of these with holy fillets bound

And all their temples were with garlands crown'd.

PURGATORY.

Igneus est illis vigor et coelestis origo

Quantum non noxia corpora tardant,

Terrenique hebetant artus, moribundaque membra.

Hinc metuunt cupiuntque; dolent gaudentque; neque auras

Dispiciunt, clausae tenebris et carcere caeco.

Quin et supremo cum lumine vita reliquit: