Now, let not my Protestant readers wonder how sensible men can be induced, by such ephemeral and ill-founded hopes, to disinherit their families in order to enrich these hypocritical monks. They must remember that the Romish believer views these matters in quite a different light from that in which they see them. Masses and prayers are, in his belief, not only useful, but indispensable. For lack of them he would writhe for centuries amid the tormenting fires of purgatory, the purifying pains of which are described by his priest, with appalling eloquence, as being far more excruciating than those of hell. According to the doctrine of his Church, every soul (one in a million only excepted) who is not eternally damned, must, ere it enter heaven, pass a certain time in this abode of torture for the expiation of its sins. And let him not take comfort from the fact that his conscience does not reproach him with the commission of any heinous crime. The catalogue of sins by which he may be shut out from eternal blessedness is made artfully long, and detailed with great minuteness. The most upright and pious of men must condemn himself as a presumptuous sinner if he for an instant harbours the hope of escaping the purifying fire. So he becomes quite resigned to his fate, and all his care in this life is, how to appease the Divine anger, and shorten the period of his exclusion from heaven. This he is taught to do—not by trusting to the righteousness of Jesus Christ, with the true repentance which manifests itself through a holy life, but by accumulating on his head hundreds of masses and millions of days of indulgence. Hence the innumerable masses and prayers which he sends before him during his life, as if to forestall his future punishment, and bribe the Divine justice. And when the terrible moment arrives—that moment in which he is about to appear before the awful Judge, beneath whose searching eye his most secret thoughts lie bare—when, trembling at the strict account that is about to be demanded of him, his fears represent to his excited imagination the most trifling shortcomings as mortal sins—when, with the decline of bodily strength, his enfeebled mind becomes more easily worked upon—then does his Jesuit confessor, his generous master, his kind, disinterested friend, come to give him the last proof of his ever-growing affection. He seats himself at his bedside, and, serpent-like, under pretence of inducing him to repent of his sins, he draws him a fearful and impressive picture of the torments which await the damned. He descants to him with oily sanctity upon the enormity of offending the Divine Saviour, who shed his precious blood to redeem us. He terrifies him with the Almighty’s implacable vengeance; and when his victim, choked with heart-rending agony, distracted, despairing of his ultimate salvation, is ready to curse God, and set his power and anger at defiance—then, and not till then, does the Jesuit relent. Now he