Indeed the general principle of ameliorative suffering is so obviously true and inexhaustibly profound that only many, long-lived abuses in the practice, and a frequent obscuration in the teaching, of the doctrine, can explain and excuse the sad neglect, indeed discredit, into which the very principle and root-doctrine has fallen among well-nigh one-half of Western Christendom. As to the deplorably widespread existence, at the time of the Protestant Reformation, of both these causes, which largely occasioned or strengthened each other, we have the unimpeachable authority of the Council of Trent itself: for it orders the Bishops “not to permit that uncertain doctrines, or such as labour under the presumption of falsity, be propagated and taught,” and “to prohibit, as so many scandals and stones of stumbling for the faithful, whatever belongs to a certain curiosity or superstition or savours of filthy lucre.”[251] The cautious admissions of the strictly Catholic scholar-theologian, Dr. N. Paulus, and the precise documentary additions and corrections to Paulus furnished, directly from the contemporary documents, by the fair-minded Protestant worker at Reformation History, Prof. T. Brieger, now furnish us, conjointly, with the most vivid and detailed picture of the sad subtleties and abuses which gave occasion to that Decree.[252] (3) _Catherine’s purgatorial conceptions avoid those causes. Her conceptions harbour two currents of thought._ It is surely not a small recommendation of Catherine’s mode of conceiving Purgatory, that it cuts, as we shall see, at the very root of those abuses. Yet we must first face certain opposite dangers and ambiguities which are closely intertwined with the group of terms and images taken over, for the purpose of describing an immanental Purgation, by her and her great Alexandrian Christian predecessors, from the Greek Heathen world. And only after the delimitation of the defect in the suggestions which still so readily operate from out of these originally Hellenic ideas, can we consider the difficulties and imperfections peculiar to the other, in modern times the predominant, element in the complete teaching as to the Middle State, an element mostly of Jewish and Roman provenance, and aiming at an extrinsically punitive conception. Both currents can be properly elucidated only if we first take them historically. 1. _Jewish prayers for the dead._