It is interesting to note how considerably subsequent to the practice is, in this instance also, its clear doctrinal justification. Indeed the Jews are, to this hour, extraordinarily deficient in explicit, harmonious conceptions on the matter. Certainly throughout Prof. W. Bacher’s five volumes of Sayings of the Jewish Rabbis from 30 B.C. to 400 A.D., I can only find the following saying, by Jochanan the Amoraean, who died 279 A.D.: “There are three books before God, in which men are inscribed according to their merit and their guilt: that of the perfectly devout, that of the perfect evil-doers, and that of the middle, the uncertain souls. The devout and the evil-doers receive their sentence on New Year’s day … the first, unto life; the second, unto death. As to middle souls, their sentence remains in suspense till the day of Atonement: if by then they have done penance, they get written down alongside of the devout; if not, they are written down alongside of the evil-doers.”[255] 2. _Alexandrine Fathers on Purgatory._ Yet it is the Platonizing Alexandrian Fathers Clement and Origen, (they died, respectively, in about 215 and in 254 A.D.), who are the first, and to this hour the most important, Christian spokesmen for a state of true intrinsic purgation. We have already deliberately rejected their Universalism; but this error in no way weakens the profound truth of their teaching as to the immanental, necessary inter-connection between suffering and morally imperfect habits, and as to the ameliorative effects of suffering where, as in Purgatory, it is willed by a right moral determination. Thus Clement: “As children at the hands of their teacher or father, so also are we punished by Providence. God does not avenge Himself, for vengeance is to repay evil by evil, but His punishment aims at our good.” “Although a punishment, it is an emendation of the soul.” “The training which men call punishments.”[256] And Origen: “The fury of God’s vengeance profits unto the purification of souls; the punishment is unto purgation.” “These souls receive, in the prison, not the retribution of their folly, but a benefaction in the purification from the evils contracted in that folly,--a purification effected by means of salutary troubles.”[257] Now Clement is fully aware of the chief source for his formulation of these deeply spiritual and Christian instincts and convictions. “Plato speaks well when he teaches that ‘men who are punished, experience in truth a benefit: for those who get justly punished, profit through their souls becoming better.’”[258] But Plato, in contradistinction from Clement, holds that this applies only to such imperfect souls as “have sinned curable sins”; he has a Hell as well as a Purgatory: yet his Purgatory, as Clement’s, truly purges: the souls are there because they are partially impure, and they cease to be there when they are completely purified.