St. Thomas declares most plainly: “Venial guilt, in a soul which dies in a state of grace, is remitted after this life by the purging fire, because that pain, which is in some manner accepted by the will, has, in virtue of grace, the power of expiating all such guilt as can co-exist with a state of grace.” “After this life … there can be merit with respect to some accidental reward, so long as a man remains in some manner in a state of probation: and hence there can be meritorious acts in Purgatory, with respect to the remission of venial sin.”[277]--Dante (_d._ 1321) also appears, as Father Faber finely notes, to hold such a voluntary, immanental Purgatory, where the poet sees an Angel impelling, across the sea at dawn, a bark filled with souls bent for Purgatory: for the boat is described as driving towards the shore so lightly as to draw no wake upon the water.[278] Cardinal Bellarmine, perhaps the greatest of all anti-Protestant theologians (_d._ 1621) teaches that “venial sin is remitted in Purgatory _quoad culpam_,” and that “this guilt, as St. Thomas rightly insists, is remitted in Purgatory by an act of love and patient endurance.”[279] St. Francis of Sales, that high ascetical authority (_d._ 1622), declares: “By Purgatory we understand a place where souls undergo purgation, for a while, from the stains and imperfections which they have carried away with them from this mortal life.”[280] And recently and in England we have had Father Faber, Cardinal Manning, and Cardinal Newman, although differing from each other on many other points, fully united in holding and propagating this finely life-like, purgative conception of purgatory.[281] 7. _A final difficulty._ One final point concerning a Middle State. In the Synoptic tradition there is a recurrent insistence upon the forgiveness of particular sins, at particular moments, by particular human and divine acts of contrition and pardon. In the Purgatorial teaching the stress lies upon entire states and habits, stains and perversities of soul, and upon God’s general grace working, in and through immanently necessary, freely accepted sufferings, on to a slow purification of the complete personality. As Origen says: “The soul’s single acts, good or bad, go by; but, according to their quality, they give form and figure to to the mind of the agent, and leave it either good or bad, and destined for pains or for rewards.”[282]