Reformed Covenanter
Cancelled Commissioner
... We are obliged to nourish the peace of honest and pure Consciences, and of Souls truly penitent. They accuse us of lulling them asleep, and plunging them into Security. God is our Witness therein: We present to them just and lawful Terrors, by the sight of the Pains of Hell; but when they have escaped those Pains by a true Repentance, we would account a Cruelty to present to them other Pains of the same Nature, and declare them to be unavoidable.
If the Roman Church should teach this Dogma in good earnest, and that it were so believed: I maintain, it would be Impossible for their Faithful People to die without unimaginable Anguishes. A Moment in Purgatory is something more cruel than whole Years of the Gout, or Gravel, Colic, and all other Pains gathered together in some wretched Creature. How could a Man die with any tranquillity, being assured to fall into Torments so horrible and of so long continuance? If we must consider it as a Capital Crime, to make a poor Wretch suffer, without the Magistrates Order, Racks and dolorous Torments; We cannot behold it as a light thing to torment Souls so cruelly, without God’s Order, by the fear of an Imaginary Evil. ...
For more, see Pierre Jurieu on the cruelty of purgatory.
If the Roman Church should teach this Dogma in good earnest, and that it were so believed: I maintain, it would be Impossible for their Faithful People to die without unimaginable Anguishes. A Moment in Purgatory is something more cruel than whole Years of the Gout, or Gravel, Colic, and all other Pains gathered together in some wretched Creature. How could a Man die with any tranquillity, being assured to fall into Torments so horrible and of so long continuance? If we must consider it as a Capital Crime, to make a poor Wretch suffer, without the Magistrates Order, Racks and dolorous Torments; We cannot behold it as a light thing to torment Souls so cruelly, without God’s Order, by the fear of an Imaginary Evil. ...
For more, see Pierre Jurieu on the cruelty of purgatory.
