Oldham, in his "Satires upon the Jesuits," a work which would admit of a curious commentary, alludes to their "lying legends," and the innumerable impositions they practised on the credulous. I quote a few lines in which he has collected some of those legendary miracles, which I have noticed in the article LEGENDS, and the amours of the Virgin Mary are detailed in that on RELIGIOUS NOUVELLETTES.
Tell, how _blessed Virgin_ to come down was seen,
Like play-house punk descending in machine,
How she writ _billet-doux_ and _love-discourse_,
Made _assignations_, _visits_, and _amours_;
How hosts distrest, her _smock_ for _banner_ wore,
Which vanquished foes!
---- how _fish_ in conventicles met,
And _mackerel_ were with _bait of doctrine_ caught:
How cattle have judicious hearers been!--
How _consecrated hives_ with bells were hung,
And _bees_ kept mass, and holy _anthems sung_!
How _pigs_ to th' _rosary_ kneel'd, and _sheep_ were taught
To bleat _Te Deum_ and _Magnificat_;
How _fly-flap_, of church-censure houses rid
Of insects, which at _curse of fryar_ died.
How _ferrying cowls_ religious pilgrims bore
O'er waves, without the help of sail or oar;
How _zealous crab_ the _sacred image_ bore,
And swam a catholic to the distant shore.
With shams like these the giddy rout mislead,
Their folly and their superstition feed.
All these are allusions to the extravagant fictions in the "Golden Legend." Among other gross impositions to deceive the mob, Oldham likewise attacks them for certain publications on topics not less singular. The tales he has recounted, Oldham says, are only baits for children, like toys at a fair; but they have their profounder and higher matters for the learned and inquisitive. He goes on:--
One undertakes by scales of miles to tell
The bounds, dimensions, and extent of HELL;
How many German leagues that realm contains!
How many chaldrons Hell each year expends
In coals for roasting Hugonots and friends!
Another frights the rout with useful stories
Of wild chimeras, limbos--PURGATORIES--
Where bloated souls in smoky durance hung,
Like a Westphalia gammon or neat's tongue,
To be redeem'd with masses and a song.--SATIRE IV.
The readers of Oldham, for Oldham must ever have readers among the curious in our poetry, have been greatly disappointed in the pompous edition of a Captain Thompson, which illustrates none of his allusions. In the above lines Oldham alludes to some singular works.
Treatises and topographical descriptions of HELL, PURGATORY, and even HEAVEN, were once the favourite researches among certain zealous defenders of the Romish Church, who exhausted their ink-horns in building up a Hell to their own taste, or for their particular purpose.[1] We have a treatise of Cardinal Bellarmin, a Jesuit, on _Purgatory_; he seems to have the science of a surveyor among all the secret tracks and the formidable divisions of "the bottomless pit."
Bellarmin informs us that there are beneath the earth four different places, or a profound place divided into four parts. The deepest of these places is _Hell_; it contains all the souls of the damned, where will be also their bodies after the resurrection, and likewise all the demons. The place nearest _Hell_ is _Purgatory_, where souls are purged, or rather where they appease the anger of God by their sufferings. He says that the same fires and the same torments are alike in both these places, the only difference between _Hell_ and _Purgatory_ consisting in their duration. Next to _Purgatory_ is the _limbo_ of those _infants_ who die without having received the sacrament; and the fourth place is the _limbo_ of the _Fathers_; that is to say, of those _just men_ who died before the death of Christ. But since the days of the Redeemer, this last division is empty, like an apartment to be let. A later catholic theologist, the famous Tillemont, condemns _all the illustrious pagans_ to the _eternal torments of Hell_? because they lived before the time of Jesus, and therefore could not be benefited by the redemption! Speaking of young Tiberius, who was compelled to fall on his own sword, Tillemont adds, "Thus by his own hand he ended his miserable life, _to begin another, the misery of which will never end_!" Yet history records nothing bad of this prince. Jortin observes that he added this _reflection_ in his later edition, so that the good man as he grew older grew more uncharitable in his religious notions. It is in this manner too that the Benedictine editor of Justin Martyr speaks of the illustrious pagans. This father, after highly applauding Socrates, and a few more who resembled him, inclines to think that they are not fixed in _Hell_. But the Benedictine editor takes great pains to clear the good father from the shameful imputation of supposing that a _virtuous pagan might be saved_ as well as a Benedictine monk! For a curious specimen of this _odium theologicum_, see the "Censure" of the Sorbonne on Marmontel's Belisarius.
The adverse party, who were either philosophers or reformers, received all such information with great suspicion. Anthony Cornelius, a lawyer in the sixteenth century, wrote a small tract, which was so effectually suppressed, as a monster of atheism, that a copy is now only to be found in the hands of the curious. This author ridiculed the absurd and horrid doctrine of _infant damnation_, and was instantly decried as an atheist, and the printer prosecuted to his ruin! Caelius Secundus Curio, a noble Italian, published a treatise _De Amplitudine beati Regni Dei_, to prove that _Heaven_ has more inhabitants than _Hell_,--or, in his own phrase, that the _elect_ are more numerous than the _reprobate_. However we may incline to smile at these works, their design was benevolent. They were the first streaks of the morning light of the Reformation. Even such works assisted mankind to examine more closely, and hold in greater contempt, the extravagant and pernicious doctrines of the domineering papistical church.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: One of the most horrible of these books was the work of the Jesuit Pinamonti; it details with frightful minuteness the nature of hell-torments, accompanied by the most revolting pictures of the condemned under various refined torments. It was translated in an abbreviated form, and sold for a few pence as a popular religious book in Ireland, and may be so still. It is divided into a series of meditations for each day in the week, on hell and its torments.]
[The end]
Isaac D'Israeli's essay: Hell