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The Platonists, indeed, while they maintain that no sins are
unpunished, suppose that all punishment is administered for remedial
purposes, be it inflicted by human or divine law, in this life or
after death; for a man may be scathless here, or, though punished,
may yet not amend. Hence that passage of Virgil, where, when he had
said of our earthly bodies and mortal members, that our souls derive-
"Hence wild desires and grovelling fears, And human laughter, human
tears; Immured in dungeon-seeming night, They look abroad, yet see
no light," goes on to say: "Nay, when at last the life has fled,
And left the body cold and dead, Ee'n then there passes not away
The painful heritage of clay; Full many a long-contracted stain
Perforce must linger deep in grain. So penal sufferings they endure
For ancient crime, to make them pure; Some hang aloft in open view,
For winds to pierce them through and through, While others purge
their guilt deep-dyed In burning fire or whelming tide."
They who are of this opinion would have all punishments after death to
be purgatorial; and as the elements of air, fire, and water are
superior to earth, one or other of these may be the instrument of
expiating and purging away the stain contracted by the contagion of
earth. So Virgil hints at the air in the words, "Some hang aloft
for winds to pierce;" at the water in "whelming tide;" and at fire
in the expression "in burning fire." For our part, we recognize
that even in this life some punishments are purgatorial, not, indeed,
to those whose life is none the better, but rather the worse for them,
but to those who are constrained by them to amend their life. All
other punishments, whether temporal or eternal, inflicted as they are
on every one by divine providence, are sent either on account of past
sins, or of sins presently allowed in the life, or to exercise and
reveal a man's graces. They may be inflicted by the instrumentality
of bad men and angels as well as of the good. For even if any one
suffers some hurt through another's wickedness or mistake, the man
indeed sins whose ignorance or injustice does the harm; but God, who
by His just though hidden judgment permits it to be done, sins not.
But temporary punishments are suffered by some in this life only, by
others after death, by others both now and then; but all of them
before that last and strictest judgment. But of those who suffer
temporary punishments after death, all are not doomed to those
everlasting pains which are to follow that judgment; for to some, as
we have already said, what is not remitted in this world is remitted in
the next, that is, they are not punished with the eternal
punishment.of the world to come.
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