Free TranslationFree Translation
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Purgatory   Listen
noun
Purgatory  n.  A state or place of purification after death; according to the Roman Catholic creed, a place, or a state believed to exist after death, in which the souls of persons are purified by expiating such offenses committed in this life as do not merit eternal damnation, or in which they fully satisfy the justice of God for sins that have been forgiven. After this purgation from the impurities of sin, the souls are believed to be received into heaven.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Purgatory" Quotes from Famous Books



... entrails of many an old good author, with a violation worse than any could be offered to his tomb. Nor did they stay in matters heretical, but any subject that was not to their palate, they either condemned in a Prohibition, or had it straight into the new purgatory ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton

... soul; also, Adam in the state of innocence seems to have had a body more sensitive than Christ had, who assumed a human body with its natural defects. Consequently, it seems that the pain of a sufferer in purgatory, or in hell, or even Adam's pain, if he suffered at all, was greater ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... that I could afford the tax, I would never travel without a courier, for a good courier is a convenience whose value cannot be estimated in dollars and cents. Without him, travel is a bitter harassment, a purgatory of little exasperating annoyances, a ceaseless and pitiless punishment—I mean to an irascible man who has no business capacity and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... Miguel, an ominous light flashing from his eyes. "Those golden pesos so lightly earned will just about pay for a thousand masses in order to avert excommunication and enable the Church to snatch the soul of the Chiquita from the fires of purgatory as a punishment for conduct unbecoming the ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown

... sombrero to him as I stood at the wheel one day, "It's very hard to carry me off this way to purgatory. I shipped to ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville

... that poor old woman into the dismals, and she has the pains of purgatory on her already. I shall ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat

... death, Dionusos is in the highest sense the LIBERATOR: since, like Osiris, he frees the soul, and guides it in its migrations beyond the grave, preserving it from the risk of again falling under the slavery of matter or of some inferior animal form, the purgatory of Metempsychosis; and exalting and perfecting its nature through the purifying discipline of his Mysteries. "The great consummation of all philosophy," said Socrates, professedly quoting from traditional and mystic sources, "is Death: He who pursues philosophy aright, is ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... traveller is not mitigated by the knowledge that, to reach Yakutsk you must slowly wade, as we had done, through a little hell of monotony, hunger, and filth. To leave it you must retrace your steps through the same purgatory of mental and physical misery. There is no other way home, and so, to the stranger fresh from Europe, the place is a sink of despair. And yet Yakutsk only needs capital, energy, and enterprise to convert her into a centre of modern commerce and civilisation. ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt

... he echoed, eyes widening. Henderson was a company man, a real company man. A vacation for him was purgatory, it was separation from a loved one. "I don't believe you have a vacation coming," he said frostily, "for ...
— The Risk Profession • Donald Edwin Westlake

... from them the vineyard of Naboth, lest they should act the Jezebel and tempt me to play the Ahab thereto. If I did thus when those trees and I were young, shall I do worse now that I stand with one foot in the grave, and purgatory itself in the other?' ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald

... at that time badly afflicted with cancer of the tongue, and he told me that he hadn't long to live. He also told me that he had bought the Old Arcadia Indian Camp on the Picketwaire River (Picketwaire means River of Lost Souls or Purgatory to the Indians). The camp is between Fort Lyons and Bent's Old Fort on the opposite of the river. Some of the land at that time was rated at $50 per acre and is now, most of it, worth $100 per acre. His rating at the time of death in Dun & Bradstreet's Commercial ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus

... practicability and common sense—supposing such people could have got into such a mess, which I own is improbable. A method that would answer for them is not so easily applied to these superfine specimens, who have taken such pains to build themselves a private Purgatory, and keep it going on a limited supply of fuel. They might resent intrusion on their agreeable demesne, and put up a board with 'No Trespassing' on it; but then they ought to keep the place fenced in better: as it is, the smoke and heat spread too much. They might say, 'If we enjoy ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol

... And if there were indeed no way of escape for these victims of sin and misfortune, we might well prefer to draw a veil over the sad scene, and to bury in the ocean of forgetfulness, the very recollection of this earthly purgatory. ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker

... out of purgatory," she said; "and it is something to be on a pedestal; I should not like to come down. It is a cheap victory, but so are most of the victories that ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... My lord, it may be some ghost, newly crept out of Purgatory, come to beg a pardon of ...
— The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe

... bower anchor, and the ship was brought up with the sheet anchor so near the shore, that this morning I have been obliged to cut the cable, in order to get clear of the shore, and that I might not lose this opportunity of escaping from Purgatory. ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various

... kitchen. Folks had to eat, whatever happened. But she went on talking, Madame Morin. One must not speak evil of the dead. They have their work cut out to extricate themselves from Purgatory. But all the same—after forty years' faithful service—and not to mention in the will—meme pour une Bretonne, c'etait raide. Jeanne agreed. She had no reason to love her Aunt Morin. Her father's people came from Agen on the confines of Gascony; he had been a man of great gestures and vehement ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke

... Papists are justly condemned for bringing Diabolical Testimony to confirm the Principles of their Religion. Peter Cotton the Jesuite[56] enquired of the Devil in a possessed Person, what was the clearest Scripture to prove Purgatory. At the time when Luther died, all the possessed People in the Netherlands were quiet: The Devils in them, said the Reason was, because Luther[57] had been a great Friend of theirs, and they owed him that respect as to go as far as ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather

... appear like figures of demons; while the cave, with its flinty sides and uneven roof, blackened by the charcoal vapours which hover about it in festoons, seems to offer no inadequate representation of fabled purgatory. Working in iron was an occupation strictly forbidden to the Gitanos by the ancient laws, on what account does not exactly appear; though, perhaps, the trade of the smith was considered as too much akin to that of the chalan to be permitted to them. The Gypsy smith of Granada ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow

... of Lady Dunstane soothed him during the term of a visit that was rather like purgatory sweetened by angelical tears. He was glad to go, wretched in having gone. She diverted the incessant conflict between his insubordinate self and his castigating, but avowedly sovereign, principle. Away ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... the pleasant Story of his apparition, being condemned after Death to be viridis viridarius, a green Forrester because in his life-time he had violently inclosed other men's Grounds into his Park. Surely such Fictions keep up the best Park of Popery (Purgatory), whereby their fairest Game and ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas

... so much better than Bobville or Robertstown, and because it will be beautiful. It will be the green fields of God after centuries upon centuries of purgatory; because it will be the land I've been telling you about, where you'll find all the things your soul is hungry for; where we will own a big farm, you and I, with great fields of alfalfa with purple blossoms; and there'll be long rows of apple and pear trees and ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne

... an eternity of bliss or woe? If the victim were heathen, these brief pangs were but the faint prelude of an undying flame; and if a Christian, they were the fiery portal of Heaven. They might, indeed, be a blessing; since, accepted in atonement for sin, they would shorten the torments of Purgatory. Yet, while schooling themselves to despise the body, and all the pain or pleasure that pertained to it, the Fathers were emphatic on one point. It must not be eaten. In the matter of cannibalism, they were ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman

... left behind, every day, in an empty mess-room, with a bad pen, utterly deprived of copy or of any substitute for copy, and to have to construct war articles out of your inner consciousness, would be purgatory for a journalist. But to have a mad dream in your soul and a pair of breeches in your hold-all, and to see no possibility of "sporting" either, is the very refinement of hell. And your tortures will be unbearable if, at the same time, you have ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair

... soulless shows which marked the transition of the Spanish drama from maturity to decay. It is gone and forgotten with thousands of its kind. Calderon will be remembered not as the director of such vain pomps, but as the author of the sublime and tender 'Wonderful Magician,' the weird 'Purgatory of St. Patrick,' 'The Constant Prince,' 'The Secret in Words,' and 'The Physician of His Own Honor.' The scrupulous student of the Spanish drama will demand more; but for him who would love Calderon without ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various

... repeated several Paternosters, the thought that she must die without receiving the last unction weighed heavily on her soul. But this she could not help, and it seemed more terrible to stand in the stocks, like the barber's widow, and be insulted, spit upon by the people, than to endure the flames of purgatory, where so many others—probably among them Biberli, who had brought her to this pass—would ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... with its foundation is given by Peter Damiani in his Life of St Odilo. According to this, a pilgrim returning from the Holy Land was cast by a storm on a desolate island where dwelt a hermit. From him he learned that amid the rocks was a chasm communicating with purgatory, from which rose perpetually the groans of tortured souls, the hermit asserting that he had also heard the demons complaining of the efficacy of the prayers of the faithful, and especially of the monks of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... Dread when thou may'st pass, —Every nighte and alle, To Purgatory fire thou com'st at last; And ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy

... sooner be out of hearing of his doings. When a cup is broke, throw it from you and think of it no more. But whether 'tis the spleen or the vapours, I have a mind to cross the water and seek a new earth, if not a new heaven. Here I am in neither, but in purgatory. Quelle vie!—'Tis what ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington

... period of cosmic activity; a day of Brahma, 4,320 million years. Kama Loka, abode of desire, the first condition through which a human entity passes in its passage, after death, to Devachan. It corresponds to purgatory. Kama, lust, desire, volition; the Hindu Cupid. Kamarupa, the principle of desire in man; the fourth principle. Kapila, the founder of one of the six principal systems of Indian philosophy—viz., the Sankhya. Karans, great festival of the ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... popular girl in the whole bevy of them. The studious ones admired her for her facility of learning, and her extraordinary appetite for every form of instruction, and the showy girls, who were only enduring school as the purgatory that opened into the celestial world of society, recognized in her a very handsome young person, who would be like to make a sensation sooner ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... sitting long enough? Take a fresh cigar, and we will walk. That was Purgatory where your quondam friend, Jake Beloo, is. He will remain there awhile longer, and, if you desire it can go, though it cost much exertion to entice him here, and then only after he ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman

... of the Holy Ghost, the Pillar and Ground of Truth and the true teacher of the doctrine of Christ, has, in the distribution of her feasts and festivals, set apart one day in the year, the second of November, in favor of the suffering souls in Purgatory. She calls on all her children to assemble around her sacred altars, to assist and pray at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass for the deliverance from Purgatory of the souls of those who, whilst dying in peace with Our Lord, still had debts to pay ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier

... pecuniary equivalent, was extorted as a kind of death-duty by the clergy, were sanctioned by excommunication: no grievance was more bitterly felt by the poor. The once-dreaded curses on evil-doers became a popular jest: purgatory was a mere excuse ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang

... bodies, temples of the Holy Ghost, will live again in glory, one would like to believe with Dante that the hymns, temples of the Word, are likewise immortal, and that they will still be heard in the everlasting. Doubtless in the twilight glens of Purgatory the bewailing souls continue to sing the Te lucis ante terminum, even as in the star-circles, where the Blessed move ever, will always leap up the triumphant notes of ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand

... nervous shock—the effect of some agitation. She has been overwrought lately. The truth is, Ladislaw, I am an unlucky devil. We have gone through several rounds of purgatory since you left, and I have lately got on to a worse ledge of it than ever. I suppose you are only just come down—you look rather battered—you have not been long enough in ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot

... charity, he added every day something to his exercises of penance and devotion: he was remarkably solicitous to avoid sloth, being sensible of the inestimable value of time. Alas! what would not a damned soul, what would not a suffering soul in purgatory give, for one of those moments which we unthinkingly throw away. As far as the state of the blessed in heaven can admit of regret, they eternally condemn their insensibility as having lost every moment of their mortal life, which they did not improve to the utmost advantage. ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... graduate from 'these classic shades' direct into celestial regions, do you, without sojourning awhile in this terrene purgatory? I do not, and, moreover, je n'en ai pas l'envie; I think the world has some claims upon me, and I mean to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various

... what I do. Suppose I gain a year of indulgences; I say: Blessed Senor Saint Dominic, have the kindness to see if there is some one in purgatory who has need of precisely a year. Then I play heads or tails. If it falls heads, no; if tails, yes. If it falls heads, I keep the indulgence, and so I make groups of a hundred years, for which there is always use. It's a pity one can't loan indulgences at interest. But do ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... opening would be made by his gift to her: a diamond heart containing one priceless ruby in its centre?—Should he, by daring, win to heaven? or should he be considered a libertine, and so thrust back to the dull purgatory whence he had so lately risen to her? Better risk nothing than lose all!—Whereby it may be seen that Ivan's blood had cooled a little in ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter

... by his order; and considering both, comes to express an opinion that the worldly pangs and agony suffered by Louis were such as might compensate the crimes he had committed, and that, after a reasonable quarantine in purgatory, he might in mercy he found duly qualified for the superior regions... The instructive but appalling scene of this tyrant's sufferings was at length closed by ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott

... more vast and dim and gray; but there is as much difference as between noonday and twilight." The pictures, too, were apt in these first days to go against the grain with him. Contemplating a fresco representing scenes in purgatory, he broke forth: "I cannot speak as to the truth of the representation, but, at all events, it was purgatory to look at this poor, faded rubbish. Thank Heaven, there is such a thing as whitewash; and I shall always be glad to hear of its application ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne

... that would give me greater pleasure." "We feel obliged, Larry" said Sir Theodore, "for your good wishes." "Is it I pull you out of the grave, indeed!" continued the whipper-in, for such he was, —"I'd let nobody pull your honour out of any place, saving 'twas purgatory; and out of that I'd pull you myself, if I saw you going there." "I am of opinion, Larry," said Doctor Dickenson, "you would turn tail if you saw Sir Theodore on that road. You might go further, and fare ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 342, November 22, 1828 • Various

... fait quelque bAtise." Was it possible that some tragic sin lay under this gentle life? And was the four-funnelled, twin-screwed Parana but a ghostly ship bearing a cargo of haunted souls into their earthly purgatory? ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King

... Heaven by way of Purgatory," responded Don Carlos cryptically. "I am looking forward eagerly to our next meeting, when I shall ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage

... the home of Martin de Vaux, the Englishman who died in my arms at the monastery of Cruta. For six nights I have prayed for his soul in Purgatory, amongst the ruins here. He ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... trace the likeness of men so accurately that a physiognomist could discover the ruling passion to which they were subject. Dante's characters, in his view of Purgatory, are drawn with accurate reference to the principles of physiognomy; and Shakspeare and Sterne, particularly the latter, were clever in the art; while Kempf and Zimmermann, in their profession, are said seldom to have erred as physiognomists. Surely it is a higher authority ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various

... but sin. These articles with the following make up the whole charge, (1.) That auricular confession is not necessary to salvation. (2.) That actual penance cannot purchase the remission of sin. (3.) That there is no purgatory, and that the holy patriarchs were in heaven before Christ's passion. (4.) That the pope is Antichrist, and that every priest hath as much power as he.——For these articles, and because he refused to abjure them, he was condemned as an obstinate heretic, ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie

... before the rising of the curtain. Nobody had heard of Weber and Beethoven, and Mozart, dead more than a score of years, was mentioned by a well-known musical connoisseur as a young man of great promise! Such surroundings as these were a species of purgatory to Berlioz, against whose bounds he fretted and raged without intermission. The director's receptions were signalized by the performance of insipid cavatinas, and from these, as from his companions' revels in which he would sometimes indulge with the maddest debauchery ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris

... strictly just to us; because, not having bestowed what was necessary to render us essentially good, it would be requiring more than he had given. The most whimsical idea was, that not believing in hell, she was firmly persuaded of the reality of purgatory. This arose from her not knowing what to do with the wicked, being loathed to damn them utterly, nor yet caring to place them with the good till they had become so; and we must really allow, that both in this world and the next, the ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... confessor of Galla Placidia, and was originally in the church of S. Lorenzo in Caesarea, whence it was brought to the cathedral in the thirteenth century by the archbishop Bonifazio de' Fieschi, whom Dante found in Purgatory among ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton

... of the evils as well as the advantages of civilization!)—I was saying, they send us these love-tokens, no doubt (we shall have to weigh out the crumbs, if each is to have his fair share) that we may the better estimate their state of bliss by passing some hours in purgatory. This, as far as I can apportion it without weights and scales, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... priests; but the sabio, who was also from Mogadore, at once took the part of the Swiri, and decided that the other should have nothing. Whereupon the Gibraltar Jew cursed the sabio, his father, mother, and all his family. The sabio replied, "I put you in ndui," a kind of purgatory or hell. "I put you in seven nduis," retorted the incensed Jew, over whom, however, superstitious fear speedily prevailed; he faltered, became pale, and dropping his voice, retreated, ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... that on the instant she hears a summons that breaks the spell of anger as no threat of purgatory would have done. A moment she hesitates, the old hands sink unclenching, the fierceness fades from her eyes, and once again with wondering uplifted look Molly Regan turns to the things beyond, which no ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... double performance of the marriage ceremony with him seems to favour), whom, being anxious to convert to her own faith, she thought to deceive, by the "cunningly devised fable" of a spirit with a burning hand, into the Papistical tenet of purgatory? and, that by a confusion of real circumstances with her original fiction, is derived the remarkable family tradition recorded? Leaving this speculation for the private rumination of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various

... for the best (compare Phaedo), but he indirectly implies that the evils of this life will be corrected in another. And as we are very far from the best imaginable world at present, Plato here, as in the Phaedo and Republic, supposes a purgatory or place of education for mankind in general, and for a very few a Tartarus or hell. The myth which terminates the dialogue is not the revelation, but rather, like all similar descriptions, whether in the Bible or Plato, ...
— Gorgias • Plato

... cold floor of the prison-cell, and then went out, locked the door, and departed several ways to put the "boys" up to it. And about midnight the "boys" gathered round with a supply of liquor, and waited, and somewhere along in the small hours there was a howl, as of a strong Irishman in Purgatory, and presently the voice of the Flour was heard to plead in changed ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson

... little above Orleans, in which place there was a forest of five-and-thirty leagues long, and seventeen in breadth, or thereabouts. This forest was most horribly fertile and copious in dorflies, hornets, and wasps, so that it was a very purgatory for the poor mares, asses, and horses. But Gargantua's mare did avenge herself handsomely of all the outrages therein committed upon beasts of her kind, and that by a trick whereof they had no suspicion. ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... to them, as we have done; and you know that in respect to odors I am rather fastidious. Monsieur Mazarin told me, the other day, that my punishment in purgatory will consist in breathing ill scents and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... far-fetched and artificial. Yet some of those which were pointed to at the time as flagrant instances of extravagant misinterpretation have now come to look different. Nothing could exceed the scorn poured on the interpretation of the Twenty-second Article, that it condemns the "Roman" doctrine of Purgatory, but not all doctrine of purgatory as a place of gradual purification beyond death. But in our days a school very far removed from Mr. Newman's would require and would claim to make the same distinction. And so with the interpretation ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church

... prevalence in our time of the opposite opinion has fashioned so intolerable a yoke for the neck of any one who has had the misfortune to pass from the sweet paradise of obscurity into the vulgar purgatory of Fame, that it almost behoves a man of genius to avoid, if he can, passing into that ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton

... Ted showed her a note from Father O'Malley, and she nodded amiably. Thrice blessed goddess! Her fat, white face took on angelic qualities in my eyes. One little movement of her hooded head, and I was wafted from purgatory, not into heaven, but into a place which seemed to me more attractive, into the freedom of the outside world—Ted's world. Not that I was permitted to leave the island, but, until the time for evening milking, I was allowed to ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson

... of us, signore, so many of us small and of slight importance, that, likely enough, God with all His larger cares has not the time to remember us. What may happen to him in the hereafter does not concern me; for he will certainly be in the purgatory of the rich and I in the purgatory of the poor. It must ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath

... disregarding his silent salutation, continued to stare at him wild-eyed, as a damned soul in purgatory might look at Satan passing in regal splendour through the seventy times sevenfold ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck

... most awful place in the world!" he repeated at intervals, even to the hall porter, who agreed with him. When I asked him how long he had been at the base he groaned miserably and confessed to three weeks of purgatory. ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs

... dear sir, if you feel for him still, in spite of all his faults, how do you know that God may not feel for him still, in spite of all his faults? For my part," quoth Frank, in his fanciful way, "without believing in that Popish Purgatory, I cannot help holding with Plato, that such heroical souls, who have wanted but little of true greatness, are hereafter by some strait discipline brought to a better mind; perhaps, as many ancients have held with the Indian Gymnosophists, by transmigration into the bodies of those animals whom ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... beds, candles in sconces and in branched candlesticks. They were married in April, and when we went down in June poppies were blowing in the wide grass spaces, and honeysuckle rioting over the low stone walls. I think we all felt as if we had passed through purgatory and had entered heaven. I know I did, because this was the kind of thing of which I had dreamed, and there had been a time when I, too, ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey

... value of this new office, he replied, that "It might be worth some thousands of pounds to him who after his death would instantly go to heaven; twice as much to him who would go to purgatory: and nobody knows what to him who would adventure to go to hell." Such was the pious casuistry of a witty usurer. Whether he undertook this last adventure, for the four hundred thousand pounds he left behind him, how can a sceptical biographer decide? Audley ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli

... worshipped child Cold in its mother's arms is but a clod And has not gone to God; That souls united by love undefiled And holy can by death be torn asunder To meet no more. It must be true that under This earth of ours there lies a Purgatory For those who seek to rob grief of the glory That shines through hope of life immortal. In Sin's lexicon this is the vilest sin - Needless and cruel, ugly, gaunt and mean, Without one poor excuse on which to lean, A vandal sin, that with no hope ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... children eating big hunches of heavy cake. It was impossible to give her any pleasure, and she had no sort of intention of pleasing anyone else. It was so difficult to see what kind of effect this dismal purgatory was meant to have on any human soul. She was not improved by suffering—she grew daily more callous and spiteful before one's eyes. One of her few pleasures was to sit in the garden pretending to be asleep, when ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson

... twisted round his legs, surrounded by a crowd of devils. Messer Biagio complained to the Pope, who asked him where he was placed? "In hell," was the reply. "Then I can do nothing to help you," said the Pope; "had the painter sent you to purgatory I would have used my best efforts to get you released, but I exercise no influence in hell, ubi nulla est redemptio." Some years afterwards Paul IV. objected to the naked figures, and employed Daniele da Volterra to patch draperies on to some of them, ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd

... days and then died. His body, worn out with old age and hard times, could not bear the drink as in his young days. He was a great teller of tales, and unlike our common romancers, knew how to empty heaven, hell, and purgatory, faeryland and earth, to people his stories. He did not live in a shrunken world, but knew of no less ample circumstance than did Homer himself. Perhaps the Gaelic people shall by his like bring back again the ancient simplicity and amplitude of ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats

... moment the door is opened he is exposed to everybody. People know it, too, and they take advantage. He would give the chicken off his plate if he hadn't anything else. I have to scold him a little sometimes—I can't help it. And as for father, he says he has doubled his days in purgatory by the lies he ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine

... thou mayst passe, Everie nighte and alle, To Purgatory Fire thou comest at last, And Christe ...
— Ballad Book • Katherine Lee Bates (ed.)

... was taken up by the Press. "Purgatory is no name for it," "The Old Bailey Scandal," and other startling headlines failed to move Bumbledom. The most celebrated Criminal Court in the world, situated in the richest city, to this day remains a public scandal and a purgatory to unfortunate jurymen. My suggestion in this "amusing ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss

... myth has become its substratum. Religion no longer reveals divine personalities, future rewards, and tenderer Elysian consolations; nor does it seriously propose a heaven to be reached by a ladder nor a purgatory to be shortened by prescribed devotions. It merely gives the real world an ideal status and teaches men to accept a natural life on supernatural grounds. The consequence is that the most pious can give an unvarnished description ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... its poignant power to wound. For the pure soul in the frail body, for the high hope and the will of burned cord, for the passion which hurries the senses and has no power to blind the conscience, there is a lasting purgatory open. How many a time since that hour of loss he had groaned in the silence of the night to think of it, and had taken his pillow in his teeth! To live the purer for the shame which bit so deep and keen? Ah, no; to overlay it ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray

... that destroyest the temple of God and buildest it in three days, save thyself"; Christ and the thieves held their dialogue; the Madonna and S. John stood at the foot of the Cross while Christ spoke the sentences and inclined his head. Then there was the earthquake, and we saw the souls in purgatory surrounding the Cross and heard them welcoming ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones

... to come, as described by Dante, and comprising, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, will be exhibited in a room adjoining the Western Museum on the 4th of July, and days following. Admittance, twenty-five cents. In the centre is seen a grand colossal figure of Minos, the Judge of Hell. He is seated at the entrance of the INFERNAL REGIONS [enormous ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various

... attentive examination of different communications leads us toward a conclusion as to their origin. When amidst the Marquis de Mirville's revelations, one is in the full swing of Roman Catholic diabolism—demons, spirits, purgatory, miracles, prayers,—nothing is lacking. With the Count de Gasparin, we are in the bosom of Rational Protestantism, which is absolutely the opposite of the other. Here are no present miracles, no devils, but simply a physical agency, a ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various

... Spain, from whom Gibraltar took its name. Gebir, bound by a vow to his dying father in the name of ancestral feud to invade Egypt, prepares invasion, but yields in Egypt to the touch of love, seeks to rebuild the ruins of the past, and learns what are the fruits of ambition. This he learns in the purgatory of conquerors, where he sees the figures of the Stuarts, of William the Deliverer, and of George the Third, "with eyebrows white and slanting brow," intentionally confused with Louis XVI. to avoid a charge of treason. But the strength of ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor

... months. I used to press this reason against myself: The trials and sufferings of living as a nun cannot be greater than those of purgatory, and I have well deserved to be in hell. It is not much to spend the rest of my life as if I were in purgatory, and then go straight to Heaven—which was what I desired. I was more influenced by servile fear, I think, than by ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila

... presupposed by those in authority in the cases of these indulgences that, confession having been made, the temporal penalties to be undergone either here or in purgatory were thus remitted. But preachers in their eagerness to raise troops asserted that those guilty of the foulest crimes obtained pardon from the moment when they assumed the cross, and were assured of salvation in the event of death. ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley

... If purgatory could hold worse torture than life held on that last evening Lady Bridget spent at Moongarr, then neither she nor her husband would have been required to do any long expiation there. It would be difficult to say which of the two suffered the most. Probably McKeith, because he was the strongest. ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed

... which they applied to detached sentences or single phrases of Holy Writ, it would not be easy to imagine a position which they could not 'shew in Scripture.' Let this be elucidated by the texts even now cited by the Romish priests for the truth of purgatory, indulgence, image-worship, invocation of dead men, and the like. The assertion therefore must be thus qualified. The ancient Fathers anathematized any doctrine not consentaneous with Scripture and deducible from it, either 'pari ratione' or by consequence; as when Scripture ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge

... In Lamaism there is also the tiara-crowned pope, and the transubstantiation theory; the reverence to Virgin and Child, confessions, fasts, purgatory, abbots, cardinals, etc. Compare ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins

... eight thousand years in the midst of fire and brimstone. Mrs Tabitha revolted at this dogma, which filled her at once with horror and indignation — She had recourse to the opinion of Humphry Clinker, who roundly declared it was the popish doctrine of purgatory, and quoted scripture in defence of the fire everlasting, prepared for the devil and his angels — The reverend master Mackcorkendal, and all the theologists and saints of that persuasion were consulted, and some of them had doubts about the matter; which doubts and ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett

... once when Henry VIII of England sent an officer to confiscate certain vast possessions which a fraternity of monks held by frankalmoigne, "What!" said the Prior, "would you master stay our benefactor's soul in Purgatory?" "Ay," said the officer, coldly, "an ye will not pray him thence for naught he must e'en roast." "But look you, my son," persisted the good man, "this act hath rank as robbery of God!" "Nay, nay, good father, my master the king doth but deliver him from the ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce

... your face, your thoughts, uncertain on which side you will strike, and his distracted mind frames thousands of plans in an instant, but he is still afraid to speak, afraid of giving himself away! This purgatory of the spirit, this animal thirst for self-preservation, these humiliating moments of the human soul, are awful, and sometimes arouse horror and compassion for the criminal even in the lawyer. And this was what ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... morally, no. In France you must never say nay to your mother, whatever she requires of you. She may be the most abominable old woman in the world, and make your life a purgatory; but, after all, she is ma mere, and you have no right to judge her. You have simply to obey. The thing has a fine side to it. Madame de Cintre bows her head and ...
— The American • Henry James

... I should," replied Ayrault, finally recognizing the voice of Violet Slade in the song of the wind, "and I cannot understand why I am not. Tell me, is this paradise, Violet, or is it not rather purgatory?" ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor

... acquainted with the prince's sentence, which seemed to him far more terrible than death. To him it appeared there was no world out of Verona's walls, no living out of the sight of Juliet. Heaven was there where Juliet lived, and all beyond was purgatory, torture, hell. The good friar would have applied the consolation of philosophy to his griefs: but this frantic young man would hear of none, but like a madman he tore his hair, and threw himself all along upon ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb

... 1769, where the Roman Catholic doctrine of purgatory or 'a middle state,' as Johnson calls it is discussed, and Boswell's Hebrides, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell

... hacer ——s break to pieces, tear. pedestal m. pedestal, foundation. pedir ask, ask for, beg, demand; —— cuenta bring to account, demand account of. pedrera f. precious stones. pena f. punishment, penalty, agony, trouble, anxiety, sorrow, pain; nima en —— soul in purgatory. pendencia f. quarrel, dispute, row. pendn m. banner, flag. penetrar penetrate, pierce. penoso, -a painful. pensamiento m. thought, mind. pensar think, consider, plan, mean, intend; —— en think of. pensil m. beautiful garden. peasco m. large ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup

... Jacintha met him, and begged that some Masses might be sung for the repose of Elvira's soul, which She doubted not was suffering in Purgatory. He promised not to forget her request; But He perfectly gained the old Woman's heart by engaging to watch during the whole of the approaching night in the haunted chamber. Jacintha could find no terms sufficiently strong ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis

... This wintry purgatory wore away; the icy stalactites that hung from the cliffs fell crashing to the earth; the clamor of the wild geese was heard; the bluebirds appeared in the naked woods; the water-willows were covered with their soft caterpillar-like blossoms; the twigs of the swamp maple were flushed ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.

... reached by a carefully planned, fatiguing flight of steps to the top of a bluff, where three churches at the back beckon so many recording angels to swell the purgatory lists. As you advance to the abrupt edge, everything is spread before you; nothing is concealed. In the first plane, the entangling branches of a score of apple-trees are ready to trap a topped ball and bury ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson

... its solid worth till it has been tried by fire,—is all the better for being hammered and beaten; stone is as much improved as an unruly boy by a good dressing; while bricks, like ghosts, come forth from their purgatory for the express purpose of being laid. All of these, by appropriate treatment, are invested with graces and glories that by nature they never owned. But a tree, graceful, noble, and grand beyond ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner

... Simla, Rose Arden was enduring her own minor form of purgatory. The news of Lance Desmond's sudden death had startled and saddened her; had pierced through her surface serenity to the deep places of a nature that was not altogether shallow under its veneer ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver

... century, was asked the value of an office which he had purchased in the Court of Wards, he replied:—"Some thousands to any one who wishes to get to heaven immediately; twice as much to him who does not mind being in purgatory; and nobody knows what to him who is not ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles

... her best to banish it under all other circumstances. She certainly succeeded; for she led her poor old widow-mother and their single servant such a life as to give them a lively foretaste of what Purgatory—to say no ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various

... burnt wine and spiced ale they were wont at Pace and Yule and other papistal high times to partake of together in the house of Theophilus Lugton, happy and well content when their possets were flavoured with the ghostly conversation of some gawsie monk well versed in the mysteries of requiems and purgatory. ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt

... her presence into the little sordid houses where disease and sickness were rife, he felt as if he had dropped from heaven to earth, from paradise to purgatory. When in heaven and paradise every obstacle to his wishes vanished, and he was lapped in elysium; but when he returned to earth and purgatory, the idea of marrying Lady Louisa seemed the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various

... Agricola's mother said to me these words, so touching in her simple and believing mouth, 'Luckily, I pray for you and myself too, my poor girl; the good God will hear me, and you will only go, I hope, to Purgatory.' ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue

... grain to have dealings with such a man, for I was born of honest people, but if the ould gentleman himself had offered me a couple of saws, and I knew that I would have to give him a thousand years extra of purgatory, I would have closed with the bargain. Those two saws cost me another louis, ...
— In the Irish Brigade - A Tale of War in Flanders and Spain • G. A. Henty

... affirmatively their church may be proved, by a child of ten years old, contradictory to it, in their most important points. My second question is, if they think St. Peter and St. Paul knew the true Christian religion? The constant reply is, O yes. Then say I, purgatory, transubstantiation, invocation of saints, adoration of the Virgin, relics (of which they might have had a cartload), the observation of Lent, is no part of it, since they neither taught nor practised any ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville

... to speak to him, and have discovered in yourself no wrong motive, you must not trouble yourself about the result. That may be a thousand years off yet. You may have sent him into a hotter purgatory, and at the same time made it shorter for him. We know nothing but ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald

... keep down my Irish bluid. I cursed him and all his tribe by all the Saints from St. Peter to St. Patrick, until good ould Father Mahan tould me, whin I confessed, that he was afraid I would swear my own sowl away, and keep Patrick in Purgatory; and the Father tould me that I should lave off cursin' Patterson, for the Americans thimselves would attend to that, and take to fighting the Rebels for revinge; and he said by way of incouragement that at the same time I'd be sarving God ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong

... buys this world, and delivers you from the pains of purgatory; amongst the Hindus, it furthermore opens ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton

... wrote in July 1825, 'that I nauseate portraits, except portraits of clever people. I feel quite convinced that every portrait-painter, if there be purgatory, will leap at once to ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter

... furious attacks upon her, one monk going so far as to say from the pulpit that she should be put into a sack and thrown into the Seine. Upon her publication of a religious poem, Miroir de l'ame pecheresse, in which she failed to mention purgatory or the saints, she was vigorously attacked by Beda, who had the verses condemned by the Sorbonne and caused the pupils of the College of Navarre to perform a morality in which Marguerite was represented ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme

... beaten, the unfortunate Irishman sat down again, and again started up, but, feeling ashamed, suddenly flung himself flat on his back, held his breath, and ground his teeth together. He thought of gridirons; he thought of the rack; he thought of purgatory; he thought of the propriety of starting up and of tearing limb from limb the attendant, who, with a quiet smile, lay down beside him and shut his eyes; he thought of the impossibility of bearing it an instant longer; and then he suddenly thought that it ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne

... Death took him directly and put an end to him. They went away together and came to the next world, and then Gambling Hansel made straight for the door of Heaven, and knocked at it. "Who is there?" "Gambling Hansel." "Ah, we will have nothing to do with him! Begone!" So he went to the door of Purgatory, and knocked once more. "Who is there?" "Gambling Hansel." "Ah, there is quite enough weeping and wailing here without him. We do not want to gamble, just go away again." Then he went to the door of Hell, and there they let him in. There was, however, no one at ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers

... night-passage it is delightful to steam into the harbour of St. Malo. If the sea has been rough and unkindly, you at once pass from Purgatory to Paradise, with a relief those will understand who have experienced it. The scene is very charming. The coast, broken and undulating, is rich and fertile; very often hazy and dreamy; the landscape is veiled ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various

... other side was much larger, for it was carried up so far as to darken a great portion of the window. That on the left represented the misery of hell—torment without hope. That on the right contained two tableaus: the lower one was purgatory, here four recumbent figures lay in the four corners, uncomfortably enough; for the bed of each figure was six sharp spikes, each of which perforated the occupier of it. But yet these dead men were not horrible to look at as those six other wretches; their eyes ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope

... most tormenting and sickening of all. To be tortured by such a crowd of little fiends was enough to produce delirium. But I will not recall the visions of the night. It was worse than dreaming of being in purgatory!" ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen

... purgatory early appear among the Christians. Many of the gravest Fathers of the first five centuries naturally conceived and taught, as is indeed intrinsically reasonable, that after death some souls will be punished for their sins until they are cleansed, and then ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... St. Francis, and they had gathered the miraculous yellow fennel-flowers of the mountain. Now they were to receive the Pardon. The chains of hell had fallen from them in confession: at the moment of entering the chapel the bonds of Purgatory would also be loosened, and if they should drop dead there, or die before having committed another sin, they would fly straight to heaven as larks into the morning sky. No passing from a miserable present to a miserable Purgatory, but unimaginable bliss in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various

... fight he waged. Then he gave up the idea disdainfully. As well try to leave his hand-print on an iron bar or a gray granite slab as to seek to impress on Kathryn's mind the vital nature of the questions that were haunting him, taunting him, turning his life into a purgatory of uncertainties whether his choice of profession had been aught but a selfish wish for an easy and spectacular road to ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray

... the first beach, which at that hour was black with bathers and by-standers, and had climbed the hill-slope which separates it from the second beach, when Marian suddenly cried, "Mamma, here we are close to Purgatory; can't we stop just a minute ...
— A Little Country Girl • Susan Coolidge

... the Cardinal's, then! He is still in purgatory, and there will wait the arrival of the Bourgeois, to balance accounts ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... cold-hearted people. I wish every sculptor might be at once imprisoned for life who shall hereafter chisel an allegoric figure; and as for those who have sculptured them heretofore, let them be kept in purgatory till the marble shall have crumbled away. It is especially absurd to assign to this frozen sisterhood of the allegoric family the office of weeping for the dead, inasmuch as they have incomparably less feeling than a lump of ice, which might contrive to shed a tear if the sun shone on it. But ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... miracle of accomplishments. By the time she was eighteen she could embroider to admiration, and had worked whole histories of the saints in tapestry with such strength of expression in their countenances that they looked like so many souls in purgatory. She could read without great difficulty, and had spelled her way through several Church legends and almost all the chivalric wonders of the Heldenbuch. She had even made considerable proficiency in writing; could sign her own ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving

... best our tongue Thou honour'st Verse, and Verse must send her wing To honour thee, the Priest of Phoebus Quire 10 That tun'st their happiest lines in Hymn or Story Dante shall give Fame leave to set thee higher Then his Casella, whom he woo'd to sing Met in the milder shades of Purgatory. ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton

... portrait on the covers of books and puts feathers in my hat. He is in love with me, Willy, and he is to be my big brother. Yesterday I took him to Ranalegh and heard a discourse upon the beauties of nature and the wonders of the air and the sky. Oh, my dear man—what a purgatory and what an event. We are going to sell our jewels presently and to live in Whitechapel. My father, I must tell you, seems afraid of this beautiful apparition and implores him every day not to go away. I know ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton

... should have been needed and should have been boasted of with such violent vulgarity was almost more than Mrs. Western could stand. She came down-stairs and then underwent the additional purgatory of listening to the silver-tongued farewell. That she, she with her high ideas of a woman's duty and a woman's dignity, should have put herself into such a condition was a marvel to herself. Had some one a year since told her that she ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope

... time, and receive absolution; consequently those who went out into the wilderness, where there were no churches and no priests to absolve them, did so at the risk of losing their souls. But with him it was different: he expected in the end to escape the fires of purgatory and go directly in all his uncleanness to heaven—a thing, he remarked, which happened to very few; and he, Nuflo, was no saint, and had first become a dweller in the desert, as a very young man, in order to escape ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson

... curate of Leguerno shall say enough masses in your behalf to keep your poor soul out of purgatory. But you ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas

... circumvented his sense of honor about marrying a rich girl, and how hard and fast she had him. Moreover the contrast between her joyous present and her anxious past was alone enough to make her run over with gayety. All her troubles had vanished in a pack; she had gone at one bound from purgatory to paradise. ...
— Overland • John William De Forest

... Trifles and Frauds, the Community of good Works, of all Men whatsoever, or in any Society whatsoever; that he abhor'd the Sale of Pardons for Sins, and derided the Treasury of Indulgences, from whence it is a plain Inference, that he believ'd nothing of Purgatory. ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus

... the two clauses of this prayer. He prays absolute mercy, on account of his faith in Christ; but remission of purgatory, in proportion to the quantity of good work he has done, or meant to do, as against evil. You are so much wiser in these days, you think, not believing in purgatory; and so much more benevolent,—not massacring women and children. But we must not be too proud of not believing in purgatory, ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin

... dazed and lost; when I looked at a bush I should say: that did not grow at home; the soil would be different and even the sun would not set in the same place. And what should I tell my father if he were to come looking for me when it gets too hot for him in Purgatory? He would ask me how I was to find his grave again, and Stasiek's, poor Stasiek who has laid down ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various

... a long while, her eyes narrowed in a hard searching regard; the trembling gloom with the tiny sallow flame in its middle suggested the purgatory of imaginative artists. Should she go down and thrust the dagger into ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... these "degenerate days," to the old doctrine of eternal punishment, that "to die" and "to go to heaven" are becoming interchangeable terms. But if all men are to be admitted to Heaven (or to its ante-room, Purgatory) at the end of this, their one earth-life, it is clear that there can be no causal connection between conduct and salvation. For though there may be degrees of happiness in Heaven to reward the varying degrees of virtue on earth, ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes

... scamp was certainly a scamp, even though he might not be a murderer, or he would have revealed the secret. In fact, Mrs. Mountjoy believed in the matter exactly what Augustus had intended, and, so believing, had resolved that her daughter should suffer any purgatory rather than become ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope

... are sought for at the extremities of the globe? They are sold, and are finally converted into gold. With gold we not only do whatever we please in this world, but we can even employ it to snatch souls from Purgatory, and to people Paradise." These words bear the stamp of the age in which Columbus lived; but we are surprised to see this pompous eulogium of riches written by a man whose whole life was marked by the most ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt

... there's a ghost lives inside it, of some man who was murdered under its branches years gone by. How he do groan at night sometimes! It has been the same ever since we came here. At first I could not sleep for listening to him, and thinking what a pain he was in: just like the pains of souls in purgatory." This remark made Jack suspect that ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston

... answered indifferently. "I was glad of it. I don't have to meet the spying, talking teachers, and think all the time the pupils know it from their parents. They're all foreigners where I am now. They say the Everglade school is the next thing to the last. It's a kind of Purgatory, where they keep you for a few ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... natives. Feeling that she could not escape, she instantly tied her babe to her leg and then suspended herself from a beam. The dogs came up at the moment that a monk was baptizing the child, thus luckily cutting off its purgatory just behind the jaws that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various



Words linked to "Purgatory" :   mythical place, fictitious place, situation, divinity



Copyright © 2024 e-Free Translation.com