"Did you order a mass said for your dead wife, as I advised you yesterday?" asked the young woman, changing the subject of conversation.
"What a pity!" she exclaimed with unfeigned regret.
"They say that until ten o'clock tomorrow the souls will wander at liberty, awaiting the prayers of the living, and that during these days one mass is equivalent to five on other days of the year, or even to six, as the curate said this morning."
"What! Does that mean that we have a period without paying, which we should take advantage of?"
"But, Doray," interrupted Don Filipo, "you know that Don Anastasio doesn't believe in purgatory."
"I don't believe in purgatory!" protested the old man, partly rising from his seat. "Even when I know something of its history!"
"The history of purgatory!" exclaimed the couple, full of surprise. "Come, relate it to us."
"You don't know it and yet you order masses and talk about its torments? Well, as it has begun to rain and threatens to continue, we shall have time to relieve the monotony," replied Tasio, falling into a thoughtful mood.
Don Filipo closed the book which he held in his hand and Doray sat down at his side determined not to believe anything that the old man was about to say.
The latter began in the following manner: "Purgatory existed long before Our Lord came into the world and must have been located in the center of the earth, according to Padre Astete; or somewhere near Cluny, according to the monk of whom Padre Girard tells us. But the location is of least importance here. Now then, who were scorching in those fires that had been burning from the beginning of the world? Its very ancient existence is proved by Christian philosophy, which teaches that God has created nothing new since he rested."
"But it could have existed _in potentia_ and not _in actu_," [54] observed Don Filipo.
"Very well! But yet I must answer that some knew of it and as existing _in actu_. One of these was Zarathustra, or Zoroaster, who wrote part of the Zend-Avesta and founded a religion which in some points resembles ours, and Zarathustra, according to the scholars, flourished at least eight hundred years before Christ. I say 'at least,' since Gaffarel, after examining the testimony of Plato, Xanthus of Lydia, Pliny, Hermippus, and Eudoxus, believes it to have been two thousand five hundred years before our era. However that may be, it is certain that Zarathustra talked of a kind of purgatory and showed ways of getting free from it. The living could redeem the souls of those who died in sin by reciting passages from the Avesta and by doing good works, but under the condition that the person offering the petitions should be a relative, up to the fourth generation. The time for this occurred every year and lasted five days. Later, when this belief had become fixed among the people, the priests of that religion saw in it a chance of profit and so they exploited 'the deep and dark prison where remorse reigns,' as Zarathustra called it. They declared that by the payment of a small coin it was possible to save a soul from a year of torture, but as in that religion there were sins punishable by three hundred to a thousand years of suffering, such as lying, faithlessness, failure to keep one's word, and so on, it resulted that the rascals took in countless sums. Here you will observe something like our purgatory, if you take into account the differences in the religions."