securely expect the day of judgment; when thou mayest receive thy body, when thou mayest be changed to be equal unto an angel."
And for the state of souls betwixt the time of the particular and general judgment, this is his conclusion in general:
"The time that is interposed betwixt the death of man and the last resurrection, containeth the souls in hidden receptacles, as every one is worthy either of rest or of trouble, according unto that which it did purchase in the flesh when it lived."
Into these hidden receptacles he thought the souls of God's children might carry some of their lighter faults with them: which being not removed would hinder them from coming into the kingdom of heaven, whereunto no polluted thing can enter, and from which, by the prayers and almsdeeds of the living, he held they might be released. But of two things he professed himself here to be ignorant.
First, What those sins were which did so hinder the coming unto the kingdom of God, that yet by the care of good friends they might obtain pardon.
Secondly, whether those souls did endure any temporary pains in the interim betwixt the time of death and the resurrection. For howsoever in his one and twentieth book of the City of God, and the thirteenth and sixteenth chapters, (for the new patch which they have added to the four and twentieth chapter is not worthy of regard,) he affirms that some of them do suffer certain purgatory punishments before the last and dreadful judgment; yet by comparing these places with the five and twentieth chapter of the twentieth book, it will appear, that by those purgatory punishments he understandeth here the furnace of the fire of conflagration, that shall immediately go before this last judgment, and, as he otherwhere describeth the effects thereof,
"separate some unto the left hand, and mete out others unto the right."
Neither was this opinion of the reservation of souls in secret places, and the purging of them in the fire of conflagration at the day of judgment, entertained by this famous Doctor alone; divers others there were that had touched upon the same string before him. Origen, in his fourth book, περὶ ἀρχῶν as we have him translated by Ruffinus, (for both in the extracts selected out of him by St. Basil and St. Gregory, and in St. Jerome's 59th
