When a person enters purgatory he is exactly the same person as
before he died. He has just the same appetites, likes and dislikes, sympathies and
antipathies, as before. There is one important difference, however, namely, that he has no dense body wherewith to gratify
his appetites. The drunkard craves drink, in fact, far more than he did in this
life, but has no stomach which can contain liquor and cause chemical combustion necessary to
bring about the state of intoxication in which he delights. He may and does enter saloons,
where he interpolates his body into the body of a physical drunkard, so that he may obtain
his desires at second hand as it were, he will incite his victim to drink more[pg 168]and more. Yet there is no true satisfaction. He sees the full glass upon
the counter but his spirit hand is unable to lift it. He suffers tortures of Tantalus until
in time he realizes the impossibility of gratifying his base desire. Then he is free to go
on so far as that vice is concerned. He has been purged from that evil without intervention
of an angry deity or a conventional devil with hell's flames and pitchfork to administer
punishment, but under the immutable law that as we sow so shall we reap, he has suffered
exactly according to his vice. If his craving for drink was of a mild nature, he would
scarcely miss the liquor which he cannot there obtain. If his desires were strong and he
simply lived for drink, he would suffer veritable tortures of hell without need of actual
flames. Thus the pain experienced in eradication of his vice would be exactly commensurate
with the energy he had expended upon contracting the habit, as the force wherewith a falling
stone strikes the earth is proportionate to the energy expended in hurling it upwards into
the air.
Yet it is not the aim of God to “get
even;”love is
higher than law and in
His wonderful mercy and solicitude for our welfare He has[pg 169]opened the way of repentance and reform whereby we may obtain forgiveness
of sin, as taught by the Lord of Love: the Christ. Not indeed contrary to law, for His laws
are immutable, but by application of a higher law, whereby we accomplish here that which
would otherwise be delayed until death had forced the day of reckoning. The method is as
follows:
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