Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, no. 45, July, 1861 | Page 6

an accident, and the poor young man went raving mad,--but that awful
rosary the old hag couldn't get rid of. She couldn't give it away,--she
couldn't sell it,--but back it would come every night, and lie right over
her heart, all white-hot with the fire that burned in it. She gave it to a
convent, and she sold it to a merchant, but back it came; and she locked
it up in the heaviest chests, and she buried it down in the lowest vaults,
but it always came back in the night, till she was worn to a skeleton;
and at last the old thing died without confession or sacrament, and went
where she belonged. She was found lying dead in her bed one morning,
and the rosary was gone; but when they came to lay her out, they found
the marks of it burned to the bone into her breast. Father Anselmo used
to tell us this, to show us a little what hell-fire was like."
"Oh, please, Jocunda, don't let us talk about it any more," said Agnes.
Old Jocunda, with her tough, vigorous organization and unceremonious
habits of expression, could not conceive the exquisite pain with which
this whole conversation had vibrated on the sensitive being at her right
hand,--that what merely awoke her hard-corded nerves to a dull
vibration of not unpleasant excitement was shivering and tearing the
tenderer chords of poor little Psyche beside her.
Ages before, beneath those very skies that smiled so sweetly over
her,--amid the bloom of lemon and citron, and the perfume of jasmine
and rose, the gentlest of old Italian souls had dreamed and wondered
what might be the unknown future of the dead, and, learning his lesson
from the glorious skies and gorgeous shores which witnessed how

magnificent a Being had given existence to man, had recorded his
hopes of man's future in the words--_Aut beatus, aut nihil_; but,
singular to tell, the religion which brought with it all human tenderness
and pities,--the hospital for the sick, the refuge for the orphan, the
enfranchisement of the slave,--this religion brought also the news of the
eternal, hopeless, living torture of the great majority of mankind, past
and present. Tender spirits, like those of Dante, carried this awful
mystery as a secret and unexplained anguish; saints wrestled with God
and wept over it; but still the awful fact remained, spite of Church and
sacrament, that the gospel was in effect, to the majority of the human
race, not the glad tidings of salvation, but the sentence of immitigable
doom.
The present traveller in Italy sees with disgust the dim and faded
frescoes in which this doom is portrayed in all its varied refinements of
torture; and the vivid Italian mind ran riot in these lurid fields, and
every monk who wanted to move his audience was in his small way a
Dante. The poet and the artist give only the highest form of the ideas of
their day, and he who cannot read the "Inferno" with firm nerves may
ask what the same representations were likely to have been in the grasp
of coarse and common minds.
The first teachers of Christianity in Italy read the Gospels by the light
of those fiendish fires which consumed their fellows. Daily made
familiar with the scorching, the searing, the racking, the devilish
ingenuities of torture, they transferred them to the future hell of the
torturers. The sentiment within us which asserts eternal justice and
retribution was stimulated to a kind of madness by that first baptism of
fire and blood, and expanded the simple and grave warnings of the
gospel into a lurid poetry of physical torture. Hence, while Christianity
brought multiplied forms of mercy into the world, it failed for many
centuries to humanize the savage forms of justice; and rack and wheel,
fire and fagot were the modes by which human justice aspired to a faint
imitation of what divine justice was supposed to extend through
eternity.
But it is remarkable always to observe the power of individual minds to
draw out of the popular religious ideas of their country only those
elements which suit themselves, and to drop others from their thought.
As a bee can extract pure honey from the blossoms of some plants

whose leaves are poisonous, so some souls can nourish themselves only
with the holier and more ethereal parts of popular belief.
Agnes had hitherto dwelt only on the cheering and the joyous features
of her faith; her mind loved to muse on the legends of saints and angels
and the glories of paradise, which, with a secret buoyancy, she hoped to
be the lot of every one she saw. The mind of the Mother Theresa was of
the same elevated cast, and the terrors on which Jocunda