councils laid down any doctrine whatever concerning the everlasting misery of the wicked.  Yet the question had been most vehemently disputed.’[263] Throughout the Middle Ages, religious terrorism in its barest and most material form was an universal, and sometimes no doubt a very efficient instrument of moral control; but small consideration is needed to perceive how these fears must have been at once tempered and partly neutralised by the belief in purgatory—­tempered by the hope that pains preceding judgment might take the place of ultimate penalties, and almost neutralised by the superstitious idea that such purgatorial sufferings might be lightened and shortened by extraneous human agencies independent of the purification and renewal of the sinful soul.  Throughout the earlier period of the Reformation, and especially in England, the protest of Protestantism was mainly against specific abuses in the Church, and against the Papal supremacy.  Two or three generations had to pass away before habits of thought engrained for ages in the popular mind were gradually effaced.  In spite of the rapid growth of Puritanism, and of the strong hold gained by an extreme form of Calvinism on some of the leading Churchmen of Queen Elizabeth’s time, the faith of the mass of the people was still a combination, in varied proportions, of the old and the new.  The public mind had utterly revolted against the system of indulgences; but it would be very rash to assume that men’s ideas of the eternal state were not largely and widely modified by an undefined tradition of purifying fires.  Although this may not have been the case with the clergy and others who were familiar with controversy, there was certainly among them also a strong disinclination to pronounce any decided or dogmatical opinion about that unknown future.  This is traceable in the various writings elicited by the omission of the latter part of the third article in the Revision under Archbishop Parker; and is more palpably evident in the entire excision of the forty-second article, which for ten years had committed the Church of England to an express opinion as to the irreparable state of the condemned.  But long before the seventeenth century had closed, orthodox opinion seems to have set almost entirely in the direction of the sternest and most hopeless interpretation possible.  Bishop Rust of Dromore, who died in 1670, ardently embraced Origen’s view.[264] So also did Sir Henry Vane, the eminent Parliamentary leader, who was beheaded for high treason in 1662.[265] A few Nonconformist congregations adopted similar opinions.  The Cambridge Platonists—­insisting prominently, as most writers of a mystical turn have done, upon that belief in the universal fatherhood of God, which had infused a gentler tone, scarcely compatible with much that he wrote, even into Luther’s spirit—­inclined to a milder theology.  Henry More ventured to hope that ’the benign principle will get the upper hand at last, and Hades, as Plutarch says, [Greek: