I won't speak now of the religions of northern Europe, for they were religions of warriors, bards, and hunters, and not of philosophers.

While they yet preserve their beliefs and even their rites under Christian forms, they were unable to accompany the hordes in the spoliation of Rome or to seat themselves on the Capitoline; the religions of the mists were dissipated by the southern sun.

Now then, the early Christians did not believe in a purgatory but died in the blissful confidence of shortly seeing God face to face.

Apparently the first fathers of the Church who mentioned it were St.Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and St.Irenaeus, who were all perhaps influenced by Zarathustra's religion, which still flourished and was widely spread throughout the East, since at every step we read reproaches against Origen's Orientalism.

St.Irenaeus proved its existence by the fact that Christ remained 'three days in the depths of the earth,' three days of purgatory, and deduced from this that every soul must remain there until the resurrection of the body, although the '_Hodie mecum eris in Paradiso_' [56] seems to contradict it.