It is interesting, also, to find that the earliest instance of prayer for the dead for release from sin comes from the Jewish apocryphal Second Book of Maccabees,^[1] which the Roman Catholic Church reckons as Scripture, but we do not.^[2]

In Christian teaching based on Christ’s complete revelation and achievement, the ruling thought is the same for life here and hereafter: the faithful stand in a new relationship to God in Christ now, and after death they ‘sleep in Jesus’;^[3] for St. Paul to depart from this life is to be with Christ,^[4] or ‘at home with the Lord’.^[5]  The evidence of the epitaphs in the Catacombs at Rome to the Christian Hope is at once simple and eloquent: it is either assumed that the faithful departed are in light, refreshment and peace, or their friends pray that they may be; there is not a hint of discomfort or suffering.  In the New Testament future punishment is usually connected with the Last Judgement and after, and not with the experience of spirits in the Intermediate State.^[6]

Acceptance of belief in an Intermediate State (for which there is considerable evidence) is very different from the Roman doctrine of Purgatory.  It is important to note ‘the clear and important distinction between the Roman Catholic doctrine of Purgatory and a general belief in spiritual progress in the Intermediate State.  The latter may be held apart from any thought of Purgatory, for the Roman doctrine is really part of a penal process, the payment of a debt which was not fully discharged on earth, a view based on the distinction between mortal and venial sins.  But to carry the penal consequences of sin into the next world is really to deny the fulness and completeness of Atonement and Justification.’^[7]  Belief in Purgatory did not become a dogma of the Faith until the Council of Florence in 1439.  The Eastern Orthodox Church, while accepting a process of purification after death, protests against the Roman view of purgatory as an innovation unknown to Scripture.