On the day of All Souls (_el dià de difuntos_), in Spain, we find exhibited in the churches the most disgusting representations, such as human bones, skulls, and entire skeletons; the churches are kept in profound darkness; and nothing is omitted to inspire terror and move the hearts of the devout. In the middle of the church is placed a large table with a silver plate, two immense wax candles, lighted, and some of the figures just alluded to. A priest, seated by the table, is imploring, in the most pitiful language, the generosity of the attendants. “He who puts a half-dollar in this plate,” said the priest in one of the churches in Cadiz, “draws out a soul from purgatory.” An Andalusian, as great an epigrammatist and jester as are generally the natives of that agreeable province, on one of these occasions took out from his purse his half-dollar, and put it on the plate, saying that his intention was to rescue the soul of his father. At the end of a moment or two he asked the priest if the soul of his father was now drawn out of purgatory, and on being answered by the oracle in the affirmative, very quietly re-took possession of his coin, with this pungent observation, “Very well then, my father is not such a fool as to return to purgatory after having succeeded in entering heaven.” Ridiculous and irreverent as this incident may appear, it cannot be denied that the logic contained in it is irresistible.
In every parish in Spain there is a confraternity of souls (_hermandad de animas_), whose treasure is composed not only of the contributions of the faithful, but of vast properties and metallic recompenses called _censos_, which always, in fact, consist of available money. The pious legacies (_mandas piadosas_), which abound in all the provinces of Spain, form a capital of incalculable amount. They call _mandas piadosas_ those rustic or urban securities which have been left by testators with the sole object of investing their products in masses to be said for the dead. The church receives these proceeds, and pays for the masses. It often occurs that the number of those masses is so immensely great that there is not a sufficient number of priests in the neighbourhood to discharge the duty of saying them; the incomes, therefore, received by the clergy accumulate, and are disposed of for other purposes. Thus the church becomes a debtor to purgatory for thousands of masses which, though paid for, remain unsaid. In these cases the clergy have recourse to the pope, and demand a bull called _bulla de composicion_, for which the datary at Rome exacts a considerable sum of money. In fact, this bull is to compress, by a science which appears very like that of chemistry, the virtue of four or five thousand masses unsaid into only one which _is_ said; so that if four or five thousand or more souls ought to be drawn out by means of the like number of masses, one single mass alone, through the medium of the bull, produces this grand result; and by this homœopathic process the consciences of the debtors are pacified.