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tical kind of joy only, as the devils are said to have when they have seduced and deceived any man.

"But peradventure,"

saith Cardinal Bellarmine for the upshot,

"the things which are brought touching that skull might better be rejected as false and apocryphal."

And Stephen Durant, more peremptorily:

"The things which are told of Trajan and Falconilla, delivered out of hell by the prayers of St. Gregory and Thecla, and of the dry skull spoken to by Macarius, be feigned and commentitious."

Which last answer, though it be the surest of all the rest, yet it is not to be doubted for all that, but that the general credit which these fables obtained, together with the countenance which the opinion of the Origenists did receive from Didymus, Evagrius, Gregory Nyssen, (if he be not corrupted,) and other doctors, inclined the minds of men very much to apply the common use of praying for the dead unto this wrong end of hoping to relieve the damned thereby. St. Augustine doth show, that in his time not only some, but exceeding many also, did out of a humane affection take compassion of the eternal pains of the damned, and would not believe that they should never have an end.

And notwithstanding this error was publicly condemned afterwards in the Origenists by the fifth general council held at Constantinople, yet by idle and voluptuous persons was it greedily embraced, as Climacus complaineth: and

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even now also," saith St. Gregory, "there be some who therefore neglect to put an end unto their sins, because they imagine that the judgments which are to come upon them shall some time have an end."

Yea, of late days this opinion was maintained by the Porretanians, as Thomas calleth them, and some of the Canonists, (the one following therein Gilbert Porreta, Bishop of Poictiers, in his book of theological questions, the other John Semeca in his gloss upon Gratian,) that by the prayers and suffrages of the living the pains of some of the damned were continually diminished, in such manner as infinite proportionable parts may be taken from a line, without ever coming unto an end of the division; which was in effect to take from them at the last all pain of sense or sense of pain. For, as Thomas observeth it rightly, and Durand after him,

“in the division of a line at last we must come unto that which is not sensible, considering that a sensible body cannot be divided infinitely. And so it would follow that after many suffrages the pain remaining should not be sensible, and consequently should be no pain at all."

Neither is to be forgotten, that the invention of All-Souls' Day, (of which you may read, if you please, Polydore Virgil, in his sixth book of the Inventors of Things, and the ninth chapter,) that solemn day, I say, wherein our Romanists most devoutly perform all their superstitious observances for the dead, was occasioned at the first by the apprehension of this same erroneous conceit, that the souls of the damned might not only be eased, but fully also delivered by the alms and prayers of the living. The whole narration of the business is thus laid down by Sigebertus Gemblacensis in his Chronicle at the year of our Lord 998.

"This time," saith he, "a certain religious man returning from Jerusalem, being entertained for awhile in Sicily by the courtesy of a certain anchoret, learned from him among other matters, that there were places near unto them that used to cast up burning flames, which by the inhabitants were called the Pots of Vulcan, wherein the souls of the reprobates, according to the quality of their deserts, did suffer divers punishments, the devils being there deputed for the execution thereof; whose voices, angers, and terrors, and sometimes howlings also, he said he often heard, as, lamenting that the souls of the damned were taken out of their hands by the alms and prayers of the faithful, and more at this time by the prayers of the Monks of Cluny, who prayed without ceasing for the rest of those that were deceased. The Abbot Odilo having understood this by him, appointed throughout all the monasteries under his subjection, that as upon the first day of November the solemnity of all the saints is observed, so upon the day following the memorial of all that rested in Christ should be celebrated. Which rite passing into many other churches, made the memory of the faithful deceased to be solemnized."

For the elect, this form of prayer was wont to be used in the Romish Church:

"O GOD, unto whom alone is known the number of the elect that are to be placed in the supernal bliss, grant, we beseech thee, that the book of blessed predestination may retain the names of all those whom we have undertaken to recommend in our prayer, or of all the faithful that are written therein."

And to pray, that the names of all those that are written in the book of God's election should still be retained therein, may be somewhat tolerable; considering as the divines of that side have informed

us, that those things may be prayed for which we know most certainly will come to pass: but hardly, I think, shall you find in any ritual a form of prayer answerable to this of the Monks of Cluny for the reprobate; unless it be that whereby St. Francis is said to have obtained that Friar Elias should be made ex præscito prædestinatus.

66 an elect of a reprobate."

Yet it seemeth that some were not very well pleased that what was done so seldom by St. Francis, the angel of the Friars, and that for a reprobate yet living, should be so usually practised by the followers of St. Odilo, the archangel of the monks, for reprobates that were dead and therefore, in the common editions of Sigebert's Chronicle, they have clean struck out the word damnatorum, and instead of reproborum chopped in defunctorum. Which deprivation may be detected, as well by the sincere edition of Sigebert, published by Aubertus Miræus out of the manuscript of Gemblac Abbey, which is thought to be the original copy of Sigebert himself, as by the comparing of him with Petrus Damiani in the life of Odilo, whence this whole narration was by him borrowed. For there also do we read, that in those flaming places

"the souls of the reprobate, according to the quality of their deserts, did suffer diverse torments:"

and that the devils did complain,

"that by the alms and prayers" of Odilo and others "the souls of the damned were taken out of their hands."

§ 4. Of the opinion of the heretic Aerius touching Prayers for the Dead.

By these things we may see what we are to judge of that which our adversaries press so much against us out of Epiphanius; that he

"nameth an obscure fellow, one Aerius, to be the first author of this heresy, that Prayer and Sacrifice profit not the departed in Christ."

For neither doth Epiphanius name this to be an heresy, neither doth it appear that himself did hold that prayers and oblations bring such profit to the dead as these men dream they do. He is much deceived who thinketh every thing that Epiphanius findeth fault withal in heretics is esteemed by him to be an heresy; seeing heresy cannot be but in matters of faith: and the course which Epiphanius taketh in that work, is not only to declare in what special points of faith heretics did dissent from the catholic doctrine, but in what particular ohservances also they refused to follow the received customs and ordinances of the Church. Therefore at the end of the whole work he setteth down a brief, first of the faith, and then of the ordinances and observances of the Church; and among the particulars of the latter kind he rehearseth this:

"when

"For the dead they make commemorations by name, performing," or they do perform, their prayers and divine service and dispensation of the mysteries:"

and disputing against Aerius touching the point itself, he doth not at all charge him with forsaking the doctrine of the Scriptures, or the faith of the Catholic Church, concerning the state of those that are departed out of this life, but with rejecting the order observed by the Church in her commemorations of the dead; which being an ancient institution, brought in upon wonderful good considerations, as he maintaineth, should not by this humorous heretic have been thus condemned.

"The Church," saith he, "doth necessarily perform this, having received it by tradition from the Fathers; and who may dissolve the ordinance of his mother,

or the law of his father?"

And again: "Our mother the Church hath ordinances settled in her which are inviolable, and may not be broken. Seeing then there are ordinances established in the Church, and they are well, and ail things are admirably done, this seducer is again refuted."

For the further opening hereof it will not be amiss to consider both of the objection of Aerius, and of the answer of Epiphanius. Thus did Aerius argue against the practice of the Church: "For what reason do ye commemorate after death the names of those that are departed? He that is alive prayeth or maketh dispensation" of the mysteries: "what shall the dead be profited hereby? And if the prayer of those here do altogether profit them that be there, then let nobody be godly, let no man do good, but let him procure some friends, by what means it pleaseth him, either persuading them by money, or entreating friends at his death; and let them pray for him that he may suffer nothing there, and that those inexpiable sins which he hath committed may not be required at his hands."

This was Aerius's argumentation, which would have been of force indeed if the whole Church had held, as many did, that the judgment after death was suspended until the general resurrection, and that in the meantime the sins of the dead might be taken away by the suffrages of the living. But he should have considered, as Stephanus Gobarus, who was as great an heretic as himself, did, that the doctors were not agreed upon the point; some of them maintaining

"that the soul of every one that departed out of this life received very great profit by the prayers and oblations and alms that were performed for him ;" and others, on the contrary side, that it was not so;"

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and that it was a foolish part in him to confound the private opinion of some with the common faith of the universal Church. That he reproved this particular error, which seemeth to have gotten head in his time, as being most plausible to the multitude, and very pleasing unto the looser sort of Christians, therein he did well but that thereupon he condemned the general practice of the Church, which had no dependence upon that erroneous conceit, therein he did like unto himself, headily and perversely. For the Church, in her commemorations and prayers for the dead, had no relation at all unto those that had led their lives lewdly and dissolutely, as appeareth plainly, both by the author of the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, and by divers other evidences before alleged; but unto those that led their lives in such a godly manner as gave pregnant hope unto the living that their

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