epistle ad Avitum, we find the place somewhat otherwise expressed,) saith that

"such as depart out of this world after the common course of death are disposed of according to their deeds and merits, as they shall be judged to be worthy, some into the place which is called hell, others into Abraham's bosom, and through divers other places or mansions."

And in his commentaries on Leviticus, he addeth further:

"Neither have the Apostles themselves as yet received their joy; but even they do expect, that I also may be made partaker of their joy. For the saints departing from hence do not presently obtain the full rewards of their labours; but they expect us likewise, however staying, however slacking." Then touching the purging of men after the resurrection, he thus delivereth his mind in his commentaries upon Luke:

"I think that even after our resurrection from the dead we shall have need of a sacrament to wash and purge us; for none can rise without pollutions." And upon Jeremy:

"If any one be saved in the second resurrection, he is that sinner which needeth the baptism of fire, which is purged with burning, that whatsoever he hath of wood, hay, and stubble the fire may consume it."

Which in his 5th book against Celsus he doth explicate more at large.

Neither doth Lactantius show himself to vary much from him in either of those points; for thus he writeth :

"When God shall judge the righteous, he will examine them by fire. Then they whose sins shall prevail, either in weight or number, shall be touched with the fire and burned; but they whom perfect righteousness and the ripeness of virtue hath thoroughly seasoned, shall not feel that fire; for from thence have they something in them that will repel and put back the force of the flame. So great is the force of innocency, that that fire shall fly back from it without doing any harm, which hath received this power from God, that it may burn the wicked and do service to the righteous. Yet, notwithstanding, let no man think that the souls are presently judged after death. All of them are detained in one common custody, until the time come wherein the great Judge doth make trial of their doings."

In like manner doth St. Hilary write of the one part:

"All the faithful, when they are gone out of the body, shall be reserved by the Lord's custody for that entry into the heavenly kingdom, being in the mean time placed in the bosom of Abraham, whither the wicked are hindered from coming by the gulf interposed betwixt them, until the time of entering the kingdom of heaven do come."

And thus of the other:

“Being to render an account of every idle word, shall we desire the day of judgment, wherein that unwearied fire must be passed by us, in which those grievous punishments for expiating the soul from sins must be endured?" For, "to such as have been baptized with the Holy Ghost, it remaineth, that they should be consummated with the fire of judgment."

In St. Ambrose also there are some passages to be found which seem to make directly for either of these points; as these for the former :

"The soul is loosed from the body, and yet after the end of this life it is held as yet in suspense, with the uncertainty of the future judgment: so that there is no end where there is thought to be an end.”

“We read in the books of Esdras, that when the day of judgment shall come, the earth shall restore the bodies of the deceased, and the dust shall restore the relics of the dead which do rest in the graves; and the habitacles shall restore the souls which were committed to them; and the Most High shall be revealed upon the seat of judgment."

Also that Scripture

“nameth those habitacles of the souls promtuaries," or secret receptacles; “and meeting with the complaint of man, that the just which have gone before may seem to be defrauded, until the day of judgment, which is a very long time, of the reward due unto them, saith wonderfully, that the day of judgment is like unto a crown, wherein as there is no slackness of the last, so there is no swiftness of the first. For the day of crowning is expected by all; that within that day both they who are overcome may be ashamed, and they who do overcome may obtain the palm of victory."

"Therefore while the fulness of time is expected, the souls expect their due reward. Pain is provided for some of them, for some glory; and yet, in the mean time, neither are those without trouble, nor these without fruit.”

And these for the latter:

"With fire shall the sons of Levi be purged, with fire Ezekiel, with fire Daniel. But these, although they shall be tried with fire, yet shall say, we have passed through fire and water. Others shall remain in the fire."

"And if the Lord shall save his servants, we shall be saved by faith, yet saved as it were by fire. Although we shall not be burned up, yet shall we be burned.” "After the end of the world, when the angels shall be sent to separate the good and the bad, this baptism shall be ; when iniquity shall be burnt up by the furnace of fire, that in the kingdom of God the righteous may shine as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. And if any one be as Peter or as John, he is baptized with this fire." Seeing therefore, "he that is purged here, hath need to be purged again there, let him purge us there also, when the Lord may say, Enter into my rest: that every one of us being burned with that flaming sword, not burned up, when he is entered into that pleasure of paradise, may give thanks unto his Lord, saying, Thou hast brought us into a place of refreshment."

Hereunto we may adjoin that observation of Suarez the Jesuit:

"They who think that the souls of men are not judged at their death, nor do receive reward or punishment, but are reserved in hidden receptacles unto the general judgment, do consequently say, that as men do not receive their last reward or punishment, so neither are they also purged, until the general resurrection and judgment do come, from whence they might say with reasonable good consequence, that men are to be purged with the fire of conflagration."

And with as good consequence also may we add, that prayers were not to be made for the delivery of the souls of the dead from any purgatory pains, supposed to be suffered by them betwixt the time of their death, and their resurrection, which be the only prayers that are now in question.

"In the resurrection, when our works, like unto clusters of grapes, shall be cast into the probatory fire, as it were into the wine-press, every man's husbandry shall be made manifest,"

saith Gregorius Cerameus, sometime Archbishop of Tauromenium in Sicilia.

And

"No man as yet is entered either into the torments of hell, or into the kingdom of heaven, until the time of the resurrection of the body."

saith Anastasius Sinaita. Upon whom Gretser bestoweth this marginal annotation; that this is the

66 error of certain of the ancient and latter Grecians."

And we find it to be held indeed both by some of the ancient, (as namely in Caius, who lived at Rome when Zephyrinus was Bishop there, and is accounted to be the author of the treatise falsely fathered upon Josephus, περὶ τῆς τοῦ παντὸς αἰτίας, a large fragment whereof hath been lately published by Hoeschelius, in his notes upon Photius's Bibliotheca,) and by the latter Grecians, in whose name Marcus Eugenicus, Archbishop of Ephesus, doth make this protestation against such of his countrymen, as yielded to the definition of the Florentine Council: "We say, that neither the saints do receive the kingdom prepared for them, and those secret good things, neither the sinners do as yet fall into hell; but that either of them do remain in expectation of their proper lot; and that this appertaineth unto the time that is to come after the resurrection and the judgment. But these men, with the Latins, would have these to receive presently after death the things they have deserved; but unto those of the middle sort, that is, to such as die in penance, they assign a purgatory fire, which they feign to be distinct from

that of hell, that thereby, say they, being purged in their souls after death, they likewise maybe received into the kingdom of heaven together with the righteous."

2. And, therefore, as the Latins in their prayers for the dead have respect for the delivery of souls out of purgatory, so the Grecians in theirs have relation to that other state, which is to determine with the resurrection. As in that prayer of their

Euchologe for example:

"The body is buried in the earth, but the soul goeth in unknown places, waiting for the future resurrection of the dead; in which, O gracious Saviour, make bright thy servant, place him together with the saints, and refresh him in the bosom of Abraham :"

the condition of which "unknown places," they do thus further explicate in another prayer :-Forasmuch as by thy divine will thou hast appointed

"the soul to remove thither, where it received the first being, until the common resurrection, and the body to be resolved into that of which it was composed; therefore we beseech thee, the Father without beginning, and thine only begotten Son, and thy most holy and consubstantial and quickening Spirit, that thou wilt not permit thine own workmanship to be swallowed up in destruction, but that the body may be dissolved into that of which it was composed, and the soul placed in the quire of the righteous."

That "barbarous impostor," as Molanus rightly styleth him, who counterfeited a letter as written by St. Cyril, Bishop of Jerusalem, unto St. Augustine, touching the miracles of St. Jerome, taketh upon him to lay down the precise time of the first arising of this opinion amongst the Grecians in this manner: "After the death of most glorious Jerome, a certain heresy or sect arose amongst the Grecians, and came to the Latins also, which went about with their wicked reasons to prove, that the souls of the blessed, until the day of the general judgment, wherein they were to be joined again unto their bodies, are deprived of the sight and knowledge of God, in which the whole blessedness of the saints doth consist; and that the souls of the damned, in like manner, until that day are tormented with no pains. Whose reason was this: that as the soul did merit or sin with the body, so with the body was it to receive rewards or pains. Those wicked sectaries also did maintain, that there was no place of purgatory, wherein the souls which had not done full penance for their sins in this world might be purged. Which pestilent sect getting head, so great sorrow fell upon us, that we were even weary of our life."

Then he telleth a wise tale, how St. Jerome, being at that time with God, for the confutation of this new-sprung heresy, raised up three men from the dead, after that he had first

"led their souls into paradise, purgatory, and hell, to the end they might make known unto all men the things that were done there;"

but had not the wit to consider, that St. Cyril himself had need to be raised up to make the fourth man among them. For how otherwise should he, who died thirty years before St. Jerome, as is known to every one that knoweth the history of those times, have heard and written the news which those three good fellows, that were raised by St. Jerome after his death, did relate concerning heaven, hell, and purgatory? Yet is it nothing so strange to me, I confess, that such idle dreams as these should be devised in the times of darkness, to delude the world withal, as that now in the broad daylight Binsfeldius and Suarez, and other Romish merchants, should adventure to bring forth such rotten stuff as this, with hope to gain any credit of antiquity thereby, unto the new-erected staple of Popish Purgatory.

The Dominican Friars, in a certain treatise written by them at Constantinople in the year 1252, assign somewhat a lower beginning unto this error of the Grecians; affirming that they

"followed therein a certain inventor of this heresy, named Andrew, Archbishop sometime of Cæsarea in Cappadocia, who said, that the souls did wait for their bodies, that together with them, with which they had committed good or evil, they might likewise receive the recompense of their deeds."

But that which Andrew saith herein he saith not out of his own head, and therefore is wrongfully charged to be the first inventor of it; but out of the judgment of many godly Fathers that went before him.

"It hath been said," saith he, "by many of the saints, that all virtuous men," after this life, "do receive places fit for them; whence they may certainly make conjecture, on the glory that shall befall unto them."

Where Peltanus bestoweth such another marginal note upon him, as Gretser his fellow Jesuit did upon Anastasius:

"This opinion is now expressly condemned and rejected by the Church."

And yet doth Alphonso de Castro acknowledge that

"the patrons thereof were famous men, renowned as well for holiness as for knowledge;"

but telleth us withal, that

"no man ought to marvel that such great men should fall into so pestilent an