A Revision of Two Letters from George Morley, Bishop of Winchester, to Jan van Vliet

your Communion you make no mention of the deceased, which the ancients always used everywhere in the liturgy itself.

For which reason, most learned Morley, you have warned imprudently, and to the detriment of your cause, that these two prayers are to be distinguished. For the very distinction between them, the very diversity that is granted between them (and you must confess that some is granted), attacks the throat of your cause and strangles it. For it evidently demonstrates a third state between Blessed souls and the damned. For the ancient Piety of the Faithful never offered, nor does the modern [piety] offer, prayers for the damned, because it always was, is, and will be certain to all the faithful that there is no Redemption from Hell, and the Church has always detested the contrary dogma of Origen, who in this matter platonized followed Plato, as the worst heresy. And so no prayers can be offered for those existing there. Wherefore we do not pray to those miserable souls, nor for them. Therefore, the prayers of the Church look to other souls, from whose diversity arises a certain persuasion that they themselves are in a double state, of which some are in need of our help, we of others; that those may relieve us, and we may relieve those by our work. The truth has extorted this acknowledgment from you against your will. But, conscious that you have afflicted your cause, you prepare a remedy for it, late though it be, and one that will be of no benefit, while you say:

D. Morley, end of page 13:

By prayer for the Departed I do not understand such as is now in use among the Papists, nor one leaning on such a foundation—namely, the ingenious and profitable fiction of Purgatory. For it cannot be proven from the custom of the ancient Church of praying for the Departed, although the Papists falsely suppose and gratuitously assume that those ancients believed the dead for whom they prayed were tormented in such a place as they dream of, or could be freed from that place or torment by the suffrages of the living.

Resp. We assume nothing which the ancients did not posit; we take nothing for granted which they did not grant. For the Council of Trent itself, or the profession of faith edited by the order of Pius IV, says nothing in this matter which those prayers do not bear out. For what does that profession of faith say? That there is a Purgatory, and that the souls detained there are helped by the suffrages of the faithful. But those prayers say that some souls are in need of rest, and they relieve them by their suffrages. You call this an ingenious and profitable fiction: which words contain a censure unworthy of your erudition and moderation: nay, even most false and most iniquitous; since we have not been fictitious in this matter, but embrace the doctrine handed down through the hands of the Apostles and derived to us. For the Church does not hand down anything as of faith in the seventeenth century which it did not believe in the tenth, which it did not in the fifth, which it did not in the first.

You hope to slip out of this snare by recurring to the place, which you say we dream of: yet nothing of a dream, nay, not even a phantom, creeps upon us. But you yourself truly dream, while you think to escape by that path. The Church has not declared to us thus far that souls are purged in any determined place: nor did Blessed Gregory, in Book IV of his Dialogues, chapter 40, condemn the report that the soul of Paschasius the Deacon was being purged in the Baths. But you rashly add that the ancients did not believe any souls could be freed by those suffrages: which you will prove by no reason. Nay, it is evident that this is said falsely, since the solemn prayers themselves, most rich in minds and meanings, sound otherwise.

Prayers for the Departed are proven from the Holy Fathers. Where concerning the places of souls separated from the body.

D. Morley, page 14: The first of the ancients in whom the custom of Oblations and Prayers for the dead is encountered is Tertullian: but he never thought about some third place, or receptacle, of souls separated from the body. For in Book IV against Marcion he established only two places for receiving souls stripped of the body, where they are, as it were, sequestered until the day of judgment: the Lower Regions for the reprobate, but for the souls of the just, the bosom of Abraham.

Resp. Tertullian is not the first who makes mention of oblations for the dead. For it is evident from the books of the Maccabees that sacrifices were offered for the dead even before the coming of Christ in the flesh: Which books, although you deny them to be Canonical, against the faith of the Church, you cannot, however, deny...