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

REVISION OF THE FORMER LETTER

which they support with their own suffrages. You call this an ingenious and profitable fiction: these words contain a censure that is unworthy of your erudition and moderation, and furthermore, it is most false and most unjust. For we have invented nothing here, but we embrace the doctrine handed down from the Apostles and derived to us. Nor does the Church in the seventeenth century deliver anything as a matter of faith that it did not believe in the tenth, the fifth, or the first.

You hope to escape from this snare by recurring to a place, such as we dream of, you say: to which, however, no dream, nor even the creeping of sleep, approaches. But you yourself are truly dreaming while you think to escape by that path. The Church has not yet declared to us that souls are purified in any determined place, nor did Saint Gregory condemn, in Book IV of his Dialogues, chapter 40, the account of the soul of Paschasius the Deacon being purified in the thermal baths original: "in Thermis". You truly add rashly that the ancients did not believe any souls were liberated by those suffrages, which you will be able to prove by no reason. Indeed, it is said falsely, since the solemn prayers themselves sound otherwise, being most rich in meaning and sense.

Prayers for the Dead are proven from the Holy Fathers. Wherein is treated the locations of souls separated from the body.

Morley, p. 14. The first of the ancients among whom the custom of Oblations and Prayers for the dead is encountered is Tertullian: but he never thought of some third place, or receptacle for souls separated from the body. For in Book IV against Marcion, he establishes only two places for receiving souls stripped of the body, where they are, as it were, sequestered for the day of judgment: Hell original: "Inferos" for the reprobate, and for the souls of the just, the Bosom of Abraham.

Response: Tertullian is not the first who mentions 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. Although you deny these books to be Canonical, against the faith of the Church, you cannot deny