censured by His express words, to be held by our Lord's silence approved as lawful and expedient, a very superficial acquaintance with rabbinical literature will be amply suf ficient to convince any impartial mind that we should be committed to some startling conclusions.* The heresies bound up with the Jewish use of praying for the dead in the far later times, to which Rashi belonged (for he is quoted as an authority for the custom), are sufficiently exposed by the following words of Canon Luckock himself, who yet has not one word of censure for the very heterodox opinion that he is content to quote and so to leave: 'The gift' (originally spoken of in Deut. xvi. 10, 16; but, of course, the allusion is to the rabbinical times) 'was usually made at the commemoration either with a view to relief from sickness or any other trouble, or as an atonement for some dead relation or friend, under the firm conviction that they would be benefited, in whose behalf the offering was presented.' And then it is added, still without any expression of the least dissent, in an explanatory note: 'The Jews admit four means of procuring atonement— repentance, the day of atonement, sufferings, death; of which the last-death, i.e., the dying-possesses the greatest power. During the first year after a parent's death, a child, in commemorating the deceased, says or writes after his name: "I am ready to serve as an atonement for his couch; I am ready to suffer for his transgressions, provided only that his rest may be peace." When the first year had expired, by which time it was supposed that the deceased

*Cf. that able and orthodox rabbinical scholar's (Dr. McCaul) exposure of the rabbinic system of Judaism, 'The Old Paths,' and cf. especially, on prayers for the dead, pp. 149-152, where he notes the fact, omitted by Canon Luckock, that the rabbins commanded that the prayer 'Kaddish' should be said 'for eleven months only, to intimate that the deceased was not so wicked as to remain all that time in torment !'

would be purged from his sins, the language changed: May his memory be blessed," etc.*

66

What perverted ideas of atonement, so contrary to their own Scripture (Psa. xlix. 7; Isa. liii. 10, 11), had these rabbinical Jews, and yet it is infinitely more sad and culpable in one who has signed the Eleventh and Fifteenth Articles of the Church of England, to thus produce without a word of condemnation those miserable heresies; by which also we may see that prayer for the dead is inseparably united with a doctrine of purgatory, whether in Christian or in Jewish use. The Church of Rome, in her 'Modus a Benedicto XIV. approbatus ad impertiendam Benedictionem Apostolicam cum Indulgentia plenaria' for those at the point of death, has the same idea of atonement by death: 'Mortem ut offerat ipsam in satisfactionem pœnarum,' etc.

Canon Luckock can only adduce further, from this tainted source of Jewish belief, some prayers, 'said to be ancient,'‡ and some epitaphs and mortuary inscriptions, the antiquity of which, it is confessed, is 'not unreasonably disputed.'

If, now, we turn to the Christian Church and examine its witness, there is not one single trace of praying for the dead in any of the immediately sub-Apostolic writings, such as the one first and genuine, or the second, more doubtful, 'After Death,' p. 59.

*

† As an example of the wretched superstition connected with the rabbinic use of prayer for the dead, it will be enough to instance the 'Joreh Deah': 'The custom is for twelve months to repeat the prayer called Kaddish, and also to read the lesson of the prophets, and to pray the evening-prayer at the going out of the Sabbath, for that is the hour when the souls return from hell. He that prays and so worships in the congregation redeems his father and his mother from hell.'

He candidly owns, after relating the story in 2 Macc.: 'There is no more definite evidence which can be appealed to, but it is well known that prayers' (for the dead) 'are found in many old Jewish services and commemorations.'

Epistle of Clement; nor in the extant Epistle of St. Polycarp; nor in that precious relic of confessedly Apostolic times, the anonymous Epistle to Diognetus; nor in the letters of Ignatius (whether in the longer or shorter recensions, or in the Curetonian Syriac Version); nor in the lately discovered' Didache';* nor in the Epistle of Barnabas, which in its nineteenth and twentieth chapters is clearly and closely associated with the 'Didache'; nor in the fragmentary sayings, still preserved, of Papias; nor in those of Melito, some of whose writings, if the Syriac fragments are indeed his, contain thoughts of singular beauty. In the Syriac Version of the Teachings of the Apostles,' it is simply ordained and the simplicity has its own glorious pathos-that 'on the departure of any of the faithful, who die with a good testimony to the faith of Christ and with affliction (borne) for His sake, a commemoration shall be made of them on the day on which they were put to death.' Certainly this document seems far more ancient than the so-called Apostolical Constitutions,' by the token of its unadorned and un-artificial style, which is wholly unencumbered with the superstition of the later documents. (Cf. Lightfoot, Apost. Fathers,' Part II., i. 263.)

Yet there is much debate among those learned in early Christian letters regarding the genuineness and the true date of these Syrian ecclesiastical documents. Nor can we forbear here suggesting that a subject for one of the most painful chapters that could be written in Church-history might be found in the early growth of 'pious,' or rather impious because deliberate and fraudulent-forgeries, imposed upon the uncritical ages of Christianity often in the interests of heresy (Irenæus, 'Adv. Hær.,' i. 20) by those

*Cf. for this deeply interesting relic of the earliest Christian times Canon Spence's edition, with, particularly, Excursus i., ii. and iv. ; also Bishop Lightfoot ('Ep. of Clement,' i., pp. 5, 6, 13).

who did not scruple to court popular acceptance for their counterfeit-writings, of which, unhappily, the number became very large under the forged sanction of venerable and even of Apostolical names. We may trace the rise of this impudent spirit of falsehood and invention even to the times of the Apostles themselves; for in his earliest Epistle St. Paul is compelled to warn the Thessalonian Church against an epistle, forged under his name, which was current at that time. In the 'Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius,** these spurious and uncanonical-or at least disputed— writings are often mentioned. Many of them are still extant, profane, and worse than puerile, Gospels, Acts, Revelations, liturgies, canons, decretals, romances,-many connected with Apostolic names; others rather more modestly seeking a false popularity under less sacred names, among which we may instance those under the name of Clement ;--the 'Recognitions' and 'Homilies,' which last became the basis of that monstrous forgery, 'the false Decretals,' that imposed on the long centuries of papal superstition. These spurious documents have been the poisoned fountain of many of the lying legends, and of the vast pretensions and claims of apostate Christianity. They were originally the forgeries of heretics, or the wretched fruit of the grafting, within the Church and upon the pure stock of the Divine truth, of a semi-pagan, romancing, and myth-loving genius; and they may be easily detected by their inflated and profane style, so utterly in contrast with the severe truth and beauty of inspired and of genuine writings. The earliest decree authoritatively forbidding the reading of apocryphal books, an ancient Index Expurgatorius,' was issued by Gelasius, A.D. 492-496. The lists of writers condemned seem, however, to have been added later. But this is a digression.

*E.g., 'Hist. Eccles.,' iii. 25.

Now, there is, also, no trace of the use of any service, or of private prayers for the dead, in the writings of the later sub-Apostolic times, such as the 'Martyrium' of Polycarp, nor in that of 'The Holy Martyrs at Rome,' of which goodly and glorious fellowship the famous apologist, Justin Martyr, was one; nor in the Shepherd of Hermas; nor in the writings of Justin Martyr himself, who has given us the earliest description of Christian eucharistic worship, if we except that in the ‘Didache'; nor in the extant writings of another apologist, Athenagoras (circa 177 A.D.); nor in those of Theophilus of Antioch; nor in the newly-discovered 'Refutation of all Heresies' by Hippolytus, the martyr and bishop-whether with no territorial see, and holding a general episcopate, as Bishop Lightfoot* supposes, or in reality diocesan-of Portus; nor in the controversial books of the famous Irenæus, the disciple of the blessed Polycarp, and the teacher of Hippolytus.† And yet, as Justin and Athenagoras wrote on the great doctrine of the resurrection of the dead,—not to particularise many other of these writings, where opportunity offered,—an allusion to this use, had it then been general, might well have occurred. (Cf. the famous words in 2 Macc. xii. 44, 45.) Nor will any search find any allusion to the use of such prayers in the various writings of the famous Clement of Alexandria.

Clement of Rome, in his first Epistle to the Corinthians, may be quoted as a witness to the simple faith and bright hope for the dead, that possessed the heart of the Church in the Apostolic ages:

'All the generations from Adam unto this day have passed away; but those who through the grace of God have

*

Lightfoot, Clement, Intr. to Epistles of,' i., p. 415.

+ Cf. again, for a full discussion of the strange and perplexed circumstances connected with the identification and life of Hippolytus, -Bishop Lightfoot, Apost. Fathers,' Part I., vol. ii., p. 317 et seq.

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