zum, and by Chrysostom. They were authoritatively condemned by a canon of the Council of Laodicea. In the West they were generally held in Rome and in other Italian cities to a later period.

'So completely, however, had they grown into the habits of the Christian community, that in many places they lingered on in obstinate resistance to the eloquence of the great teachers of Christianity. Even the councils pronounced with hesitating and tardy severity the sentence of condemnation against these inveterate usages to which the people adhered with such strong attachment. That of Carthage prohibited the attendance of the clergy, and exhorted them to persuade the people, as far as possible, to abstain from these festivals; that of Orleans condemns the singing, dancing, or dissolute behaviour in churches; that of Agde (Sens) condemns secular music, the singing of women, and banquets, in that place of which "it is written that it is a house of prayer"; finally, that in Trullo, held at Constantinople as late as the beginning of the eighth century, prohibits the decking of tables in churches (the prohibition indicates the practice); and at length it provoked a formal sentence of excommunication.'

In the well-known Epistle of St. Jerome, 'Adv. Vigilant.' (Op., tom. ii. 86), it may be seen from the furious invective of the fiery old Father, how strong and intense a hold the new cultus of martyrs had taken upon the Christian world even so soon after the conversion of the empire: 'Go (he exclaims) into the basilicas of the martyrs, and thou shalt not be burned by the wax-tapers that so much displease thee, but by invisible flames.' The rest is in the (toofrequently) coarse and violent manner of this superstitious and very unsaintly saint. There is a real beauty in the counter-expostulation of Vigilantius, 'that it is but poor honour to the blessed martyrs, whom the splendour of the

Lamb upon the throne perpetually illumines, to burn for them these miserable tapers.' The Council of Elvira (303 A.D.), in its 34th canon, forbade this custom of burning lights by the tombs of confessors and martyrs. By this council, (otherwise called that of Illiberis or Granada, and which Dr. Waterland dates 305 A.D.,) paintings in churches were also proscribed.

Who can pretend, therefore, to any reasonable wonder if we do not venture to receive without much caution the opinions of individual Fathers, in these later times of what can only by courtesy be called primitive Christianity, seeing that these retrograde tendencies of religious thought and custom towards the old paganism were so pronounced? What was said of Roma Victrix* in the days of her ancient conquests was more sadly true of Rome,- -as the head under Constantine of the new Christian world,-taken captive by the paganism she had conquered. The bias of man's heart has been always anti-spiritual, and has constantly drifted from the Eternal and the Unseen towards the seen and visible, as objects of, at least, a secondary reverence and worship. The pure abstraction of spiritual worship is too fatiguing for the unsupernaturalised senses of man. Yet it is very remarkable how few pre-Nicene testimonies, out of so considerable a mass of documentary material, can be adduced for this custom of praying for the dead. Canon Luckock,‡ after marshalling in a retrogressive order the names of the later and post-Nicene Fathers,-Augustine, Ambrose, Epiphanius, and Chrysostom, with Arnobius, who is only just pre-Nicene,—is content to 'close with Tertullian'; and presuming, we suppose, upon the ignorance of his readers, Horace, Ep. II., i. 156.

*

+ Cf. the amusing account of the multiplication of bodies (as relics) of St. Hippolytus in Bishop Lightfoot, 'St. Clement,' ii. 467-477. 'After Death,' chap. viii.

leaves them quietly to conclude, upon the production of that one name, that he has forged a sufficient chain of patristic evidence reaching back to the second century; yes, and this without one word of confession that he has produced only one single name out of the many writers of that or the previous century of the Christian faith. We will allow that some of the later Fathers go so far as to claim a primitive authority for the use of prayers for the dead. St. Chrysostom often mentions such prayers, but rather as commemorations (τῶν εἰ Χριστῷ κεκοιμημένων).* He, with St. Epiphanius, do, however, venture to assert an Apostolic sanction for such prayers; but, when we remember how uncritical the age was in which these Fathers lived, and how many forgeries they unhesitatingly received, the ecclesiastical corruptions also that they tolerated, little credence can be given to their unsupported assertions. The solitary and impassioned voice of Tertullian, if we except the discredited and unorthodox witness of Origen (for Arnobius is scarcely to be reckoned, as he lived on the extreme border of pre-Nicene times), with the very doubtful testimonies in the two Epistles of Cyprian, already discussed, alone break the silence of pre-Nicene Christianity. In the fervid and stern nature of the African Montanist the gentleness of the Christ of all mercy is already darkening into the mediaval Christ of all terror and judgment, and with His pierced and wounded Hands no longer full of absolutions, but armed with lightnings and excommunications, for so His grace is interpreted, or rather disguised, in the passionate writings of Tertullian. And yet, even in days little later than Tertullian's, this one of his opinions,that rest in Paradise is granted to none save to martyrs and confessors, receives rebuke in the beautiful words of St. Cyprian, himself a martyr, and, though a disciple, yet certainly not in his intolerance, of the great apologist:

* Hom. 41, on 1 Cor.

'God does not ask for our blood, but for our faith. For neither Abraham nor Isaac nor Jacob were slain; and yet, being honoured by the deserts of faith and righteousness, they deserved to be first among the patriarchs, to whose feast and banquet shall be gathered all and everyone who is found faithful and righteous and praiseworthy.'*

We are left face to face, then, with this fact, that preNicene and orthodox Christianity, as, at least, expressed in its extant writings, knows of no such use as prayer for the dead. Now, it is hardly to be estimated how much the creed of Medievalism is indebted to these two opposite schools,―to the philosophic or Alexandrian School, with its broad tendencies of thought and its compromising attitude to paganism and the Neo-Platonic philosophy, and to the North African, with its high and fierce ecclesiastical intolerance. For in the Alexandrian School‡ the development of the dogma of an intermediate and post-mortem purification of the soul, not all-unconnected with the Origenistic heresy of universalism, prefaced the later dogma of Purgatory. While in the opposite school of Northern Africa, which became the hotbed of fanatical Donatism, the fiery breath of religious prejudice and pride dared to kindle in the terrified imaginations of men the lurid reflection of purgatorial flames, and to consign without pity to their scorching embrace the lapsed and erring brother or sister. A passage in the 'Passions of Perpetua and Felicitas' lends itself to some * 'De Mortalitate,' 17 (Oxford ed. 12).

+ Bishop H. Browne says: 'Contemporary with Tertullian, though somewhat his junior, was Origen. If Tertullian derived a notion somewhat resembling Purgatory from a heretic, Origen derived a notion also bearing some resemblance to it from a heathen.'-'On the Art.,' p. 498.

Cf. for the Alexandrian School and the Origenistic heresies, Newman's 'Arianism,' i. 4, and Robertson, 'Ch. Hist.,' ii., pp. 93, 94, and

114.

§ 'Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas' (the last name wrongly printed 'Felicia' on p. 23).

such belief; but we must remember that Perpetua was probably a Montanist, and that it was the soul of a young brother, who had died in heathenism, which she believed to be rescued from penal fires by her prayers. What was this, then, but the natural effect of an overwrought imagination, strained to the utmost by the combined forces of suffering, excitement, and enthusiasm? And shall we too harshly condemn as without excuse, in those transitional days, an excess of charitable hope when thus expended only upon those, who, being dearly loved, had died in the unenlightened darkness of paganism? Their unblessed death must otherwise have been an unendurable agony to the newly-illuminated Christian souls of those early days; and who can refuse pity to a yearning affection, which might dimly stretch forth its hands towards the Lord's mysterious words, 'beaten with few stripes'? Yet how easily this natural feeling could develop into the conception of a Purgatory, though in reality wholly distinct, and having relation only to those dying in invincible ignorance, will at once be seen. Another conception of the soul's purification is offered by Lactantius,-who was indeed scarcely a pre-Nicene father, for he supposes that there is a trial by fire in reserve at the Doom, which will be beaten back by the innocence of the righteous.' But neither has this any kind of affinity with the Roman doctrine of an intermediate Purgatory.*

The strong current of superstitious use was not without earnest opposition, and that from within the Church. St. Augustine,† in his 'Liber de Hæresibus' (Op., tom. viii. 14, C, D), mentions a sect of Aërians (to be carefully distinguished from the blasphemous Arians), whose leader,

* 'Divine Institutes,' vii. 21. Cf., again, Bishop Harold Browne, P. 499.

There is a painful passage in Augustine's 'Liber ad Dulcitium,' vi. 950, in which he speaks of the Abdita animorum receptacula, and