Page:Tracts for the Times Vol 3.djvu/124

36 editions of that history published before, there be any such thing to be found,) touching a dead man's skull, that should have uttered this speech unto Macarius, the great Egyptian anchoret:

A brainless answer you may well conceive it to be, that must be thought to have proceeded from a dry skull lying by the highway side; but as brainless as it is, it hath not a little troubled the quick heads of our Romish divines, and put many an odd crotchet into their nimble brains. Renatus Laurentius telleth us, that

And true it is, indeed, he neither saith that it was so, neither that it was not so; but the Grecians generally relate the matter thus: that Macarius

And among the Latins, Thomas Aquinas and other of the schoolmen take this for granted, because they found in the Lives of the Fathers, that the speech which the dead skull used was this:

so John, the Roman sub-deacon, translateth it; or, as Rufinus is supposed to have rendered it,

Well, saith Mendoza then,

And so he doth, resolving the matter thus: that the damned get no true ease by the prayers made for them, but such a phantas-