Page:Tracts for the Times Vol 3.djvu/128



By these things we may see what we are to judge of that which our adversaries press so much against us out of Epiphanius; that he

For neither doth Epiphanius name this to be an heresy, neither doth it appear that himself did hold that prayers and oblalions bring such profit to the dead as these men dream they do. He is much deceived who thinketh every thing that Epiphanius findeth fault withal in heretics is esteemed by him to be an heresy; seeing heresy cannot be but in matters of faith: and the course which Epiphanius taketh in that work, is not only to declare in what special points of faith heretics did dissent from the catholic doctrine, but in what particular observances also they refused to follow the received customs and ordinances of the Church. Therefore at the end of the whole work he setteth down a brief, first of the faith, and then of the ordinances and observances of the Church; and among the particulars of the latter kind he rehearseth this:

and disputing against Aerius touching the point itself, he doth not at all charge him with forsaking the doctrine of the Scriptures, or the faith of the Catholic Church, concerning the state of those that are departed out of this life, but with rejecting the order observed by the Church in her commemorations of the dead; which being an ancient institution, brought in upon wonderful good considerations, as he maintaineth, should not by this humorous heretic have been thus condemned.

"The Church," saith he, "doth necessarily perform this, having received it by tradition from the Fathers; and who may dissolve the ordinance of his mother,