Page:Tracts for the Times Vol 3.djvu/137



In the mean time, the reader who desireth to be rightly informed in the judgment of Antiquity, touching this point, is to remember that these two questions must necessarily be distinguished in this enquiry: whether prayers and oblations were to be made for the dead? and, whether the dead did receive any peculiar profit thereby? In the latter of these we shall find great difference among the doctors; in the former very little, or none at all. For

Therefore for condemning the general practice of the Church herein, which aimed at those good ends before expressed, Aerius was condemned; but for denying that the dead received profit thereby, either for the pardon of the sins which before were unremitted, or for the cutting off or mitigation of any torments that they did endure in the other world, the Church did never condemn him; for that was no new thing invented by him. Diverse worthy men, before and after him, declared themselves to be of the same mind, and were never, for all that, charged with the least suspicion of heresy.