Page:Tracts for the Times Vol 3.djvu/98

10

Whereupon he thus presseth them that used immoderate mourning for the dead:

And in the end he concludeth somewhat prophetically, that he

Whether the doctrine now maintained in the Church of Rome, that the children of God, presently after their departure out of this life, are cast into a lake that burneth with fire and brimstone, be not a spice of this disease, and whether their practice in chanting of Psalms, appointed for the expression of joy and thankfulness, over them whom they esteem to be tormented in so lamentable a fashion, be not a part of that scene and pageant at which St. Chrysostom dost so take on, I leave it unto others to judge. That his fear was not altogether vain, the event itself doth show. For howsoever in his days the fire of the Romish purgatory was not yet kindled, yet were there certain sticks then a-gathering, which ministered fuel afterwards unto that flame. Good St. Augustine, who was then alive, and lived three and twenty years after St. Chrysostom's death, declared himself to be of this mind; that the oblations and alms usually offered in the Church

Which, although it were but a private exposition of the Church's meaning in her prayers and oblations for the dead, and the opinion of a doctor too that did not hold purgatory to be any article of his creed, yet did the Romanists in times following