and to be present with councils lawfully assembled; yet the prayer notwithstanding is grateful unto God, and the hymns, whereby his presence and favour and grace are implored both for the council and the Church."
And whereas it might be objected, that howsoever the Church may sometimes pray for those things which she shall certainly receive, yet she doth not pray for those things which she hath already received; and this she hath received, that those souls shall not be damned, seeing they have received their sentence, and are most secure from damnation; the Cardinal replieth, that this objection may easily be avoided:
"For although those souls," saith he, "have received already their first sentence in the particular judgment, and by that sentence are freed from hell, yet doth there yet remain the general judgment, in which they are to receive the second sentence. Wherefore the Church, praying that those souls in the last judgment may not fall into darkness, nor be swallowed up in hell, doth not pray for the thing which the soul hath, but which it shall receive."
Thus, these men, labouring to show how the prayers for the dead used in their Church may stand with their conceits of Purgatory, do thereby inform us how the Prayers for the dead used by the ancient Church may stand well enough without the supposal of any purgatory at all. For if we pray for those things which we are most sure will come to pass, and the Church, by the adversary's own confession, did pray accordingly that the souls of the faithful might escape the pains of hell at the general judgment, notwithstanding they had certainly been freed from them already by the sentence of the particular judgment; by the same reason, when the Church in times past besought God to "remember all those that slept in the hope of the resurrection of everlasting life," which is the form of prayer used in the Greek Liturgies, and to give unto them rest, and to bring them unto the place where the light of His countenance should shine upon them for evermore, why should not we think that it desired these things should be granted unto them by the last sentence at the day of the resurrection, notwithstanding they were formerly adjudged unto them by the particular sentence at the time of tiieir dissolution?
For, as
"that which shall befall unto all at the day of judgment is accomplished in every one at the day of his death;"
