"received those honours that did befit a new created soul, which the Spirit had reformed by water,"
(for he had been but lately baptized, before his departure out of this life,) doth, notwithstanding, pray that the Lord will be pleased to receive him.
Divers instances of the like practice in the ages following, I have produced in another place; to which I will add some few more, to the end that the reader may, from thence, observe how long the primitive institution of the Church did hold up head among the tares that grew up with it, and in the end did quite choke and extinguish it. Our English Saxons had learned of Gregory, to pray for relief of those souls that were supposed to suffer pain in Purgatory; and yet the introducing of that novelty was not able to justle out the ancient usage of making prayers and oblations for them, which were not doubted to have been at rest in God's kingdom. And, therefore, the brethren of the Church of Hexham, in the anniversary commemoration of the obit of Oswald, King of Northumberland, used
"to keep their vigils, for the health of his soul;"
and having spent the night in praising of God with Psalms,
"to offer for him, in the morning, the sacrifice of the sacred oblation,"
as Bede writeth; who telleth us yet withal, that he "reigned with God, in heaven," and by his prayers procured many miracles to be wrought on earth. So likewise doth the same Bede report, that when it was discovered, by two several visions, that Hilda, the Abbess of Streamsheale, or Whitby, in Yorkshire, was carried up by the angels into heaven, they, which heard thereof, presently caused prayers to be said for her soul. And Osberne relateth the like of Dunstan; that being at Bath, and beholding in such another vision, the soul of one that had been his scholar, at Glastonbury, to be carried up into "the palace of heaven," he
"straightway commended the same into the hands of the divine piety,"
and entreated the lords of the place, where he was, to do so likewise.
Other narrations, of the same kind, may be found among them that have written of the saints' lives; and particularly in the tome published by Mosander, p. 69, touching the decease of
