"Who it was that did change it, or when it was changed, or why?"
the Pope returneth him for answer.
"That who did change it, or when it was changed, he was ignorant of: yet he knew upon what occasion it was changed: because that where the authority of the Holy Scripture doth say, that he doeth injury unto a martyr, who prayeth for a martyr,"
(which is a new text of Holy Scripture, of the Pope's own canonization,)
"the same by the like reason is to be held of the other saints."
The gloss upon this decretal, layeth down the reason of this mutation a little more roundly:
"Of old they prayed for him, and now at this day he prayeth for us; and so was the change made."
And Alphonsus Mendoza telleth us, that the old prayer was "deservedly" disused, and this other substituted in the room thereof:
"Grant unto us, we beseech thee, O Lord, that by the intercession of thy servant Leo, this oblation may profit us."
Which prayer, indeed, was to be found heretofore in modernioribus sacramentariis, as Pope Innocent speaketh, and in the Roman missals that were published before the Council of Trent, as, namely, in that which was printed at Paris, Anno 1529; but in the newly reformed missal, wherewith, it seemeth, Mendoza was not so well acquainted as with his scholastical controversies, it is put out again, and another prayer for Leo put in; that by the celebration of those
"offices of atonement a blessed retribution might accompany him."
Neither is there any more wrong done unto St. Leo, in praying for him after this manner, than unto all the rest of his fellows in that other prayer of the Roman Liturgy:
"We have received, O Lord, the divine mysteries; which as they do profit thy saints unto glory, so we do beseech thee that they may profit us for our healing:"
and nothing so much as is done unto all the faithful deceased, when, in their masses for the dead, they say daily,
"Lord Jesus Christ, King of Glory, deliver the souls of all the faithful that are departed from the pains of hell, and from the deep lake; deliver them from the mouth of the lion, that hell do not swallow them up, that they fall not into darkness."
