"led their souls into paradise, purgatory, and hell, to the end they might make known unto all men the things that were done there;"
but had not the wit to consider, that St. Cyril himself had need to be raised up to make the fourth man among them. For how otherwise should he, who died thirty years before St. Jerome, as is known to every one that knoweth the history of those times, have heard and written the news which those three good fellows, that were raised by St. Jerome after his death, did relate concerning heaven, hell, and purgatory? Yet is it nothing so strange to me, I confess, that such idle dreams as these should be devised in the times of darkness, to delude the world withal, as that now in the broad daylight Binsfeldius and Suarez, and other Romish merchants, should adventure to bring forth such rotten stuff as this, with hope to gain any credit of antiquity thereby, unto the new-erected staple of Popish Purgatory.
The Dominican Friars, in a certain treatise written by them at Constantinople in the year 1252, assign somewhat a lower beginning unto this error of the Grecians; affirming that they
"followed therein a certain inventor of this heresy, named Andrew, Archbishop sometime of Cæsarea in Cappadocia, who said, that the souls did wait for their bodies, that together with them, with which they had committed good or evil, they might likewise receive the recompense of their deeds."
But that which Andrew saith herein he saith not out of his own head, and therefore is wrongfully charged to be the first inventor of it; but out of the judgment of many godly Fathers that went before him.
"It hath been said," saith he, "by many of the saints, that all virtuous men," after this life, "do receive places fit for them; whence they may certainly make conjecture, on the glory that shall befall unto them."
Where Peltanus bestoweth such another marginal note upon him, as Gretser his fellow Jesuit did upon Anastasius:
"This opinion is now expressly condemned and rejected by the Church."
And yet doth Alphonso de Castro acknowledge that
"the patrons thereof were famous men, renowned as well for holiness as for knowledge;"
but telleth us withal, that
