editions of that history published before, there be any such thing to be found,) touching a dead man's skull, that should have uttered this speech unto Macarius, the great Egyptian anchoret:
"When thou dost offer up thy prayers for the dead, then do we feel some little consolation."
A brainless answer you may well conceive it to be, that must be thought to have proceeded from a dry skull lying by the highway side; but as brainless as it is, it hath not a little troubled the quick heads of our Romish divines, and put many an odd crotchet into their nimble brains. Renatus Laurentius telleth us, that
"without all doubt it was an angel that did speak in this skull." And "I say," quoth Alphonsus Mendoza, "that this head which lay in the way was not the head of one that was damned, but of a just man remaining in purgatory; for Damascen doth not say in that sermon that it was the head of a Gentile, as it there may be seen."
And true it is, indeed, he neither saith that it was so, neither that it was not so; but the Grecians generally relate the matter thus: that Macarius
"did hear this from the skull of one that had been a priest of idols, which he found lying in the wilderness, that by his prayers such as were with him in punishment received a little ease of their torment, whensoever it fell out that he made the same for them."
And among the Latins, Thomas Aquinas and other of the schoolmen take this for granted, because they found in the Lives of the Fathers, that the speech which the dead skull used was this:
"I was a priest of the Gentiles;"
so John, the Roman sub-deacon, translateth it; or, as Rufinus is supposed to have rendered it,
"I was the chief of the priests of the idols, which dwelt in this place, and thou art Abbot Macarius, that art filled with the spirit of God. At whatsoever hour, therefore, thou takest pity of them that are in torments, and prayest for them» they then feel some consolation."
Well, saith Mendoza then,
"if St. Thomas, relating this history out of the Lives of the Fathers, doth say that this was the head of a Gentile, he himself is bound to untie this knot."
And so he doth, resolving the matter thus: that the damned get no true ease by the prayers made for them, but such a phantas-
