tical kind of joy only, as the devils are said to have when they have seduced and deceived any man.
"But peradventure,"
saith Cardinal Bellarmine for the upshot,
"the things which are brought touching that skull might better be rejected as false and apocryphal."
And Stephen Durant, more peremptorily:
"The things which are told of Trajan and Falconilla, delivered out of hell by the prayers of St. Gregory and Thecla, and of the dry skull spoken to by Macarius, be feigned and commentitious."
Which last answer, though it he the surest of all the rest, yet it is not to be doubted for all that, but that the general credit which these fables obtained, together with the countenance which the opinion of the Origenists did receive from Didymus, Evagrius, Gregory Nyssen, (if he be not corrupted,) and other doctors, inclined the minds of men very much to apply the common use of praying for the dead unto this wrong end of hoping to relieve the damned thereby. St. Augustine doth show, that in his time not only some, but exceeding many also, did out of a humane affection take compassion of the eternal pains of the damned, and would not believe that they should never have an end.
And notwithstanding this error was publicly condemned afterwards in the Origenists by the fifth general council held at Constantinople, yet by idle and voluptuous persons was it greedily embraced, as Climacus complaineth: and
"even now also," saith St. Gregory, "there be some who therefore neglect to put an end unto their sins, because they imagine that the judgments which are to come upon them shall some time have an end."
Yea, of late days this opinion was maintained by the Porretanians, as Thomas calleth them, and some of the Canonists, (the one following therein Gilbert Porreta, Bishop of Poictiers, in his book of theological questions, the other John Semeca in his gloss upon Gratian,) that by the prayers and suffrages of the living the pains of some of the damned were continually diminished, in such manner as infinite proportionable parts may be taken from a line, without ever coming unto an end of the division; which was in effect to take from them at the last all pain of sense or sense of pain. For, as Thomas observeth it rightly, and Durand after him,
