us, that those things may be prayed for which we know most certainly will come to pass: but hardly, I think, shall you find in any ritual a form of prayer answerable to this of the Monks of Cluny for the reprobate; unless it be that whereby St. Francis is said to have obtained that Friar Elias should be made ex præscito prædestinatus.
"an elect of a reprobate."
Yet it seemeth that some were not very well pleased that what was done so seldom by St. Francis, the angel of the Friars, and that for a reprobate yet living, should be so usually practised by the followers of St. Odilo, the archangel of the monks, for reprobates that were dead: and therefore, in the common editions of Sigebert's Chronicle, they have clean struck out the word damnatorum, and instead of reproborum chopped in defunctorum. Which deprivation may be detected, as well by the sincere edition of Sigebert, published by Aubertus Miræus out of the manuscript of Gemblac Abbey, which is thought to be the original copy of Sigebert himself, as by the comparing of him with Petrus Damiani in the life of Odilo, whence this whole narration was by him borrowed. For there also do we read, that in those flaming places
"the souls of the reprobate, according to the quality of their deserts, did suffer diverse torments:"
and that the devils did complain,
"that by the alms and prayers" of Odilo and others "the souls of the damned were taken out of their hands."
