or the law of his father?" And again: "Our mother the Church hath ordinances settled in her which are inviolable, and may not be broken. Seeing then there are ordinances established in the Chvirch, and they are well, and all things are admirably done, this seducer is again refuted."
For the further opening hereof it will not be amiss to consider both of the objection of Aerius, and of the answer of Epiphanius. Thus did Aerius argue against the practice of the Church:
"For what reason do ye commemorate after death the names of those that are departed? He that is alive prayeth or maketh dispensation" of the mysteries: "what shall the dead be profited hereby? And if the prayer of those here do altogether profit them that be there, then let nobody be godly, let no man do good, but let him procure some friends, by what means it pleaseth him, either persuading them by money, or entreating friends at his death; and let them pray for him that he may suffer nothing there, and that those inexpiable sins which he hath committed may not be required at his hands."
This was Aerius's argumentation, which would have been of force indeed if the whole Church had held, as many did, that the judgment after death was suspended until the general resurrection, and that in the meantime the sins of the dead might be taken away by the suffrages of the living. But he should have considered, as Stephanus Gobarus, who was as great an heretic as himself, did, that the doctors were not agreed upon the point; some of them maintaining
"that the soul of every one that departed out of this life received very great profit by the prayers and oblations and alms that were performed for him;" and others, " n the contrary side, that it was not so;"
and that it was a foolish part in him to confound the private opinion of some with the common faith of the universal Church. That he reproved this particular error, which seemeth to have gotten head in his time, as being most plausible to the multitude, and very pleasing unto the looser sort of Christians, therein he did well: but that thereupon he condemned the general practice of the Church, which had no dependence upon that erroneous conceit, therein he did like unto himself, headily and perversely. For the Church, in her commemorations and prayers for the dead, had no relation at all unto those that had led their lives lewdly and dissolutely, as appeareth plainly, both by the author of the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, and by divers other evidences before alleged; but unto those that led their lives in such a godly manner as gave pregnant hope unto the living that their
