souls were at rest with God: and to such as these alone did it wish the accomplishment of that which remained of their redemption; to wit, their public justification and solemn acquittal at the last day, and their perfect consummation of bliss, both in body and soul, in the kingdom of heaven for ever after. Not that the event of these things was conceived to be any ways doubtful, (for we have been told that things may be prayed for, the event whereof is known to be most certain;) but because the commemoration thereof was thought to serve for special use, not only in regard of the manifestation of the affection of the living toward the dead, (he that prayed, as Dionysius noteth,
"desiring other men's gifts as if they were his own graces,")
but also in respect of the consolation and instruction which the living might receive thereby, as Epiphanius, in his answer to Aerius, doth more particularly declare.
The objection of Aerius was this: the commemorations and prayers used in the Church being no profit to the dead, therefore as an unprofitable thing they are to be rejected. To this doth Epiphanius thus frame his answer:
"As for the reciting of the names of those that are deceased, what can be better than this? what more commodious and more admirable? that such as are present do believe that they who are departed do live, and are not extinguished, but are still being and living with the Lord; and that this most pious preaching might be declared, that they who pray for their brethren have hope of them, as being in a peregrination."
Which is as much in effect as if he had denied Aerius's consequence, and answered him, that although the dead were not profited by this action, yet it did not therefore follow that it should be condemned as altogether unprofitable, because it had a singular use otherwise; namely, to testify the faith and the hope of the living concerning the dead: the faith, in "declaring them to be alive," (for so doth Dionysius also expound the Church's intention in her public nomination of the dead,)
and as divinity teacheth, not mortified, but translated from death unto a most divine life;"
the hope, in that they signified hereby that they accounted their brethren to have departed from them no otherwise than as if they had been in a journey, with expectation to meet them afterward; and by this means made a difference betwixt themselves
