nation of their brethren and their living with the Lord, as the putting a difference betwixt Christ our Saviour and all other men how blessed soever, (in respect the one is God, the other but men; the one after his glorious resurrection remaineth now immortal in heaven, the other continue yet in a state of dissolution, with their bodies resting in the earth in expectation of the resurrection; the purity and perfection of the one is most absolute, the manifold failings of the very best of the other such that they stand in need of mercy and pardon;) this prayer following may witness:
"Receive, O Lord, our prayers and supplications, and give rest unto all our fathers, and mothers, and brethren, and sisters, and children, and all our other kindred and alliance; and unto all souls that rest before us in hope of the everlasting resurrection. And place their spirits and their bodies in the book of life, in the bosoms of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the region of the living, in the kingdom of heaven, in the paradise of delight, by thy bright angels bringing all into thy holy mansions. Raise also our bodies together with theirs in the day which thou hast appointed, according to thy holy and sure promises. It is not a death then, Lord, unto thy servants, when we flit from the body and go home to thee our God, but a translation from a sorrowful state unto a better and. more delightful, and a refreshment and joy. And if we have sinned in any thing against thee, be gracious both unto us and unto them. Forasmuch as no man is clean from pollution before thee, no, though his life were but of one day, thou alone excepted who didst appear upon earth without sin, Jesus Christ our Lord, by whom we all hope to obtain mercy and pardon of our sins: therefore, as a good and merciful God, release and forgive both us and them: pardon our offences as well voluntary as involuntary, of knowledge and of ignorance, both manifest and hidden, in deed, in thought, in word, in all our conversations and motions. And to those that are gone before us grant freedom and release, and us that remain bless, granting a good and a peaceable end both to us and to all thy people."
Whereunto this other short prayer also for one that is deceased may be added:
"None, no, not one man hath been without sin but thou alone, O Immortal. Therefore, as a God full of compassion, place thy servant in light with the quires of thine angels; by thy tender mercy passing over his iniquities, and granting to him the resurrection."
Lastly, that these prayers have principal relation to the judgment of the great day, and do respect the escaping of the unquenchable fire of Gehenna, not the temporal flames of any imaginary purgatory, is plain, both by these kinds of prosopopœias, which they attribute to the deceased:
