"The Bishops have a separating power, as the interpreters of God's judgments,"
according to that commission of Christ, Whose sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose ye shall retain, they are retained: and whatsoever thou shall bind upon earth, shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose upon earth, shall be loosed in heaven. Now, as in the use of the keys the schoolmen following St. Jerome do account the minister to be the interpreter only of God's judgment, by declaring what is done by him in the binding or loosing of men's sins; so doth this author here give them power only to
"separate those that are already judged of God," and, by way of "declaration and convoy to bring in those that are beloved of God, and to exclude such as are ungodly."
And if the power which the ministers have received by the aforesaid commission do extend itself to any further real operation upon the living, Pope Gelasius will deny that it may be stretched in like manner unto the dead; because that Christ saith, Whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth.
"He saith, upon earth; for he that dieth bound is nowhere said to be loosed."
And
"that which a man remaining in his body hath not received, being unclothed of his flesh he cannot obtain,"
saith Leo. Whether the dead received profit by the prayers of the living, was still a question in the Church. Maximus, in his Greek Scholies upon the writer of the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, wisheth us to
"mark, that even before" that writer's "time this doubt was questioned."
Among the questions wherein Dulcitius desired to be resolved by St. Augustine, we find this to be one:
"Whether the offering that is made for the dead did avail their souls any thing?" Many "did say to this, that if herein any good were to be done after death, how much rather should the soul itself obtain ease for itself by its own confessing of her sins there, than that for the ease thereof an oblation should be procured by other men."
The like also is noted by Cyril, or rather John, Bishop of Jerusalem, that he
