An answer to a challenge madeAn ansvver to a challenge made

By all that hath been said, the indifferent Reader may easily discern, what may be thought of the cracking Cardinal, who would face us down, that ^mall the ancients, both Greek and Latin, from the very time of the Apostles, did constantly teach that there was a Purgatory. whereas his own partners could tell him in his ear, that ⁿin the ancient writers there is almost no mention of Purgatory, especially in the Greek writers; and therefore that by the Grecians it is not believed until this day. He allegeth indeed a number of authorities to blear m•ns eyes withal: which being narrowly looked into, will be found either to be counterfeit stuff, or to make nothing at all to the purpose; as belonging either to the point of praying for the dead only, (which in those ancient times had no relation to Purgatory; as in the handling of the next article we shall see) or unto the fire of affliction in this life, or to the fire that shall burn the world at the last day, or to the fire prepared for the Devil and his Angels, or to some other fire then that which he intended to kindle thereby. This benefit only have we here gotten by his labours: that he hath saved us the pains of seeking far for the forge, from whence the first sparkles of ⟨p. 171⟩that purging fire of his brake forth. For the ancientest memorial that he bringeth thereof, (the places which he hath abused out of the Canonical and Apocryphal scriptures only excepted) ^ois out of Plato in his Gorgias and Phaedo, Cicero in the end of his fiction of the dream of Scipio, and Virgil in the sixth book of his Aeneids: and next after the Apostles times, ^pout of Tertullian in the seventeenth chapter of his book de Animâ, and Origen in diverse places. Only he must give us leave to put him in mind, with what spirit Tertullian was led, when he wrote that book de Animâ: and with what authority he strengtheneth that conceit of mens paying in hell for their small faults before the resurrection, namely of ^q