An answer to a challenge madeAn ansvver to a challenge made

For the further opening hereof, it will not be amiss to consider both of the objection of Aërius, and of the answer of Epiphanius. Thus did Aërius argue against ⟨p. 238⟩the practise of the Church. ^sFor what reason do you 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 no body 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 Aërius his argumentation: which would have been of force indeed, if the whole Church had held, as many did; that the judgement after death was suspended until the general Resurrection, and that in the mean time 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, ^tthe 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 on the contrary side, that it was not so: and that it was a foolish part of 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 practise of the Church, which had no dependence upon that erroneous conceit, therein he did like unto himself, headily ⟨p. 239⟩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 ^u