A26947:644
A key for Catholics, to open the juggling of the Jesuits, and satisfy all…A key for Catholicks, to open the jugling of the Jesuits, and satisfie all…
A key for Catholics, to open the juggling of the Jesuits, and satisfy all that are but truly willing to understand, whether the cause of the Roman or reformed churches be of God ... containing some arguments by which the meanest may see the vanity of popery, and 40 detections of their fraud, with directions, and materials sufficient for the confutation of their voluminous deceits ... : the second part showeth (especially against the French and Grotians) that the Catholic Church is not united in any merely humane head, either Pope or council / by Richard Baxter, a Catholic Christian and Pastor of a church ...A key for Catholicks, to open the jugling of the Jesuits, and satisfie all that are but truly willing to understand, whether the cause of the Roman or reformed churches be of God ... containing some arguments by which the meanest may see the vanity of popery, and 40 detections of their fraud, with directions, and materials sufficient for the confutation of their voluminous deceits ... : the second part sheweth (especially against the French and Grotians) that the Catholick Church is not united in any meerly humane head, either Pope or council / by Richard Baxter, a Catholick Christian and Pastor of a church ...
London: printed by R.W. for Nevil Simmons, 1659
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
You see then, that our Question is not whether the dead may be prayed for: but what prayers may be made for them. And therefore to find that about three hundred years after Christ (more or less) men begun to pray for the dead, is no proof that they were not of our Church or Religion; or that therefore we want succession. It was not a praying to be sooner out of Purgatory that then was used, as Papists do, but a Praying for the mercies promised at the Resurrection: And thus we think it lawful to pray for the dead; were it not for ⟨p. 162⟩the accidental evil that might follow with them that will misunderstand and abuse it.
You see then, that our Question is not whether the dead may be prayed for: but what prayers may be made for them. And therefore to find that about three hundred years after Christ (more or less) men begun to pray for the dead, is no proof that they were not of our Church or Religion; or that therefore we want succession. It was not a praying to be sooner out of Purgatory that then was used, as Papists do, but a Praying for the mercies promised at the Resurrection: And thus we think it lawfull to pray for the dead; were it not for ⟨p. 162⟩the accidental evil that might follow with them that will misunderstand and abuse it.
And its further to be noted, that as Pegna, Stapleton and others confess, the Fathers, Greek and Latin, before mentioned, did believe that men had not their perfect Joys till the Resurrection; and therefore they had the far stronger motive to pray for the dead. And if Protestants had not been partly of this mind (save only that we put not the soul into hidden receptacles, nor anywhere but with Christ) Bellarmine had not found so much occasion of that unworthy calumny against Calvin for the words cited by him in his Instit. as if he denied the beatifical vision, if not the immortality of the soul: Even because he took not our bliss to be perfect till the Resurrection, but somewhat short of what we shall then be. Now seeing the Fathers were so commonly of that mind, and the Greeks and Ethiopians are still of that mind, and Bellarmine saith Luther and Calvin are of that mind, you may see that neither in that nor the point of praying for the dead as used by the ancients, is our distance so great as to weaken the proof of our succession, or make us to be of two Churches or Religions.