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ID	Title	Author	Corrected Date of Publication (TCP Date of Publication)	STC	Words	Pages
A65798	Notes on Mr. F.D.'s Result of a dialogue concerning the middle state of souls in a letter from Thomas White.	White, Thomas, 1593-1676.	1660 (1660)	Wing W1838; ESTC R27876	31,093	81

to be excepted against Rather I congratulate among many other learned passages in this Chapter your truly Catholike explication of the Churches Tenet that while they are in Purgatory their sins remain and that their sins once perfectly taken away they are straight in Heaven which is in my mind the true sense of the Bull and Council Though I cannot approve what you attribute to Scotus that in Hell veniall sins after certain proportion of punishment cease to be which I think a misgrounded and exotick conceit Notes on the seventh Chapter IN your seventh Chapter you give Aristotles Reason for the unchangeableness of an abstracted soul a very true and good one but so dangerous if not perfectly understood that it hath precipitated divers Peripateticks into the suspicion if not the reality of being Atheists because a substance without an action is accounted among Philosophers frustraneous and superfluous and incongruous to nature to avoid which inconvenience I must note that this is one difference betwixt bodily spirituall substances that bodies are essentially instrumentall and therefore where they are the directly and primarily intended parts of nature they are frustraneous and idle if they have not motion but spirituall substances especially separated souls are certain beings which are the end of bodies and of all changes which end succeeds to changes as standing still and quiet doth to locall motion as being at home to the journey by which we come thither as health to curing and manhood to growth therefore souls are of themselves uncapable of motion as being now grown above materiality which is the possibility to change and motion and so by the negation of materiality in Peripatetick Philosophy is demonstrated the unchangeableness of souls And who ever supposes a change in spirits must suppose them also to have a potentiality to somewhat which is to be attained by motion as indeed those Divines do who put change in them This is Aristotles way throughout his Philosophy which those Peripateticks understood not who drew the mortality of the soul out of the deficiency of fancy in her I am glad in the mean while to meet an Adversary so learned as to penetrate the truth of Aristotles and S. Thomas his Tenet and so ingenuous as to attest those great Lights are on my side by which it appears I am not left singular in my opinion A favour the Vindicator would not aford me but made it injurious in me to pretend or assert I built on Saint Thomas his Principles It is now time to retire from this digression to the imputation you lay upon the Translator out of the Council of Trent where it forbids difficult points to be preached to the vulgar which you extend to the putting them into vulgar Languages not without some wrong to all such great wits who are as capable of high speculations as the Greeks and Romans were and yet know no other Tongues then their mothers and what Languages I pray you did those Greeks and Romans themselves use in their sublimest discourses but their mother Language In fine the practice of other Nations testifies that the Councils prohibition reacheth not so far if you think it did I wonder you prest it not home look in his Preface and you shall see this perform'd by him both to his and my justification of which yet you vouchsafe not to take the least notice But I would heartily intreat you to consider likewise those branches of the Decree which concerns your party and is a great deal more morall and important to vertue Incerta etiam vel quae specie falsi laborant evulgari ac tractari non permittant Uncertain devotions ought not to be divulged how much less violently pressed Were there but one clear sentence of a Father for the opinion of souls being freed before Judgement Were there any ground of it but unproveable revelations before the School Did there any ancient School man censure the contrary did it not pass in the Council of Florence for an indifferent opinion and the contrary not to be exacted Did not even at this day the gravest School men temper themselves from censure whatsoever their private opinion is I might think this command might less concern you But if none of this I have said can be confuted then lay your hand upon your heart and think what is to be done Remember in what language the scandalous delusive promises annext to certain prayers are printed and improvidently thrust as your Epistle calls it into Ladies hands look but a little about you and you may perhaps find motives enough to proceed very temperately in applying the Council of Trent against that worthy Person that translated the Book whose conclusion you dislike but confute not the Premises Your next opposition is about the day of Judgment which you say is not to be prayed for and your grounds are the dreadfulness of it and a place out of Saint Hilary And as for the dreadfulness I pray consider the words you cite Cum vix justus sit securus which if you please to mark say the just shall be secure that is out of all fear Consider also the triumph the book of Wisdom describes Then that the just stand up in great assurance c. And you your self know it is the sense of the whole Church that even in Purgatory they are all secure of their salvation As for Saint Hierom he was yet in the state of uncertainty and therefore no wonder if he had a deep apprehension of it being perpetually in thought of his sins But this was not the way which the spirit of God led Saint Martin Saint Ambrose and a late Saint who professed he rather desired to live in uncertainty of his salvation so to gain souls then to die immediately with security of going to heaven nor the mind of Saint Paul who desired to be dissolved and accounted death a gain so you see one Saints apprehensions are not to be the rule of the Church We have our Saviours warrant exhortation even to them who shall see the disorder of the heavens in way to judgment to lift up their heads with joy that their redemption is neer And Saint Paul calls the Saints those who love Christs coming And our only Master teaches us to say Thy Kingdom come Nevertheless I admit that the frightfulness of that great scene of the Universall conflagration may deterr spirits weak and not confident of their strength from desiring to be alive themselves at that day but not from desiring to come when God hath prepared elect Saints fit to encounter those terrors and to pray that such men may quickly be raised which is more regardfull in their way who think that even in aeviternity the addition of time is of eminent consequence Briefly in the day of Judgment there are two things considerable One the terrors and dangers in relation to which part none can conceive we ought to pray for it the other the great rewards and

benefits to be then distributed to such as are found worthy and in that respect nothing can possibly be more desireable to a Christian heart erected with hope and enflamed with love of such infinit felicity Your ensuing part brings in the difficulty of the fruit of prayer for the dead of which I may truly pronounce it is both the easiest and hardest part of all this question easiest to understand hardest to perswade And I hold my self bound to thank you that you handle it like a grave and solid Divine and not with whimsies like my Vindicative Answerer unworthy to be regarded and able to turn a mans stomack that is bound to answer them And yet fame threatens the world with a second Tome of Christian doctrin turned into jests by our Divine Tarleton Now to come to the point of the profit of prayer for the dead wherein there are three considerations to be managed first what is the fruit of this prayer secondly what is obtained by it and lastly what comes to the speciall share of him who is prayed for As to the first remember that prayer is the substance of Christian life recommended to us to be constant and perpetuall in all our actions and let me add what you will not deny in all our passions and defects If we be so imperfect as to desire what is not fit for us yet it pleases God that even that as long as it stands with ignorance that 't is against his will be demanded at his hands For still there is a conversion of the soul to him and many times so much the greater by how much the passion in us to the thing we desire is the greater Turn your eyes on a Gentlewoman that hath lost her husband or dear child see the passion she is in the sorrow she suffers so far as she conceives her beloved loss to be in misery Remember the words of Saint Paul Sicut qui spem non habent that is inconsolably put this Lady with all her passion into a conceit that her loss is recoverable that by her prayers to God she shall eternally enjoy the missed comfort in a plenitude of bliss and happiness With what earnestness of affection with what a flood of tears with what impetuousness of heart doth she embrace God and his goodness and the hopes of heaven for her self and hers And will you after this tell me there is no fruit of prayer for the dead and this dead in particular since it hath so deep a stroke upon the living friends But your eye lay only upon the fruit of impetration I pray therefore not to repeat again how punctually all our expectation of successive relief for those souls by our prayers is verifyed in their simultaneous enjoyment of it tell me is it to be understood that a cause can make a thing be sooner and not make it be It is plain then if impetration be a causing or making the eternall reward come sooner it is the causing of the eternall reward it self to come I can put this more home to You who make no doubt but God so orders Beatitude to be the End of our works that withall he orders our works to be the means of our Beatitude so that it is perfectly true if the works precede not Beatitude shall not follow notwithstanding the effectuall will by which God hath ordained it For you understand that in Gods resolutions there are no ifs and ands as in ours but that with one intuitive and strong act he orders the means for the end and the end by the means and that all priority and posteriority is purely in the effects none in his acts And that Gods free disposition of creatures consists not in that he can now determin what he list but in that he hath determined what he listed or rather that he is essentially the very determination of what he lists But I exceed the bounds of what you think fit for a discourse to be vulgarly communicated and therefore I return to my Theme and conclude if impetration of the day of Judgment be such a cause of it and of all that passes in it true Divinity must confess if this impetration be not the day of Judgment shall not be nor any effect in it how can any Divine who understands the exactness of Gods working deny but that the prayers for the dead by which its coming is procured procure the very happiness it self of the party for whom he prayes and brings him to the crown to which his merits call him as St. Ambrose speaks so that you see the difficulty of this point consists in this that those who are not Divines do not understand the connexion of Gods works and how it is true that if any one circumstance ordain'd by God to bring about such an effect should fail the effect it self would have no success By which the third consideration is made manifest that the party for whom the prayer is made obtains by vertue of such prayer not only his own glory and every accidental part of bliss allotted to him but besides obliges all the Saints of God by being the occasion that by the prayer made for him all their bliss respectively comes to atchievment how hard so ever it be to stamp a full conceit of this into the heads of the common sort Your second Argument presses that the coming of the day of Judgment concerns the living as well or more then the dead I will not question whether it doth or no but I ask what doth that prejudice the prayer if it helps more then the maker of it thinks on unless you imagin the good people pray like the little boy whose prayer was that God would bless his father and mother and brothers and sisters and no body else I have not learn'd any such restriction of charity nor did he teach it who bids us in his own Prayer call him Pater noster not Pater mi And told us he knew well that is better then we what we wanted and that our desires should be after the Kingdom of God and all other things would be added to us as to Salomons Petition of Wisdom besides the grant of it were added those felicities he did not pray for And me thinks the reason is cleer for if our charity be the adequate cause of impetrating what we beg rationally of God and God is not ignorant of what is fit for us certainly in respect of our charity he will do it so we be carefull to increase that whether we ask it him or no Look the Pater noster thorow and see if you find any other object of prayer then the good of the world in common and the necessaries to our own perfection Other prayers are fram'd in condescension to our weakness who do not cleanse our souls from particular desires and are good and commendable to the proportion of divers abilities But if all could attain the perfection of desiring nothing but what charity commands it would