PRAYER FOR THE PURGATION OF A SOUL (From Book of Common Prayer) O Almighty God, with Whom do live the spirits of just men made perfect, after they are delivered from their earthly prisons; We humbly commend the soul of this Thy servant, our dear brother, into Thy hands, as into the hands of a faithful Creator, and most merciful Saviour; most humbly beseeching Thee, that it may be precious in Thy sight. Wash it, we pray Thee, in the blood of that immaculate Lamb, that was slain to take away the sins of the world; that whatsoever defilements it may have contracted in the midst of this miserable and naughty world, through the lusts of the flesh, or the wiles of Satan, being purged and done away, it may be presented pure and without spot before Thee, through the merits of Jesus Christ, Thine only Son our Lord. Amen. XII. Patristic Teaching on Future Purification WE E have already referred to the mistaken notion that the Faith of the Gospel was an entirely new revelation, standing in isolation from all that was already commonly believed in the Jewish and pagan religions. Christianity was not an entirely new revelation, but rather the summing up and final expression of all the truths of the natural and supernatural order in the person of Jesus Christ. God "made Him to be the ȧvakepaλaiwois, or recapitulation, of all the Theism, and of all the truths relating to the nature of man and the moral law, which were already found throughout the world; and has set these truths in their place and proportion in the full revelation of the 'truth as it is in Jesus.'" 1 "By the unity of doctrine, or faith, the Church has taken up all philosophies and consolidated them in one. Whether by the momentum of an original revelation, or by the continual guidance of a heavenly teaching, or by the mutual convergence of the reason of man 1 See H. E. MANNING, Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost, p. 17. towards the unseen realities of truth, it is certain that all thoughtful minds were gazing one way. As the fulness of time drew on, their eyes were more and more intently fixed on one point in the horizon, 'more than they that watch for the morning'; and all the lights of this fallen world were bent towards one central region, in which at last they met and kindled. The one Faith was the focus of all philosophies, in which they were fused, purified, and blended. The scattered truths which had wandered up and down the earth, and had been in part adored, and in part held in unrighteousness, were now elected and called home, and, as it were, regenerated and gathered into one blessed company, and glorified once more as the witnesses of the Eternal."1 It was, however, not all at once that the Church developed out of the deposit of truth committed to her guardianship the full meaning of each doctrine, and placed it in its proper relationship to other truths of the faith. Only as time went on and heresies arose did she examine each region of doctrine, define the truth in exact language, and explain its place in the great fabric of the faith of the Gospel. To this careful unfolding and explaining of the truths of the faith we owe the Creeds of the Church. Each Article represents either a battle with heresy, or the determination of a controversy, or the accentuation of the vital importance of some fact or doctrine. But besides 1 H. E, MANNING (1845), The Unity of the Church, p. 205. those great and fundamental dogmas that found a place in the Catholic Creed, there were other points of doctrine that gradually became more clear to the Church. Among these we may include the doctrine of the Intermediate State of the soul. The Fathers, as we have seen, received from the Apostles the tradition of the value of prayer for the departed, so that while we have proof that such prayers were common in the Church shortly after the death of St. John, we have no hint in any orthodox writer that these prayers were ever looked upon as other than the charitable expression of the hope that sprang from Christian faith. It was, however, only after a lapse of several centuries that anything like a definite doctrine as to the soul between the death and resurrection of the body was formulated, and even then there was not an absolute agreement on all points throughout the whole Church, but the West differed in some respects from the East. This difference, of which we have seen signs in the writings of St. John Chrysostom and St. Augustine, was later on associated with the doctrine of purgatory. It will therefore be well briefly to trace the growth of this doctrine, and to note how far the East and West were agreed in their teaching; we may thus arrive at the Catholic belief-i.e. what was (and is) held by the whole Church of God. In this chapter we will confine ourselves to the Patristic doctrines as to the purification of the soul after death. |