This is so cardinal a principle of our Church that I cannot but feel confident that it is by an inadvertence, if language is used by any persons in authority which seems to imply a disregard of it. I apprehend that what it really means is that our Reformers excluded from our Prayer Book forms of Prayer for the Dead which were in use in the primitive Church; and that an appeal is being made to that primitive example as an authority for their reintroduction. Now, I fully admit that primitive practice has a _prima-facie_ claim to favourable consideration; and, as I have urged for years, if that principle were only acted upon, the Romish practices which are being forced upon our Church by the ritualistic party would be at once condemned. What, then, let us ask, were the Prayers for the Dead which were in use in the primitive Church? The description of them given by Bingham in his account of the ceremonies at the interment of Christians in the ancient Church (vol. viii., Oxford edition, p. 151) is in perfect harmony with that of Field and Ussher, and will not, I think, be questioned. At the interment, as at the Communion Service, “a solemn commemoration was made of the dead in general, and prayers offered to God for them--some Eucharistical, by way of thanksgiving for their deliverance out of this world’s afflictions, and others by way of intercession that God would receive their souls to the place of rest and happiness, that He would pardon their human failures, and not impute to them the sins of daily incursion, which in the best men are remainders of natural frailty and corruption; that He would increase their happiness, and finally bring them to a perfect consummation with all His Saints by a glorious resurrection.” The spirit and purpose of these prayers is illuminated by an observation of Archbishop Ussher (_Answer to a Jesuit_, chapter vii): “In these and other prayers of the like kind we may descry evident footsteps of the primary intention of the Church in such supplications for the dead, which was, that the whole man, not the soul separated only, might receive public remission of sins and a solemn acquittal in the judgment of that Great Day, and so obtain a full escape from all the consequences of sin, _the last enemy being now destroyed, and death swallowed up in victory_, and a perfect consummation of bliss and happiness. All which are comprised in that short prayer of St. Paul for Onesiphorus, though made for him while he was alive: _The Lord grant unto him that he may find mercy of the Lord in that day_.”