We have commented elsewhere on Bishop Bickersteth's won- derful decision
that " Requiescat in pace" is a prayer for the dead which no Evangelical Protestant could properly use. In the meantime, it has come out that, within the Province of Can- terbury at least, it is allowable even to place a real request to the reader to pray for the dead on a tombstone. Sir Herbert Jenner Fust appears to have ruled, in the case of "Bucks v. Wool- fru," decided in 1838 or 1839, that the inscription, "Pray for the repose of the soul of J. W." is not an inscrip- tion condemned by the theology of the Anglican Church. The doctrine of Purgatory was, according to Sir Herbert Jenner Fust, condemned by our Church, but the doctrine of purgatory was not to be confounded with the assumptions implied in the primitive usage of prayer for the dead. Prayers for the dead, he said, were not favoured, but also were not prehibited by the English Church. A great wily persons who, like our- selves, have no leaning at all to Anglicanism, will say, "So ,much the better." It is nowhere asserted in Scripture,,and,itie hardly possible in right reason, that the mement of death can nuke such a sudden and violent difference in the state-of 413:7 character, as to fix it thenceforth in marble lineaments for ell the ages of eternity.
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