E SACRIFICE OF THE MASS

THE OFFERTORY. 179
Heaven. Nor is it likely that the Church would apply
to Purgatory the very word Tartarus, which St. Peter
applies to Hell in the well-known passage of the Second
" For if
Epistle, where he speaks of the fallen angels :
God spared not the angels which sinned but delivered
them drawn down by infernal ropes to the lower Hell
unto torments to be
"
reserved unto judgment rudentibns
inferni
detractos in TARTARUM tradidit cmciandos.
Without violence to language we can easily interpret
the Church s words in the Offertory of the Requiem
Mass in strict accordance with her doctrine.
Cardinal Wiseman, following distinguished modern
writers, reminds us that the Services of the Church are
eminently dramatic. In her hands the past becomes the
present. In her Office for Advent and Christmas she
places the manger at Bethlehem before our eyes as if
the Divine Babe had just been born, and in Holy
Week she speaks of each incident in the Passion as if
it were enacted that moment before us. The Church
kneels in spirit, so thinks this great man, beside the
dying beds of her children, and mindful of the
tremendous risk, pours forth her earnest supplications
for the souls whose fate for eternity is soon to be fixed ;
or to follow Father Suarez, more dramatic still, the
Church represents souls at the moment of their
departure from the body on their road to Judgment
and begs for them the mercy of God. Deliver the
souls of all the faithful departed from the pains
deliver them from the
of Hell and the deep lake ;
mouth of the lion : let not Hell swallow them up.
The concluding words of the versicle fac eas, Domine,
de morte transire ad vitam, can be explained, without
strain, to mean, let them pass from temporal death,
O Lord, to the glory of that existence which alone