As time went on, further developments took place. Thus men felt difficulty in supposing that those who repented at the close of a wicked life could at once enjoy the fellowship of the saints in Paradise, and the simple division of good and bad of Luke xvi., 26, became the threefold division, made familiar by Dante. These speculations were further fixed by the growth of the theory of Satisfaction and of Indulgences: each forgiven soul was sup posed to have to endure an amount of suffering in proportion to the guilt of its sins, and the prayers and pious acts of the living availed to shorten this penance time in Purgatory (see INDUL It thus came about that prayers for the dead were re garded only as aiming at the deliverance of souls from purgatorial fires ; and that application of the Eucharist seems to have almost overshadowed all others. The Council of Trent attempted cer tain reforms in the matter, with more or less success ; but broadly speaking, the system still remains in the Roman Catholic Church, and masses for the dead are a very important part of its acts of worship. The Reformation took its rise in a righteous protest against the sale of Indulgences; and by a natural reaction the Protestants, in rejecting the Roman doctrine of Purgatory, were inclined to disuse all prayers for the dead.
In the English Communion Service of 1549, after the offering of praise and thanks for all the saints, came the following : "We commend into thy mercy all other thy servants, which are de parted hence from us with the sign of faith and now do rest in the sleep of peace : grant unto them, we beseech thee, thy mercy and everlasting peace." The Burial Service of the same date also contained explicit prayers for the deceased. In 1552 all mention of the dead, whether commemorative or intercessory, was cut out of the Eucharist; the prayers in the Burial Service were brought into their present form ; and the provision for Holy Communion at a Burial was omitted. The thankful commemoration of the
dead in the Eucharist was restored in 1662, but prayers for them remained, if they remained at all, veiled in ambiguous phrases. The Church of England has however never forbidden prayers for the dead. It was proposed in 1552 to condemn the Romish doctrine de precatione pro defunctis in what is now the 22nd of the Thirty-Nine Articles, but the proposal was rejected. And these intercessions have been used in private by a long list of English divines, e.g., Andrewes, Cosin, Ken, Wesley and Keble. In a suit (1838) as to the lawfulness of an inscription "Pray for the soul of . . .," the Court held that "no authority or canon has been pointed out by which the practice of praying for the dead has been expressly prohibited." See H. M. Luckock, After Death (i886) ; E. H. Plumptre, The Spirits in Prison (i886) ; H. B. Swete, "Prayers for the Departed in the First Four Centuries," Jour. Theol. Stud. viii.; Arts. "Prayers for the Departed" in Hastings' Encyc. Rel. Eth. and "Dead, Prayers for the" in Cath. Encyc. (W. 0. B.) PRAYING WHEEL, used by the Buddhists of Tibet as a means of offering invocations. The smallest kind consists of a cylinder of metal or other substance turning on a handle as pivot. Outside it and on strips of paper within is inscribed the invocation to Avalokitevara or his consort, Om Mayipadme hum. A weight hangs at the side, and with a slight movement of the hand the cylinder revolves. Larger wheels are made to revolve by means of wind or water.