Two ancient treatises on purgatory

Introduction

A fresh edition being called for of these two fine old books on Purgatory, they have been joined together and are re-issued in one volume. The Appendix to the first of the two treatises is no part of Father Mumford’s work, but the present editor is responsible for it. It seemed to be wanted to bring the treatise up to date.

The second book was edited by Father William Henry Anderdon, and as to our loss he is no longer here to carry the book through the press again, as he would greatly have enjoyed to do, another has had to re-edit it for him. An explanation given by Father Anderdon must be now repeated. The references in the footnotes have not been verified ; indeed, now that it is too late, it seems a pity that they were not omitted altogether. No one would expect, considering the date when the book was written, that the historical illustrations and quota¬ tions should have the exactness and precision of

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modern criticism, and it would have been better that there should have been no pretence of proofs or references. The stories are given for the purpose of enforcing the pious lessons of the book, and the reader will recognize the ability with which Father Thimelby avails himself of their help. The vigour of the style makes one feel at every turn that the good Father must have been a very forcible preacher, though all that he says is not invariably in accordance with modern taste. For the matter of this treatise, he tells us that he was largely indebted to Father Stephen Binet, S.J., but he says of himself that he was “ not a bare translator,” and that no reader would be likely to think.

The two books are contemporary. Father Mumford’s work first appeared in 1661, and Father Thimelby’s in 1663. They were both reprinted (Father Mumford’s for the third time) in St. Joseph’s Ascetical Library in 1874. A short account of each author was prefixed to the editions of their books published in that year, and is now reproduced.

James Mumford, a native of the county of Norfolk, was born in the year 1606. His name is spelt in various ways. The Catalogue of the English Province S.J. for the year 1642, calls him “ Momford.” That for the year 1655 calls him, in

INTRODUCTION.

IX the body of it, “Jacobus Momfordus,” whilst in the Index to the same it has “ Mumfordus.” Mr. Dodd, in a very brief notice of this Father, in his Church History, vol. iii. p. 321, calls him “ Monford ; ” and Father Nathaniel Southwell, in his Bibliotheca Scriptorum Societatis Jesu (Rome, 1676), gives his name as “Jacobus Munfordus.”

He entered the Society of Jesus in the year 1626, made his noviceship at Watten, and was pro¬ fessed of the four vows on the 29th of September, 1641. In the Catalogue of the Province for the year 1642, he appears as Father Minister of the English College S.J. at Liege, at the same time being Consultor of the College and teaching huma¬ nities. He was subsequently Rector of the College. In the Catalogue for the year 1655, he is entered as serving in the College of the Holy Apostles, which comprised the Jesuit missions in the counties of Essex, Sussex, Norfolk, and Cambridge. He is stated to be then forty-nine years of age, of weak health, with the mention of a goodly array of offices in which he had been previously employed, such as Rector, Confessarius, Spiritual Father, Socius to the Master of Novices, Minister, Consultor, Pro¬ fessor of Sacred Scripture and of Moral Theology.

About the year 1650 he was missionary priest at Norwich, the first of whose residence in that

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city we have any record. In those evil days every priest in England lived in the constant expectation of confessorship, if not of martyrdom. Father Mumford had the honour of bearing insults and imprisonment for his Master. A few years before his death he was betrayed and apprehended at Norwich. He was paraded through the streets of the city by the posse comitatas, who carried his priestly vestments on their halberds, the Father being dressed in a priest’s cloak. .His interior joy at being called thus to suffer for Christ was so expressed by the cheerfulness of his countenance as to make no little impression on the people. After some days’ imprisonment in the common jail, he was sent by boat, handcuffed and manacled, to Yarmouth ; a journey that occupied a day and a night. Norwich, however, conceiving its rights and privileges injured by the transfer, he was brought back again, and, though kept in prison, was treated with less rigour. He had a separate cell allowed him, and the Catholics being permitted to bring him his breviary and other books, he occupied his time in writing his Catholic Scripturist, which was first published in Ghent in 1662, and has since been three times reprinted. After some months’ imprison¬ ment he was permitted to go at large on bail, but again and again he was obliged to reappear at the

INTRODUCTION.

xi bar as his judges came on circuit, till at length, his accuser having ceased to appear, and no legal proof of his priesthood being forthcoming, he was liberated.

Father Mumford died in England on the gth of March, 1666, in his sixtieth year, and the twentysixth of his service of the English Mission.

Father Mumford had a most charitable love for the suffering souls in Purgatory, offering for them the satisfactions of all his labours and sufferings. To spread the same devotion he published a i2mo treatise in 1641, at St. Omers, called A Remembrance for the Living to pray for the Dead, and six years afterwards, at Liege, a Latin treatise entitled, De misericordid fidelibus defunctis exhibendd. The latter was translated into French by Pere Brignon, S.J., with Triessem’s letters to Father Mumford (Paris, 1691). Besides these books and the Catholic Scripturist , Father Mumford wrote A Vindication of St. Gregorie his Dialogues (London, 1660), and The Question of Questions, which, rightly resolved, resolveth all our questions in religion. This question is, Who ought to be our judge in all these our differences ? By Optatus Ductor (Ghent, 1658, and London, 1686).

The Annual Letters of the English Province for the year 1650-1 relates as follows the circum¬ stances under which the latter of the two works

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xii

in behalf of the Holy Souls was reprinted at Cologne.

“ Of Father Mumford’s pious and instructive treatise on compassion for the Faithful Departed, the first edition has been nearly sold off, and William Triessem, the printer at Cologne, was about to publish a second edition, when a son of his, a little boy of four years old, was taken dangerously ill, and deriving no benefit from medical treatment, seemed drawing near his end. The printer, being a pious man, and according to his custom desiring to read some spiritual work, and seek consolation in religion, took up the first pious book that presented itself, which happened to be Father Mumford’s treatise. Meeting with that part of it in which the author represents works of charity to the souls in Purgatory as very efficacious for obtaining all favours from God, the good man felt himself impelled to have recourse to this means of obtaining of God the recovery of his son. His trade gave shape to his purpose, and going that morning to the church, kneeling before the high altar, he made the following vow to Almighty God : 4 O my God, if it pleases your Divine Majesty to restore my boy to health, I here vow to distribute one hundred copies of this treatise gratuitously to Religious and ecclesiastics, as the persons most likely to diffuse

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• • • Xlll

the devotion it recommends.’ Having made this vow, and returned home from his place of business to dinner, he heard with joy and gratitude that his son was asking for food, and the next day the boy’s recovery was already far advanced. The father faithfully fulfilled his vow. The worthy publisher experienced a second time the efficacy of this work of charity. His wife fell dangerously ill, but recovered on his vowing to distribute gratis two hundred copies of the salutary treatise.”

A later edition of the Remembrance , &c., bears the name of Paris as that of its place of publication. The first part was printed in 1660, in a i2mo

. volume of 480 pages. The second part, contain¬ ing 138 pages, was published in the following year. On the title-page of the first part it is called, “ The second edition, augmented and altered by the author, as the Preface declares.” The Preface “ to the Catholique Reader” begins thus:

“ Almost twenty years are past since I composed a small treatise as a Remembrance for the Living to pray for the Dead. But this unfortunate island began presently to be almost as violently tossed within by the waves of sedition and rebellion, as it is battered

without by the restless billows of its encircling ocean. Whence that little work, as it was made and printed beyond the sea, so also all the copies

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of it were almost dispersed among such Catholiques as the fury of those times had enforced to leave their native country. Times changing, a second edition seemed expedient.” From this we gather, what Father Nathaniel Southwell distinctly says, that this second edition was really printed in London, though it bears the imprint of Paris.

The first part is not now reprinted. It is not only controversial, and therefore out of keeping with the purpose of a purely ascetical book, but the chief point confuted is a curious error long since forgotten, that “ souls, once detained in. Purgatory, be not thence deliverable before the last General Resurrection.”

Of the work that is now reproduced, the author says, in the same Preface, “ This second part is properly that which may be truly said to have a second edition in English, but yet not without some alteration and increase, particularly by some additions taken out of my larger Latin treatise, which hath been translated into several languages. The whole scope of it is to inflame the will towards that never sufficiently commendable devotion of praying for the dead. And because this part is proper for such as seriously desire to exercise themselves in practice of piety, and are either unable or unwilling to attend to school disputations

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xv concerning points in which already they are as well settled as our learnedest forefathers cared to be, I have thought fit to print it in a volume apart, yet so as to account it a part of this whole work (to which it may be joined by those who please) that all may understand nothing to be there delivered by me for increase of piety, which in my first part hath not been proved to be solidly grounded in the exactest rigour of divinity.”

This book has been translated into French by the Abbe Bouix, who has prefixed it to the treatise of St. Catherine of Genoa, giving it at the same time the high praise that it is the best treatise with which he is acquainted on the subject of which it treats. It would be hard that it should be more accessible to foreign readers than to the author’s fellow-countrymen for whose edification it was written.

Thimelby, or Thimbleby, was the name of an ancient knightly family, seated at Pelham in Lincolnshire, in the reign of Edward III.1 Towards the end of the fifteenth century, Richard Thimelby married the heiress of Sir Andrew Lutterell, knight, of Irnham in the same county. This lady brought with her, to the family into which she married, 1 Clifford’s History of Tixall, p. 223.

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INTRODUCTION .

besides a claim to the barony of Lutterell, the manor of Irnham, which continued in Catholic hands until comparatively recent times. Their son, Richard Thimelby, married a daughter of Mrs. Brooksby,1 daughter of Lord Vaux of Harrowden. This Eleanor Brooksby, and her sister Anne Vaux, were Father Henry Garnet’s brave and devoted benefactresses. Two of Eleanor Brooksby’s grand¬ daughters, Winefred and Frances Thimelby, joined the English Augustinianesses at Louvain ; entering St. Monica’s Convent in 1634 and 1642 : and in 1668 Sister Winefred became Prioress of that devout and venerable house. Henry Thimelby, the younger brother of these two religious, married Gertrude, daughter of Walter, first Lord Aston of Forfar ; and, on her husband’s death, she entered religion in the same convent. Her niece, Catherine Aston, the daughter of her brother Herbert Aston and of Catherine Thimelby his wife, entered St. Monica’s at the same time. Elizabeth, another sister, married Richard Conquest, of Houghton Conquest in Bedfordshire ; and on the death, with¬ out issue, of her eldest brother’s grand-daughter, Mary the wife of Thomas Giffard of Chillington, the property passed to the Conquests. Mary Conquest, heiress of the last of that name (Benedict

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XVII

Conquest, who died in 1753), married Lord Arundell of Wardour; and thus Irnham passed to the Cliffords through her daughter Eleanor, wife of Lord Clifford of Ugbrooke.

Winefred, Frances, Catherine, and Elizabeth Thimelby had two brothers besides Henry, already mentioned. The eldest was Sir John Thimelby, knight, with whose son John the male line of the Thimelbys expired. The other was the translator of the present work, Richard Thimelby, who entered the Society of Jesus in 1631, at the age of seventeen. In those times few religious men were called by their own names, and that by which Father Richard Thimelby was generally known was Ashby. He spent nearly fifty years in the labours of the Society, and held many important offices. He taught Philosophy at the English College at Liege, and Polemical or Controversial Theology, of which in those days there was a professorship distinct from that of Dogmatic Theology. For sixteen years he laboured on the English Mission, and for some time he was Superior of the Jesuits in Lincolnshire, his native county, which was then known in the Society as “the Residence of St. Dominic.” From this he passed, in 1666, to the English Novitiate at Watten in Flanders, where he was Rector and Master of Novices for six years.

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On the 28th of August, 1672, he was transferred to the English College at St. Omers, the Rectorship of which he held for another period of six years. He was relieved of this charge some months before his death, which took place at St. Omers on the 7th of January, 1679-80. This good Father was professed of the four vows, November 22, 1646. The records of the Society speak in the highest terms of praise of his learning, prudence, and religious spirit ; but the list of the offices he held, speaks more eloquently than words of the esteem in which he was held as a spiritual man.

Several other Catholics of the name are men¬ tioned, but their connection with this branch of the family is not clear. Edward Thimbelby, who died in 1690, Provost of St. Gery or Gaugericus in Cambray, may have been another brother. Three officers of the Royal army, Charles, Robert, Nicholas Thimelby, lost their lives in the Civil War. There was one Gabriel Thimelby, who died a still more glorious death, and may be called a martyr, as he is recorded to have died in prison in the year 1586. Unfortunately, all that we know of him is, that he was once a student in the College at Rheims.

John Morris, S.J.

Contents

Page

Introduction . vii

A REMEMBRANCE FOR THE LIVING TO PRAY