Chapter XVI. Purgatory And Prayers For The Dead. 215 Unwilling to make this assertion without the strongest evidence, I procured from a Jewish convert an authorized PrayerBook of the Hebrew church, from which I extract the following formula of prayers which are prescribed for funerals: "Departed brother! mayest thou find open the gates of heaven, and see the city of peace and the dwellings of safety, and meet the ministering angels hastening joyfully toward thee. And may the High Priest stand to receive thee, and go thou to the end, rest in peace, and rise again into life. May the repose established in the celestial abode ... be the lot, dwelling and the resting-place of the soul of our deceased brother (whom the Spirit of the Lord may guide into Paradise), who departed from this world, according to the will of God, the Lord of heaven and earth. May the supreme King of kings, through His infinite mercy, hide him under the shadow of His wing. May He raise him at the end of his days and cause him to drink of the stream of His delights."293 [221] Among the many-sided merits of Shakespeare may be mentioned his happy faculty of portraying to life the manners and customs and traditional faith of the times which he describes. How deep-rooted in the Christian heart in pre-Reformation times, was the belief in Purgatory, may be inferred from a passage in Hamlet who probably lived in the early part of the eighth century. Thus speaks to Hamlet the spirit of his murdered father: "I am thy father's spirit, Doom'd for a certain time to walk the night; And for the day confin'd too fast in fires, Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature Are burnt and purg'd away."294 293 Jewish Prayer Book. Edited by Isaac Leeser, published by Slote & Mooney, Philadelphia.