N. Well, James, you expect M., as it was arranged.
James. Yes, sir; he will be here, no doubt, directly. Pray sit down, sir.
N. Thank you. How are you getting on?
James. I find my spirit happy and at peace. I enjoy the word now with Mary and the children. I feel I am very weak, but I am conscious that my peace rests on Christ's perfect work, and as to the certainty of it, on God's own word; while I enjoy it within in my own soul. It makes me wonderfully happy, for I see it all flowing from God's blessed love. I know He loves me, unworthy as I am, but then, I have no difficulty in believing it because of Christ. I hope I may be able to glorify Him through His grace.
N. The Lord be praised, James; and this is but the earnest of a more perfect enjoyment still of what now we know in part and see through a glass darkly. Our present Christian joys have the stamp of eternity on them.
James. Yes, sir; poor as our feelings are, we know that what makes us happy now will make us still more happy for ever. We shall know then better what gives us our joy now. But He who has brought me to peace is the one who loves me, and whom I hope to see in glory.
N. And did your mind get clear the last time as to purgatory?
James. It could not but be clear when once one knows Christ's precious blood cleanses from all sin. I had no thought that they had such strange notions that so deny Christ's work. It is dreadful. I did not understand all about the Fathers, but what sets the soul clear is the knowledge of Christ and His grace. I was thinking since, sir (though there is nothing about purgatory in it), how the beautiful parable of the prodigal son sets all thoughts of it aside -- how that parable would prevent one who really knew the grace of it from ever thinking of such a thing. However could the Father, when the poor prodigal had all his rags off and the best robe on, that is, Christ Himself, put him in purgatory after? It is like putting Christ Himself there. And then I see plainly that once I leave this world I have not the flesh at all, so that I do not know what is to be purged away. Here, where I have it, I can be exercised and sifted and tried, and for my good, because the flesh is still here in me.
N. You are quite right, James. It is a complete confusion between penal suffering and purifying. If it be really purifying, it is a cruel thing to get it shortened by indulgences. If it be penal, it is contrary to all the testimony of the gospel.
N. They are decrees of the pope, by which, in virtue of the merits of Christ and the saints, he delivers souls in purgatory from a part or all of the punishment they have to go through.
Mrs. J. Dear, who would have thought of such things? Why, it is not Christianity at all, sir.
N. Surely it is not. I dare say we shall get upon this subject before we have done. It was the immediate occasion of the Reformation. They sold them in the most shameful or shameless way to get money to build St. Peter's, the magnificent cathedral at Rome.
As to the Fathers, James, you have no need to think of them. They are no authority for anything, and indeed contradict each other continually like other men: only there was more superstition and ignorance in them than in most cultivated persons now, with real piety in some; as to others, it is very doubtful if they had any. I have referred to them because it was necessary to meet what was alleged. And now that their doubts and contradictions are shewn, we may dismiss them without passion and without fear. They have indeed been altered, and passages cast out by the Roman Catholics, but not so as much to affect such a mass of writings. But Rome has what is called an index expurgatory, by which some books are prohibited, and others are directed to be printed without such a passage, or changing it, or the like, when any passage militates against the doctrines of the Roman system. And this has been done.
James. Dear, what a crafty system!
N. It is a system little known. They have published a kind of imitation of the Psalms, one hundred and fifty of them in number, just like the Psalms, and with a general resemblance, but have put the Virgin Mary instead of the Lord.
Mrs. J. What wickedness! It is all planned so. I am glad, James, you knew what it was before you got drawn in.
James. So am I, I am sure; it is a mercy to be kept from it in any way, but more still when it is by knowing the grace of God, which makes me see not only that there are wrong things, but that the foundation of their whole system is wrong. They do not build on grace and redemption, but on man and works. That I see plainly. But here is M. Good day, Bill, sit down.
N. Good day, M. We have waited to go on with the subject proposed till you came. We are to speak of the word of God and of the church. We can still take Milner, who, in a brief way, will say all that is to be said.
M. Yes, we must seek the right rule of faith, and that is the written and unwritten word, the church being the interpreter and judge. We must have a living judge of controversy, or there is no end to disputes.
N. The thing to be ultimately judged is not doctrines, my good friend, but souls. And the difference is most serious. I am not going to avoid the other question, that is, the means of discovering the truth; but while you profess to have the true church where alone salvation is, you have people in crowds who are lost, and none who know whether they are saved after all. But when you speak of judging what is the truth, your principle is wholly false. God does not judge of truth; He reveals it. Man is not to judge of truth, but, if God has revealed, he is bound on his peril to receive it. Men will be judged according to the truth they have before them. They that have sinned without law shall perish without law, and they that have sinned under law shall be judged by the law. If they have rejected Christ, they are still more guilty. The Holy Ghost was to convict the world of sin, because they had not believed in Him, and if they did not, they would die in their sins. If they do believe from the heart, they are saved, at least if God's declaration is to be believed.
M. "Saved?" you mean hope to be saved.
N. I do not, they are not yet out of trial and temptation, but they are reconciled to God, have peace with Him. As scripture speaks: -- He has saved us, and called us with a holy calling, not according to our own works, but according to His own purpose and grace; 2 Timothy 1: 9. So Titus 3: 5; but according to His mercy He saved us by the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Ghost, which He shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Saviour. They have eternal life.
M. That is, they hope to have it.
N. Not at all. Of course, in all its fulness and glory they have not got it yet. But the scripture says, "This is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He that hath the Son hath life: and he that hath not the Son hath not life." Again, John the baptist says, "He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life, and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him." What proves the Roman Catholic system to be so utterly false is that it teaches men as if the grace of God had not brought salvation at all. Men are just where they were if there was no Christ; they have to make their peace with God, whereas Christ has made peace by the blood of His cross. According to Romanism they have to gain eternal life, as the law required, "Do this, and thou shalt live." Christianity says he that hath the Son hath life.
M. And must not a man work to get life?
N. Surely not. How can he work if he has not got it? He believes on Christ as a poor sinner, and has life in Him; and then works to serve God and glorify Him, and grow on in the life he has got. "He that heareth my words, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment, but is passed from death unto life," says Christ. Nothing is more false than supposing that no good works can be done unless we are to gain life by them; I should say none can be done till we have life. Do angels do good works?
N. Do they do it to gain heaven?
M. Well, no, they are in heaven.
N. What do they do it for, then?
M. Why, they are blessed things, they do nothing else.
N. Well, M., we can hardly say we do nothing else, but as to the motive it shews that there is another way of doing right besides gaining life and heaven by it.
Besides, all real duties and right affections flow from the relationships we are already in. I mean this. If you were my servant it would be your duty to act and feel as such. James' children's duties and their right feelings flow from their being his children, and living in the consciousness that they are so. They have not, cannot have, such towards you and me, because they are not our children. So with a wife and every relation of life. Now, we must be really children of God before the duties of children can apply to us, and before we can have the affections suited to that place. We are children of God by faith in Christ Jesus, and our duties and right affections flow from this -- can have no existence till we are in that relation. We have never to work to get into any true living relationship, for the duties cannot exist till we are in it; indeed, it is not possible in the nature of things. The Christian has duties, and has to cultivate holy affections, but it is because he is a child of God, and knows it. For he can have neither the feeling nor the conscience of his duty as a child till he knows he is such. We have difficulties and temptations to overcome, and God does encourage us by the reward of glory, the crown of life; but He never tells us to gain life by our works: the law, if indeed this can be said, does. But we are all condemned on that ground, because we have not kept it. The gift of God is eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord. What are good works, M.?
M. Well, I suppose, works done purely out of love to God and our neighbour.
N. Then you never can do any according to your system, because you do them to gain eternal life, to merit heaven for yourself.
M. But you would look for something above human nature.
N. Surely I should; I look for grace -- grace and life from Jesus Christ working within. He has saved by His death. The Roman Catholic system is (not theoretically perhaps, but practically) the deadly heresy of Pelagianism.
N. Believing that there is strength in man to do good and merit life by his works. And though they talk of grace, it is practically man's own efforts; there may be sacramental grace referred to, but no personal practical dependence on grace. The Roman Catholic system hides it under hard words, and distinguishes between grace of condignity, that is, what a man sufficiently deserves -- merit in which the works deserve a reward for their own worth; and grace of congruity, what fits a man to receive, though he be not worthy in the way of merit; but, in point of fact, a man merits eternal life by his own doings and efforts, which in principle and substance and verity is Pelagianism. Christ delivered the Old Testament saints, they say, out of limbo, and set us to keep the new law.
James. Well, I am sure I never had merit, or fitness, or anything, unless as a poor sinner is fit for grace, because he is one and wants it.
N. But tell me, M. You believe that life is given, and pardon too, in baptism, do you not?
N. Very well, according to Rome we are born of God in it, -- and have remission of sin, original and all actual sins, if we have committed any. It cleanses from sin, makes us Christians and children of God. We are born of water and of the Spirit, and what a child has contracted by generation is cleansed by regeneration.+
M. Never.++
N. Then they have received life?
M. Of course, they are regenerated by water and the Holy Ghost.
N. Do you think any other sacrament confers life?
N. So again Rome teaches, We may lose grace but not faith, and it is true faith, though it be not living faith (Council of Trent, 6, 28, 54, cap. 15, 46). The character imprinted by baptism can never be lost.
Note, then, if divine life be lost, it never can be had again. And if life be not lost when man dies in mortal sin, a man may go to hell and yet have faith, as born of God -- only no grace.
+Any authorised Romish catechism on the baptismal service may be consulted, or Cat. Conc. Trid. 42; and Conc. Trid. 5, 4, for the last words of the sentence. The Roman doctrine on baptism speaks very little of giving life in it; much more of taking away sin, original and actual, and insists on taking it away, not removing imputation only, adding that concupiscence which does remain is not properly sin, as Cat. Conc. Trid. on Baptism 43. It teaches it, however, distinctly, not only in the term made children of God, in every catechism and the baptism service, but very definitely also Cat. Conc. Trid. (Lord's Prayer) sect. 10. It is altogether remarkable how very little is said of life in authorised Romish teaching. Eternal life is wholly in the future, Cat. Conc. Trid. (on the Creed), art. 12. They are replenished with divine grace, a divine quality. See on Baptism 50, and Cat. Conc. Trid. 6, 7, where hope and charity must be added to have eternal life. However, they are said to be born again, made children of God, and incorporated in Christ by baptism.
++Conc. Trid. Sess. 7, 9; Cat. Conc. Trid. 54.
M. But life is lost by mortal sin, but there is the sacrament of penance to restore grace.
N. T know you hold that. But a man is not born again by the sacrament of penance; so that if he has lost life, he is ruined for ever, for he cannot be baptized again; or he must have the life still, though he have lost grace -- a very strange notion if it be the life of Christ; but quite consistent with going to hell in mortal sin though having faith. But this is what is taught in the Council of Trent.+
But the matter really stands thus: The doctrine of catechisms and every Roman authority tell us that mortal sin, as the word indeed implies, is the death of the soul, deprives the soul of life or sanctifying grace which is the life of the soul. I take the words of one of many catechisms, "Why is it called mortal? Because it kills the soul, by depriving it of its true life which is sanctifying grace, and because it brings everlasting death and damnation on the soul." Another, "By destroying the life of the soul, which is the grace of God." Another, "that which killeth the soul in a spiritual manner, because it deprives us of the grace of God, which is the spiritual life of the soul." The two first are American, sanctioned each by a different prelate of New York, the last Irish, drawn up by the Most Revelation Dr. Reilly. Now we are taught by the Council of Trent itself, That they are cleansed by regeneration from what they contracted by generation, referring to John 3. They are born again of water and the Spirit. They are frequently called 'born again' (renati). And in the Catechism of the Council of Trent it is insisted that baptism cannot be repeated: "that this accords with the nature of the thing, and with reason is understood from the very idea of baptism which is a certain spiritual regeneration. As then, by virtue of the laws of the nature, we are generated and born but once, and as St. Augustine observes, there is no returning to the womb; so, in like manner, there is but one spiritual generation, nor is baptism ever at any time to be repeated."++
+There is a strange and startling anomaly on the point of mortal sin, surely a very grave one, of which Irish catechisms furnish an example. Each gives a catalogue of deadly or mortal sins, but they are different. One is by the Right Revelation Dr. Plunket, thirteenth edition, Dublin, 1827. How many are the chief kinds of mortal sin? Seven, called capital sins. Which are the seven capital sins? Pride, covetousness, luxury, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth. The other is by the Most Revelation Dr. Reilly, Dublin, 1827. Both are printed by the same printer, Wogan. How many capital or deadly sins? Seven: pride, covetousness, lust, gluttony, envy, anger, sloth. So in two dioceses in Ireland, the sins which would take a man to hell and kill his soul were different.
++I give a translation submitted to the authorities at Rome, and printed at the Propaganda. Those in mortal sin have a true but not a living faith. VI, canon 28 on Justification.
Here though I might quote many authorities to the same effect, we have the highest assuring us that a man cannot be born twice, and hence he cannot be baptized twice. But then, if his soul is killed by mortal sin, deprived of life, what is to be done? He cannot be born again. It is all very well to talk of forgiveness by the sacrament of penance, only with increased trouble, and purgatory to boot; but where is life to be had? It is lost by mortal sin. No one pretends that it is given by the sacrament of penance. Its being given in baptism is declared in the Catechism of the Council of Trent, as we have seen, to be the reason why that sacrament cannot be repeated. No man can be born again, twice. It is a fatal objection to the whole sacramental system of popery, fatal upon a fundamental point. Falsehood is always inconsistent and breaks down somewhere. Forgiveness may be talked of, justification regained, but the soul is killed, deprived of life, and cannot be born again. It is a curious part of the same system that baptism puts away all sins and all penalties, freely and absolutely, from a child who has none; penance leaves a large and awful part, though forgiving them, on those who have. People who have no sins are cleared people; those who have, are not, though reconciled to God. All this to a soul taught of God shews the folly of human inventions. Ah, M., to a soul that feels its need and looks to Christ, such darkness on vital points will never do.
But I return to the point we were upon. God reveals truth, and man is bound to receive it at his peril. He does not judge, nor is there any one to judge, what is truth. God has judged what is truth, since He has revealed it Himself; nobody can judge about it after that. Men will be judged by it. "The word I have spoken to you, the same shall judge you in the last day," John 12: 48.
M. But have I not to ascertain the truth?
N. You are responsible for receiving God's truth that He has revealed. When anything professes to be a revelation, I must of course first know that it is of God. For that I have a promise: Christ says, He that will do His will shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God or whether I speak of myself.
M. Well, we must ascertain, or know, whether it is a revelation of God, and for this we must have an infallible judge in order to know as a matter of faith whether it be so.
N. It is a mere blasphemy to say so. God has given a revelation, and called upon me to believe. Is it necessary after this for some one to authorize me to believe? Then God's calling on me for faith by a revelation has no force: because, according to you, when God has spoken and claimed my faith, another must judge about it.
M. But supposing I do not receive it? How can you help a man's being a Socinian or an infidel?
N. You cannot help it. Rome cannot help it -- cannot give faith in the heart by authority; but the man will be lost because he has made God a liar. But your notion excuses the Socinian and the infidel, because, according to you, though God has revealed the truth, they are not bound to believe without the church. The whole question lies there. Has a revelation which God has made to us authority over me -- a claim upon my belief -- without any judgment of man? Your system says it has not. We must have, you say, a tribunal to judge about it, that is, to judge whether God's revelation has a claim on my soul. This is an outrage upon God. If you, M., came to me, and I say, "Your word I cannot receive till James authenticates it," it is quite clear I do not believe what you say because you have said it. Now, if I cannot believe God's revelation because He has said what is in it, and for no other reason, I do not believe God at all.
James. That is clear, Bill; God's word must have authority over us by itself or it has none at all.
M. But we must know that it is God's word.
N. It is a sad thing you should call it in question, when you know it is so; but we will pursue the point. I never knew a Romanist who did not on this point take the ground of the infidel: indeed he has no other. For, if the word has direct authority over my conscience, all his argument about the church falls to the ground.
M. We'll take what Dr. Milner says: That the rule of faith or means of discovering Christ's religion must be secure and universal; and it is evident that He has left some rule by which those persons who seek it may with certainty find it.+ These, as Dr. Milner says, are fundamental maxims. Letter 5.
+Dr. Milner's book is craftily written. He introduces the whole inquiry by essays, etc., of members of the supposed society, by which the truths of natural and revealed religion are proved true as a starting point. But if I am to discover a true religion, this cannot be, for the true one is discovered, and fundamentally the true faith in the revealed religion already demonstrated. Else I have not the true religion. But that is found, it seems, without the church at all, and what is the professed inquiry in the book is settled. But this avoids admitting openly the authority of scripture in itself. But then, having the true religion of true faith, I have not to discover it, but whether Romanism is consistent with it. Every true Christian believes in the authority of the word of God: with this I do not discover a religion at all, but, having it, judge the pretensions of the Romanist to the possession and the exclusive possession of it. The whole statement of the case is a subtle fallacy, for which the way has been paved by what precedes. We are not discovering a religion, but judging Romanism, and Protestantism too, if you please, when I am a Christian. In a word, if I have natural and revealed religion demonstrated, I have discovered the true religion, for the demonstrated revealed religion is the true one. Our inquiry is not then the discovery of Christ's religion; it is discovered and demonstrated. We are inquiring if Romanism, the state of the church, is according to what has been demonstrated.
N. All Dr. Milner's book depends on them, I know, and indeed he admits it; but I stop you at once here by saying that, as his book does all depend on this, all is totally false. What do you mean by establishing a religion on earth, and then having a rule of faith or means of discovering it? If Christ has established a religion, there is nothing to discover. And, further, a rule of faith and a means of discovery are totally different things, and the confusion of these two is the source of all the sophistry of the book. How did Christ establish a religion on earth?
M. Why, by His own teaching, and the teaching of the apostles.
N. Quite right. And who judged of their doctrine so that men might discover the true religion? Who was the living judge?
M. Why there could be none: they must believe Christ and the apostles.
N. Then all Dr. Milner's and your theory about a living judge is false. There were what we may call ecclesiastical authorities then. The scribes and Pharisees sat in Moses' seat, and they were all against God's testimony by Christ. But men were bound to receive what Christ said (and the same of the apostles), because they said it. Now that is always true.
M. Yes, but they were alive to say it.
N. They were; but has what they said lost its authority now they are dead? So far from this, that the Bereans searched the scriptures to know if Paul's preaching was according to them, and they are commended for it, and therefore many of them believed. The scriptures were an authority to judge of an apostle's teaching whether it were of God, that is, when he first came, to know if what he said were really of God. And when the rich man is described as praying that Lazarus might be sent to his brothers to warn them, the Lord answers, They have Moses and the prophets (that is, their writings), let them hear them; for "if they believe not their writings, how shall they believe my words?" We have no need to say what the authority of Christ's words is for all of us; but, as an instrument of authority, the Lord puts writings before words. But the truth is, the condition of Christians -- and it is with those professedly so we have to do -- was exactly the same as now. The apostles sent the writings we have to different Christians to whom they had been particularly blessed, or published them for general use. Were Christians not to receive these writings as having authority?
N. And so are we. Now supposing at the first, the Jews had waited for the church to sanction the Lord, or the Jews or Gentiles to sanction the apostles, to discover the true religion, what would have happened?
N. Quite so; where Christ taught and the apostles preached, there was none, and there never would have been. That is, faith in the word goes before the church, not faith in the church before the word. Without faith in the word there never would have been any church at all; and, in point of fact, the religious authorities (when Christ was there) did everything they could to hinder people believing in Christ. And people believed in spite of them. So it has really been as to Rome. But further: when the apostles wrote epistles to the churches or general epistles, were the churches to wait for them to be sanctioned by others, by some church authority, in order to receive, believe, and obey them?
M. Of course not. If the apostles wrote, they were bound to believe and obey.
N. And so are we. Was there any reference to any church authority in order to their receiving them?
M. No; they were bound to receive them. How could there be church authority about the apostles when the Lord sent them, and they were the highest authority in it?
N. All right; and so are we bound to receive what they have written for the same reason. But there is another point. Were they addressed to a clergy who were to receive and interpret them, or to all the faithful? That is a material point for us to settle.
M. It is; and I cannot say exactly. I have not the Bible just at my fingers' ends.
N. You could not be where you are if you had, M. I would affectionately urge you to read it and see for yourself what these blessed servants of our Lord and Master, the Son of God, have said, and His own blessed words too. There cannot but be a blessing with it if done humbly trusting in God's grace. I remember a case in Ireland where a Testament had been torn up and the leaves thrown to the winds. A poor man, who found one of the leaves and picked it up, could read, and saw, "And Jesus said," "And Jesus answered and said," "And Jesus said," and so on. He said to himself, What! has the blessed Lord said so many things, and I did not know them? Struck by these simple but solemn words, "Jesus said," he went off to the neighbouring town and bought a Testament, was converted, believed what Jesus said, and was happy in a known Saviour.
But you may say, How did he know it was true that Jesus said these things? Well, God guides the humble simple soul. Jesus had said it, and His word had power over his soul by grace. But, as I have related to you one history, I will tell you another.
I was in a cabin in Ireland where I was known, and began speaking to the brother-in-law of the man of the house about the scripture; his niece, a young woman, who was present, said, "But they tell me, sir, this is a bad book -- that the devil wrote it." She was very ignorant, and could not read. I said, "That is a shocking blasphemy. (I know they excuse themselves when any intelligent person is there by saying, It is only because of the false translation; however, so it passed.) But I will not reason with you, but read you a bit, and you shall tell me yourself if the devil wrote it."
I read to her what are called the Beatitudes: "And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying, Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you."
I then said, "Well, what do you think? Did the devil write that?" "No, sir," she said, "the devil never wrote that; that came from nothing but the mouth of God." The word of God had laid hold of her; she lived and died most happy, dying three years after of a fever in a hospital. That is, the word of God proves its own truth and power to the soul.
But to return to our point. I will help you. None are addressed to what can be called in the modern term "clergy" at all save three: two to Timothy and one to Titus. These three were addressed to those specially engaged in the service of Christ. The rest are addressed to all the Christians either of a locality or in general, the elders among them in Peter being noticed in their place among the rest, and the bishops and deacons along with all the rest in Paul's to the Philippians.
Thus that to the Romans, "To all that be in Rome beloved of God, saints called." Here you could not tell from the Epistle if there were such a thing as elders or bishops. 1 Corinthians: "To the church of God which is at Corinth, to them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, saints called, with all that in every place call upon the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours." I suppose that all saints, and there were many ignorant ones, ought to have received and obeyed the apostle's teaching. Here too we have not a hint about any elders. The receiving the apostle's orders was a test of the spirituality of their state, "If any be spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things that I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord." And so John says, "He that is of God heareth us." In 2 Corinthians it was to all the saints which were in all Achaia, the province in Greece where Corinth was. The Epistle to the Galatians is addressed to the churches of Galatia. Here the whole body of saints is addressed too.
I need not notice every Epistle, because it is only to repeat the same thing; they are addressed to all the faithful. I may notice an expression in the first Epistle to the Thessalonians, which shews it in a distinct manner. Paul says at the end of it, "I charge you by the Lord that this epistle be read by all the holy brethren." Colossians and Laodicea were to exchange Epistles, and they were to be read in the churches. Peter's Epistles were addressed to all the dispersed residing in various provinces. In John's we get if possible a stronger evidence. He distinguishes the Christians, while addressing all in general, into classes of fathers, young men, and little children, and writes more special words to these last, pressing on them their competency in virtue of having the Holy Ghost to understand everything, and says, though warning and teaching them with all affection, they had not need of any one to do so. And in his second Epistle he writes to a lady and desires her to judge those who came teaching and preaching by the doctrine they brought.
Thus we have ample evidence that the scriptures were addressed not to the teaching body (with the exception of three Epistles of Paul, which, however, are full of instruction to all, because he tells Timothy and Titus how all ought to act), but by the teaching body to the mass of the faithful. If Rome has reduced the faithful to a state of ignorance which makes them incapable of it, the guilt is on her shoulders. It is a proof that she cannot enlighten them. The only thing to do is for them to go back to the scriptures which she has practically deprived them of.
M. But they are written in Greek or Hebrew. What can the unlearned do? How can they now use this rule, or means of discovering Christ's religion?
N. This is another fallacy. The means of discovering Christ's religion (and we are speaking now of places where the profession of Christianity is established), and a rule of faith, are not at all the same thing. A minister preaches, a mother teaches her child, a schoolmaster in a school, a friend-in a word, the means of communicating truth, or leading a person to discover it, are various. The scriptures may be the direct and blessed means in many cases, but any Christian, and in particular parents and ministers, may be and are the regular instruments in God's hands of communicating the truth contained in the word to souls, but none of these are the rule of faith.
Dr. Milner admits that this is so, as regards the heathen, that is, that his principle does not hold good; but then, as he says, there is a special grace accorded. I admit the special grace -- there is never any good or blessing without it: but I understand very well what Dr. Milner is about too. It is quite evident that in the case of heathens the church has no authority, for they as heathens do not own it; they must in any case become Christians first. Thus we find that in this case the word of God has power and authority without the church. Men discover the true religion without the authority of the church.
This is a grand difficulty for Dr. Milner; because after all, when Christianity has really to be discovered (as in the case of a heathen), it is discovered by the power of the word through grace, without the church at all. That is, in a word, that, in the only real case where the true religion is discovered, it is discovered without the authority of the church. Now for communicating the knowledge of Christ's religion where it is professed, there are similar means, as I have said, ministers, parents, and the like. And do you mean to say that special grace is for heathens to receive the word, but that there is none needed, and none given for professing Christians? It is needed for every man. But, remark further, this way of discovering Christ's religion is not a rule of faith. A minister, a priest, as you call him, is not a rule of faith; a friend or a mother is surely not a rule of faith. Yet they are the means in an ordinary way of the discovering, or more properly of the reception of, Christ's religion. Now the confusion of these things is the source of all the fallacy; because the means of discovering need not be infallible -- need not be, in the sense here stated, secure nor universal; in point of fact, unless when scripture is the means, it never is; on the contrary, it is adapted to the state and capacity of the person evangelized or taught.
A rule of faith must be secure, but as it is not the means of communicating Christ's religion (though it may be such a means), it is not as a rule required to be adapted to such universal communication. It subsists in the form in which it was originally given to be referred to. Now these two things we have without the authority of the church at all: apostles, ministers, parents, and others, communicating Christ's religion according to the language or capacity of hearers and learners; and we have the scriptures the fixed and unchanged rule to which all teaching is to be referred. And note this well: if the truth contained in scripture be not received, if a man remain an infidel, or become a confirmed heretic, the authority of the church is of no use. For such do not acknowledge it. She must in result leave them where they are, unless she burn them (as Rome indeed has done by hundreds and thousands) or banish and imprison them. But that is only copying the heathen who did the same thing.
I admit then the ministry to communicate the truth, and even a parent or any other. I admit the need of grace; but I say that you will be lost and condemned, if when God has spoken you do not bow to it, if there were no church at all. In point of fact, there was and could be none when first the word of God was announced, and men were bound to receive it at their peril. "If our gospel be hid," says the apostle, "it is hid to them that are lost, in whom the god of this world has blinded the minds of them that believe not, lest the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them": so the Lord -- "he that believeth not is condemned already." Indeed, as I have said, those who stood in the place of authority then opposed the word. All who have to receive the religion of Christ as a new truth necessarily receive it without the authority of the church. They are Jews, infidels, or heathens, and acknowledge no such authority. If I turn to Christians by profession, they have not to discover the truth of Christianity, for they believe it; what is needed is that they should understand the truth, and that it should have power over their hearts and lives, and grace gives this, not the church. And, moreover, the Epistles and Gospels were addressed to the body of Christians in general by those who were gifted of God, as Paul, Peter, and the rest employed by God to write them. And those who received them were bound to receive and believe them, and to understand them and be taught by them. That there is progress in spiritual understanding is readily admitted.
Thus the whole theory of Romanism is a false one. Their analogy of a living judge, which they all make so much of, is none at all. A judge decides a cause by the law, not whether the law is authentic or not. He could not say, I receive the law on the authority of any one, judges or others. He receives the law because it is the law, because the legislator has so prescribed. So the Christian; he receives the revelation of God, because it is His revelation, and for no other reason. A spiritual Christian may be more enlightened in applying the word of God to any given case (a small part of the use of scripture) as a judge may; but neither of them gives authority, but only application, to that whose authority is employed. The church was providentially charged with taking care of the scriptures when they were written; just as anyone may take charge of my father's will, but he gives no authority to it. Its being my father's will gives it its authority. The scriptures were committed to the whole church of God.
The only difference as to the Romanist body is, that they have been unfaithful to the trust as regards the Old Testament, having pretended to authenticate as scripture what confessedly is not scripture at all. Her own famous doctor who translated the Old Testament for her, and whose translation she receives as the authentic scriptures though but a translation, declares that the church did not receive the books called apocryphal. Rome is unfaithful in this as in all else. God has not permitted her to be so as to the New Testament; but where she could be unfaithful, she has been so. And you will please remember, moreover, that your rule is as much Greek and Hebrew (in your case I must add Latin) as ours. The written word is the same for both: only that you have only a translation, and your unwritten one is Latin. What you have in any one's mother tongue is mere teaching, as ours may be, not a rule of faith, not secure, for we have seen there are different lists of mortal sins, and even as to the written word you have a confessedly false list of books. You have added what the fathers even say is not to be taken for a rule of faith.
M. But what are we to receive as a rule, if it is not the written and unwritten word, and the church as interpreter?
N. The written word of God is the only rule. It has divine authority. The other two parts I reject altogether, that is, tradition and the church.
M. But the church was never to fail, nor the gates of hell prevail against her. What do you make of that?
N. I make nothing of it; I believe it, and bless God for it with all my heart. In spite of all the waywardness and wickedness of man, Christ maintains what He builds, and will maintain it till He receives it into glory. And it is maintained. Rome papal, as Rome heathen, has done her best to extinguish and put out this light; but she has failed and must fail. She seemed to succeed, and may apparently in large measure succeed again, for it is announced in scripture that there shall be perilous days in the last time, a form of godliness denying the power; but as God had reserved seven thousand who had not bowed the knee to the image of Baal, when even the prophetic eye of Elijah could not see one but himself, so God has in the darkest times (times confessed by your own popish writers to be times of shame and darkness)+ preserved a witness to Himself that no strength or subtlety of Satan, with all the power of Rome at his back, could ever suppress or extirpate. I recognize not the church of Rome, or any other particular professing body, but the whole church to be the dwelling-place of God by the Holy Ghost, until Christ comes and takes the saints to Himself, and that what is called Christendom stands in a particular relationship to God by its profession, and that it will be judged as His house. But the scripture has warned us that evil would come in, and perilous times come, with the form of piety (2 Timothy 3); and the apostle Paul charges the man of God to cling to the scriptures when the professing church should have all gone wrong.
He tells us (Acts 20: 29) that grievous wolves would come in, that of the church itself perverse men would arise; but he never hints at apostles, their successors, or the clergy, as a resource, but, on the contrary, commends them to God and the word of His grace as able to build them up, and give them an inheritance among them that are sanctified. That is, he warns us that the outward professing church would go all wrong, so that the true servant of God would have to fly to the scriptures. The mystery of iniquity was already working; and, note, the apostle's words exclude all idea of his having a successor. He knows that after HIS departure all will go wrong. How so, if another like himself would succeed him? So Peter sees the hour of his departure near, and takes care that they should have the truths he taught always in remembrance, and so writes his epistle; 2 Peter 1: 12-15. Thus the apostles foresaw the danger and difficulty; Paul prophesies that all would go on badly, and evil men and seducers wax worse and worse; and, instead of referring to the church as securing the truth, he states that it will go all wrong, so that at last there will be an apostasy, or falling away (2 Thessalonians 2); and both he and Peter refer to the scriptures as the means of being guarded in the truth.
+Baronius says he must give the names of popes as dates, but how can he own as popes the sons of the mistresses of the Marquis of Tuscany, whom they put in to be popes by their guilty influence? (Bar. An. 912, 7, 8.) There were the two parties, the Roman nobles and the Marquis of Tuscany, who in turn put in the popes, or drove them out, so that there were often two at a time, and each habitually when he got the upper hand quashed all the ordinations of his adversary as invalid. (Bar. An. 907, 3.) Auxilius wrote a book on the ordinations, exordinations, and super-ordinations of the Roman pontiffs. (See Baronius' Account of Sergius, 908, 2.) At last the Emperor came in to introduce some decent order. But this lasted a great while. We may examine this a little more exactly when we come to succession as a proof of the true church. Here I only give the undoubted facts, which may be seen in Baronius as in other historians.
The evil is come and has ripened, and we do refer, as the apostle told us, to the scriptures. You tell me divisions have arisen. I admit it, and admit the evil of it. But divisions have arisen with scriptures and clergy and all; the clergy have not hindered it more than the scriptures -- they have been its authors. Rome is one of the divisions -- a large one no doubt, but the worst of all -- so that she hardly merits to be reckoned as a part of the Catholic church at all since the Council of Trent. But admitting that she be, she is just one part, and the worst part by far. Numbers make nothing when the question of the church is concerned. Christ speaks of a little flock (Luke 12: 32) to whom He gives the kingdom, so that there being millions would rather prove it was not that flock. And when Rome had it all her own way in many countries (for she never had it everywhere, far from it, nor in the greatest part of Christendom), she could not help sects.
She slaughtered and killed thousands and thousands to put them down; she burned and hanged, and used every atrocity imaginable, to put down whatever did not bow to her, but by her conduct proved herself not to be the church of God, but the seat of Satan, and thus made natural conscience revolt on one hand, while on the other the plants of God's planting throve in spite of her, and Europe was overrun by the hunted witnesses of Christ, while Rome disgraced herself below even natural conscience by breaking openly and solemnly plighted faith, and teaching men that they ought to do so, and not keep faith with heretics, and acted on it, hypocritically pretending to deliver them to the secular arm, and pursuing with relentless cruelty all who held the truth. She invented tortures and established the Inquisition to destroy all that had divine life. I have said she seemed to have reduced all to silence, when, after a secret working of the truth (particularly in the Netherlands, Germany, Bohemia, and Moravia), her security in wickedness led her to such a course of conduct as made all blaze out again more violently than ever; and now, taking all professing Christendom in, she is a minority in population, and maintains her former place only in her persistence and growth in errors.
M. But she is the true Catholic church.
N. Far from it; the majority of professing Christendom condemn her as a dreadful departure from the true standing of the church of Christ. Many count her wholly apostate.
James. But, Bill, you used to say that your church was the universal church, and the oldest; and that all the millions of Christians, except just England that Henry VIII turned away to get rid of his wife he did not like, belonged to it.
N. We will speak of Henry VIII in a minute. But as to the pretended Catholic church, all their assertions are unfounded. I admit that numbers prove nothing, but they impose on the imagination, and hence only I notice this. The majority of professing Christians do not belong to Rome. There are something under one hundred millions of Protestants, and I suppose sixty millions of Greeks, besides Armenians and Jacobites, in the East, whose numbers are not exactly known, but of which there must be a few millions, so that in rough round numbers there are, giving the largest margin, some hundred and thirty millions connected with Rome, and some hundred and seventy millions separate from it. Hence there is no pretension of catholicity. As to antiquity, it is beyond all controversy that Eastern Christendom is more ancient than Rome. Strange to say, the church was not founded at Rome by an apostle, though Paul was in prison there, not in his free apostolic labour -- this he never was. But we know from the Epistle to the Romans that there were a number of Christians there before he arrived. We are a little anticipating what comes under the head of proofs of the true church. But facts dispel many illusions, so that we may reason more freely when the imagination is undeceived.
James. Well, I am glad to hear all this. I know numbers don't prove truth, of course. We must have, we all admit, a divine foundation for our faith; but it acts on one's feelings to think one is going against all Christians in the world, and I see it is nothing of the sort, and I know from scripture that Christianity did not begin at Rome.
N. If we were to go by numbers, I suppose we should be Buddhists. They constitute, I believe, by far the most numerous religion in the world. The Mahometans count by many millions -- I do not know how many, but I dare say some sixty millions. They own God, and Christ to be a prophet and judge of quick and dead, but not as Son of God. They are spreading rapidly in Africa through having the schools in their hands, and the prohibition for any Mahometan to make a slave of another. The Brahminical religion counts some hundred millions of votaries, other heathens perhaps over two hundred millions. I attach no importance to exactitude in numbers, my object being only to dispel the idea of the Catholic or universal character of Rome -- to disabuse the imagination. But that it may not seem a loose boast, in rough round numbers I count them thus: --
| Romanists | Protestants |
| France ... . 33,000,000 | Great Britain ... 26,000,000 |
| Austria ... . 30,000,000 | Germany, including Prussia ... ... 22,000,000 |
| Italy ... ... 21,000,000 | Austria ... ... ... 4,000,000 |
| Spain ... ... . 17,000,000 | France ... ... ... . 2,000,000 |
| Germany out of Austria 8,000,000+ | Holland ... ... ... 2,500,000 |
| Holland ... . 1,000,000 | Switzerland ... ... 2,000,000 |
| Belgium ... . 3,500,000 | Sweden ... ... ... . 4,000,000 |
| Poland ... . 4,000,000 | Denmark ... ... ... 2,000,000 |
| Switzerland ... 1,000,000 | Russia ... ... ... . 3,000,000 |
| United States .. 2,500,000 | United States 26,000,000 |
| Great Britain .. 4,000,000 | |
| South America .. 8,000,000 | |
| 133,000,000 | 93,500,000
|
+Perhaps more; chiefly in Bavaria, Baden, Rhenish Prussia, and Silesia.
Besides this, there is Canada, the West Indies, and a scattered population, which cannot very much affect the balance either way. The main numbers are pretty nearly exact; were there five millions wrong in either, it would not affect the question we are considering. Then between Turkey, the Austrian possessions, Russia, and the East, the Greeks must number some sixty millions, besides smaller, but ancient, bodies. So that Christendom not connected with Rome numbers some hundred and sixty, or hundred and seventy, millions; Rome, some hundred and thirty. That is a strange way of being Catholic. Catholic means, you know, James, universal.
That the Greek churches in Asia are more ancient than Rome, as James has said, scripture itself proves. Rome was the last founded of which we have any original history, and Greeks, Nestorians, and Jacobites were all separate from Rome, the earliest in the fifth, the latest in the ninth, century, and have their succession too.
But having got rid of this delusion, let us turn to the rule of faith. We need not consider the first false rule, private inspiration, for, save a few Quakers, no one alleges such a rule. Only we must, on the other hand, be very careful to guard against Romanist infidelity as to the action of the Holy Ghost. They practically deny the aid and succour of the Holy Ghost given to every humble believer. They ridicule it (as I know by experience) to throw men helplessly on their clergy. Now this is the worst kind of Pelagianism, the denial of the assistance of grace. The faithful Christian is assisted of God to understand the scriptures as he is to walk as a Christian.
The help and teaching of the Holy Ghost, and the written word, are not two rules of faith.+ The scriptures are the one sure rule, and the Holy Ghost He who works in the believer to enable him to use that rule, and not merely as a rule but as the food and edification of his soul. And in this the contents of scripture are adapted to the progress the soul makes in divine things and its state in every respect. It is applied by the Holy Ghost to the conscience and heart of the humble Christian who owns his need of the grace of God, and looks for it according to his need. The person who denies this is an heretical denier of the grace and goodness of God. Mark this, because Dr. Milner, who I suppose from his book is an unbeliever as to this, carefully leaves it all out. If men go on presumptuously, without depending on the grace of God, they will err as to scripture, and as to everything else, whether they call themselves Catholic or Protestant. Do you deny, M., the need a Christian has of the grace of God, and the goodness and faithfulness of God in giving it, and the gracious operations of the Spirit of God in the Christian's heart, as it is said, "The meek shall he guide in judgment, and the meek shall he teach his way"; or, as the Lord said, speaking of His people, "They shall be all taught of God"?
+Dr. Milner's Letters, 6 and 8.
M. No, of course I do not; no good Catholic does; but that can only be in the true church.
N. In one sense I quite agree with that. It is only in the true church, though we may not yet be agreed what the true church is. But this same gracious operation must take place to bring a person into the true church when he is outside it, and to help him when he is in it.
N. I am glad of it. Only this is all overlooked by Dr. Milner. He does not dream of any help from God. But not only does he leave out the gracious actings of the Holy Ghost in believers, but he leaves out all ministry. He will talk of tradition, and of the authority of the church, meaning however the clergy; but the ministry of those called of God in the church to teach and edify he overlooks altogether, or even of parents, who in their place have a ministry, and are called upon to bring up their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
People are not called upon to discover a religion. They are not called upon to take up a Bible, printed by the king's printer, as Dr. Milner says (Letter 9). That may happen, and has often, very often been blessed, but it is not the regularly appointed way of learning the truth. If even (as may be the case in the neglected masses of mankind, be they high or low, rich or poor) that is the case, they have not to judge of the book; they may judge right or judge wrong, but, if that is all, nothing is done. If the word of God is to profit them, it must judge them, and have its place in their hearts and consciences. We are superior to the thing we judge. As long as we are in spirit superior to God's word, it is not God's word at all really to us. We must be subject to it, receive it as it is in truth the word of God, to have life and edification by it.
As the truth of God is in the word, or rather as it is the truth, of course the Holy Ghost can use the scriptures to convince of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment, and, blessed be God, thousands of souls have thus found life and peace; but that is not our subject, but what is the sure rule of faith when we do profess Christ to be our Lord. There is a ministry of the word and parental responsibility in the church of God. God alone can give efficacy to either by His grace, but men are not left to discover a religion. Christianity is the activity of God to communicate the knowledge of the truth, and grace which saves and gives eternal life, the knowledge of Christ. This is carried out by the ministry of the word and parental care, but that is not a rule of faith, but an appointed means of grace. This the Roman Catholic professes to believe as well as Protestants. None pretends a parent, or even a priest, is infallible. The question is -- supposing men who profess Christianity teach differently, what is the rule by which a sincere person may know with certainty what the truth in that matter is? We say the rule of faith is the written word of God. You say the Bible and tradition taken together, or the word of God, written and unwritten, and that, besides the rule itself, Christ has provided in His holy church a living, speaking, judge to watch over it, and explain it in all matters of controversy. That is, that, in fact, the word, written or unwritten, is no rule for him at all; he must submit to what is told him by the living judge. If the judge pronounces and decides the matter, that is the rule for him who has to submit to it; he cannot refer from the judge to the law.
I need not take notice of Dr. Milner's objection (Letter 8, 1), that if Christ had meant to make the scriptures the rule, He would have written that book. It is irreverent, pretending to say what Christ ought to have done; but, besides, it contradicts his own theory, because he admits the written word, with unwritten tradition to complete it, to be the rule; and, if this be so, Christ has given for a rule what He did not write. The traditions as to the motives for writing the Gospels are too vague and too late in the history of the church to require any notice; and, as Dr. Milner adds, no doubt the evangelists were moved by the Holy Ghost, which is what we believe: I have no controversy with him on this head. His only attempt is to shew that they are insufficient; what has he to add? This point will come in after, when the same subject is spoken of in treating of the true rule.
I have only to notice the objection of differences of opinion among the reformers who acknowledge scripture. This is merely to catch people's minds. No rule can hinder differences so long as the human mind works. The doctrine of the Greeks differs from the doctrines of Rome, of Nestorians from both, of Jacobites from all, of Protestants from the system they have abandoned. This only proves that the church has failed in hindering divisions and maintaining unity. We have four great bodies, of which the latest formed has been for nearly a thousand years separate from Rome, and older than she, besides Anglicanism and the other Protestants. The divisions existed before Protestants were there. Rome is only one of these divided parts, not the oldest, not so numerous as all the rest taken together. With these divisions, the question is, what is the rule to judge which is the right one? Not the authority of one giving itself as the rule. That is what Rome does. Who can trust that? The scriptures were before all these divisions and questions, are given by inspired writers, are God's revelation of what was from the beginning, as God instituted it.
Divisions prove the infirmity of human nature: only that it is much more excusable in Protestants just coming out of the dark obscurity and superstition men were immersed in during the middle ages, than in Greece and Rome whose common starting-point was pure Christianity. And men must not suppose differences do not exist among Romanists. The Dominicans resisted with all their force the doctrine of the immaculate conception of Mary (now made by the present pope a matter of faith); so that there was the most important body of Romanists (till the Jesuits arose), the inventors and directors of the Inquisition, judges thus of heretical pravity, unsound on what is now declared to be an article of faith. The Augustinians believe in predestination; the Roman Catholic priests deny it. Nay, so far did these disputes go, that the Dominicans in the seventeenth century charged the Jesuits with maintaining the idolatry of the Chinese in their missions in China. For years the inquiry was pursued before the pope, and the practices sanctioned by the Jesuits at last condemned by Pope Clement XI in 1704.+ The decree was mitigated in 1715. Now the allowance of heathen idolatry in Christians was a much graver difference than the details on which Protestants differ, while agreeing in fundamental truth.
+The decree of 1715 allowed the Chinese to continue the worship of their ancestors, with gifts and burnings before them, and prostrating themselves, the principal worship of the heathen Chinese. Since China has been opened recently to Europeans, they have found a great dragon on the altar of a Jesuit church of that day, so that the Chinese could worship that and the host at the same time.
Again, on the point of authority, which you consider so important, the gravest differences exist. The famous four articles by which the Gallican church defended its liberties were condemned as earnestly as possible by the Papal advocates. In these the synod of French bishops declares that the decrees of the Council of Constance, which maintained the authority of general councils as superior to that of the pope, are approved and ratified by the Gallican church; and that the decisions of the pope are not infallible in points of faith unless they be accompanied by the consent of the church.
Now here is an all-important difference on the subject of authority and infallibility. Our question will bring us back to this. I only notice here that differences are not confined to Protestants. It is a noticeable circumstance that it was the same man Bossuet, that wrote a crafty book on the variations of Protestants, who led the way in this important variation among Romanists, and defended it against the attacks of Ultramontanes as they are called, that is, the extreme defenders of the pope's claims. Ultramontane principles prevail now, but to this day Gallican principles, which deny the pope's infallibility, hold their ground in France and Germany.+ Disputes and discussions belong to the infirmity of human nature. Where there is freedom for it, it appears more openly, and so it has amongst Protestants. In Rome, though violent, it is more connected with intrigues, and less exposed to view.
Another point insisted on by Dr. Milner, which has nothing to do with the rule of faith, but which I may do well to take up as it is noticed, is this, that sovereign princes have acted more in the Reformation than theologians. The truth is that sovereign princes, long oppressed in the rights and authority which God confers on the magistrate, profited by the public movement, brought about by the faith of individuals though long prepared by the working of God's Spirit, to throw off the unjust authority of the pope. This was according to God's will, who gives to the sovereign his authority, and brought about by His providence. With this the rule of faith has surely nothing to do. It was the righteous resumption by he Civil magistrate of an authority to which the pope had no title. Whether they abused this is nothing to the purpose. Civil statutes had been passed constantly against the absorption of lands into the hands of monks and others -- mortmain as it was called. They evaded them by the introduction of uses (that is, when it was forbidden to a monastery to hold lands, they were given to a layman to hold it to their use, to the peril of their souls if they did not); and then when this was condemned by the Statute of Uses, they evaded that by what are called trusts.
+Since this was written, as every one knows, the Council at Rome has declared the pope infallible. But what has taken place only proves the truth of what is here said.
All this was roughly swept away in England at the Reformation -- the land partly given to courtiers, partly employed for education. But what all this has to do with the rule of faith it would be hard to tell. Superstition had given the lands to monks, and, when fresh light broke up the superstition, they were taken away again; and the monasteries, which had become a plague to every country by luxury and wickedness, were suppressed. As to Henry VIII, he threw off the pope's authority, and he was right. Why should a prelate at Rome govern England? As to his being a Protestant, he was anything but that. He had six articles drawn up, amongst which was the doctrine of transubstantiation, the key-stone of Romanism, and persecuted bitterly those who did not submit, all who held the Protestant faith, as the pope had done before him.
James. I do not see what all this has to do with the authority of the scriptures.
N. It has none. It is merely advanced by Romanists to excite prejudice against Protestantism.
M. And do you not charge the popes and others with wickedness?
N. Well, as yet we have not spoken of it. But this has a just place when we speak of popes and the mass of prelates, because Romanists pretend to find the church, and infallibility, and authority over other men's faith and consciences, in these wicked men; whereas no Protestant dreams of taking Henry VIII or the Protector Somerset as an authority. They will be judged in the great day like others, and their acts judged like other men's now.
James. That does make all the difference in the world, M. Save as I may mourn over others' evil, what is it to me what Henry VIII or any such person was? He has nothing to do with my faith. We are talking of scripture, and that is what you must speak of.
N. As to fanaticism, I answer again, that it is one of the infirmities of our poor nature, but it has been in all ages, papal or Protestant. The wicked fanaticism of the Brethren of the Free Spirit, in the palmiest days of popery, was worse than any fanaticism that ever arose out of Protestantism, and lasted longer. But what has this to do with the rule of faith? The Protestant princes put down Munzer by force of arms because he armed himself against them. The popes nearly suppressed the Brethren of the Free Spirit by punishment and burning them. All this proves nothing but the sadness of man's history.
There is another assertion which, by a seeming analogy, is more plausible. That there are judges for the law, and a common or unwritten law in England; and so for the divine law, both of these too (Letter 10). The first point for which this unwritten law is shewn to be needed is that I cannot receive laws till I own the authority of the legislature. This shews the danger of analogies. There is but one lawgiver, and I may add one judge. God Himself is the Legislator and Judge too; but now let us speak of legislature. Is not God Himself the lawgiver, the authority?
N. Well, that question then is settled. There is indeed another important point which you seem to forget -- natural conscience, the knowledge of good and evil. Now I do not deny that this may be sadly darkened and corrupted. Still there is a conscience, and, Christianity having brought in light, natural conscience is enlightened and has a means of judging, though it may not even be aware of how it has acquired it. Thus, if money be given practically to allow sin, or for forgiveness of sin, or to commute for humbling penances and a tax on particular crimes as to how much should be paid; if the clergy was forbidden to marry, and then money was taken by their superiors for allowing them to live with a woman not their wife, the common law of natural conscience overrules the pretended authority of the church, and tears all sophistry to pieces by its just horror.
James. But surely the Romanists have never done or allowed this.
N. Indeed they have; it is just as much a matter of history as that Rome exists.
James. Why, M., what do you say to that?
M. It is only relaxing the temporal punishment due to sin.
N. It is (Letter 43) an actual remission by God Himself of part of the temporal punishment due; and, further, does it not take out of purgatory or shorten the stay there?
M. Yes, that is, the temporal punishment due to sin.
N. Is it not by virtue of the surplus of merits of Christ and the saints?
N. Does Dr. Milner deny that indulgences were sold?
N. He does not; he says (Letter 42), "avarice has done everything bad"; but yet a further question: who sold them, and by what authority were they sold? Was it not the church's, or, if you please, the pope's?
M. Well, I suppose it must have been.
N. To be sure it must and was, and they were farmed out to the Fuggers, who were famous bankers, to whom the sale was given for so much by the Archbishop of Mentz who was charged with it, and committed to the Dominican order. So that the Roman Catholics' accusation against Luther is that it was his jealousy, as an Augustine monk, against the Dominican order about this, which made him break with the pope.
James. Well, M., this is dreadful. This never could be the true church, the church that the Lord Jesus established, nor have His authority. I understand What Mr. -- means by conscience now, for all the reasoning in the world could not persuade me that that comes from God, or that those are from God who do it. And I see you cannot deny that what you call the church did it.
N. He could not, because it is a notorious piece of history. It was the immediate cause of the Reformation. Luther protested against it because it destroyed all morality, and in point of fact, they did forgive all sins (that is, the punishment of them, which was what people cared about) past and future, so that in one case a person bought the indulgence and then waylaid the priest and took all the money he had collected.
M. But people must be in a state of grace to profit by it.
N. A queer state of grace a man must be expected to be in when those that expect it are selling him remission of chastisement for sin on the part of God; besides, the sacraments may have settled all the state of grace for him.
No, no, that is what I say; natural conscience breaks through all this sophistry. At the time of the Reformation the corruptest thing in the world was the Roman system. Do you deny what is perfectly notorious, that the corruption of clergy, monks, and all, had arisen to such an inconceivable pitch in the fifteenth-century that the natural conscience rose up in clamour against it, and helped to bring on the Reformation?
M. Well, I do not know the details of history, but I know the church is holy and always was. It is one of the marks of the true church.
N. Well, I will give you some details as far as one can venture. We shall touch on this mark. But I agree with you, it is a mark of the true church, and you shall judge whether the Roman body can be the true church, though the point we are on now is to shew that the common law of even natural conscience, claims its rights against such horrors. The practice of concubinage among priests with those to whom they were not married was so universal that it was forbidden by the Council of Paris in 1429, which says their example had corrupted all the laity. But in vain; in the middle of the same century it was decreed at Breslau that they should pay ten florins if they did, and indeed the people of the parish very often would have it so to prevent more universal corruption. The truth is, it was universal, and so among monks, and even unnatural crimes. The witnesses to these are all of the Roman body, and a layman complains what was a sin for laymen was none for the clergy, and what was a sin for the clergy was none for the laity; for if a clergyman had a wife of his own it was a sin, if a layman had it was not; but if a clergyman had a hundred and sixty or a hundred and seventy, none of which was a wife, it was no sin, but if a layman had it was. And the ablest and most respectable Romanist doctor of his day who sought reformation, Gerson, declares if a monk lives in uncleanness he does not violate his vow provided he does not marry, only he is guilty of sin. One remedy, he says, is to do it as little as possible and do a great many good works, and take care it should be in secret, not on festivals or in holy places, and with unmarried persons. In truth, the shameless lives of the clergy, or, as Adolphus bishop of Merseburg, expresses it, "the licentious unmarried life of the clergy was before the eyes of all."
I have only cited these general testimonies; to go farther would be to enter into a sea of enormities horrible to go through. No doubt many a godly man cried out against it, and a reform in head and members was the universal outcry of natural conscience from laymen. And the councils of Constance and Basel tried to do something towards reforming the excessive licentiousness and wickedness of the monasteries. But as soon as Constance had started a pope, having deposed three, who were all reigning together, the chief one as guilty of everything that was horrible, there was an end of reformation; and the council at Basel was broken up by the then pope under pretext of transferring it elsewhere; so that there were two councils at a time, one at Basel without a pope, and another at Florence with a pope; and the Council of Basel passed decrees against priests living with women without being married, and added that the bishops were not to hinder the severity of the decrees being enforced: a pretty plain proof of what took place. The result was that the excessive wickedness of the clergy brought about the Reformation, the immediate occasion being the sale of indulgences for sin. God came in with an ancient truth in His grace, but the occasion of it, and what made men ready to receive it, was the revolt of the common law of conscience against the outrageous wickedness of the so-called church.
James. Well, M., what can you say to this? It is very shocking. Can you deny it?
N. He cannot deny it. It is a matter of public notoriety, known to all acquainted with history, and proved by the outcry of Christendom, and the public acts of synods to repress it, because it was grown so scandalous. The Reformation has partially moralised the Roman clergy where it has come; but only partially, and where it is not present the fatal obligation of celibacy is a source still of endless corruption. Now conscience revolts against this, the true common law of man if you please to talk of common law, which the church is not, because it is confessedly a positive institution. Our Legislator there is God Himself, and there is a certain common law for man, namely, the knowledge of good and evil.
M. Yes; but you have no judge who is to decide on the matter when there is a difference.
N. Have I not? In the first place conscience, as far as it goes, decides at a man's peril what is right and what is wrong. And note here, though man may get light from God's revelation, yet as to a judge God is and will be the final judge, and the conscience must and is bound so to regard Him. Conscience is answerable to God directly, and no man can come between the conscience and God so as to destroy the right of God. "Who art thou," says the apostle, "that judgest another man's servant? To his own master he standeth or falleth." To come in between God and the conscience is not to touch man's rights, but God's.
James. That is true, M. If my master bids me to do something in his own matters, and you tell me to do something else, you meddle with his right to command me as much and more than with me. Conscience makes us subject to God, and not dare to disobey Him. We do want help and light for it, but it always looks to God as the authority that is over it, and it cannot, dare not, look away from Him to another, because this sets aside God. It would no longer be subject to Him.
M. All very true, no doubt; but if God has set any one to judge, as the king does the judges, you must abide by their decision.
N. That is all well to decide about property or crimes, and to keep peace among men. But that is absolutely impossible as to conscience, because God has a judgment to come in which He will pronounce originally and finally as to guilt; in which He will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and make manifest the secrets of the heart. Therefore the apostle warns to judge nothing before the time till God does that, God having reserved this to Himself. There can be no judgment which can come between the conscience and God's final judgment. It remains, in spite of men, in all its force and authority, and a man must answer to it, and no other authority can come in between, so as to relieve him from obedience to that judgment. So that in the proper sense of judge I admit no judge but God, who executes it in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ. Judgment applies to the final state of souls, and not to causes between man and man, or offences against the State. Offences against the State the State judges. Our offences are against God, and God judges.
M. Yes; but the State appoints judges, and God has appointed the church.
N. Hence the Queen cannot judge at all; she may shew mercy, but that is not the question now. But she is not allowed to judge at all. Is that true as regards God?
N. He judges then Himself, and He only; save, as we know, He exercises this judgment by Christ, does He not?
M. Of course, every one owns that.
N. The whole case then has to be settled by Him who knows it all, He being the judge, and having the whole cause originally and finally before Him?
M. Yes, priests and pope and all.
N. Then all your comparison about a judge is simply all false. God Himself judges, and that is the only true judgment; and I am bound to look to that, and not to allow any other to come between me and my conscience. For God judges according to a permanent, abiding, direct authority He has over me every moment, so that I dare not look away from Him. If I do I am sinning. For note that, James, it is not only particular cases to be settled, about which God judges, but every instant of our lives, so that we cannot look at anything but Him without neglecting Him and His claims.
James. I see it plain enough; I feel it too. I know I may fail, and shall, save as kept by His grace, but I know I am bound to take His will every moment. It ought to be my joy to obey Him. It was the blessed Saviour's own joy; but at any rate I am bound to do it, and must give, and ought to give, an account of myself to God. And tell me, M., can the priest, or the pope, if you please, answer for me in that day?
N. Then I would not give much for their answering for me now.
M. But is it not said, "Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven?" And, "Do you not judge them that are within?" and "to whomsoever ye forgive anything, I forgive it."
M. Then there must be a judge.
N. But unless you speak of what the apostle's authority established as binding, which no Christian denies, you are now speaking of discipline, not of a rule of faith. Now I own fully scripture speaks of discipline; 1 Corinthians 5: 13; 2 Corinthians 2: 10. When a person was put out, his sins were bound upon him, and when he was forgiven and re-admitted, his sins were loosed. And this is the distinct unequivocal force of a passage you are fond of quoting: "If he will not hear the church, let him be unto thee as a heathen man and a publican." The subject is a wrong done to a person: he remonstrates; if he recovers his brother, well; if not, he takes two or three more, so that if the person remains obdurate, these are witnesses of all; and then he tells the whole assembly, and if the wrong-doer will not hear the assembly, the injured person may hold him as a person having no claim to be owned as belonging to it; but what has this to do with a rule of faith? And note, just as it was in the Corinthians, the whole assembly was to be listened to, and that to cleanse themselves; 1 Corinthians 5.
James. Well, M., you used to quote this passage as if it was a direction for everybody to listen to the church's teaching, and it has nothing whatever to say to that. It is when some matter of wrong is told to the assembly as the last means of winning a person back from wronging his neighbour, and he will not hearken to the whole assembly, he may then be treated as a heathen that does not belong to it. And I see it is said that, wherever two or three are gathered together in Christ's name, He is in the midst of them, so that it applies to Christians assembled together.
M. But is it not said, "Go and teach all nations, and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world"?
N. Let me remark to you that you are quoting scripture, and you tell me I cannot receive it without the church, nor understand it either.
M. Yes; but the church has sanctioned it.
M. Why, the Holy Roman Catholic church.
N. But I do not own it to be the church, nor do I admit that the church can sanction God's word; it savours to me of blasphemy. You tell me I must have the church first, and we have not got that yet, and therefore you cannot quote it to me. You tell me I must leave it to the church to give authority to the scripture. And now you are quoting scripture to prove the church. That will not do.
James. No, surely, M.; you cannot bring in to prove the church till you have the church to prove it, according to your system. So you ought to prove the church some other way, for according to you the scripture cannot have authority till you have it from the church, and we have not got the church yet for your faith; though I do not contest the Bible.
N. Quite right, James. You have got no ground yet, and we will therefore surely answer as to it seriously. But when we are inquiring into the rule of faith, this is important, because the Roman Catholic has no real ground for his faith. If the scripture is to prove the authority of the church, the church cannot prove the authority of scripture. If the church is to prove the authority of scripture, we cannot use scripture till we have the church first, as the scripture has none without it.
James. That is clear, M. How does your Dr. Milner get out of that?
M. Why, he says he believes the Catholic church, and everything that she teaches, upon the motives of credibility (namely, her unity, sanctity, etc.), which accompany her. And she brings me the book and tells me it is inspired.
N. On whose judgment then have you believed the church? -- who has judged of these motives of credibility?
M. Well, on my own, of course. I must judge if it is the church.
N. Clearly, but then you avow that your whole faith depends on private judgment, and not on a divine foundation at all. And, remark, Dr. Milner felt the force of this, and refers to the objection made to him, and seeks to clear it up. Now, in doing this, he is forced to rest the church's authority on motives of credibility -- motives for whom? Man. That is, it is mere human probability. The house cannot be stronger than its foundation. If I have only probability for the church, what the church teaches can only probably have authority. That is, it is no divine authority or divine faith at all. It would be a blasphemy to say, "Probably God says the truth." The Protestant's faith is founded on God's word as such; and motives of credibility can go no farther than private judgment, nay, may vary with each individual in their force. Thus sanctity is alleged to be a proof of the true church.
I read history, and I find that what a Romanist calls the church and infallible is stamped throughout, after history as contrasted with scripture begins, with the most horrible depravity and unholiness of anything on record. Where is the motive of credibility for me? When it rests on motives of credibility, it must rest on private judgment. There is no divine faith at all. Dr. John H. Newman admits there is only a degree of probability, though an immensely strong one. But that is not divine faith. The Romanist has confessedly none.
Dr. Milner says, you receive as a king's messenger one clothed like one, and you assure yourself he is one, and then accept the letter from the king that he brings, which tells you to mind all he (the messenger) says. But if he was a clever rogue, he might deceive you, and then use the letter to prove you ought to mind him, and get authority over you in everything, and you have only your own judgment to trust to in receiving him. Thus you have nothing but your own judgment to trust to, upon your own shewing, for what you believe.
But let us see a little farther what Dr. Milner's argument is worth. He believes the church and all that she teaches because of unity, sanctity, etc. Why all that she teaches? There may be unity and sanctity, and yet not present infallibility. This argument will not hold water. Dr. Milner jumps into infallibility before he has even got the scriptures to tell him the church is infallible, a point we will speak of. Then, suppose I deny the unity (and, remember, all the oldest churches reject the Roman Catholic church as erroneous, and the pope's authority, and of course do not admit their infallibility, and so, we have seen, do the majority rather of Christians), and the sanctity -- both of which, in fact, I do entirely deny -- all your supposition falls to the ground. If you have to prove them, in the end divine authority rests upon the judgment I form of unity and sanctity, before I have got any revelation at all. How do I know there ought to be but one church? And as there are many, how am I to know which is the right one? -- and must I know all history in order to say which has been holy, or which has the right succession, if any, before I can have any right faith? You have no divine foundation for your faith at all, nor the church to give it me. And, supposing I am asked to receive all the church teaches now, why may not I judge of the sanctity and unity at the beginning of her history and believe her to be infallible then, and hear what she says? Ah, you tell me I must not judge by that, but only by what is now. Now this looks suspicious. Why may not I see what the apostles and inspired men taught -- what the church, if you please, taught then? Was it not one and holy then?
N. Was it not more united and holy than now?
M. Well, I suppose it was, for here at least there is not much to boast in that way.
N. Why may I not then hear it at that time? Then I should listen to Paul and John and Peter and the rest. But you do not seem to like that; you will only allow me to hear people who are not inspired. And where am I to find any inspired teaching, or even the church's teaching now?
M. You must listen to her pastors.
N. Then I have no divine faith in what they say.
M. But they will not mislead you; the priest is seen after by the bishop, and he by them above him.
N. How can I tell? Is that divine faith? At any rate I do not hear the church, for aught I can tell, in hearing him. We will return to this, for it is a large subject. But on our main point at present, Dr. Milner on his own shewing, though he has been very astute, has no ground to stand upon. And, after all, I am to listen to this church now in those who confessedly are not inspired, and am not allowed to listen to it when apostles and others were inspired. And what does Dr. Milner therefore do? He puts the word of God first, unwritten as well as written, as the rule; and the church as the judge. When pressed (for it is only in a note) he says the church must come first, and be proved by its unity, sanctity, etc., etc., and then come to the word, but this, in fact, he did not dare to do. He had not the unity; he had not the sanctity. He tries to confirm the church's authority by these marks when he has got the true rule as he says, but, according to his own shewing, he could not get it till he had got the church. But he could not put the church forward, first because he has to prove it had such authority, which could not be proved at all; and next, that the Roman system was that church. It could not be proved that the church had the authority, because, if the church has to be proved first, how am I to know she is infallible? -- how can I tell what marks she is to be known by? She cannot adduce scripture to prove it in any way, for what propounds and explains it -- that is, the church -- we have not got yet. And supposing I admit the church to exist, as I do, for there it is before my eyes; why is it infallible? It tells me so; but is it right in telling me so? I see worldliness, ambition, horrible corruption, disputes, difference of doctrine. Take, for instance, the Dominicans and Franciscans on the immaculate conception. The former, the greatest and most important body for many centuries in their church (and which managed the Inquisition), denied what is now held necessary to be believed as of the faith itself.+
+Vincencius Lirinensis' rule is a real farce on the face of it. I must know all the church ever held to say, "held always, and by all" before the rule can apply. And when I do know it, as in this instance, I have a doctrine declared to be a dogma of faith which the most important body among the Roman Catholics denied publicly for centuries.
M. But then the pope and the bishops have decided now, and they had not then.
N. But how do I know the pope and the bishops have the right to decide? Who has made them infallible? I know some pretend the pope is so, and some pretend a general council is, and some say there must be both. But this is a new infallible body. And is it not a strange thing that the church, which you say was to keep people safe in the truth, should have left a vast body, and the most famous doctors, and those who were to decide upon heresy, in error for centuries, and only then settle the truth? How am I to receive all it teaches, or anything, with a divine faith? Hence in fact Dr. Milner puts the word of God first to prove the church before he has proved it to be the word of God, and declaring we cannot tell whether it is. This rule even then rests on no divine faith in his system, because, according to that, I get to the church, and cannot tell if the scriptures, by which its authority is alleged to be taught, are divine. He is cleverly resting on my protestant good faith to hide the weakness of his own cause.
Mark another thing. He puts the proof of the credibility of Christianity in a protestant mouth -- in Dr. Carey's. How comes that? He makes him quote the scriptures as a warrant for the doctrines and miracles of the Lord Jesus. Now he is quite right in doing that, because faith in Christianity cannot be founded on the church; because he who has to learn to believe in Christianity of course does not yet own the church. But here, however cunning, he has given all his position up. I can believe without the church. I have discovered the true religion. And if I have believed in Christianity and the word, I have what I want substantially, and, above all, I recognize the divine authority of the scriptures. You plead, or make the Protestant plead -- for as a Roman Catholic you can have no such faith -- the words and works of the blessed Jesus. You do well; but where did you get them in order to prove what Christianity is? Have you any account but the scriptures of the words and works of Jesus? Not the smallest iota. Anything that ever pretended to be so is too bad for anyone to allege it as of any authority. You must come to the scriptures to know what Christ said or did. A priest may repeat it from them, or I may, but nothing (with all the boastings of the clergy) has the smallest authority but what is found there.
But then the word has divine authority over my soul; the moment I have Jesus' words, and the apostles' words, I have the certainty of divine truth. You have nothing at all but this to prove what Christianity is, and its credibility; and, if I take this and so believe in Christianity, I have already the words of Christ and His apostles, and neither would nor dare but hear them. Do not tell me I cannot understand or believe them. That is the Christianity I have to understand and believe. Now, I do not wish to offend you, M., God forbid, but if I were to take what you call the Catholic church, as it is, or as it was at the time the Reformation took place, or long before, I see, without at all pretending that Protestants are what they ought to be, the greatest scene of wickedness that ever was known on the face of God's earth. And I should say, if that is what I am to believe as Christianity, God keep me from it. It is a wickedness that revolts an honest moral man, and that in priests, bishops, and popes more than in others. That there is no disputing about before the Reformation.
M. Well, all admit there have been wicked popes and clergy, but that is not the church.
N. But is it not what you want me to hear? Are they not the people who you say are to secure my having the truth? And as you plead sanctity as a proof of infallible authority, I must at once say, Well it is certainly not to be had here.
M. Well, but that does not change the faith of the church.
N. Aye, but we are talking about the infallibility of the church, on which my faith is to be divinely founded. And if sanctity, or even unity, is to be a proof of it, it was lost altogether, for the popes were the wickedest of men, and there were two, and even three, at a time denouncing one another as the falsest and wickedest of men; and at last it was so scandalous, that the three who then pretended to be pope were all deposed. Where was sanctity and unity then? Where infallibility? And note, to have it, it must never cease.
M. Well, but it was in the known doctrines of the church.
N. But I thought we must have a speaking tribunal. And if you found yourself on documents, where are they?
M. Well, there is the Council of Trent and the Catechism of Pope Pius IV.
N. That was a century later, and if I go to these documents, why may not I go to what Paul and Peter and John wrote? I get it first hand, and I suppose the apostles were as sure as the Council of Trent.
M. Yes, of course; but you may interpret them wrong; and then, if you go to that, they are in Greek; you must come to the pastors of the church.
N. Well, but I may interpret the decrees of Trent and the Catechism wrong. They are much more obscure than the most of the New Testament. And as to this being in Greek, the decrees and the Catechism are in Latin, and you are not going to tell me that the poor Romanists read them to know their faith; and if I go to the pastor, I am with a fallible man, and can have no divine faith. No, with the word of God I have a divine foundation for my faith, whereas you have none at all. Hence, M., though you have no right to quote the scriptures to me, because you say we cannot tell they are the word of God, and you have not yet proved what and where the true church is; yet, as I do believe they are the word of God, I shall make no objection to your quoting them, so that we will return to the point we left, only it was very important to shew that you Romanists have no divine ground for your faith at all. Your principle is that we cannot tell if the scriptures be the word of God. Hence I cannot have a divine faith in the revelation given. I cannot tell if it is a revelation. If it is, it has divine authority, and I must listen to it. As to the church, you have not proved anything about it yet. But I shall listen to all you say from the word, because, though you have no right to use it, I do not want to cavil, and I own it to be God's word. We were speaking of "Go and teach all nations, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always to the end of the world."
M. Well, is not that a plain proof that the church is secure from error, and that, as the apostles could not live for ever, we must obey their successors?
M. Why, all the bishops, and especially the pope, as the successor of St. Peter, the prince of the apostles.
N. I see nothing about successors. But must I know the succession of bishops of a see before I know what saves my soul? This is a serious question, because there have been three popes at a time. But let us see now if you think God was always with them. For instance, when Pope Julius was the most ardent warrior of his day, or when his predecessor, Pope Alexander VI, carried on a life of dissoluteness without example, seeking to establish his illegitimate children in dukedoms and principalities, to say nothing worse of him (for worse is said, and counted true), and at last was poisoned by what he had prepared to poison a rich cardinal to get his money -- was the Lord (may He forgive one for naming such a thing!) with these as with the apostles?
M. Yes, but there are wicked men everywhere.
N. No doubt. That is not our question; but is the Lord with them as He was with the apostles? That is the question.
James. Why, M., you cannot say that. It would be awful.
N. Well, when there were two popes for thirty years, and then three for some years more, the two holding their ground against the third, named to put them down, and then this third, probably poisoned by the person who was his successor, and after various fighting in open war, the Emperor succeeded in having a general council, and putting down all three (the last as too infamous to be tolerated) -- was the Lord with all these? or with which of them?
M. No, of course not; but He was with the church.
N. That I believe. But then, in that case, these were not the church. And, remember, your doctrine is that the promise to the apostles was with their successors. And this schism is of the more importance, because it is alleged that the Lord may be with an office when not with the person. But here there were two successors condemning each other, and part of Europe siding with one, and part with the other, and a third condemning both, so that the Lord could not be with them, and neither could secure the truth for us. The truth is, the papacy and all connected with it was such a horrible scene of wickedness, that men got tired of it and put down these popes -- and we may well say God, in His mercy, too -- and brought about the Reformation. For the Reformation, long cried for by all Christendom, took place about a century after this in another way than was expected; the popes, to whom reformation was left by the council, taking good care not to reform themselves, though not so scandalous as those I have referred to.
M. Well, but there were good popes too.
N. In the beginning of the history of Christianity there were blessed men in the See of Rome, martyrs among them: only they were not popes of Christendom. Far from it. Yet already in the fifth century the city of Rome was filled with blood and massacres through the conflicts between two contending popes, Symmachus and Laurentius, and at last they had to go to an heretical Arian king to decide the matter. This is the Roman Catholic account (Baronius, vol. 8, page 619). The dispute too lasted a long time. But, further, when the so-called bishops went to war, as princes at the head of their troops, as happened constantly in the middle ages, particularly in Germany, was the Lord with them as the successors of the apostles? And when they allowed sin for ten florins, as we have seen, was the Lord with them?
James. Well, M., what can you say to this? But is this all certain, sir?
N. I have stated nothing but what is matter of well-known and authentic history, for which authentic proofs remain, and mainly in councils of the Roman Catholic church. Nor indeed is it possible to go into all the wickedness and horrors that went on.
M. Well, I suppose it cannot be denied that they were dark and evil times; even Catholics admit that. But they were the habits of the age, and the clergy were not wholly exempt.
N. They do admit it. St. Bernard, as you call him, said Antichrist was at Rome in the eleventh century. But were the successors of the apostles, with whom you allege the Lord was, to follow the habits of the age? Besides, forbidding to marry and then living in sin was the case of the clergy only, and not otherwise the habits of the age, save as the corruption of the clergy corrupted everything around them.
James. But I thought, M., you called the church holy; and what is all this? It is dreadful: how could you think I could take such persons for successors of the apostles?
N. But again, are all the Greek patriarchs, prelates and clergy who reject the authority of the pope -- are they successors of the apostles too?
N. Well, but then successors of the apostles are in schism. Is not that a queer thing, and how is the Lord with them so that they can secure my faith? And then there are some sixty millions of professing Christians in schism with them, well nigh half the number of those subject to the pope. And then, note, they are the successors of the apostles, most of them in older churches than that of Rome. How can I be secure in thinking they can guide me according to the promise we are speaking of, "Lo, I am with you always," when they condemn utterly the pretensions of the one you think, I suppose, infallible?
M. But they hold the same doctrines.
N. So your Dr. Milner states; but it is not true, and, begging his pardon, he must have known it was not true. They do not hold the procession of the Holy Ghost from the Son, nor purgatory -- the last exercising more influence in the papal body than any other doctrine. I might add the priests marry; only that is practice, not doctrine. Again, when pope Liberius turned Arian to please the Emperor Constantius, and denied the divinity of the Lord Jesus, was the Lord with him as a successor of the apostles? Athanasius, who stood up for the truth of the blessed Lord's divinity was banished, and died in banishment excommunicated. And even before, in Constantine's time, when all the prelates, fathers, as they are called, of the Council of Tyre joined in accepting this denial of the truth, and the Arians were recalled, could they pretend the Lord was with them? -- or the 800 bishops who at Ariminium denied the divinity of the Lord? There were but 318 in the Council of Nice which affirmed it, only the Emperor's authority maintained it. Had I trusted the clergy for the truth in Constantius' days, I must have turned Arian. If I lived in Russia or Turkey now, I must, if I listen to the clergy, hold the pretensions of Rome to be all wrong. If I live at Rome, I must hold the successors of the apostles in the East to be all wrong. Is that all the security you can give me? When I take the scriptures, I have the certainty of having the truth, because I get what you own to be the apostles' own teaching. But to our point. Is God with all those of whom we have been speaking in their errors, when the pope for example was an Arian, or when there were two?
M. No, of course He was not with them in that. But you see God has preserved the church through it all in spite of all this, and you must hear the church.
N. We have not got the true church yet. However, you hold, then, that God has preserved the true church not by, but in spite of, these successors of the apostles. That I fully believe, and bless His abundant grace for. He has not permitted the gates of hell to prevail against it. But if anything could have frustrated God's promise and have destroyed the church, the conduct of the hierarchy would have done so.
M. But He was very often with them too. There were holy godly men, who sacrificed their lives for the truth.
N. Undoubtedly there were, at any rate in the earlier part of the history, though we might not always agree in judging of the particular cases. But there were some more enlightened, others less. And I am well assured that God was with them in the measure in which they followed the apostles and their doctrine, and so He will now with those who do, and that to the end of the age. He was fully with the apostles, and will be with all those who serve Him like them according to the measure given unto them. But this does not make the popes and prelates who are not all like them any security for the truth.
I believe then fully in the promise given, and that the Lord was with the apostles and will be with all those who so serve Him. And you are forced to admit that with the mass of your successors of the apostles the Lord is not. And your Dr. Milner looks at it, when it suits him, in the same way, for he couples with the passage we are speaking of, another from Mark, "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature." I add, "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, and he that believeth not shall be damned." Now, in this work I do not doubt that the Lord is with those who serve Him; but then your successors of the apostles are not that in their office. They rule over the flock where people are all professing Christians. Christ is speaking in Matthew of making disciples of the heathen. In Mark too He is speaking of the conversion to Christianity of those who were strangers to it. He is not speaking of the care of the church, nor of successors in that at all.
And mark here the importance of a distinction I was making with James before you came. Dr. Milner says the unwritten word was the means of propagating the doctrines. Now I admit that fully, and it may be, and is still; but that does not make the preacher a rule of faith. A means of propagating is not a rule of faith. This fallacy runs all through the book.
M. But Christ promised the Comforter should abide for ever, and that He would teach the apostles all things and bring all things to their remembrance, whatsoever He had said to them.
N. Both these statements I believe with all my heart, as Christ's own words. But, allow me to say, if He taught the apostles all things and brought all things to their remembrance, two things are clear: first, that all was taught them then, and all brought to remembrance then, and that of Christ's teaching nothing more is to be learnt than what they thus received. On this point Tertullian largely insists; and, better still, the apostle John. He tells us that, if we abide in what was from the beginning, we shall abide in the Father and in the Son; next, that it was to them only He then spoke, for He says, "to bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said to you." This can apply only to the apostles, and we have to inquire, How do we get what was thus taught them, whether directly by the Holy Ghost or by His bringing to remembrance Christ's words?
M. That is true; but the Comforter was to abide for ever.
N. So I am fully persuaded He does, but not to teach new truths, for all were taught to the apostles. He may, morally speaking, lead us to think of what Christ says, but cannot properly do what He did to the apostles. And the passage is an unfortunate one, for Judas (not Iscariot) asks the Lord how He would manifest Himself to them and not to the world, and the Lord tells him, "If a man love me, he will keep my words, and my Father will love him, and we will make our abode with him." So that the way the Comforter abides with the apostles and their successors, if you please, is with those who love Him and keep His word. Thus it is the Lord Himself carries on the succession, not by offices. Now, I admit, in the fullest way, that there are gifts, "pastors and teachers," by which the Lord edifies His people individually and collectively. But these, all admit, are not rules of faith. They are a means of blessing, not a rule of faith.
So that, if we examine the passage, we find that all was taught to the apostles, and that the true presence of the Spirit is with those who love Christ and keep His word. There is no promise whatever to official successors. There is one to the apostles, the end of the age being unrevealed; but there is not one word of official successors as objects of the promise. To allege it is only a supposition that it must be: a pretension often loudest in the wickedest now, to be the successors of the apostles. And when Judas asks how the Lord could be present, it is explained in another way by the Lord. Christ, who had been their Comforter or Paraclete, was going away from the disciples. This was a deep sorrow, an affecting loss. He promises another, who should not thus leave them, but ever abide with them. And surely as long as the church remains the Holy Ghost will remain. Who has Him dwelling in him is another question. The Lord says He is with those who love Him and keep His word.
Now as all truth was taught to the apostles, one question is, How can we have this securely and surely as they had it? But that there were any successors to the apostles in the true sense of the word I entirely deny. First, in a mass of places churches were found in which they never were, so that there was no proper successor to an apostle, for there was no apostle to succeed to. There may have been godly administrative care and teaching by those called and sent of God, and a great blessing too; but no proper successors of the apostles where there were no apostles to succeed.
But I go farther into the root and heart of the thing than this. There was no successor to an apostle at all as to what he was as an apostle. No one was chosen, sent directly by the Lord Himself, and this is what an apostle means. It is a name given by Christ. No pretended successor could say as Paul (and the rest too) "not of man, nor by man." The pretension to be a successor denies the person being in an apostle's place; for it denies that immediate relationship to Christ, which alone constitutes apostleship. The Timothys and Silvanuses and the rest, precious as they were to the church, were by man; or simply gifts without any local office, as the prophets. An apostle, in the nature of things, cannot have a successor in any official place in the church. For such successor is as such not the founder of the church as an eye-witness, and sent directly by Christ as such. Nobody pretends that those called successors of the apostles are inspired to make revelations. Individually they have no pretension to be considered in any respect as successors of an apostle. Nor was it (unless possibly at Jerusalem, and this is quite uncertain) the office of an apostle to govern any particular see, nor did any, unless the case I have just alluded to, and then that was not the apostolic office.
But I go farther. There is distinct proof that the apostles themselves recognized no successors. Paul insists on the diligent care of the elders, because he had no successor. This is very distinct. He knew (Acts 20) that after his decease grievous wolves would enter in, and perverse men would arise. Who, after his decease, if he was to have a successor? Evil would spring up because there was not an apostle to check or control it by his spiritual energy and consequent authority. He urges the elders, those whom the Holy Ghost had made overseers, to watch -- a thing wholly out of place if another was to succeed him and take his place. Some say Timothy was afterwards bishop of Ephesus. There is no evidence of it, but the contrary; but if he were, it upsets the theory altogether, for the same authorities tell us John was at Ephesus, so that we have an apostle there governing and guiding, and yet a successor at the same time to do it as if the apostle were gone.
So Peter says, seeing his departure was near, that he would take care they should have these things always in remembrance, and writes his Epistle; but if he had a successor who was to secure the truth, and it be not the scriptures which are to do it through grace, he made a great mistake in the whole matter. Paul therefore, and Peter and John practically too, all deny the whole theory on which the Romish system is founded. They know no successor, deny by their words that there will be such, and give other means of security as regards the truth; for Paul is still clearer than Peter as to the scriptures. Not only does he commend the elders of Ephesus to God and the word of His grace, but he tells us positively that in the last days perilous times should come; that the professing church would be in a horrible state, having a form of godliness but denying the power of it; and that we should turn away from such; and that the security of the faithful Christian would be the scriptures, which are able to make us wise unto salvation. Not a word of tradition, but the contrary; for Timothy is made to rely on knowing of whom he had learned the things he knew. This was Paul himself.
N. In 2 Timothy 3. He says evil men and seducers would wax worse and worse, but Timothy was to continue in what Paul himself had taught, and hold fast to the scriptures as able to make him wise unto salvation, and make the man of God perfect. Thus the apostle had-no thought of anything else than apostolic teaching, and the scriptures as the security of the faithful in the perilous times of the last days. And you see too, plainly, that instead of such security and right conduct and good state of the church continuing through the care of the successors of the apostles perilous times were to come; and indeed at the end, as he tells us in 2 Thessalonians 2, an apostasy; and that when the state of the professing church made it perilous for the saint, the scriptures and the certain teaching of the apostle himself would be the means of securing us by faith in Christ Jesus. The Christian would have to be secured in perils arising from the state of the church. Paul does not refer to the hierarchy as the safeguard, but to the scriptures and Timothy's knowing who had taught him.
James. That is very clear, M.; because, if the state of the church was so evil as to make it perilous, it could not be a security for him who desired to walk right; and if I read what Paul says I do know of whom I have learned it, and that and the other scriptures will keep us through faith in Christ.
M. But you may take a false meaning out of them. Every kind of notion and religion is come out of scripture.
James. That I do not believe, because both you and I believe they are the truth of God, and therefore error cannot come out of them. That people, if they are not humble, and if they read scripture with their heads and not depending upon grace, may follow their own thoughts and wrest scripture to prove them -- this may be; but they cannot get anything but perfect truth out of scripture, that you dare not deny. If they are proud, wise in their own conceits, they will reap the consequence of it, but grace will keep the humble soul. Besides, I may take a wrong meaning out of what your books or priest teach me. And, further, I do not despise at all the help of those whom God has sent and fitted to teach and help us: only they are not the rule of faith. They cannot, I see they cannot, have the authority God's word has; they are not inspired. I must prove all things, and hold fast that which is good. That is what the apostle tells us to do; 1 Corinthians 10: 15.
M. Why you are growing quite a little teacher yourself, James. What can a poor man like you know about it?
James. I know well I am not a learned man, M., but I have faith in what I find in scripture, and therefore am certain of the truth that is in it. Ought not I to believe what Paul says?
M. Of course; but how can you tell what he meant?
James. By what he says; and do you not believe that the grace of God will help a poor man as well as a learned one in what concerns his soul?
M. Well, I do not gainsay that.
James. And the blessed Lord who cared for the poor said, that the Father hid these things from the wise and prudent and revealed them to babes: "even so, Father, for so it seems good in thy sight." And Paul says, "If any man will be wise in this world, let him become a fool that he may be wise." And the Psalm says, "The entering in of thy word giveth light and understanding to the simple."
M. Where do you get all this scripture, James?
James. Why, by reading it to be sure. You pretend we cannot understand it, M., and you have never tried. Read it, and try and see if it is not light and food for the soul. Of course we need grace for this, as for every blessing. And tell me, M., to whom did the Lord speak when He was teaching, the learned or the poor?
M. Why, they say the poor. The scribes and Pharisees would not listen to Him.
James. And do you think He spoke so that they could understand Him if their hearts were not hardened? Alas, there are many such, poor and rich.
M. Well, I suppose, of course He did.
James. And why should not I, if I humbly seek His help? I do not know Greek of course, but (thank God) it has been put into English, and I can trust Him to get the truth from it. I am not looking for a learned knowledge of it, but for the edification of my soul. Read it in your own translation. There is one they approve of, read it in that, if you won't have ours. I do not believe the blessed Lord meant to make a way for learned men to get to heaven and not for the poor. He says "to the poor the gospel is preached"; and the apostle, "not many wise men, not many rich, not many noble are called, but God hath chosen the foolish things of this world to confound the wise." Yet he wrote almost all his Epistles to these very people.
M. Well, what you say there, James, is reasonable. I should like to see what scripture does say; but I do not know whether Father O. will allow me.
James. Father O.! But what right can Father O. have to hinder your hearing what God has said to you? Who gave him the right to keep away from the poor God's word that was once written to the poor? For, as Mr. N. said, the Epistles, save a few, were written to all the Christians in a place, not to the clergy.
M. Well, but you do not know whether he will hinder me.
James. Perhaps not. They would not be apt to do it when all around can read them; but how comes he to have the right to hinder? or how comes it you are dependent on another man as to whether you may hear what God has said?
M. Well, I doubt that is right too. But surely we ought to obey those who have the rule over us.
James. I have nothing against that, for the scriptures say so. But how comes it they only give you these scraps of them? If one of the family would not let me see my father's will, pretending he was wiser than me, and I was no lawyer, and I should only take a wrong sense out of it, I should not, as a man, like it. I am not a lawyer, and he might be better able to explain lawyer's words in it; but I should like to know what my father did say. Some of it might be plain and for me, and I should know if he was keeping something back from me that was mine in what was plain. I should like to see it. And when one does see the scripture, one sees that God meant us to see it.
N. Yes, and that is a very important point; because it is not merely going against our rights, as between man and man, but against God's rights as to His own people. And Dr. Milner lets out that Rome does not wish Christians in general to see the scriptures. He says she has confirmed her decrees by them. She enjoins her pastors to read and study them. Finally she proves her perpetual right to announce and explain the truths, etc., by several of the strongest and clearest passages (Lett. 10), but not a word of the faithful seeing or reading them. And James is quite right in what he supposes: where there are many Protestants, the Bible is allowed, and occasionally to those they feel sure of elsewhere, with notes; but otherwise it is not thought of, and Dr. Milner could not speak of liberty to read the scriptures existing, because it is formally denied by the highest authority of the Romish system.
The Index of prohibited books has been referred to a committee by the Council of Trent. In the last session this was referred to the pope, and the pope sanctioned the rules they had laid down. In the fourth rule, if a person shall have presumed to read or to have a copy without the express permission of the parish priest or confessor, he cannot receive absolution till the Bible be given up; and a bookseller who sells or otherwise lets a person have one is to forfeit the value for pious uses, and undergo other penalties. Dr. Milner therefore says the Catholic church does not cast any slight on the scriptures. He could not say Christians were free to read them, and M. must get leave from his priest to do so, and that in writing (Rule 4 at the end of Council of Trent), or he would not get absolution.
The Romish system interferes with God's rights -- His title to send His own message to His own people; and no one denies that in the primitive churches all were free to read, and encouraged to read, the scriptures. St. Chrysostom insists on it. Nor does Pope Gregory VII (Hildebrand) conceal that many things were done by the early Fathers which were changed by the church in after times, on a critical examination of the matter. God has addressed His word to the people, not, save a very small part (three epistles), to the clergy, and the clergy have taken them away -- taken away, as the Lord says, the key of knowledge.
M. And do you not think ignorant people may wrest the scriptures to their own destruction, as it is said?
N. I think anyone may, if he does not look for God's grace to help and guide him. But I do not think ignorant people do it a thousandth part as much as learned ones, because they come to it more simply as God's word, and respect it. Whereas the learned, thinking they are able to exercise their minds on it and judge about it, do not receive it as little children. Heresies have not come from the ignorant, but from doctors.
God has given the scriptures to the people, and the clergy of Rome have taken them from them. And it is to God they will answer. Augustine insists largely in his book on the unity of the church (chapter 10) against the Donatists, who insisted, just as the Romanists do now, on the obscurity of scripture.
We now turn to another part of your rule of faith -- tradition. Your Dr. Milner says, Paul puts the written and unwritten word upon a level, leaving us to suppose that this last is tradition.
James. And I thought that was tradition -- a doctrine handed down from one to another.
N. It is not, in the New Testament, except where it is condemned, when the Lord says, "Thus have ye made the word of God of none effect by your tradition." Where remark, that traditions are put expressly in contrast with the word of God. The word of God was complete in itself, and their traditions set it aside, and so do Romanist traditions.
But the passage which Dr. Milner quotes proves that tradition is not used as he uses it. Where the word is used of written and unwritten, the written is called tradition as well as the unwritten. It means any doctrine delivered. Now if Paul delivered a doctrine to me by word of mouth, I ought of course to observe it as if it was in one of his epistles. There is no difference: only that I might forget or change it if it were not written. Here is Paul's phrase -- "Stand fast, and hold the tradition ye have been taught, whether by word or our epistle." Of course, what he had taught as truth, they ought to keep. Tradition means what he had taught.
But where are the doctrines which Paul taught which are not found in scripture? They have none to produce: we shall see this just now. Dr. Milner tells us an old wife's tale about the apostles agreeing upon a short symbol, a story which everyone knows to have no foundation. The Apostles' Creed is the Roman creed, with some additions, and the creed of the church of Aquileia, in the fifth century, preserved by Ruffinus, the descent into hell being added afterwards. But, further, a very just and important remark has been made by another as to the way tradition is spoken of by the Fathers, on whom Dr. Milner chiefly rests his case. The word is not used as meaning a source of additional doctrines, an unwritten word besides the written, but as a sure proof of the true faith to be received, and way of knowing the right use of scripture. Tradition for them was a testimony to scriptural truth of a surer kind, as they alleged, not a communication of additional truths besides the scripture. They charged heretics with pretending to a tradition of this kind. They as often appeal to the scriptures against everything else as to tradition; but with them tradition is not a source of additional truths, but a surer proof, as they say, of common truths. Now, I admit freely that, supposing the apostles had not left us the scriptures, men ought to have followed tradition (that is, what the apostles taught) when they had it. The question is, first, would it have secured the preservation of the apostles' doctrine? The apostles thought not, and left us the New Testament -- that is, really, the Holy Ghost did. But, secondly, now they have left us the scriptures, are we not to use them? and are we not to reject everything contrary to them, even if it pretends to be a tradition?
We will now see what the Fathers say about it, as Dr. M. quotes them. The early Fathers, those near to the time of the apostles, appeal to tradition, not as an additional source of truth, but a security for truth against heresy, against new doctrines, proving by what everybody held all over the world that such heresy was new. Now, though not an authority, it might be useful as a proof of this when it was universal. But as to its securing the certainty of teaching, it cannot, and so God thought, and gave His people a book. History has shewn that it does not, for doctrines have changed. Afterwards tradition came to be appealed to as an independent source of like authority, because the scriptures did not contain a multitude of superstitions which came in; and at last the scriptures were taken away, because they condemned well nigh all that was done and taught, as a certain Peter Sutor (A.D. 1525), a Carthusian monk, innocently confesses, that "the people will be apt to murmur when they see things required, as from the apostles, which they find not a word of in scripture." Whence he concludes it was a rash, useless, and dangerous thing to translate them.
Irenaeus, for example, uses tradition as a security for truth, not as revealing other things besides what is in scripture. The quotation from Tertullian surprises me, because this same Tertullian, after saying the traditions of the different episcopal sees secured the faith, left what called itself the Catholic church, because its state was so bad. It did not secure his faith. Not only so, but the particular tract Dr. Milner quotes was assuredly written when he had left the universal church to become a Montanist, or, at any rate, accepted the Montanist rhapsodies as prophecy, for he says in the first chapter, No wonder they would not face martyrdom, when they reject the prophecies of the Spirit, that is, of the Paraclete, so called, of Montanus. Even here he only insists on rites and ceremonies, and on no doctrine of faith, saying, that if certain ceremonies have been always used they are to be observed, and it is to be assumed there was some tradition as their origin -- just shewing that it was to justify superstitious practices they began to use tradition because there was no scripture for them
The other proofs of Dr. Milner are drawn from authors from the end of the fourth to the end of the fifth century after Christ, when every perplexity of doctrine, and the grossest relaxation of practice, had come into the church, so that they were glad to get anything to rest their foot upon. Popes had denied the divinity of Christ. The bishops had killed the poor old archbishop of Constantinople by blows in one of their councils, and the vices of the clergy were such that they surely did require something not in scripture to support them. What I have said I will justify when we speak of the marks of the true church. But it will be well to examine the point of tradition a little closer. We will take Tertullian, because he is the first that speaks largely of it in the tract Dr. M. refers to. Here are the points for which he refers to tradition as an authority: --
"Therefore let us inquire whether tradition also should be received if it be not a written one. We will deny that it is to be received if no examples of other observances which we defend, without any written document, on the ground of tradition alone, and then, by the patronage of custom, prejudge the case. Finally, that I may begin with baptism. When we are approaching the water, there but a little before in the assembly, under the hand of the president, we witness that we renounce the devil, and his pomps, and his angels; then we are immersed three times, answering something more than the Lord determined in the gospel. Received back [from the water], we taste a mixture of milk and honey, and from that day abstain from our daily washing for a week. The sacrament of the Eucharist, which was received from the Lord at a time they were eating, and committed to all to celebrate, we take in meetings held before daylight, and not from the hand of others than the president. We make offerings for the dead. We celebrate the anniversaries of martyrs. We count it a wickedness to fast on the Lord's day, or to worship on our knees. We enjoy the same immunity from Easter to Pentecost. We are grieved if any even of our own cup or bread drop on the ground. At every progress and advance, at coming up or going out, in clothing, putting on our shoes, washing at tables, when we bring the lights, when we go to bed, when we sit down, whatever we are engaged in, we sign our forehead with the cross. If you ask scripture for the law of these and other like practices, you will find none. Tradition will be alleged to you to be the source. Custom has confirmed it, and faith observes it."
Now that none of these observances are found in scripture I fully admit. But we see what tradition was worth -- not kneeling on Sunday, giving a taste of milk and honey to the newly-baptized, and such like futilities, which, not being in scripture, they alleged tradition for. Now it is well to see what the earliest tradition was worth. You have it from Dr. Milner's witness for us; we were to take him as a guide in our inquiry; I have examined what he has alleged. But then I have a few remarks to make here. Had these traditions the authority of the word of God, the alleged unwritten word? The triune immersion in baptism, which some took for a sign of the Trinity, some for three days of Christ's being in the grave -- Jerome of the unity too -- was insisted upon by Tertullian, Basil, and Jerome, as coming from tradition, Chrysostom refers it to the words of Christ Himself in sending His disciples; Matthew 28. And the so-called apostolical canons order a bishop or presbyter to be deposed who should administer baptism not by three immersions, but by only one in the name of Christ. Pope Pelagius condemns it too, and founds the practice on Christ's words in Matthew. So, it appears, does Theodoret, who accuses Eunomius of changing baptism in not immersing thrice; so Sozomen.
Here, if ever, we have a tradition of the highest character and greatest authority. Alas! it is given up. The Arians used it, and in Spain this alarmed the orthodox, and many gave it up, and others would not, and the whole country was in a practical state of schism. Leander, of the See of Seville, wrote to Gregory the Great. He answers: "Concerning the triune immersion in baptism, nothing can be answered more truly than what thou hast felt, that in one faith a different custom does no harm to the holy church; but in being thrice immersed we mark a sacrament of the three days' burial, as when the infant is taken up the third time out of the water, the resurrection on the third day is expressed. But if anyone thinks that there is an assertion of the exalted Trinity therein, neither as to this is there any hindrance to being plunged only once; since, as there is one substance in three Persons, it can in no way be reprehensible that an infant should be immersed once or thrice in baptism, since in three immersions the trinity of persons, in one the unity of the divinity is designated; but now, as infants are baptized by the heretics with three immersions, I judge that it should not be done among you," Greg. lib. 1, ep. 1, ad Leand.
Still the pope's advice did not succeed in stopping the schism. The Spanish Council of Toledo decided that, though, as Gregory judged, both were perfectly innocent, yet they should only immerse once, and comfort all parties by saying that the plunging is a sign of death; the coming up of resurrection; the one immersion, of the unity of the Godhead; the three names, of the Trinity of persons. (Conc. Toledo 4, can. 5.) So this tradition, enforced by deposition from office in the canons which tradition asserted to be those of the apostles, as the same tradition did the creed to be theirs, came to an end. And faith observed it no more. How certain an authority it is! You cannot complain of the choice I have made; it is Dr. Milner's own. I suppose Roman Catholics kneel on Sunday, and from Easter to Pentecost too; so that what Tertullian alleges to be tradition observed by faith has no authority at all.
I shall refer to what Irenaeus says of scripture just now. I do not quote him as to tradition, because his use of it is to appeal to the universal voice of the church to confirm his reasonings from the word against heretics, which is quite another thing from Dr. Milner's use of the word.
But a word more as to Tertullian, who was a lawyer and also a great stickler for church prescription, which is only a principle of Roman civil law, and what Dr. Milner quotes only an advocacy in the terms of Roman law. One question is, Can the authority of tradition secure us in the faith? The answer is, Tertullian himself who insists on it received, at the time he wrote this, the Montanist rhapsodies, as inspiration and the Comforter, and went amongst them, leaving that which he said alone had authority. The most important of his traditions which was universal was given up, Pope Gregory very wisely saying that, if there was unity of faith, such things were of no consequence. How futile most of his traditions are, anyone can see. They are notions and practices crept in from a lively imagination, and that is all; but a dangerous thing in the church of God, because a long observed custom becomes a matter of faith for many.
M. But have we not the Apostles' Creed by tradition, and that they composed it before they went away to preach?
N. The Apostles' Creed, as the church has it now, was composed at different times, and no two churches hardly had just the same. "The Communion of Saints," for example, was added quite late; "the holy church" earlier; the word "Catholic" again later still. The descent into hell was not there at all in the Roman creed called the Apostles'. And it was added very late indeed; it appears in the creed of Aquileia, in the fourth century. As to the apostles making a creed, as Dr. Milner alleges, I am surprised he should quote such a fable; for such it is now, I suppose, universally owned to be. All the creeds are called apostolic, meaning they contain apostolic doctrine. What is now called the Apostles' Creed was the creed of the Roman church with one or two articles added.
This story of the apostles composing it does not appear before the fourth century, and then the story went rapidly farther; for an author, passing under the name of Augustine, gives us the particular article contributed by each apostle. But all this is trumpery and contrary to known history, for it is known that many articles were added, as I have said, quite late in the church's history. Dr. Milner urges, too, that they (the apostles) profess belief in the church (Lett. 10), not in scripture. This is an unfortunate observation. The authors of the creed were stating objects of faith, what they did believe, not sources of revelation, nor the authority for their believing it. They do not speak of believing in tradition either: both would have been absurd, because the question was briefly what they believed, not why, or where they found it.
But, further, the author quoted by Dr. Milner -- he who tells us the apostles made the creed -- Ruffinus charges his readers to remark that they are not called on to believe in the church (that is, have confidence in it as an authority and source of faith), but only to believe the church -- that is, that there was such a thing. If anyone says that it is just the same with every article that they are 811 objects of faith whether there be "in" or not, I shall not contest with him. However Dr. Milner's (Lett. 10) authority presses strenuously the remark that we are only to believe the objective fact that there is a church, but not to believe in it -- that is, draws exactly the opposite conclusion to that for which Dr. M. quotes him. He says, "By this syllable of a preposition (believing the church, instead of in the church) the Creator is separated from the creatures, and divine things are separated from human." (Ruffinus in Symb. Apostolorum); and St. Augustine and after him the schoolmen insist on the difference in principle.
But I must return a moment to a remark I made to you. The word "tradition" is shamefully abused. No one doubts that the disciples ought to receive whatever the apostles taught by word of mouth. The question is whether we can have it now handed down unwritten outside scripture. Now the scripture and the earliest writers used the word simply in the sense of teaching; as in the passage quoted by Dr. Milner, "the tradition which ye have received by word or our epistle." That had not been handed down. Paul had taught them by word of mouth; he had taught them by letter: they were to receive both. Of course they were; but they had received both directly from the apostle; there was no handing down. It means his teaching, and he uses it so elsewhere. Now it is dishonest trifling to use this to prove what is alleged when the word is used in another sense. Tradition means now what is handed down unwritten from one to another, the unwritten word as distinguished from scripture. Paul says, tradition by letter or words. It is not the same thing he speaks of. The duty of receiving what Paul taught by word of mouth has nothing to do with proving that handing down by words of mouth means our having what was not written by them. Ignatius, as quoted by Eusebius, uses tradition as Paul does -- that is, as apostolic teaching.
James. Well, M., that seems quite clear. When Paul speaks of tradition by letter or word, he does not use it as you do now, and Dr. Milner ought not to have quoted it. It has nothing to do with the matter.
N. We say Paul and the rest did teach by word of mouth; but what God meant for the church in all ages he caused them to commit to writing. Now first let us see how the Lord speaks and acts in this respect. He does speak of tradition, when it was something handed down added to the written word; and thus the scribes and Pharisees asked Him why His disciples transgressed the tradition of the elders. "But he answered and said unto them, Why do ye also transgress the commandment of God by your tradition? ... Thus have ye made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition": adding from Esaias, "In vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men." Now we charge the Romanists with this. They worship God in vain, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. They have taken away one of the ten commandments, and made two of the last to make out the ten, and added six commandments of the church (others make eight, dividing one, and adding one -- to pay tithes). They are to be binding as God's commandments, besides a hundred other human ordinances.
M. The church has given commandments besides the ten.
James. And left out the second?
M. Deuteronomy proves that it is only a part of the first, and that the last two are distinct, for they are in a different order from Exodus.
N. But you have left out the second and divided the tenth, and that second is, "Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image, or the likeness of anything that is in heaven or on earth." And you have made graven images and set them up in all your churches, and in your streets and roads, where you can.
James. Well, I had no thought of what their doctrine was. My wife might well say that it was not Christianity as God gave it. Why, a child may see that.
N. The Lord never appeals to tradition but openly condemns it, and appeals to scripture, saying it cannot be broken. The apostles never do, but always quote the scriptures, not only so, but foreseeing by the prophetic Spirit what would come on the church, they tell us our security would be the divinely-inspired scriptures, and Timothy's knowing the person who had taught the doctrine which thus only could have authority, and so of us. And Peter expressly says he would take care they should have the testimony of God, and writes his epistle, clearly shewing that thus, and thus only, and not by oral tradition, the truth would remain and be secured to them.
Further, the Romanist cannot tell us one truth with any knowledge of whom it came from -- cannot authenticate as apostolic a single tradition. Paul does refer to what he had taught by word of mouth without repeating it in writing. "Now ye know what letteth." Now here the Romanists cannot supply anything by tradition at all. Where tradition (if of any value) would come in they can say nothing at all. Yet they have the Fathers very clear upon this. They have a church tradition upon this. The apostle says that, when this hindrance was removed, the man of sin would come. Now the Fathers taught it was the Roman empire; and prayed for its continuance, persecuting as it was, that the dreadful time of Antichrist might not come. But there they were all wrong. The Roman empire is gone and the man of sin not come, however much the pope may have his spirit. See the wisdom of scripture.
Now, as an external hindrance the Roman empire may have been what hindered (though the presence of the church on earth with the Holy Ghost dwelling in it I believe to have been the cause); but if the apostle had said, in what God was giving for all ages, it was the Roman empire, it would have turned out subsequently to have been inexact. And therefore the Spirit of God, in what was written, left it in terms the import of which are to be learned by the spiritual mind from the word. The Fathers may have been right that the external hindrance then was the Roman empire. I can suppose Paul may have even spoken of this as the then hindrance; but by leaning on tradition they went all wrong. The Holy Ghost for all ages only taught the general truth. The tradition has proved false, and the body that trusts to it now cannot supply one word to say what it meant.
Now I do not own the smallest authority in the Fathers. I own it in nothing but the word of God; but, as they have been quoted, I shall quote them as to the scripture, to shew they argued exactly in an opposite way to which Dr. Milner quotes them for. I recognize no authority of any kind in the Fathers, for the simple reason that they neither give us, nor pretend to give us, any revelation from God. Whether they have given the doctrine of the apostles correctly is easily ascertained by comparing them with the apostles' writings; and as a general fact I affirm that they do not, and this on all the most vital subjects. It is all nonsense to talk of their judgment being surer than ours, because the scriptures are not easy to understand. I answer, the scriptures are just as easy to understand as the Fathers. If they are to be the rule of faith they are in Latin and Greek, and instead of one volume full of truth and riches, I have masses of folios, with some good things in them here and there, but a vast quantity of confusion, heresy, and trash. If I am to take them as witnesses of what the apostles taught, it is much simpler to take the apostles own writings. However I shall refer to them, since they are quoted and made a parade of, to shew how little ground there is for trusting what is said of them, or, I must add, what they say.
Irenaeus, whom Dr. Milner quotes, begins the reasonings of the passage thus (Contra Haereses, lib. 3, chapter 3): -- "We have not known the dispositions of our salvation but by those by whom the gospel came to us, which, indeed, they then preached, but afterwards by the will of God have delivered to us in writings, which were to be the foundation and column of our faith. Nor is it right to say they preached before they had a perfect knowledge." He then refers to the Gospels as flowing from their teaching.
In the second chapter we come to the key of the whole matter. The Valentinian heretics against whom he wrote (who held it was a bad God that made the world and gave the Old Testament), finding they could not prove their doctrines by scripture, pretended there were other doctrines which the apostles taught and had not written, appealing, that is, as Romanists do -- for it is the old heretical story -- to the unwritten word known by tradition. "For when," he says, "they are convicted out of the scriptures, they turn to accusations against the scriptures themselves, as if they were not right, nor of authority, and because things are variously said there, and because the truth cannot be found out from them by those who are ignorant of tradition, for that was not delivered in writing, but viva voce." Thus, what Dr. Milner insists on is exactly what these horrible heretics insisted on, and Irenaeus' language is. The Fathers had no such tradition, but believed in one supreme God. The heretics appealed to unwritten tradition, because the scriptures were not clear, nor could be understood without tradition, and that there were things taught by tradition besides the scriptures.
Irenaeus then takes them on their own ground, and says, "Let them take their own ground. How can we have surer tradition than in the churches founded by apostles, and especially Rome, where Peter and Paul both were? None of them teach, nor have taught, that there was a bad God." He does not appeal to them for any doctrine not contained in the word, but to confirm his reasonings, taken from the scriptures, against the spurious traditions of these heretics; and adds then that missionaries, who taught heathens who are utterly barbarous without written documents, taught no such doctrine, and their testimony was to be received. In this way Irenaeus uses the common faith of the church to refute a pretended tradition, saying that what the apostles taught was written down, and condemning the appeal to an unwritten word for something not in scripture. Only he shews that tradition, if heretics would have it, rejected them. Remember then, that Irenaeus is arguing against heretics, because they appealed to tradition as revealing doctrines not in scripture, and interpreting scripture itself, and resists this doctrine, adding that if you appeal to the universal consent of the churches they confirm what he alleges from scripture. It is the Romanists who take the ground which the godly Irenaeus denounces as the conduct of the heretics, who insisted there was tradition besides scripture, and that scripture could not be rightly used without it.
It is the same in substance, but yet stronger, in the case of Tertullian, who is blindly quoted as the great authority for tradition. He too complains of the heretics for affirming that the apostles taught doctrines besides what is in scripture, alleging sometimes that they did not know all things, sometimes that they did not teach all things publicly. And he declares that these heretics quote certain passages of scripture to shew that there were secret doctrines which they did not teach to all, founding the doctrine of an unwritten tradition on them. The very same course is pursued by the Roman doctors to prove there is an unwritten tradition besides scripture. Tertullian declares there was no such thing; but that the apostles taught publicly all they had received to teach, first by word of mouth, and then afterwards in their epistles; and, denying these heretics to be Christians at all, he says they ought to be, according to the scriptures rejected after one rebuke (a mistake of his, by the bye, Paul says a first and second), and not after disputation, and that Christians had better not dispute with them.
Now, though declamatory and loose, there is a great deal of truth in this. But I will shew you from the passage the exactness of what I have said. He speaks as one weak and vexed, but with a great deal of truth, though on some points we shall see his reasoning is defective at any time, and wholly useless for the purpose Romanists quote it for. He speaks of the twelve (strange to say, he does not notice Paul here) being sent forth and promulgating the same faith, and founding churches in each city, from which other churches afterwards borrowed in turn the continuation of the faith and seeds of doctrine, and yet, says he, "borrow, and thus are counted apostolic, as the offspring of apostolic churches. It is necessary that every kind of thing should be estimated according to its origin. Therefore so many and so great [as the] churches [may be], that first one [founded by] the apostles, from which all are [derived], is one; so all are the first and apostolic, while all together approve unity ... . Here therefore we found our prescription. If the Lord Jesus Christ sent the apostles to preach, others are not to be received as preachers than those Christ instituted; since none knew the Father but the Son, and he to whom He has revealed Him, nor does the Son appear to have revealed Him to others than to the apostles, whom He sent to preach surely that which He had revealed to them. But what they have preached, that is, what Christ revealed to them, and here I use prescription (the Roman form of pleading), that it ought not to be otherwise proved, but by these churches which the apostles themselves founded by preaching to them, as well viva voce (by word of mouth), as men say, as afterwards by epistles ... . Let us communicate with the apostolic churches, because none have a different doctrine; this is the testimony of truth." He then insists largely that all was revealed to the apostles, and that there could not be any other doctrine added which they had not. Now note here that he insists on the epistles as containing these same truths that were taught. But suppose I follow now Tertullian's advice, and that I go to the churches which the apostles founded. They have pretty nearly disappeared. I go to Jerusalem, and I find such fighting for the Holy Sepulchre between Armenians, Greeks, and Romanists, of different ways of thinking, that the Turks are obliged to have troops and men with whips to keep order.
The churches founded by apostles have almost disappeared by the judgment of God, they were become so corrupt. Rome was not founded by apostles. That is certain, for Paul writes a letter to them, and to a church there, before any apostle had been there, and when he went there he was a prisoner. In fine, if I go to the places which the apostles did found, as far as they subsist, they reject the Romish church altogether, and Rome is striving to gain proselytes from them. They are Greeks, Armenians, Jacobites. In result these early Fathers did not use tradition as giving additional truths, but as the common consent of the churches, to shew that their statements from scripture were sound and true, and that none had ever held what the heretics advanced. That the heretics' opinions began since the apostles, and therefore could not be true, because the apostles had been guided into all truth. Tertullian says, if the heretics were in the apostles' time, they are condemned, being only now somewhat more refined in form; or they were not in the apostles' time, and their later origin condemns them.+
+Tert. de Praescriptione Haereticorum 20, and following: ed. Rig. 208. I do not think Tertullian's confidence in scripture and grace, to use it by the Spirit, was sound. Hence, when tested, he had no strength against the fanatic pretensions of Montanus. In a preceding part of this treatise he, leaning on human argumentation, says, "If you quote a text, the heretics will quote another, so you are losing your breath"; but his arguments refer to them as a means of convicting heretics, not as the source of truth, and he refers Irenaeus to what was held by all, and not as a proof of an unwritten truth, but as a proof that what the heretics taught of two Gods, a bad and a good one, and the like, did not come from the apostles; it was new, or already condemned by the apostles. The apostles knew all that was revealed, and taught it all. The heretics pretended to some secret or concealed doctrine, but no church had these doctrines. It is a proof of what was taught. The Romanist is clearly on the ground the heretics were on.
Now that is exactly what is the truth as to the doctrines of Romanism. Peter Lombard, in the twelfth century, was the first who taught there were just seven sacraments, and Bellarmine confesses that Christ taught nothing directly as to some, and Cardinal Bessarion admits there were originally only two, baptism and the Lord's supper. And we can give the date or gradual growth of the doctrines in which we differ from them.
On the other side, the practical force of Tertullian's argument is wholly gone. There he reasons to prove that no churches had these new doctrines of the heretics, so that they were proved to be new. "Go through the apostolic churches," he says, "where as yet the sees of the apostles preside in their places, where their own authentic letters are read, sounding out the voice, and representing the face of each one. Is Achaia nearest to you?" You have Corinth. I go to Corinth now; it condemns Rome. "If you are not far from Macedonia, thou hast Philippi, thou hast Thessalonica." I cannot go to Philippi, all the place has disappeared. I go to Thessalonica; they condemn Rome again. "If not, thou canst go into Asia; thou hast Ephesus. But if thou art adjacent to Italy, Rome, whose authority is to be had for us." (He lived in Africa, over against Italy.) He declares they would find none of the new doctrines. Now remark here, first, that his appeal to this sure tradition was finding the scriptures, the authentic letters, still extant, which proved what the doctrine of the apostles was; and, secondly, if I go to these churches now, those which remain (except Rome itself) condemn Rome, and the rest can furnish no evidence at all, they are gone. What does remain of apostolic churches outside herself universally condemns her.
James. I do not see, M., what I, or any one, can gain by what is here said of tradition, nor what your doctors can gain from it but confusion. He appeals for the doctrine which is in scripture to Corinth and Ephesus and others, as witnesses that they never held such a doctrine as these heretics. But though that may have served as a testimony, as far as it went then, yet the facts prove how unsteady a foundation it was for the truth; for of these places, some of them do not exist at all, and if I were to go to the others, they do not agree with Rome. Of the means referred to I have nothing hardly left to prove scripture right; and what is left, if it be worth anything, proves Rome wrong. This is not much help to your cause. The churches mentioned in scripture I find are against you, where they still exist. Not that I believe any of them as authority, but they upset your argument from tradition entirely. You must find something better than this to build on. If I followed the direction Dr. Milner, I see, quotes -- which I should be sorry to do, because God has left us the scriptures, but if I did -- I must reject him, and Rome with him; because, in following the ordinances of tradition in the apostolic churches, I find that they are separated from Rome and condemn it.
N. You are perfectly right, James; and there is a plain proof in Dr. Milner himself that he knew this well and saw it plainly enough, because in quoting Tertullian he has left all this part of the passage out. Tertullian says, "Go through the apostolic churches. Is Achaia next to thee? thou hast Corinth. If thou art not far from Macedonia, thou hast Philippi, thou hast the Thessalonians; if not, thou canst go into Asia, thou hast Ephesus; but if thou art near Italy, Rome," etc. Now all the former part Dr. Milner carefully leaves out, and begins with "if you live near Italy." He saw plainly enough that all his fine security by tradition would fall to the ground, overthrown by the passage, if he had honestly quoted it; because, as I have said, either the witnesses which afforded the security, the apostolic churches, had gone, having ceased to exist, or they were opposed to Rome. I regret to say half one's work with the advocates of Romanism is to detect deceit of this kind.
James. Well, but, M., what do you say to this? This is not honest. Had he quoted all the passage, it would have upset all he was pleading for.
M. Well, I never read Tertullian of course. I should take it as Dr. Milner gave it. I supposed it was fair, and never meant to deceive you.
James. I am sure you did not. But you must see we cannot take all as Dr. Milner gives it. It is something to see that we cannot trust his reasonings. That is not the spirit of Christ any way, and that helps one to see clear.
N. We have gained three points. The heretics first contended for some doctrines delivered by tradition, and not contained in scripture. The Fathers resisted this. Next, when tradition was first spoken of by the early Fathers, they used it as a testimony of the churches confirming the doctrines taught from scripture, not as containing additional doctrines. Thirdly, as to the basis laid by Tertullian, on whom they so much rely, it fails altogether as a secure proof, and what it does testify of condemns Rome. I add, that they used it so far with a good intention that their object was to shew what Christ and His apostles had originally taught, and that they had taught everything openly to all, in order to reject novel doctrines introduced subsequently. Their insisting on having what was at the beginning, what Tertullian for example asserts, "That that which was from the beginning is true," is perfectly just. This is what we insist on. And we condemn the Romanists because all their peculiar doctrines are novelties, the dates or gradual introduction of them being historically demonstrable.
Thus purgatory was hinted at in the fifth century, said to be useful for very small sins in the sixth, and then only gradually grew up. Transubstantiation was never decreed definitively till the thirteenth, and the contrary was taught by the most famous doctors previously. The saints were prayed for, as we have seen, not to, for centuries, so that they had to alter the Roman liturgy to suit the change. So the so-called sacrifice of the Mass can be traced from the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving (whence the word Eucharist), the presenting offerings before the consecration (whence the word Offertory) -- both of which were called the unbloody offering, or sacrifice -- to the applying it to the elements after consecration; and, lastly, but not till very late, to its being the real sacrifice of Christ, efficacious for the sins of quick and dead, and the liturgy was changed accordingly. I am not now examining the truth or falsehood of these doctrines, but their novelty. Romanists are now in the position of the heretics of old, alleging tradition for new doctrines which are not found in scripture. We, on the contrary, rest solely on the word of God, the scriptures, as authority, for this is certainly what was at the beginning, and, on the other hand, we can appeal to history, and prove the introduction of the particular doctrines they insist on as novelties among Christians.
But Dr. Milner cites other Fathers, and it will be useful in many respects to refer to them. The fact is, they argued as it suited them at the moment. When heretics pressed scripture, they flew to tradition, not at first as containing distinct truth, but as a witness of the truth of what they alleged was scriptural -- a use we have seen to be impossible now, because the churches they appealed to, the apostolic churches, have disappeared, or are hostile to Rome. But, besides, these citations will give us the worth of the Fathers' reasonings, and how they contradict, not each other merely, but themselves. Dr. Milner passes by, he tells us, Clement of Alexandria; he was right in doing so for his cause. Clement resists the Gnostics, or men of knowledge, who infested the church, saying that ordinary Christians had elements, but that the secret full doctrine of Christianity was in their blasphemies. Tertullian met this by shewing that the apostles had taught all publicly (Tert., de Praescriptione 22, and following).
Clement took another course. He says that Christ spoke in parables in order not to be understood by ordinary Christians, but that there were christian Gnostics, who by temperance,+ a human thing, and desiring and laborious, and prudence, a divine thing, arrived at Gnosis, and thus had got higher truths and intelligence to understand what was concealed from vulgar eyes. This was to be received according to the ecclesiastical rule, and the ecclesiastical rule is the consent and harmony, both of the law and the prophets, with the covenant delivered++ during the Lord's presence. (Clem. Alex., Potter 2, 802, 3; Strom. 6.) His principle is bad, but his appeal is to the scriptures. Nor is Clement, after all, very famous for orthodoxy. He was saturated with Alexandrian Platonism, and was thoroughly sound neither on the divinity nor on the humanity of the Lord. I do not make a heretic of him, but, to say the least, he uses very awkward language, so that the famous Romanist doctor, Petau, charges him plainly with not speaking in an orthodox way.
+oion e sophrosune de ateles phronesis ephiemene men phroneseos, ergatike de epiponos.
++paradidomene, the word used for tradition.
Dr. Milner passes over Cyprian too, quite naturally. He strenuously resisted all the pretensions of Rome to the day he was martyred. But not only so, Stephen of Rome, not being able to prove his point against him on a subject of practice and discipline, appealed to tradition on the usage of the church. "Let nothing," says Stephen, "be innovated on what has been handed down" (tradition). "Whence," replies Cyprian, "is that tradition? Does it descend from the authority of the Lord and the Gospels, and come from the commandments and Epistles of the apostles? For God bears witness that those things are to be done which are written, and speaks to Joshua the son of Nun, saying, 'The book of this law shall not depart out of thy mouth, but thou shalt meditate in it day and night, that thou mayest observe to do all things that are written therein.' ... What obstinacy is that [in the pope]! what presumption, to prefer human tradition to a divine disposition, and not to take notice that God is indignant and angry as often as human tradition sets aside and passes by divine precepts, as He cries out and say by Esaias the prophet, 'This people honour me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.'" (Ep. 74, 80, Oxford.) He tells us that if a canal does not give us the water as purely and freely as it used, we go up to the source; we see if the water has failed, or the canal is leaky, or stopped -- so we must return to the original of the law and the gospel, and the apostolic teaching, and let the principle of our acting spring from that whence its order and origin spring.
James. No wonder he passes by Cyprian. He pleads here just for what we do in insisting on the scriptures against the pope.
N. We may turn to Origen. Dr. Milner does not say where the passage he quotes is, but Origen speaks distinctly in the beginning of his Principia of tradition as all these early Fathers do. That is, when the heretics brought in tradition besides scripture, they condemn it; and when they pervert scripture, they say it is to be understood according to the common faith of the church, and novelties, whose beginning could be shewn, were not to be received. However, Origen himself was driven away by his bishop for every wild novelty imaginable. He allows no knowledge out of scripture. Speaking of the peace-offerings, he says, "These two days are the two testaments, in which we may search out and discuss everything relating to God, and from thence receive all knowledge of things. But if anything remains which is not decided by divine scripture, no other third writing ought to be received as an authority for any knowledge (because this is called the third day), but what remains let us give to the fire, that is, leave to God, for in the present life it has not pleased God that we should know all things." (Hom. 5, on Levit. (213) 2.) Thus, while he referred to the common consent of the churches against the novelties of heretics (those who taught there were two Gods), he allows no authoritative source of knowledge but the two testaments.
This is just what we have seen with Tertullian, from whom I add a sentence here: "But that all things were made from subsisting materials I have not yet read. Let Hermogene's workshop shew that it is written. If it is not written, let him fear the woe destined to those who add or take away." (Tert. adverse Haer. 22.) Bellarmine does not venture to quote Origen.
Dr. Milner quotes Basil. The passage he quotes has no reference to any doctrine, if, indeed, it be genuine, which others than Protestants have doubted. Some objected to saying in a doxology, "the Father and the Son with the Holy Ghost," and said scripture always said "in the Spirit, not with." He says, "Surely this one expression, used with no premeditation or purpose, may be allowed, so long in use as it has been," and then refers to practices in the church which rested solely on tradition, the sense of which most did not understand, just the same as Tertullian refers to praying towards the east (how few, he says, know it refers to paradise), signing with the cross, praying standing on Sunday, and from Easter to Pentecost, anointing with oil, immersing three times in baptism, and so on.
Now, that superstitions were creeping in, and more than that, when Basil wrote, nearly four hundred years after Christ, when, indeed, corruption and false doctrine had made havoc of the church, is quite true. Men used to live in sin, and wait till they were dying to be baptized, in order to get off quite clear. I do not mean that all did, but adduce the fact to shew the corruption that had come in. It was nearly at the same epoch that the whole of Christendom, save confessing martyrs, had denied the divinity of the Lord. We have seen that Basil was not speaking of doctrine when he referred to traditions, but to mere rites or liturgical forms, "one expression." But when he speaks of doctrine, here are his words, "Believe the things that are written; the things that are not written do not seek." (Hom. 29.) (Adversus Calum., Bened. ed. 2, 611 E.) "It is a manifest falling away from faith, and convicts of arrogance, to annul anything of the things that are written, or to introduce anything of the things that are not written." (2, 224 D.) Poor Basil himself too became suspected of heresy. He never would say the Holy Ghost was God. The excuse was that, if he had, he would have been driven from his see, and the heretics would have had all his flock in their power; so he avoided the word, and said what was equivalent. So he defends himself, and says, "If a Jew owned Jesus to be the Anointed, but would not say Christ, ought he not to be received, as it is the same thing?" Such is the security Fathers afford; but we will return to this state of things.
"Every word or matter ought to be accredited by the testimony of inspired scripture. (Basil, Moralia Reg. 26, page 254.) Nor ought anyone to dare to annul or add anything. For if everything which is not of faith is sin, as the apostle says, and faith by hearing, and hearing by the word of God, everything outside inspired scripture, not being of faith, is sin," (79, 22, 317).
Let me add at once that what Dr. Milner quotes from Augustine and Vincent of Lerins confirms all I have said. Neither speak of doctrines learnt from tradition, but both take the universal faith of the church to guide in the interpretation of scripture. Epiphanius applies also the authority of tradition only to practice, namely, that unmarried persons who dedicated themselves to God sinned if they married afterwards, quoting what Paul says of the younger widows as analogous; but says, if there is no scripture, it ought to be accepted as founded on tradition. He is reasoning against those who forbade to marry, and says the church approved marriage, but admired people not marrying, and then he refers to tradition as helpful in understanding scripture.
Chrysostom alone speaks to the point of all Dr. Milner has quoted. He has given the whole sentence. It is all he has on 2 Thessalonians 2: 15. But it is a very unfortunate case, because the Fathers, as we have seen, had a traditional interpretation of this chapter, namely, that what let (or hindered) was the Roman empire; and they, though persecuted, prayed it might subsist, because when removed Antichrist would come. It was removed, and Antichrist did not come, unless the pope be Antichrist; and if you ask Romanists what tradition was given which is not in the passages, or what is the tradition by word of which the apostle speaks, they cannot tell you a word about it. That is, the passage shews that tradition is wholly incompetent to preserve an unwritten apostolic teaching. Here is one alluded to: who can tell me what it is? I see the wisdom of God in it, I think clearly, in the scripture not saying what it was; because what was then the hindrance is not the present one; but at any rate your tradition is dumb and can tell us nothing. When religion became a religion of ordinances, not of truth, the traditions which were in vogue for them became the groundwork of all the Christian system and the Bible disappeared. But little as I trust the Fathers for any doctrine, they speak plainly enough as to scripture, and Chrysostom urges with all persevering eloquence and zeal everybody's reading them, saying they were written by poor uneducated men on purpose that they might be plain for such; and that laymen occupied in the world had more need to read them than monks or clergy.
I add a few passages as to the exclusive authority of scripture. Athanasius against the heathen says, "For the holy and inspired scriptures are sufficient for the promulgation of all truth." (Oratio contra Gentes, Ben. 1.) So Ambrose, "How can we adopt these things which we do not find in the holy scriptures?" So Gregory of Nyssa, quoted by Euthymius, "As that is not supported by scripture, we reject it as false." So Jerome, "As those things which are written we do not deny, so those which are not written we refuse." (Contra Helvid. 19, 2, 226, Veron. ed.) So Augustine, "In those things which are specially laid down in scripture, all those things are found which contain faith and the morals of life." (De Doctr. Chris. 2, 9.) And again, "I owe my consent without any refusal to the canonical scriptures alone." (De Nat. et Grat.) And similar quotations might be multiplied. So even as to councils, "Neither ought I to object the Council of Nice to you, nor you that of Ariminum (an Arian council of some eight hundred bishops) to me; by the authority of scripture let us weigh matter with matter, cause with cause, reason with reason." (Contra Maxim. 3, 14.) So in contrast with the doctors of the church (that is, the Fathers), "For we should not consent to Catholic bishops if they by chance are deceived, and have opinions contrary to the canonical scriptures of God." (De Unit. Eccl. 11, Ben. 9, 355.) And so in his Epistles and other writings he says, over and over again, he has liberty to differ from them, and is bound only by the scriptures. Now either I am to receive these passages as right, and then, if the Fathers are consistent, consider this to be their doctrine; or if you can quote passages from them contradictory of these, then you make their authority to be simply and totally void.
If you ask me what I think, I think they used, like other men, the best grounds they thought they could find, and, when the heretics or the pope pleaded tradition, said that all must be proved by scripture. When they were, as Tertullian, perplexed by their subtle quotations of scripture, instead of doing as the Lord did when Satan quoted it, quoting another passage, which forbade what Satan used it for, they turned to tradition, but not to learn doctrines not in scripture, but to prove that of the heretics to be new. As a mere argument as to fact, it might prove it so far; but if a doctrine be in scripture, clearly it is not new but from the beginning, and it is able to make the man of God perfect. What Dr. Milner has said of tradition is at any rate entirely unfounded. What is of more importance than all, the blessed Lord has condemned it as the false foundation of His enemies, and that God was worshipped in vain by men who followed it.
M. And what do you make of the sabbath, and the change from the seventh day to the first? Is not this a proof that you must follow tradition?
N. Certainly not. If the blessed privilege of the Lord's day depended on tradition, I for one would hold it as of no force whatever. I might bear with one who observed it, because Paul tells us to do that -- "one man regardeth one day above another, another man every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind." But it does not rest on tradition. The change from the seventh day to the first is connected with the essence of Christianity and the Person of the Lord Jesus. The sabbath was the sign and seal of the Old covenant, the witness that God's people had a part in the rest of God, which in itself is the very essence of our everlasting blessing. But it was then given, as all was, in connection with an earthly system, and was a sign of the rest of the old creation, as it indeed was originally so instituted in paradise. But the rejection of the Lord when He came into that is the proof that man cannot have rest in the old creation, that he is a sinner and needs redemption out of that state. The blessed Lord, become a man, was for that not less the Lord, and came to accomplish this redemption, and as Son of man was above all these things -- was Lord of the sabbath as of everything else. It had been given for man in grace and goodness, though it took the form of law, as all did among the Jews.
But we as redeemed have to do with the new creation. All that system has found its end in the death of Christ; not the rest of God, but the hope of rest in the old creation. So Christ lay in the grave that sabbath, but now He is risen, risen the first day of the week, and the firstfruits of them that slept. We begin our Christian life as the firstfruits of God's creatures. We begin as dead and risen in Christ. We do not therefore celebrate the rest of the old creation -- we were utterly lost as belonging to that; but the resurrection of our blessed Lord, as the foundation and beginning of the new, when redemption is accomplished. Hence, after His resurrection He meets His disciples that first day of the week when they were assembled, and the first, or Lord's day following the same thing, and thenceforth it is carefully distinguished in scripture. We learn the disciples came together the first day of the week to break bread. They were to set apart, in grace, for the poor on the first day of the week. And in the Revelation it is called "the Lord's day," just as the supper is called "the Lord's Supper." Hence we own with joy the Lord's day, as scripture teaches us, the first day of the week, not the seventh, in which the Lord's body lay in the grave, the witness that the old creation was judged, condemned, and passed away -- that there was no rest in it but to die: no rest for the old man, but the restlessness of sin and the misery of its fruits; no rest in it for the new man, nor for Christ, because all was polluted and alienated from God. And He teaches us that He came to work in grace and die in it, and begin all anew, of which His resurrection, and the Lord's day as a sign of it, is witness.
M. I do not understand a word you are saying. I see scripture says Christ was Lord of the sabbath, and that the first day was set apart, and that it speaks of the Lord's day. But what you are saying about it is too high for me.
N. Well, M., take the fact at any rate that you admit that Christ was Lord of the sabbath, that His authority was above it, and that after His resurrection the first day is the day distinguished in scripture, not the seventh. This proves our point now, that we do not receive it from tradition but from scripture.
James. Well, M., I am no wiser than you, yet I do understand it. But I see plainly it is not from any wisdom in me, but that I know that in the flesh and under the law I am lost, and that Christ has died and is risen again, and if any man be in Him, he is a new creature; old things are passed away, all things are become new. And Christ's resurrection is the beginning of this hope, and that is where our rest is founded, and not in the old creation; so we have that and the first day of the week as the witness of blessing and that God's rest belongs to us, not a sign of the rest of the first creation, when God rested on the seventh day, when He had made all things good, for sin had spoiled that, and the apostle says (Hebrews 4) that man never entered into that. And I am sure we know he did not. Toil, and sin, and death are not rest. At any rate, as you say, we have it taught in scripture that the first day of the week, not the seventh, is the one marked out "the Lord's day," and that suffices. The Jews had the seventh day.
N. Well, I turn to washing the feet, which is the other point Dr. Milner speaks of. It is a foolish point, because the Lord expressly declares that His meaning in it they did not then understand; that is, it had a spiritual signification which they would afterwards understand; in a word, that He did not mean the literal act, but that it was merely the sign of what required spiritual understanding. It is absurd to suppose that such a mere outward act gives a part with Christ. And what the sign of water means is told us, "Ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you." And again to "sanctify and cleanse it [the church] by the washing of water by the word."
The next proof of tradition Dr; Milner gives is a singularly unhappy one for Romanist doctrines. "The whole sacred history," he says, "was preserved by the patriarchs in succession, from Adam down to Moses, during the space of two thousand four hundred years by means of tradition." Now the flood came in this period, because men had grown so wicked and cast off God that Noah alone remained to be preserved. And after the flood all the world fell away into idolatry, so that God called Abraham out of it to begin afresh and have a nation for Himself in which He should keep the knowledge of the true God alive by a written law, because men so entirely lost the knowledge of Him when they had not one. Here is Paul's account of this time, "Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened; professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds and four-footed beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God gave them up to uncleanness ... . And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them up to a reprobate mind," etc. This is a poor but true history of the time when man was left to tradition. The difference of Romanism now is this -- there is a written word, and they have taken it away and put reproach upon it; and as the heathen corrupted the doctrine of one God by idolatry and many false gods, so the Romanists, when God had sent His Son to bring men back, have corrupted the doctrine of one Divine Mediator by making many human and false ones.
James. I do not see, M., how Dr. Milner could refer to that time. It upsets all he seeks to prove. Why, it shews that, when man had only tradition, he was lost in sin and idolatry altogether, so that only one was saved from the flood with his family, and Abraham had to be called out miraculously because all had gone into idolatry. And it is true you have gone away from the one Mediator to have many false ones that we do not want and that are of no use.
N. Well, we will go on with Dr. Milner. He quotes Pope Stephen as referring to tradition. But this is just the tradition on which St. Cyprian opposed him; and all the African churches and Firmilian and those of Asia Minor opposed him, saying his tradition was false. It is just an additional proof of the uncertainty of tradition, and it is the very case which makes Augustine say that, if the doctors of the church go wrong, he is not bound by them. Dr. Milner's statement as to the agreement of the Greek, Nestorian, Eutychian, and other bodies in the East along with Romanists (save on the pope's supremacy -- a pretty important point when infallibility is in question) is simply untrue. They are corrupt enough, God knows; but they reject a quantity of Romanist doctrine and discipline too: as, to name no others, purgatory is wholly rejected in the Greek church, and the procession of the Holy Ghost from the Son. And as to Eutychians, they held that Christ had not really two distinct natures, but that the Godhead was as the soul of Christ; the Nestorians, on the other hand, divided the Person, though at first it was merely a very just refusal to call Mary the mother of God.+ Nestorius wished to say the mother of Him who is God. However, intrigues had the upper hand.
+The heathen, who had rejected the preaching of Christ, gave up their temples in crowds when they had a woman to worship.
As to Dr. Milner's saying that it was easier to change the scriptures, so that they would be uncertain as a rule, nobody read them, a few monks copied them in the monasteries, but save that, nobody could read, and the clergy taught what they liked. There was no object in changing scripture; besides, I doubt not God watched over it.
As to saying that religious novelties would have produced violent opposition, and of course tumults, it is too bad and dishonest. Why, half the time of the emperors was spent in keeping the peace or trying to do so, for they never succeeded. The majority of bishops in Africa seceded, and some of their partisans got the name of circumcelliones, or vagabonds, for going about using violence. And at last they were put down by the emperor by force. One council, gathered to settle these doctrinal disputes, killed an old archbishop because he did not agree with them. First, the orthodox got the Arians banished, and then the Arians got the orthodox. On the subject of images, council voted against council, and then it came in the East to wars, in which a strong party held their ground a hundred years against the emperors. Why, the whole history of the church is the history of violence and banishment, and bloodshed, and tumult, on account of doctrinal and church disputes. The streets of Alexandria and Rome have streamed with blood through them, and the civil authority had to put it down. As to transubstantiation and invocation of saints, we shall come to them in their place. H story will shew whether Dr. Milner has been rash in trusting to the presumed ignorance of his readers in referring to them.
I have now gone through the question of tradition and what Dr. Milner has to say on it. I do not think we have found either certainty or the church by it yet. I still ask, Since you appeal to the church and authority, where is it? The scripture does act on my conscience and heart, and I bow to it as the word of God, as that word which pierces to the dividing asunder the joints and marrow and soul and spirit; it is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart, and I bow as finding myself, when I read it, before Him in whose sight all things are naked and open. Not so when you speak to me of the church and what you hold up to me as such. As an outward authority in unity, where is it to be found? Dr. Milner suppresses that part of the passage in Tertullian, it is true, but what he referred to as his great authority sent me to the East. These were confessedly the most ancient churches, but they are opposed to Rome. If I am in England and northern Europe or North America, the immense majority of professing Christians owning the Lord, and even active in propagating Christianity, denounce Rome as the corruptest body in existence. Where is this one church which has authority? You tell me Rome is one. One with what? In itself. So are the Greeks. Yet Rome is not more one, as we have seen, than Protestants; not on election; not on the authority of the pope; and not, till a year or two ago, on the immaculate conception; but especially not able to tell me where infallibility really resides.+
James. My trust is in scripture as the word of God. I know it is in my soul, and you own it is the word of God, and it tells me to trust it, and that I ought to have the witness in myself, and I have: but I must say, Bill, though I know nothing of it of course myself, what Dr. Milner has insisted on all comes to nothing, and worse than nothing when it is examined. Nor have you any doctrine which you can refer to tradition when scripture says nothing. What I know of your doctrines, as purgatory, and the popes being successors of Peter, and worshipping the saints, is only a corruption of what is in scripture, or quite condemned by it. And then what you appeal to goes against you. Why did Dr. Milner leave out these other churches from the passage he quoted? They just knock up his argument.
+The Council of Rome, as all are aware, has settled this for those who own it; but proved it was not so settled for eighteen hundred years, as it was opposed by many prelates, and is publicly by many intelligent Roman Catholics still.
M. Well, it is no good my arguing, or any of us. I had better bring Father O., and he will make it plain for you.
N. By all means. We are just coming to a point of which Milner says nothing, and naturally would not -- the difficulties of his own case. And you could not tell whether I was stating it correctly or not, and I suppose Mr. O. can: at any rate I will give the proofs. Hitherto we have only examined what Dr. Milner says, so that we wanted no one. We will meet then, again, to see if we can find the church, where it is, and where the infallibility is, which is to guide us. I will now say Good-day. Good evening to you both. May the Lord guide us into all truth.
N. Good evening, Mr. O.; I am glad to see that you are come. You are already aware of what is occupying us; we shall get on more satisfactorily by your being here. Up to the present we could meet the case fairly, because I was only answering Dr. Milner's statements, but now I have to refer in turn to historical facts, and our friends here are not learned of course; and though, I trust, I should deal fairly with them, yet you can tell them if what I quote is not just. M. insists on our listening to the true church, and tells us it is infallible. We ask, Where is it? Where are we to find this infallibility?
Father O. I do not see what an ignorant person, such as Bill M., has to do disputing about religion: he has only to mind the direction of his pastor. How can such an ignorant person as he is judge about controversies that the most learned men discuss, and that the authority of the church alone can decide? He had much better have minded his religion, and shewn charity and good works in his life. However, as I found he had difficulties, I did not refuse to come and shew what the judgment of the true church is: otherwise, as Tertullian says, heretics are to be rejected, not discussed with. And I do not think it is a gentlemanlike thing of you, sir, to be coming and troubling my flock about their religion.
N. We have been looking into that passage of Tertullian. As to troubling your flock, dear sir, you will kindly remember that our good friend, Bill M., had recently changed, as is commonly said, his religion, and, I suppose, gentlemanlike or not, some one had been troubling him, though I do not think he has much to say about a great deal of religion he had before, nor indeed since. However he is very zealous for his new opinions, and tells us he is so happy now that he could not but try and get James to turn to what he calls the true church, and he had succeeded in perplexing James. Now I suppose you hardly blame his zeal in this: there is a good deal of it going.
Father O. I do not blame his zeal; it is the natural fruit of charity and the peace that the true church always gives.
N. Very well, then, you can hardly blame our meeting his arguments. We had procured Dr. Milner's "End of Controversy," and we have examined that hitherto. Now I deny entirely that Rome is the true church, or the Catholic church, in any sense; and Bill M., however zealous, was at a loss, and went to you: you can hardly blame him for that, and we are much obliged to you for coming. We will not ask you to go into all the marks of the true church; we can take them from Dr. Milner and the Catechism of the Council of Trent; but we want to know where the infallibility is. Here Bill M. and James, ignorant and sincere men, one a Roman Catholic and the other a Protestant, want to know (though James, like myself, is satisfied that the scriptures alone are certain truth, and of absolute authority, and sufficient) where this infallibility is to be found. I affirm that you have no certain source of truth at all, and no infallible guide to refer to.
Father O. Pardon me, you are to hear the church. God has promised to preserve it from error, and all it binds on earth is bound in heaven.
N. The last is not said of the church, unless a particular assembly, two or three gathered together in Christ's name, be considered such; but let that pass now. Where is the church?
Father O. That is a question easily answered. It is the holy Roman Catholic apostolic church.
N. Well, that is just what we deny; but where is the seat of infallibility, or, if we do not adopt the scriptures, the certain rule of faith? I met a Jesuit priest abroad; he told me there were three.
Father O. You must have mistaken him.
N. I do not think you will reject what he said. He said, the authoritative decision as to the truth or infallibility was in the pope and the whole church; the consent of the church universal with the pope, or the pope and the whole church represented in a general council; or, lastly, the pope speaking ex cathedra.
Father O. All that is still the church itself, or the church by its divinely appointed organs.
N. Very well, we may accept this then, and, by your permission, we will inquire whether certain truth is to be found by their means, and where. The first itself comes short of Vincentius Lirinensis' vaunted rule, "Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus," what was held always, everywhere, by all, and the rule itself invalidates the decision come to at any given epoch, and obliges me to inquire what was always held. But man's holding anything is no proof of its truth: nor even all Christians, simply as such, holding anything. To have certain divine truth we must have God's revelation. Till Paul arose, or at any rate till the case of Cornelius, all Christians held the perpetual obligation of the law of Moses. Yet they were all wrong. God was obliged to give an express revelation to Peter, and the same to Paul, to lead the church from what all held. And even after that, the Jewish Christians held so ardently to their traditions, and sought so diligently to force the Gentile Christians to receive them, that the question had to be settled by the apostles and elders coming together at Jerusalem.
Nor even did this suffice; for so little unity, after all, was there on the subject, and so perverse is the human mind in its adherence to ceremonies and legal righteousness, that Paul had to resist him of whom you make so unholy a boast, the apostle Peter, to the face, because he, and through him Barnabas and all the Jews, were carried away by dissimulation on this point. And those at Jerusalem maintained their views, and harassed the apostle Paul unceasingly in his ministry, and finally induced him at Jerusalem to follow that course which, under God's over-ruling hand, ended in his imprisonment and death. Yet this was a point in which, according to Paul himself, the truth of the gospel was concerned. So little, even in apostolic times, is the unity of the church in its views to be depended upon, or even Peter himself. But the teaching of scripture, whether in the decrees in Acts 15, or in the Epistles -- Galatians, Romans, Colossians, Timothy, and elsewhere -- is as plain and as decided as possible. Revelation decides it simply; what is held by the church gives no certain sound at all. And this, remark, upon a vital point, which half fills the Epistles of Paul, and at a time when we are told that nearness to the apostles must make us sure of their doctrine. The word of God is quite clear; but even an apostle, and a great apostle, stumbles in his walk as to it. There cannot possibly be a stronger case.
Father O. But it was settled by the council at Jerusalem.
N. Undoubtedly what was settled as truth by the decision of the apostles, none of us are disposed to question. The authority of councils as a foundation for the truth we will consider in its turn. We are now upon the consent of the whole church, including the pope. Now this fails at the first step; and if we are to take Peter at Jerusalem even as the first pope, he was to be publicly reproved by the apostle Paul, so that your great champion, Bellarmine (De Summo Pont. lib. 1, 38, 29-31), is embarrassed to the last degree by the case; tries to make the sin venial, etc., but is obliged to admit that the Latin Fathers hold it for sin. It is quite certain Paul did. But let us seek this unity and consent of all later down in the history of the church. Were all agreed as to re-baptizing heretics?
Father O. They all came to an agreement, and submitted to the pope.
N. I admit the pope prevailed at last, as he has on many points more evil than this, but has broken up and divided the church by his pretensions to do so. But we are looking for the consent of the church to secure truth. Did not the godly martyr, Cyprian, and all Africa, Egypt, and Syria, and Asia Minor -- that is, all the most ancient apostolic churches -- reject the pope's dogmas on this point?
Father O. Yes, they did, but it did not succeed.
N. Did they ever yield till the death of Pope Stephen removed the difficulties?
N. You uprightly admit what is a matter of notorious history; and then they came to a middle term -- of not baptizing again if they owned the Trinity, and baptizing them again if they did not. (Canon 8, Council of Arles.) Now, I do not blame the concord thus established, but as a source of truth the common consent of the church failed thus early in the church's history. In a very large portion of the church, if subject to their bishops, they must have differed from Rome. Now I might multiply instances. In the case of the Donatists, the African bishops applied to the Emperor Constantine, and the civil authority interfered to settle it. For, alas! when the Emperor turned Christian, so servile was the church, that he for a time was the true pope. Yet when Constantine called councils, and regulated everything, he was not even baptized -- was so only on his death-bed, to be sure to be clear of his sins.
Father O. Do you think it right to cast a slur upon the whole church of God thus?
N. I think it right to examine facts, when you make such a body as this an authority for the truth. But we will go to more serious points than even the re-baptizing of heretics. I suppose you, as I do, abhor the principles of Arius.
Father O. Surely; and he was condemned by the church, and especially in the Council of Nice.
N. He was justly so, we all admit; but did that settle the church in unity on the point? You know that Athanasius was the great and able champion of the truth. Did he not die excommunicated and banished?
Father O. Yes, but that was through the intrigues of a wicked Arian emperor.
N. I agree with you; but then how can the consent of the church secure the faith? Here was, if any be, a fundamental article -- the true divinity of the blessed Lord -- given up (save by some honoured and blessed confessors) by nearly the whole professing church, instead of its securing doctrine. But further. The pope himself, though for some time faithful, at last signed a semi-Arian formulary. Constantius had banished him from Rome because he would not be an Arian. In this he was to be honoured, and Felix was appointed pope in his place. The Emperor, on entering Rome to celebrate a triumph, found he was loved, saw him afterwards, and he signed a formulary which omitted the testing word, and got an acknowledgment from the prelates who were with Constantius that they should be condemned who said Christ, as to substance and in every way, was not like the Father, and then he was restored, and there were two popes till Felix's death. Further, was not Arius restored by Constantius' order to full communion at Jerusalem, and recalled from exile to Constantinople?
Father O. Yes; but he died miserably at Constantinople before he could be restored there.
N. Be it so. I know it is said so. If that were God's judgment upon him, what are we to make of the churches who, on Constantius' order, restored him? Is it not as plain as can possibly be that in the very foundation truth of our religion the professing church, bishops, pope, and all, failed wholly to preserve the truth? Indeed Constantine, who had first condemned the Arians, falling under the influence of Eusebius, the prelate of Nicomedia, an able and learned man but a semi-Arian and worse, recalled the Arians everywhere, and, as we have seen, Athanasius was excommunicated and banished; then Constans, who held to the Nicene Creed, ruling in the west, and Constantius in the east, the east was Arian, and the west held to the Council of Nice; but Constantius, having defeated the usurping assassin of his brother Constans, held a council at Milan, where Athanasius was condemned. He banished those who would not subscribe its decrees -- Pope Liberius, Hosius, Lucifer, and others; but, as we have seen, Liberius compromised the matter, and returned, and the aged and respected Hosius, alas! gave way. Lucifer remained firm, and became the head of the sect of Luciferians, whom Jerome wrote against. Now, mark that all this confusion was on the very essence of the faith.
Father O. No doubt it was a sad time; but do you not see how God has been with His church, and preserved it in the faith, notwithstanding all this?
N. That I admit, and bless Him for with all my whole heart. The gates of hell shall never prevail against it. That is the comfort of one's heart in reading its history. But our point now is, can the professing church secure our faith by its maintaining with one consent any doctrine? The history of Arianism clearly proves that this is not so, and that it cannot be trusted for it. We shall have to touch on this again when we speak of councils. Take, again, the case of image worship. Was there universal consent as to that?
Father O. There is now; Romans and Greeks unite in it.
N. But if now, what comes of the rule what was always, everywhere, and by all? Is it not true that for centuries there were none? Your great dogmatist, Petavius, admits that none were used for four hundred years, and gives as a reason that there was danger of their being confounded with the heathens, but that in the fifth, when she got her liberty, she began to have them openly. (Peter de Incarn. 15, 13, 3.) Epiphanius, finding an image on a curtain in a church, tore it with his own hands, as contrary to scripture. He charges their introduction on heretics, as does Augustine, and declares that the church condemns such habits. (Epiph. in Jerome lit. LL. ed. Vallar, 1, 253.)
The Council of Eliberis, in Spain, A.D. 305, decreed that pictures ought not to be in churches. For a length of time they were rejected in the East, and insisted on by the popes; solemnly condemned in a council of three hundred and thirtyeight prelates at Constantinople, in A.D. 754; approved by a council of three hundred and fifty in A.D. 787; condemned in England in A.D. 792, and by a great council of prelates at Frankfort, under Charlemagne, A.D. 794.
Now this will come before us under the question of councils. But how am I, then, to learn anything sure from the consent of the professing church, or hold what is held always, everywhere, and by all? These are only examples on the most important points of doctrine and practice. The truth is, for some hundreds of years, from the third to the sixth and seventh centuries, there was an endless war of opinions, and the Emperors trying to keep the peace by their own decrees, or by convening councils. Then, if we come down lower, after bitter and prolonged conflict, and mutual excommunication, the Greek and Roman, or Eastern and Western, Christendom, finally separated in the tenth century, and all the most ancient apostolic churches condemn Rome; so do the Nestorians and Eutychians. And now the majority of professing Christendom stands apart from her. Where am I to get this general consent? And remark, Mr. O., I am not now speaking of the doctrines or practices referred to; for instance, as to the wrongness of the heathen practice of images. Our inquiry is, if the universal consent of the church furnishes a sure ground of faith. My answer is, it cannot in principle, because it is not a revelation of God; and, secondly, that in vital points it has totally failed, and, in fact, is not to be found, and does not exist. Let me ask you, Do you believe in the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary?
Father O. Undoubtedly. The pope decided upon it a few years ago in an assembly of several hundred prelates.
N. And was it an article of faith before?
Father O. No, but it was celebrated by pious Catholics.
N. I am aware of that. But can an important dogma be introduced above eighteen centuries after the Lord?
Father O. It is promulgated then as an article of faith; but when an article of faith is promulgated, it is not new; all that is maintained is, that it was always the faith of the church.
N. But is it not true that the Dominicans and all their doctors held that this doctrine of the immaculate conception was contrary to the truth?
Father O. They did, but it was not determined by the church then.
N. They were the inquisitors of heretical pravity, were they not?
Father O. The inquisitors were taken from that order.
N. That is what I mean. But is it not strange that so celebrated an order, to which the maintenance of sound doctrine was specially confided in the church, should have been for centuries diligently teaching what now turns out to be heresy? I do not blame them, but how can the universal consent of the church secure our having the truth if this be so? and it was not merely a notion. They insisted on it, and used such scandalous means to make their cause good against the Franciscans, that four of their order were burned at the stake for it about the time of the Reformation.
Father O. You mean the history of Jetzer, at Bern?
N. I do. They had some one to personify the Virgin Mary in an apparition, and carried it so far that the fraud was discovered.
Father O. Of course I do not excuse them. It was in dark and ignorant ages, and they were punished by the church for it.
N. They were, they were burnt for it, because it was found out. But our question is, what is the security for the truth, when your greatest lights, your maintainers of sound doctrine and judges of heresy, have brought us into ages so dark as this, and are now judged to be maintainers of false doctrine all the time?
But we will now turn to the other means of infallible knowledge of the truth; the pope speaking ex cathedra, as they say, and councils. The first is soon disposed of. In the first place, we have seen Peter himself rebuked by Paul on the gravest question that could occupy the church of God. It is not possible to think of the first popes, whoever they were (for this is uncertain), as the authorized sources of truth, for the apostle John lived during the time of those who first occupied the See of Rome, and they were clearly bound to listen to and be subject to the apostle -- that very apostle who says, "He that is of God heareth us." And if the first chiefs had not this authority, its descending down to others is all a fiction. But the case of the pope goes farther, and, without multiplying cases which would carry us too far, there are the plain cases of Marcellinus, who was a traditor, that is, gave up the scriptures in persecution, and offered incense to the gods; Honorius, who was publicly condemned for being a Monothelite by the sixth General Council confirmed by the pope; Liberius, who signed a semi-Arian creed. These we will notice a little more fully.
First, then, there is the sad case of Marcellinus, who, when pope, offered to idols and apostatised from Christ. Bellarmine says he taught nothing against the faith nor heretical. (De Sum. Pont. lib. 4, c. 8, 25.) Augustine is on safer ground. He says, "whatever he may have been it is no prejudice to the Catholic church, and in the threshing-floor there may be good and bad." But where is security for infallibility?+ Bellarmine tells us it is not of much consequence if he lost the papacy by it, as he abdicated soon after, and died a martyr. I trust the poor man's weakness may have been graciously forgiven, but we are looking for infallibility and security for faith. It is easy to understand Bellarmine's motive for making it no matter, because either there would have been an apostate pope or one deposed by a local council for unfaithfulness. Marcellinus did the best thing he could do, if he abdicated, and we may trust all was right with him after all. Augustine's ground for its being no matter is a better one.
+I do not quote authorities for this account of Marcellinus, as it is a known matter of history, to be found in any considerable church history.
Father O. St. Augustine was right to say the church's faith was unaffected by it; and, indeed, as Bellarmine says, he taught nothing dogmatically wrong.
N. Well, I should have thought it wrong every way to worship idols. A worshipper of idols is a strange security for faith. But we will turn to some other instances equally notorious: Pope Vigilius in the dispute about what are called the three chapters, two of which were sanctioned by the great General Council of Chalcedon. In truth Vigilius was elevated to the See of Rome on purpose to favour Monophysite heresy,+ and restore Anthinus, the heretic, to the See of Constantinople, the Empress putting him in by force, by means of Belisarius, and banishing Silverius. When once in, he turned right round,++ but quailed before the Emperor as soon as he got to Constantinople, and intrigued in vain. Then he condemned the three chapters as the Emperor had done. Then, when the fifth General Council was called, though at Constantinople, he defended the three chapters. The Council of Constantinople broke communion with him, and approved the Emperor's condemnation of the three chapters, and Vigilius, the following year, assented to the decrees of the council, and his successor, Pelagius I, acknowledged the orthodoxy of the council. Where is the security for faith here anywhere? The Council of Constantinople condemned the Council of Chalcedon, both being accounted ecumenical, nominally saving its credit, and the pope, ex cathedra, condemned, approved, and then condemned the same doctrine, what all held to be a vital question as to the Person of the Lord! You cannot deny this.
+Baronius 9, A.D. 538, 540, etc. He had represented Rome at Constantinople. Bellarmine, De Sum. Pont. 4, 10, 16, does not contest the letter given by Liberatus (in Breviario 22); Baronius does. The facts are plain any way. Pagi adds, in a note, that there can be no doubt of it. Still, he adds, that it does not prejudice the pope's authority, because Silverius was not dead, though deposed, so that Vigilius was not really pope: a nice security for faith, a pope who could not act because he was deposed, and an acting one whose acts, though consecrated, were not valid, because the other was living.
++Baronius attributes this to the grace given to the papacy. But this accords but ill with his excusing his undoubted heresies afterwards, on the ground that he was not pope because the banished Silverius was alive. What a foundation for faith!
Father O. I do not defend Vigilius; the persecutions of the Emperor on the one hand, and the voice of the Western church on the other, made him vacillate. And see how, after all, the church was preserved, as Baronius says, "God's hand was seen in his refusing to support the heresy when once he was really pope."+
N. But his condemning, and approving the three chapters, and then acknowledging the synod which had condemned him and them, were when he was pope. It is a plain example that the pope's judgment, ex cathedra, is just worth nothing at all. I admit that God has preserved the faith and the church, but it is in spite of and not by the hierarchy. But take another example: you cannot deny Liberius acquiesced in Arianism.
N. He subscribed an Arian creed, and in the largest council ever held, of some 800 prelates; and he communicated with Arians and condemned Athanasius. Bellarmine says he was deceived by ambiguous terms; but if he was, he was no security for our faith. The truth is, he did it to free himself from the persecutions of an Arian Emperor, who sought to unite all by vague expressions, which really gave up the word on which all then depended; and, as Jerome expresses it, the world was surprised to find itself Arian. But if Bellarmine is right, and he was deceived, it is just the proof that the pope is no security for faith, nor indeed a pope and council together. To say he did not teach it, when on the solemn discussion of the question with the assembled hierarchy he signed the creed, is a miserable subterfuge. Others of course, if he was any authority, were to believe what he signed. Ought a simple Christian to have followed his faith then, when he subscribed the Arian creed?
+He acted as pope, while Silverius, who had been banished, still lived, and so (they say) was legitimate pope. What was the validity of all the papal acts, their ordinations, etc. 7
Father O. No; he should have abode by the faith of the church.
N. How was he to know the faith of the church when the pope and by far the largest council ever held had subscribed deadly heresy? No, the broad fact is there. The pope and the largest body of prelates ever assembled in council signed and promulgated an Arian creed. Nor did the church, as a body, recover itself at once.
I now turn to Honorius. Bellarmine labours hard to free him also; but then he cannot deny that he was condemned and anathematized as a heretic by not one but two general councils, the pope's legates taking part in one case. Bellarmine says they wanted to secure several Eastern patriarchs being anathematized, and so, that they might succeed, threw Honorius in with them.+ Moreover the pope, his successor, undertook he should be anathematized. And then, says Bellarmine, if it cannot be denied in the least that the pope was anathematized, the council made a mistake; but then the pope's legates were there, and it is accounted an Ecumenical Council amongst you. So that either the pope was a heretic, and he was struck out of what were called the Diptychs (those whose names were remembered in the public service) as unfit to be there, or pope and council confirmed by him can err, and nothing is certain. It is really a flat denial of your own history to pretend popes and councils (and both together) cannot err. There is no security for faith to be found in them.
I might mention a multitude of cases and statements of Fathers, but I take only notorious cases, which may be found in Bellarmine, Baronius, and all church histories.++ John XXII I have mentioned; his case may be seen in Bellarmine, and John XXIII+++ deposed by the Council of Constance.
+Bell. de Sum. Pont. Lib. 4, c. 11.
++Bellarmine gives a list of cases of alleged failure in infallibility. Baronius is not to be trusted without Pagi's corrections. The latter is much fairer.
+++The numbers attached to their popes vary in different Roman Catholic historians; for, with all their boasted succession, nothing is more uncertain, irregular, and defective than the succession of the popes; often two at the time, and no one knowing who was the right one, and this not merely at the time of the great schism; and when one got the upper hand of his rival, he annulled all his ordinations, so that nobody knew who was ordained and who was not. But of this farther on.
I might insist on the absurdity and ungodliness of making infallible in faith men of whom Baronius+ says he must use their being in the see as a date; 'but how can we own as popes persons who were illegitimate sons of the Marquis of Tuscany's mistresses, put in by them into the see?' But I leave all this, and a great deal more, and confine myself to notorious cases, known by everyone who has read church history at all, though the general point of what the popes were is of great weight in the matter. I ask you, solemnly, if a Chinese or a Hindoo were seeking, with sincere heart led of God, for the rule of faith and means of discovering the true religion, would he find it in the most licentious, depraved, wicked series of men that ever were found? and while I admit they were not so at first, what is to be a rule of faith must be always one, to say nothing of there being two or three popes at a time.
If we take history, we find there was no such doctrine in the early church, and further, that popes have grievously erred. Thus Cyprian, and all the African and Asiatic, and Egyptian bishops, resisted Stephen's doctrine. Before that, when Victor refused communion with the Eastern churches on a question of keeping Easter, the godly Irenaeus rebuked him, many bishops concurring. "This did not please all the bishops," says Eusebius, some of them speaking pretty sharply to him (the pope). (Eus. 5, 24.) And till the Council of Nice, the East and West continued their own observances as to what Victor excommunicates them for. So Augustine, in the case of Marcellinus (which, strange to say, Baronius quotes with approbation, thinking only of Catholic doctrine), says, "Whatever Marcellinus may have been, it is no prejudice to the Catholic church diffused in the whole world. We are in no way crowned by their innocence, nor condemned by their iniquity ... . In the threshing-floor (of the church) there can be good and bad." (De Unico Baptismo, Cont. Peter 16, or Ben. 39.) He had not the remotest idea of infallibility in a pope. If he was a bad one and sacrificed to idols, the faith was not affected by it. So indeed Tertullian asks triumphantly in respect of such falls, "Do we prove faith by persons, or persons by faith?" Listen to the plain language of Jerome, the translator of the Vulgate, the great friend of the pope, the great stickler for orthodoxy and church authority in his day: "Nor is the church of the Roman city to be esteemed one, and that of all the earth to be another. Both the Gauls, and Britons, and Africa, and Persia, and the East, and India, and all barbarous nations, adore one Christ, observe one rule of faith. If authority be sought, the world is greater than a city. Wherever there is a bishop, Rome, or Eugubium, or Constantinople, or Rhegium, or Alexandria, or Tunis, he is of the same worth, he is of the same priesthood. The power of riches and the humility of poverty make neither a more exalted nor an inferior bishop; but all are successors of the apostles."++
+Volume 15, A.D. 912, 8.
++Hieron. ad Evang. Epist. 146 (ed. Vall.)
This is a poor way of treating infallibility. Cyprian expressly declares that, when Paul rebuked Peter, the latter never thought of insolently and arrogantly pretending to have the primacy, and that he ought to be obeyed. (Litt. 71.) Accordingly, as we have seen, the African bishops maintained their views against the pope. The thought of infallibility did not exist. When we come lower down in history, the claims of the popes increase, and their authority extends; but the effect was that all the most ancient part of the church, that is the East, broke off from them altogether, and remains opposed to Rome to this day.
The University of Paris solemnly condemned John XXII+ for heresy, and the Council of Constance charged John XXIII with saying that the soul died with the body. Now this shews how little infallibility was supposed to be inherent in the pope. The Council of Basel says, "Many of the supreme pontiffs are said, and so we read, to have fallen into heresy and error. It is certain that the pope can err. A council has often condemned and deposed a pope as well on account of faith as morals." Now, I quite understand that you will say this council has no authority, but we are looking for a sure ground on which to found the authority of the church; and surely when the assembled prelates of Christendom declare that the popes may err, and have erred, in faith and morals, the infallibility of the pope is no longer a very sure ground. Their claiming it, which we all know they do, does not give it to them. We will enter on the ground of councils when we come to that point. I turn to the history of the popes, that we may understand what happened at Constance. There were two popes, and even three from the Council of Pisa, till after the Council of Constance: were they both infallible, both heads of the church? Half Europe obeyed one, half the other. Did not they mislead, one or both, the church of God? Where was certainty to guide the faithful here? They anathematized each other. Is this what the faith of God's church, or the saving of souls, is to rest upon? But, further, the Council of Constance, after exacting the resignation of the principal but most wicked of the three (which, after some tergiversations, he gave on being threatened to have his awful wickedness exposed), on his running away fearing the consequences of his crimes, deposed him, and chose another; the two others lingered on a little while, and then died out.
+His history is a little pleasant. The cardinals who had to choose the pope, several of them being ambitious, would not agree, and at last agreed to leave the choice to the one who became John XXII, sure he would choose one of them; but he thought the best thing was to choose himself, and became John XXII.
Father O. But the Council of Constance was not ratified by the pope.
N. It created the pope, and all your alleged spiritual authority flows from hence, that is, from its acts; you have no pope at all if its acts are wrong. But we will speak of this when we come to councils, we are now on the popes being infallible. But here, I will add, Martin V did confirm the Council of Constance, and not only so, but Eugenius, though he afterwards found means to break it up, recalled his three bulls (one, he said, was not genuine), which condemned the Council of Basel, and gave in his adhesion, and recognised it and its acts as met in the power of the Holy Ghost; which acts fully confirmed the decrees of Constance.
M. But is all this true, Father O.?
Father O. The facts are true; but I must beg you not to interfere and enter into what you cannot possibly judge of. When Mr. N. has done I will shew how fallacious all this is. I only now say, It is just a proof how, if men have been individually wicked, God has preserved the church. The faith of the church has remained the same, and that is all you have to say to.
N. That the excessive wickedness of the popes and clergy, which we shall be obliged to look into when we speak of the marks of the true church, is a proof that the blessed God has preserved His church, and the faith of God's elect in spite of them, I admit fully and bless Him for it. But we are examining, not if God has preserved the faith for us in spite of them, but if they are a warrant and security for the faith. But if these facts are true, the popes are no kind of security for the faith, and that is our question now. Let me add, dear sir, that your rebuke to M. is the best possible proof of the untenableness of the ground he and you are upon. You say he cannot possibly judge of the validity of this ground of faith. But that is what you want us to do -- only you want us to do it without honest examination. Dr. Milner says we believe the Catholic church, and therefore everything which she teaches, upon motives of credibility, and Mr. John Newman (who turned Roman Catholic) avows he has only probability, though of a high character. Now, in no case can this be a divine foundation for faith. It is upon the face of it merely human. It would be blasphemy to say that what God said was probably true.
But so utterly futile is your rule of faith, that when we begin to examine it, you tell our friend M. here that he cannot possibly judge of it. Now, where is he to get his motives of credibility? And though it may be difficult for a poor man to examine for himself folios of fathers and councils, as of course it is, yet, according to your rule of faith, he must, or be led blindfold by a man. But the facts which are brought forward by those who can examine them, shew that your rule is a dreadfully false one, and when they are thus honestly furnished to him, he can judge that the foundation you build on is utterly worthless. If the pope be a sure foundation of faith (a thing not thought of for hundreds of years) God has given a premium to the most horrible wickedness that ever disgraced human nature, for such wickedness characterizes the popes above all men on the earth. Do you deny the wickedness of John XXIII of whom we have just been speaking, or of Alexander VI, and many others? You cannot, you dare not, with any one who knows history. Even your Pope Gregory VII, who built the grandeur of the papacy, raising it above the empire, and established the celibacy (that is, the corruption of the clergy) died away from his see, having been first deposed by a council of German bishops at Worms, and afterwards condemned as a heretic, and sentenced to be deposed by the Council of Brixen, and a new pope chosen, Clement III, who was consecrated at Rome. Now, I attach no authority to this council, or their pope (though, in supporting the emperor, to whom God gave authority, against the pope, to whom God gave none, the prelates were right) but what sort of foundation for faith and salvation is all this?
James. Well, to think of all this being called the church of God and authority for our faith. I am glad I have the Bible and know nothing about all this. There one has holiness and truth, and not wars and ambition for Christianity. It is terrible to think what the professing church came to, if all this is true.
N. It is terrible, and the thousandth part of it has not been told, but we must pursue our enquiry soberly. Our point is the pope's infallibility being the source of certainty as to the faith. Now, the second point I stated was that they had confessedly erred. And we have cited examples. For it is perfectly well known that plenty believed nothing at all. But I have selected cases that have been brought out in history as to the faith. Marcellinus offered incense to idols, Liberius signed a semi-Arian creed. Honorius was condemned for being a Monothelite by a general council sanctioned by Pope Agatho. Zosimus, I may add here, corrupted artfully the canons of the Council of Nice to found the authority of the See of Rome, and was detected in the East and in Africa. John XXII was charged with heresy as to the state of souls after death. John XXIII, deposed by the Council of Constance, was charged there with denying the immortality of the soul.
Father O. I do not admit all these cases. It was never proved against Marcellinus; John XXII was only condemned by a council of divines at Paris. And Zosimus' act at any rate was a fraud, not a heresy. He quoted Sardica and said Nice. And it is a question if these canons of Nice were not burnt.
N. There is this much obscure in the case of Marcellinus, that the deacons and presbyters who bore witness to it only saw him go into the sanctuary of Vesta to do it, and did not see it done. I admit the acts of the Council of Sinuessa, in which it is fully stated, and where he is said to have confessed it on his knees, may be, and are possibly justly called in question, and I do not depend on them, though even Baronius, your great historian, did not wholly give them up, and all St. Augustine ventures to say is, that we ought not to hold him guilty till it is proved. But the account is as circumstantial as possible. It is said that he resisted the emperor's violence, but gave way to blandishments and money, and that he said he did not sacrifice, but only put a few grains of incense on the fire to the idol, the names of the priests and deacons who went with him to the door being mentioned, so that it is impossible to believe it is a mere fable. Moreover, he gave up the popedom in consequence.+ But is this what faith is to rest on? As to John XXII there is no doubt whatever. Your own historians relate it, and say he coldly retracted the error before he died, and that his successor, Benedict, condemned it. So that, as a foundation of faith, we see a pope cannot be trusted.
+Here are Bellarmine's words (De Sum. Pont. 4, 8): "The tenth is Marcellinus, who sacrificed to idols as is certain (ut constat) by the pontifical of Damascus, the Council of Sinuessa, and the epistle of Nicholas I to Michaelis. But Marcellinus taught nothing against the faith, nor was he a heretic or unfaithful, unless by an external act through fear of death. But whether on account of that external act he lost his position of pope (exciderit a pontificatu) or not, is of little moment, since he himself soon abdicated the papal see, and soon after was crowned with martyrdom. I should consider rather that he did not ipso facto lose his position of pope, since it is certain enough for all that he sacrificed to idols through fear alone." Bellarmine, therefore, had no kind of doubt about the matter. We may surely hope his sin was blotted out.
As to Zosimus, I admit that it was a fraud and not a heresy; but it was a fraudulently citing as the canons of the Council of Nice what were no part of them, and what was put forward as the foundation of the whole jurisdiction and authority of the pope. The council of bishops in Africa, in which the famous St. Augustine took part, denied their genuineness, sent and got the true Greek copies in the East and rejected Zosimus' claims. And the patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria and Antioch, did the same thing, sending full copies of the canons of Nice. Is not this true?
Father O. Yes. But they were the canons of the Council of Sardica which he cited as those of Nice.
N. That is, he attributed the resolutions of a little petty conclave of his own partisans, assembled to give him this power (from whence all the bishops of the East had separated when they found what they were about, meeting elsewhere, and condemning the Sardicans), to the first great General Council in order fraudulently to set up that authority of the See of Rome which it now claims: and Rome has ever since built largely on this fraud.
It is well to refer a little to this history as elucidating the supremacy and alleged appellative jurisdiction of Rome. I will go a little further back, as, among other things, our allegation is that we can trace the origin of these pretensions. In Cyprian's time, besides the case we have already spoken of about rebaptizing heretics, another question arose. In A.D. 252 two Spanish bishops guilty of being Libellatici (that is, having received certificates of having owned heathen idols, obtained by money from heathen magistrates without having really done so) were deposed by a provincial synod of the country. One was re-admitted to communion though not to his see, but went to Rome and complained to Pope Stephen. The pope, always glad as popes were to augment their authority, ordered the Spanish synod to restore both to their sees. Meanwhile, Cyprian being everywhere known by his activity, the bishops of the synod laid the affair before him. He summoned a local council, and they declared that Stephen had been evidently deceived, and that Basilides and Martialis (the other bishop) had greatly increased their crime by appealing from the local judgment. He declares the judgment he communicated to be conformable to the understood practice of the church. There the matter ended. The great Roman historian is careful not to notice this transaction. It may be found in other histories. (See Cyprian's letter 67, Oxford, Pam. 68.)
Cyprian in every respect maintained the independence of the episcopate against Rome. He says, "Among us there is no one who will arrogate to himself any authority over those of his own order or claim to be a bishop of bishops ... inasmuch as every bishop has equal liberty of judging and determining upon all questions that come before him, and can no more be judged by, than he can judge, another. Therefore it should be our resolution to await the judgment of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom all our powers to govern His church are derived, and who alone has authority to call us to account" (Prologue to judgment of 87 bishops in Council of Carthage). So when Pope Cornelius had received Felicissimus, who had been excommunicated in Africa, Cyprian writes to blame him severely, and says the crime ought to be judged where it is committed, and where the witnesses are, "unless to some few desperate and lost persons the authority of the bishops established in Africa seem to be inferior. Their cause is already taken cognizance of, the sentence already passed on them," and declares a special portion of the flock is appropriated to each shepherd, which each is to rule and govern, having to give an account of his acts to God (Epist. 58, Oxford).
The history of Sardica, which was subsequent to this, was the following: --
When Athanasius had been condemned by the Councils of Tyre and Antioch, and banished, he first fled to Julius, who held a small assembly at Rome, and acquitted him; then to Treves, and the Emperor Constans got Constantius, emperor of the East, to call a council. This was held at Sardica. Athanasius, whose cause was to be tried, sat there. The Eastern bishops claimed that he should be excluded. This the others refused. The parties were equally divided, and the Eastern prelates seceded; the Western ones remained. The Eastern half at Philippopolis condemned Athanasius; the Sardicans acquitted him, and then gave for the first time an appeal to Rome. These latter canons Zosimus sought to foist on the African bishops as canons of the Council of Nice. But they were never heard of (as being those of a Council of Sardica) as of any authority, nor ever received in any way in the Eastern church.
And note, the giving then, which is what they do in honour of Peter, a title to Rome to require a re-examination on the spot in case of an appeal, or to take other measures, proves that he did not possess the right before. It was very convenient to Athanasius, as he had been thus acquitted by Pope Julius, and condemned in the East, to set up this power in Rome. This Council of Sardica and its canons were, however, no way recognised in the church; for three general councils, Constantinople, 381 (34 years after), Chalcedon, 451, Constantinople, 681, all decree what is entirely in opposition to the Sardican, namely -- that causes should be heard by the provincial synods, with appeal to the patriarch to whose jurisdiction they belonged. It was Julius' successor, Liberius, who signed the Arian or semi-Arian creed, when Constantius, the Eastern emperor, had all his own way, and so did Hosius, one of the alleged presidents of the Sardican Council.
I will now return to Pope Zosimus. A certain presbyter, Apiarius, had been excommunicated by his bishop and others for ill conduct. He goes off to Rome. Zosimus pronounces him innocent, and sends Faustinus and two others to Africa to a synod then gathered about it. His messengers went to see Apiarius reinstated, and to urge that any presbyter might appeal to Rome. The African prelates answered there was no such rule in the church as that. Zosimus' messengers plead the canons of the Council of Nice. The prelates said these canons were not in their copies of the canons of the Council of Nice; but they would send to Constantinople and Alexandria and Antioch, the three great patriarchates, and see. Cyril of Alexandria, and Atticus of Constantinople replied, and it was found that there were no such canons of the Council of Nice at all. Zosimus was now dead, and his successor, Boniface, who pursued the claim, was dead also; and the African prelates write to Pope Caelestine to say that the Council of Nice had committed these things to the metropolitan, or a local council, or even to a general one.
It is worth while, though it be long, to recite what the prelates say in what they call the universal African Council of Carthage: -- "No determination of the Fathers has ever taken this authority (of judging its own clergy) from the African church, and the decrees of Nice have openly committed both inferior clergymen and bishops themselves to their metropolitans. For they have provided most prudently and justly that every matter should be terminated in its own place where it arose. Nor is it to be thought that to each and every consideration the grace of the Holy Spirit will be wanting by which equity may be prudently perceived by the priests of Christ, and firmly maintained, especially because it is allowed to every one, if he be offended by the judgment on the charges, to appeal to the councils of his province, or even to a universal one. Unless perhaps there be some one who may think that our God may inspire justice in examining to a single person, whoever it may be, and deny it to innumerable priests assembled in council ... . For we have not found it established in any synod of the Fathers that any should be sent as legates of your holiness (tuoe sanctitatis a latere, the common name since for popish legates). For that which you formerly transmitted by the same Faustinus, our co-bishop, as on the part of the Nicene Council, in the truer copies of the Council of Nice, which we have received, sent from our co-bishop, Cyril, of the church of Alexandria, and the venerable Atticus, prelate of Constantinople, from the authentic copies, which also had already been sent by us to bishop Boniface of venerable memory, your predecessor, by the hands of Innocent, presbyter, and Marcellus, sub-deacon, by whom they were forwarded to us from them (Cyril and Atticus), we have not been able to find anything of the kind. Also do not think of sending, nor granting, upon any of ours requesting it, any of your clergy as executors (agents to enforce decrees) lest we may seem to introduce the smoky pride of this world into the church of Christ, which offers the light of simplicity and the day-light of lowliness to those who desire to see God."+ And then the council declares that Africa could no longer endure the presence of Faustinus, if brotherly charity were to be preserved. Apiarius was already put out.
+See Hardouin's Councils, 1, 950. The Latin has "in quibus" here, which does not hang together to make a sentence.
Now here papal infallibility is treated with scorn by all the African bishops in council, the pope's sending legates declared to be utterly unlawful, and the canons he pleaded as his justification declared to be a fraud, and that he must know it, for they had sent the true ones from Constantinople and Alexandria to his predecessor, Boniface.
But Zosimus had had some other transactions with these African prelates, among whom was the famous Augustine. Zosimus fully sanctioned the confession of faith of Pelagius, and his teaching. Now here was the very essence of Christian grace in question. He reproves severely the African prelates for condemning him, owns him and Celestius as in communion. His predecessor had totally condemned him just before. The African prelates having done so, and communicated it, as was the custom, to Innocent, he had returned an answer condemning and excommunicating the two heretics, and claiming, I freely admit, all manner of authority in the case, for the popes were at this moment striving hard to establish their power, and profited by every opportunity. However Innocent condemned and excommunicated them by his full authority ex cathedra. Zosimus, to the said African prelates, declares them sound and in communion. And note, this was on an essential doctrine of the faith. The Africans did not of course remonstrate with Innocent for agreeing with them.
But Zosimus' pretensions set aside their judgment. They met at Carthage in May, 418, Augustine presiding, and condemned and anathematized Pelagius and his disciples, and, not content with this, took the opportunity, in the Council of Milevis, of republishing the Nicene canon, and in their 22nd decree that the appeals should be to local synods or metropolitans, and that if any appealed across the sea (that is, to Rome) he should be received into communion in no African church. Zosimus gave way, summoned Celestius, whom the Africans had condemned, and condemned him too. So much for the pope's infallibility and authority.
I have dwelt more on this because just at this time the pope was seeking to establish his authority over the West, having succeeded, through a quarrel of two prelates, to do it in the south-east corner of France, and in a measure in Eastern Illyria, naming the archbishop of Thessalonica there as "executor" -- what the Africans call the introduction of smoky pride into the church. This had been done already some 40 years before, when that country was politically transferred to the Eastern empire, and the ambitious popes were afraid it should be ecclesiastically under the influence of Constantinople, the Eastern capital. But all this was ambition, not infallibility; and when there was moral courage, the pretensions of the pope were entirely rejected as wholly contrary to the canons, as indeed they were before the canons of Nice were made. Thus did Cyprian, thus Asia Minor, Egypt, and Syria in his day; thus Spain, thus Irenaeus in Gaul; while the popes have been proved both fallible and heretics.
In the Councils of Basel and Constance these bodies were openly declared to be superior to them, and, in the last, three popes (all infallible, we are to suppose) were set aside, one as a heinous monster. Nor has this doctrine been given up in later days. The Gallican church, that is, the Roman prelates in France summoned by Louis XIV, declared publicly that the decrees of the Council of Constance, which maintained the authority of general councils as superior to the pope's in spiritual matters, are approved and adopted by the Gallican church, and that the decisions of the pope in points of faith are not infallible, unless they be accompanied by the consent of the church. Here, then, by the authority of the clergy of that great kingdom, a person who holds the infallibility of the pope is judged to be in error. Now, in what a sea of uncertainty you plunge people if they are to discover the true rule of faith in this way, to say nothing of its being impossible for a poor man to get at it at all!
Father O. Yes, but the poor man has the voice of his pastor, who will not lead him astray.
N. But this is admitted to be no security. Thus, the faithful in France would be led to hold that the pope was fallible in matters of faith.
Father O. But that is no longer the case.
N. Where then is your rule of "what is held by all, everywhere, and always"? Moreover, many do hold this still,+ and it was favoured by the Bourbons, and was, even often, by the emperor, who can do so because he names the different prelates. But see what you have brought us to. Your rule of faith in 1682, for France at least, was different from your rule of faith in 1862. Is this its certainty and clearness? Now when I turn to scripture I find that which I surely need the grace of God to understand; but what is of admitted certain authority for all (except for infidels, with whom we have nothing to do here), and the same at all times? The word of God, the direct revelation given by God by prophets and apostles and inspired men, and that with a holiness, plainness, graciousness of love, and divine love and authority which act on the mind of the poorest, and which the poorest can appreciate. You hinder his having any rule, or else he must have councils and fathers, and read through folios in Latin and Greek; and, when a man is able to do that, he finds, as we have seen, contradiction and heresy, and no sure rule anywhere. If he cannot do this, he must resign himself blindfold into a man's, perhaps a wicked man's, hand. With scripture he listens to Paul and Peter and the rest; he finds and knows in his own conscience that he has to do with the word of God, which discerns the thoughts and intents of the heart. You have no certain rule of faith, nor any living word of God in what you call such which can judge your thoughts and heart.
Father O. But the very word you quote declares Peter to be the rock on which the church is built, and that whatever he bound on earth should be bound in heaven.
N. I do not admit that this scripture says so at all, but I have already enlarged on history, proving that the popes are not infallible, so that it is quite right you should have ample opportunity of stating your views.
+This was written before the last Roman Council, which decreed the pope to be infallible: only this is an additional contradiction in church dogma.
Father O. It is written, "Et ego dico tibi quia tu es Petrus, et super hanc Petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam, et portae inferi non praevalebunt adversus eam." "Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it."
N. Forgive me if I interrupt you. Where does this come from?
Father O. From Matthew 16, from the scriptures.
N. But we have not got them yet. You tell us we must first find the church to enable us to receive the scriptures, and we have not found the church yet. You must, on your own shewing, find that for us first. You cannot quote the scriptures before you prove them to be such -- before you believe in them.
Father O. Well, but you do believe in them.
N. Nor am I going to hinder your appealing to them. But as you have not made good the church's claims, the scriptures must have authority of themselves, and be intelligible too.
Father O. I receive them from the church, and the interpretation of them also.
N. No doubt you do, but that is your private opinion. You are occupied with proving what the true church is, and you have not done that yet, and therefore cannot, if the church alone can authorize them, say anything is scripture. And this 7 is really important practically, not only to shew the unsoundness of your views, but because in fact the Romanists receive as scripture what other parts of the church do not receive as such, the ancient church and fathers included. I am not bound to listen to anything you quote from scripture, because scripture cannot have authority, you yourself tell me, till the church has declared it to be so, and we have not the church yet. But proceed: I shall not make any difficulty. Yet I take it as an admission of the absolute authority of scripture in itself, for otherwise you cannot thus quote it.
Father O. This passage then shews clearly that the church is built on Peter, and that the church built on him can never be overthrown. To him also the keys are given, and what he bound on earth was to be bound in heaven. And it could not be to him only, and then the church fail, for it was never to fail. Hence his successors must have this same authority, that is, as all admit, the pope. In confirmation of this, we find him always named the first among the apostles, as he was the first called also. Thus it is as clear as anything can make it that he had the pre-eminence, and so his successors. He always spoke the first, and took the lead. He was the president of the college of apostles, as we see all through the Acts. In the same way, after His resurrection, the Lord committed His sheep to Peter, saying, "Feed my sheep," giving him universal dominion over the church. And this was always recognized by the church, as the testimony of the fathers proves.
Thus Origen so very early says (Hom. 5 in Exodus), "See what is said by the Lord to that great foundation and most solid rock upon which Christ has founded His church, 'O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt'"? So Athanasius, in his epistle to Felix, and, indeed, the Alexandrian Synod with Him, "Thou art Peter, and upon thy foundation the pillars of the church, that is, the bishops, are established." Gregory Nazianzen says, in his oration on moderation in discussions, "Peter is called a rock, and has the foundation of the church trusted to his faith." Again, Epiphanius (in Ancorato), "The Lord constituted Peter, the first of the apostles, a firm rock on which the church of God is built." So Chrysostom (Hom. 55 on Matthew), "The Lord says, Thou art Peter, and upon thee will I build my church." So Cyril, "Commodiously shewing by that word (Peter), that on him, as on a rock and most firm stone, He was going to build His church." So among the Latin fathers. Tertullian, in his remarkable book on prescription, says, "Was anything hid from Peter, called the rock of the church which was to be built?" And Hilary, "Oh! in the gift of a new name, happy foundation of the church. Oh rock! worthy of the building of it which should dissolve the laws of the infernal regions." And the martyr Cyprian, "The Lord chose Peter first, and built His church on him." And Jerome, "According to the metaphor of a rock, it is rightly said to him, 'I will build my church upon thee.'" So Ambrose. I might add a crowd of other fathers, as Augustine, but I refer to these as both ancient and of just renown in the whole church.
Only I would remark to you that Jerome refers it not only to the person but to the See of Peter. And to close all with a still greater authority, the whole Council of Chalcedon (Action 3) of 630 fathers declares Peter the foundation and basis of the church. The words which follow this declaration that he is the rock shew the extent of dominion conferred upon him. "Et tibi dabo claves regni coelorum, et quodcunque ligaveris supra terram erit ligatum et in coelis, et quodcunque solveris supra terram erit solutum et in coelis." "And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed also in heaven."
M. Well, that is clear; what do you say to that, James? Is it not plain Peter had the first place, and was the foundation? And all he bound was to be bound in heaven; and sure the pope is in his place.
James. Of course Peter had the first place in a certain sense. He was blest by grace above others, as Paul says: God was mighty in him to the circumcision. No Christian denies that. But as to his being the foundation, save as a mighty instrument in God's hands, I do not believe it a moment, because Paul says, "other foundation can no man lay, save that that is laid, that is, Christ Jesus." So that, though I do not pretend to reason with learned men, and I had rather hear what these gentlemen have to say, yet, I am sure, if I were all alone, for my own soul, that Peter cannot in any true sense of the word be the foundation, because the word of God tells us there can be none but Christ. In a general way all Christians own the apostles to be foundations, and the prophets too; but if we make one real foundation, it can be only Christ. As ordained servants of His, and inspired witnesses of the truth, they are all foundations. But I could not trust my soul to any foundation but Christ. None has died for me but He. None is the truth but He. Besides, if Peter was the foundation, how can the pope be so now? The foundation of the church cannot be laid now.
But I would rather hear what Mr. N. has to say; only these gentlemen will excuse my speaking as I was asked the question. I have no pretension to answer about fathers and all that. But I know what my own soul's hope is built upon, and on what alone it can be built, and the church, if it be the true one, too. It cannot have, as the real rock, two foundations.
Father O. You had much better hold your tongue, M., and not make your observations when you cannot know how to answer on such difficult questions, nor pretend to interpret scripture which the most learned men find hard to interpret.
N. He did but put his Amen, Mr. O., however, to what you said. He does not alas! know the scriptures, or he would not be where he is, and I fear he will not learn much of them now. What James has said is really the true solid answer for a soul taught of God. It knows that a church built on Peter would be no church at all, that would be a ruin or rather be no church, and that no mortal sinful man can be personally the foundation of the church, and that none such could be the rock on which the church is built, if it is to stand. In the same chapter the Holy Ghost is careful to record that the Lord calls him Satan; and, even after he had received the Holy Ghost, Paul had to withstand him to the face. And I suppose the popes cannot pretend to be better than he. Still you have said the utmost that can be said. The arguments naturally are not new; and, while referring to what James has said as shewing that a divinely taught soul has its answer from the word for itself, I will take up what is, after all, the inferior part, the reasoning on scripture and quotations from the fathers; but just to learn that they are no security for anything, which indeed it would be a sin to think them. And, first, as to scripture, "Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my church." You say this is on Peter, and that it gives him, with what follows as to binding and loosing, to be the foundation and to have the primacy.
Now setting aside Paul for the moment, who was called later, I admit in certain respects a personal pre-eminence in Peter; no official one, nor one which could go to a successor, if he had one, which in office he had not, for he was an apostle, and they had no apostles to succeed them, and could not have. For none were eye-witnesses of Christ, and sent by Him to found the church; Paul was, and so he was in the fullest and strictest sense an apostle. I admit a personal pre-eminence in certain respects, because scripture teaches us there was: James and Cephas and John seemed to be pillars. All three were preeminent in gift and energy, and all three had names given by Christ Himself. But, even among these, Peter was preeminent. Paul tells us that God was mighty in Peter to the circumcision, as in Paul himself to the Gentiles. As the fathers note, he was the first to make that particular confession, and specially noticed then by the Lord. His ardent character made him forward sometimes in a sad way, for he spoke not knowing what he said, and he had to be called Satan, and the too great confidence it led to brought him to curse and swear he did not know Christ. Yet even this energy, when he was humbled and ceased to trust himself so much, as taught by his fall, and was filled with the Holy Ghost, served to fit him, as a vessel of God's choice, for the special ministry he was appointed to.
We see this pre-eminence in service, and how he was fitted for it by being humbled when the Lord says to him, "When thou art converted [restored from his fall], strengthen thy brethren." This kind of pre-eminence scripture gives him; and we find him using the keys, not of heaven, but of the kingdom of heaven, that is, administering in the kingdom. He was the first in admitting the Jews, and the first in admitting the Gentiles, to found the unity of Christians in one company on earth. All this scripture teaches us, and we bless God for His holy wisdom and sovereign pleasure in it. But he never was the apostle of the Gentiles at all, though employed to receive them first. On the contrary, when the relationship of Jews and Gentiles was settled, it was agreed by the apostles that Paul and Barnabas should go to the Gentiles and themselves to the Jews; Galatians 2: 9. He was the apostle of the circumcision, God mighty in him to the circumcision, and in Paul to the Gentiles.
Nor do we ever read in scripture of Peter, or indeed any of the twelve, going to the Gentiles. There are vague traditions, and they are very vague, but no scripture and no history for it. It is certain from the Acts of the Apostles that the Lord employed other instruments than they to send the gospel forth into the world: first, those who were scattered by persecution, when the apostles all remained at Jerusalem (Acts 8: 1-4; chapter 11: 19-21); and then Paul specially called for that purpose, and sent to that work by the Lord (Acts 26: 17; Romans 11: 13; Ephesians 3: 7, 8; Romans 1: 5 where he refers to Rome), and his companions, who could say, "it is come unto you, as it is in all the world, bearing fruit and increasing" (Colossians 1: 6); and the same Paul positively declares, when the chief apostles "saw that the gospel of the uncircumcision was committed to me as the gospel of the circumcision was committed to Peter ... they gave to me [Paul] and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcision," Galatians 2.
How the commission in Matthew 28 was not fulfilled I do not stop to discuss, though I have thought of it too; but we have the apostles' authority in Paul's account for saying that what was settled by the apostles was, that Paul should take the Gentiles, and Peter and the others the Jews, as their sphere of work; and so Paul tells us elsewhere a dispensation was committed (Ephesians 3: 2) to him. He was debtor to Greeks and barbarians, and to those at Rome too; Romans 1: 14. He was a minister of the gospel to every creature under heaven, and besides that, specially, a minister of the church (Colossians 2); and it is found on examination that he only, in all the Epistles, speaks of the church (John once of a particular church, not of the whole body).
The divine account, therefore, that I have of the dispensation of the gospel and the establishment of the church among the Gentiles is that Paul, not Peter, was the instrument in the Lord's hand for this work. And Paul very assiduously contends that he derived no fresh knowledge from Peter, and that he did not get his apostleship from man nor by man; and he resisted him to the face when it was needed; Galatians 2. So that I find from scripture that he to whom the dispensation of the gospel to the Gentiles, and especially Rome, was committed by God (and the ministry of the church too), was in no way subject to Peter, got nothing from him, and owed nothing to him; that God was mighty indeed in Peter to the Jew, but in Paul to the Gentiles; and we know by the Acts that in fact the world, as Paul says, was filled with the gospel by his labours, who rejected diligently all subjection to Peter, without having a hint in God's history of the matter that Peter ever went to a single Gentile after Cornelius, while we have him agreeing that Paul should, and he to the Jews.
Further, neither in discourse nor in his Epistles does Peter ever speak of the church as a body on earth, while Paul enlarges and teaches on it everywhere. No doubt this left him free to preach it to anyone, as it did Paul to preach to Jews, but the mission, the official relationship, of Peter was with Jews, not Gentiles, while the Gentiles were committed to Paul, and he carefully, in the Epistle to the Galatians, sets aside any superior authority of Peter. Is not this strange if Peter was to be the head of Gentile Christendom, and the rock and foundation of the church? It seems as if God, foreknowing what man would corruptly make of him, had taken pains for those who own the truth and authority of His word to shew it was impossible; just as He has never given a case in which the blessed Virgin applied to Christ that she was not refused. The authority of Peter, and deriving ecclesiastical position from him and the rest of the twelve, was a work of the enemy with which Paul had specially to contend, and which he wholly rejects.+
+It is a remarkable fact that popery and all ecclesiastical unity refers itself formally to Peter, never to Paul (he merely, at the utmost, coming in by the bye); the see is Peter's See; the unity is founded on him who was never an apostle to the Gentiles at all, but gave it up to Paul.
But further, in particular, we are certain that at the first Peter had nothing to do with establishing Christianity in Rome. Numerous Christians were there before any apostle was there, so that Paul addressed a letter to them, and speaks in it of a church gathered there (Romans 16: 5); and not only so, but he claims it as a part of the measure which God had allotted to him, part of the sphere of work committed to him. He was the apostle of the Gentiles, and the seat of Gentile power came within his prescribed apostolic district. He never hints at Peter's having any right or title there, or even at his having been there at all. He teaches, lays the foundation for them, as an apostle to whom they were confided as his sphere of work, shewing them the relative position of Jew and Gentile, all real difference being, as sinners on the one hand and by grace on the other, done away. "By whom," he says, "we have received grace and apostleship for obedience to the faith among all nations [all the Gentiles] for his name, among whom are ye also the called of Jesus Christ," Romans 1: 5, 6. And so he goes on to shew the ground of his connection with them without a thought of Peter, and really to the exclusion of their being his sphere of work, or Peter's ever claiming any apostolic relationship with them or with any other than the circumcision.
Not that only, but Paul came to Rome and laboured, though a prisoner, for two years, and we never hear of Peter. If he ever came to Rome, he must have come when the church was already long founded by another. I am aware that afterwards there was a tradition that he did it jointly with Paul; but that is certainly false, because we have the history of the Acts to prove he did not. If he came, he came into another man's measure, to use Paul's expression. Rome liked, no doubt, foolishly to give itself this credit. It is just possible he visited the Jews there, which was his sphere, as he did apparently everywhere, addressing two Epistles to the believers of the dispersion in Asia Minor.
The tradition given by Eusebius from Dionysius of Corinth is clearly false, or has nothing to do with the matter, for it states not merely that Peter and Paul went together to Rome, but that they had also been at Corinth together, and taught the same doctrine, and then gone on to Rome to be martyred together (Eus. Hist. Ec. 2, 25). Now either this is false, as the Acts prove, if it be taken literally, for it is said, "I have planted," which the Acts and two Epistles to Corinth prove to have been the work of Paul alone, who declares that in Christ Jesus he had begotten them all by the gospel, a fact fully maintained in the Epistle; or if it be not false it is only a flourish of words referring to some visit to Rome (and Corinth on the way when on their way to prison), and in that case the churches were founded long before. That Peter planted the church of Corinth is undoubtedly false; for not only have we in the Acts the history of its planting by Paul with Silas and Timotheus exclusively, but he says, in his Epistle to them, that if they had ten thousand instructors they had but one father, for in Christ Jesus he had begotten them all by the gospel; 1 Corinthians 4: 15. Thus, as to the founding of the church, Peter certainly did not found the church at Corinth, and as certainly did not found the church at Rome. This we are perfectly sure of, as we have (besides the absence of all trace of it in scripture) Paul's Epistle to the Romans and two to the Corinthians, and the history of the Acts, which exclude any possibility of Peter's having done so. If it be true that they both suffered martyrdom there under Nero, this would say nothing of founding the church there, nor of any official place they had there. If we turn to those who followed in the See of Rome, the case is, if possible, clearer, for the apostle John survived Peter and Paul some thirty years; so that the first three popes governed one of the pillars among the apostles, which is as absurd as it is wrong. The notion of the beloved apostle being subject to the supremacy of the possessor of the See of Rome is monstrous.
Father O. Of course the apostle was not subject to him, but this did not hinder others being so.
N. Pardon me. The church of Ephesus, where John dwelt, could not be subject to the bishop of Rome when John was there to guide them, and indeed the bishop of Rome must himself, if the case arose, have been subject to the apostle, for the authority of the apostles was confessedly supreme. Thus the pretended supremacy of Peter, and of his successors too, is clearly shewn to be false, unscriptural, and impossible. We have already seen in part, when you were not with us, that other prelates, the most eminent of their day, as Cyprian, Firmilian, Augustine, while shewing the greatest respect for Rome, and treating it (as tradition then did) as Peter's chair, utterly refused to be subject to it or own its supremacy, and asserted the independent jurisdiction of the different sees. The Jewish Christians sought to set up Peter in this way; but Paul resisted everywhere the Judaising of Christianity and the supremacy of Peter with it. Alas! how has it overflowed the church since.
But, further, how came it that the apostles never suspected that Peter had received this supreme place by these words, to say nothing of Rome? They were afterwards continually disputing who should be the greatest. This was strange if, in presence of them all, Christ had conferred it on Peter.
Father O. But they had not yet received the Holy Ghost.
N. True; but they acknowledged the authority of the Lord, and, when the Holy Spirit was given, we find pre-eminent activity, as we have seen, in Peter (and the blessed apostle cared more for serving His Master then than for supremacy), but we never find him claiming supremacy. Nor could he have done so, because the Lord had forbidden it: "It shall not be so amongst you, for whosoever will be great among you, let him be your servant." How would this do for the pope? And how could Peter, with the Holy Ghost bringing, as was promised, these words to his memory, have set up to be great among them? Your papal system denies the precepts of the Lord, as well as the history which scripture gives us. In the Acts Peter and John are sent by the apostles to Samaria.
So in the meeting to settle the solemn question of how far the law was binding on Gentiles, much discussion took place. Then Peter, ever forward, relates the case of Cornelius, and gives his thoughts as to the burden of Judaism. Then Barnabas and Paul are listened to, giving an account of the blessing among uncircumcised Gentiles. Each takes his place freely and suitably, and James closes the whole discussion as president of the church at Jerusalem. Peter has no place at all but what his gift and apostolic place gave him. He fills up that place rightly, and we hear no more of him in the council. In the decree we read, "It pleased the apostles and elders and the whole church." There is not a trace of any supremacy of Peter. If of any, it was of James. He says, "my sentence is". and this place of James was so marked, that when Peter was at Antioch and had eaten with the Gentiles, "when certain came from James," it is said, "he withdrew and separated himself," so that Paul had to rebuke him to the face; and accordingly, when Paul speaks of those whom he found pillars at Jerusalem, he does not put Cephas first, but says, "and when James, Cephas, and John, who seemed to be pillars," and then it was that they gave up the work among the Gentiles to Paul.
It is therefore as clear as noonday that Peter had no supremacy anywhere. Personal pre-eminency in energy and service, till Paul was called, he had. After that it was not the case; even as to that, Paul laboured more than all the apostles; 1 Corinthians 15: 10. He tells us he was not a whit behind the chiefest of them (2 Corinthians 11: 5), and in particular had to rebuke Peter to his face. Nor was Peter even the first called: Andrew, who had followed Jesus, brought Peter to Him. As regards what he bound on earth being bound in heaven, it is incontrovertible that all he apostolically pronounced upon or established was sanctioned in heaven. That is in Matthew 16; but in Matthew 18: 18 it is said to all His disciples, and indeed to the church, going so far as to any two or three gathered together in His name. So as to forgiveness, as far as it is administration in man's hands (though I agree with Bellarmine, who furnishes all the arguments used on this point, that binding and loosing goes much farther, and includes all he established as divinely ordained), Paul forgives, and recognizes the assembly's title to forgive too; 2 Corinthians 2: 5-10. And the Lord confers the title to do it expressly on all the apostles; John 20.
As to feeding Christ's sheep, it was most gracious of the Lord to commit this to him thrice after he had denied Him thrice. And that he had this charge eminently as regards the circumcision we have already seen. But he desires the elders in his Epistle to do the same thing. So Paul, when he sent for the elders of Ephesus, charges them to feed or shepherd the church of God. And this leads me to another remark, that is, whatever place Peter had, an apostle can have no successor. Those who had the authority of the twelve and Paul were invested with it immediately by the Lord, and sent of Him as eye-witnesses chosen by Him. And Paul and Peter both distinctly confirm this. Paul declares that after his decease grievous wolves would enter in, and commends the disciples to God and the word of His grace. Now, if he was to have a successor, why should he speak of the state of the church as deprived by his death of any such care as he bestowed on the saints? So Peter, in writing his Epistle, says he would take care they should have what he taught always in remembrance. He has no idea that he was going to have a successor of great authority and infallible.
And your own Bellarmine, the first of your controversialists, says plainly, "The bishops have no part of apostolic authority" (Bellarm. 4, 25). And again, "There can be no succession properly but to one who precedes; but there were apostles and bishops in the church together." I am aware that to avoid the consequence he distinguishes between Peter and the other apostles, and says the pope succeeds not to their extraordinary power, but to Peter's ordinary jurisdiction over the whole church. But where is this ordinary jurisdiction to be found? Not in binding and loosing, for that all had; not in finding that others did not exercise independent jurisdiction as it is called, for Paul exercises it in the most entire independence of him, names elders, sends Timothy, Titus, where he pleases, James and Cephas and John having agreed with him that he and Barnabas should go to the Gentiles, they to the Jews. And we find Paul, not Peter, exercising over the churches this wide care with authority not derived from Peter, for he very carefully disclaims this. He was not of nor by man, and withstood Peter to the face. It is all a fable. It is never said Peter had this authority, or that he exercised it, or named one elder in his life. Whereas we find Paul exercising what is called ordinary supreme pastorship (though it is really apostolic authority, and nothing else, directly received from the Lord) constantly and everywhere, and among the Gentiles, whose conversion and care the Lord had committed to him as a dispensation. As a wise master-builder, he says, he laid the foundation; 1 Corinthians 3: 10. He planted, others only watered after him. It is the dispensation of the grace of God given to him; Ephesians 3.
As to "Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my church," Peter had by grace confessed what none ever had, that Christ was the Son of the living God. As entitled to be called Son of God according to promises to Messiah, He had been owned, but Son of the living God He had never been called. This the Father revealed to Peter. The Lord owns the grace conferred on him, and declares that his name should be called Peter (a stone), partaking by grace through his confession of that which he confessed, for it was upon that truth so confessed (that is, on Christ's being the Son of the living God) that He would build His church. Hence it is said that the gates of hades, of the power of death (Satan as having the power of death), should not prevail against the church. For Christ by resurrection was declared to be Son of God with power, above all the power of Satan; and, the church being built on this rock, of His being the Son of the living God, Satan's power, that of death, could not overthrow it. So Chrysostom repeatedly uses it. As James has said, to suppose any real foundation but Christ is denying the Lord. And it is in this character of a divine person having the power of life over death that He can build the church.
But your statements that the fathers are agreed on this explanation, though you are borne out by Bellarmine, is quite unfounded. Some of them say it is Peter, some say it is Christ, some say it is the confession of Christ. St. Augustine says, "I know that afterwards I have very often expounded that 'upon this rock' should be understood of him whom Peter confessed." And so he had. As, again, "'Upon this rock,'" he says, "which thou hast confessed 'I will build my church.'" So Chrysostom in Matthew 16: 18, "'on this rock,' that is, on the faith of the confession." I do not quote as his, "'Upon this rock'; He did not say 'upon Peter,' for He built His church not upon the man but upon his faith," for it is generally considered spurious; but it is, at least, some very ancient writer under his name.
The famous passage in Iren. 3, 3 does not apply to the supremacy of Peter, but deserves a short notice here, as it is used as a foundation for the authority of the church of Rome. Irenaeus is not speaking of the authority of any church, but of security as to doctrine, found in the teaching of all apostolic churches, and then says, as it would be tedious to go through all, he will refer to Rome, with which all must agree as having "potiorem principalitatem." Then he states it to be founded by Peter and Paul, Linus following, etc. No one reading the passage, of which we have only a poor Latin translation, and comparing the context, and in the least acquainted with Irenaeus, but must see that in Greek there must have been archen, and the real meaning of the writer to be, "a more excellent origin," namely, two apostles themselves. He is using the testimony "of the faith manifested in all the world," as a proof that these hidden mysteries of the Gnostics would nave been known somewhere, if the apostles had taught them, and the rather at Rome as the two great apostles were there. Of course this has nothing to do with the supremacy of Peter.
So Hilary, "Upon this rock of confession is the building of the church." Origen says, "Every disciple of Christ is the rock." Pope Gregory the Great says, "Persist in the true faith, and establish firmly your life in the rock of the church, that is, in the confession of the blessed Peter, the prince of the apostles." Now, it is quite true Chrysostom also says that Peter confessing his being a sinner was made the foundation of the church. But this shews only the vague sense they use it in, for when interpreting the passage he declares it to mean his confession. Be it that he contradicts himself, or with Augustine leaves, as he expressly does, to the reader, in his Retractations, to choose which sense he likes. It only shews what the authority of fathers is worth, and what the Council of Trent requires teachers to be bound by in finding the sense of scripture. The consent of the fathers is not to be had.
But it will be well to give a specimen of the interpretation of the fathers here, which will prove that it is anything but true that they uniformly speak of Peter as the rock, and, further, what the value of their authority in such matters is. You will find almost all you have quoted. My first quotations shall disprove your assertion; the second prove that each contradicts himself: only, you will mark, it is rhetoric when they make Peter the rock, sober interpretation when they say he is not.
Origen says, in his commentary on the passage, tom. 12, c. 11, "If you think that the whole church is built by God upon Peter only, what shall we say of John, the son of thunder? Shall we dare to say that the gates of hell were not properly to prevail against Peter, but that they will prevail against the rest of the apostles and the perfect? Is it not also of all, and of each of them that is spoken what is said before? -- 'the gates of hell shall not prevail against it, and that on this rock I will build my church.' Are the keys of the kingdom of heaven given to Peter alone, and shall no other of the blessed receive them? And if that also is for others also in common: 'I will give the keys of the kingdom of heaven.' Now is not both all that is said before, and what follows as addressed to Peter?" and says much more to the same purpose, referring to its gift to all in John's Gospel, and then adds, "as the letter of the Gospel says it to that Peter, as His Spirit teaches, it is to every one who is as that Peter,"+ and in the whole chapter applies it diligently to every true Christian.
If you want a totally different interpretation, where every faithful Christian is made a Peter, and the keys given to him, you may see Com. 12, 14.
Hilary de Trin. 6, 36, says, "Upon this rock of confession, therefore, is the building of the church (37). This faith is the foundation of the church; through this the gates of hell are weak against it. This faith has the keys of the heavenly kingdom," etc. So on Psalm 140, "We have known no rock but Christ, because it is said of him, 'that rock was Christ.'"
There is quoted from Origen, to support the Romanist view, the following passage, Hom. 5 (De la Rue, 2, 145).
"See what is said by the Lord to that great foundation of the church, and most solid rock on which Christ founded the church, O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?"
This is, however, only a translation of Ruffinus, in which he professes to have added what was necessary, because Origen touched on questions often, and did not answer them, which might annoy the Latin reader.
Hilary, in the treatise on Psalm 131, says, Peter, to whom above he had given the keys of the kingdom of heaven, on whom he was about to build the church against which the gates of hell should not prevail, and as to whom what he should bind and loose on earth should be bound and loosed in heaven; and what you have quoted already. But then he is really insisting on his confession.
+In chapter 14 he says, "As all who claim the place of oversight (bishop's charge) use this saying as Peter, and having received the keys, etc. It is to be said they say it rightly if they have the works, on account of which it was said to that Peter, Thou art Peter (a stone), and if they are such as Christ can build His church upon ... but if he is bound in the chain of his sins, in vain he binds and looses."
As regards Athanasius, the passage quoted (of which Bellarmine speaks as so beautiful) is a notoriously spurious letter, and placed among the spurious ones by his Benedictine editors; the proofs you can see in Dupin on this Father, and it is a proof only of the practices resorted to by papal advocates to clothe their pretensions with the authority of great names, and which have acquired the name of pious frauds. We will therefore leave Athanasius, who affords you no help, though he resorted to Rome to help him against the Arians. It is strange moreover Roman Catholics should quote a letter to Felix, for Felix was a pope thrust in by the Arians, while Liberius was banished by the Arian Emperor; and Athanasius says it was a deed that bore the stamp of antichrist. Cardinal Baronius, the great Roman Catholic historian, will not admit him to be pope at all, as there cannot be two. Bellarmine says he was a fresh instance of how solid a foundation popes are for the church to be built upon. Roman Catholics cannot agree whether he was or was not a pope. When the Emperor let Pope Liberius back on his agreeing to communion with the Arians and signing an Arian or semi-Arian creed, Felix and he had to rub on together, two popes and two heads at a time, till Liberius died.
As to Gregory Nazianzen, it proves, orator as he was, what I maintain; though in rhetorical language, without exactness, he says Peter is called a rock, which is not exact as to fact, for in the text Simon is called Peter, or a stone. But his explanation of it every Christian would allow, and it is what the Fathers often say, that the foundation of the church was trusted to his faith. No doubt it was, under God's grace. But, in this figurative sense, Paul also declares that he had laid the foundation, and that the church is built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ being the corner stone. So in the heavenly Jerusalem, the twelve foundations have the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb. In this general way no reader of scripture could for a moment make any difficulty. But it proves that the popes can have nothing whatever to say to it. For since that foundation was once laid, all others, who have that blessed privilege, are built upon it. To lay the foundation of the church now is simply to deny it and its foundation as originally laid. It is perfectly clear that no pope nor any Christian in after times could have this place. Next as to Epiphanius.
He does exalt Peter abundantly in the place quoted, and in the book on heresies also. In the former with much else, nearly as you say, "It became the first of the apostles, the solid rock on which the church should be built, and the gates of hell not prevail against it, by which gates the founders of heresies are meant."
Here, however, I will add a passage farther on, from the same section 9 of the Anchoret:
"He (John) learning from the Son, and receiving from the Son, the power of knowledge; but he (Peter) obtained it from the Father, founding the security of faith."
But the same Epiphanius says (Heresy of the Cathari (59) 7): -- "Upon this rock of a solid faith I will build my church."
Here the faith is the rock. And note that, even in the passage in the Anchoret, the difference is founded on the immediate revelation by the Father, so that it applies only to Peter personally. Indeed, even where Peter is stated by the Fathers to be the rock, it is always on the ground of his personal faith.
Epiphanius therefore does not much help you out. It is Peter's faith one time, Peter himself another; but then because of the immediate revelation made to him by the Father. You next press Chrysostom on us; we will examine him too. You quote him on Matthew 55.
"The Lord says, 'Thou art Peter, and upon thee will I build my church.'"
This is a very unfortunate quotation of Bellarmine's. Because in the Commentary on Matthew 55, Chrysostom says just the contrary: he is insisting on the special blessedness of Peter as having owned Christ to be the Son of the living God, and directly taught there the consubstantiality of the Son. And thereon says, "Therefore He adds this: Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church," that is, upon the faith of the confession. The Sermon on Pentecost, which is as strong as possible in the same sense, I do not quote, as the best editors consider it spurious. There it is said, "He did not say on Peter, referring to Petra, a rock, for He did not found His church on a man, but on faith." At any rate, it is an ancient testimony.
However, Chrysostom's testimony is exactly the opposite to what it is alleged for.
"That in him as in a rock and most firm stone, he was going to build his church." What I do find in Cyril nearest to this is "[Christ] most suitably from the rock changed his name to Peter (petra, petron), for he was about to found his church on him." That is in Commentary on John 1 -- (Paris, 1638.)
But Cyril in his dialogue on the Trinity 4, vol. 2, page 1, 507, says on the verse, "Calling a rock, I think, by a change of word, nothing else, I think, but the immovable and firm faith of the disciples upon which, without possibility of falling, God has established and fixed the church of Christ."
We have not thus made much progress with the Fathers yet. The Greek Fathers do some of them speak of Peter, but I have taken up those presented by you, and all but one say the contrary of your interpretation, though they, several of them, contradict themselves, which it is important enough for us to remark. We have not only Fathers against Fathers, but Fathers against themselves. This is a poor foundation for faith. The Council of Trent will not allow the consent of the Fathers to be rejected in interpretation; but we find no such consent, in most cases not even of one Father with himself.
But we will turn to the Latin ones. You quote them also. You quote Tertullian, Cyprian, Hilary, and refer to Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose. I will follow here also. For one has only to know the Fathers to know what their authority is worth. Of Tertullian it is somewhat difficult to speak, because after having been a very great stickler for ecclesiastical authority (not for Rome) he became a very violent opponent of it. So that what was declared by him to be a sure foundation proved to be none in his own case. One could hardly have a more solid answer for one who would rest on his or on any Father's authority.
Father O. But any one may fall.
N. No doubt, but it is a proof that what he has pleaded as a security from falling is not a very solid one. Tertullian pleaded the prescription of the church, that is, tradition, as the grand security. He abandoned it all as carnal (physical). But I add it never was the authority of Rome on which he rested his case. Not only when a Montanist (de Pud.) he charges his adversaries with overturning the manifest purpose of Christ who conferred authority personally on Peter -- "I will give to thee ...;" "whatsoever thou ... "; in which he is perfectly right; but in the book "de Praescriptione," and the passage so much relied upon, he makes doctrine the test. "In the same way they, the heretics, will be tested by these churches, which, though they can allege no apostle nor apostolic man as their founder, as having a much later origin, yet agreeing in the same faith, are accounted apostolic by reason of consanguinity of doctrine." This we are quite ready to accept. Of Tertullian's system we have spoken. Strange to say, even this book is held by many learned men, Romanist and Protestant, to have been written when Tertullian had become a Montanist, as Dupin does on the one hand, and Allix on the other. Nor has he a thought in the treatise of setting up the authority of Rome. He insists that in Ephesus, Corinth, Philippi, Thessalonica, or Rome, you can trace up the doctrine to an apostolic source, and thus confute the heretics who have introduced new doctrines. Now we hold entirely that what was at first -- not early merely, but at first -- was right, and that only (see 1 John 2: 24). Therefore we condemn Rome which has innovated. But it is evident that an inspired epistle of an apostle is a better evidence of what the apostle taught than a tradition after the lapse of centuries of uninspired men. What was first was and is right. But the Epistles and other scriptures are what was first, and therefore we receive them only. To shew Tertullian's mind and how little he referred exclusively to Peter, I will quote another passage of his. The apostles were all sent forth, he says, after the Lord's resurrection, "and promulgated the same doctrine of the same faith to the nations, and then founded churches in each city, from which other churches have borrowed, and daily borrow, the descent of faith and seeds of doctrine, that they may become churches; and by this they also are accounted apostolic as offspring of apostolic churches. The whole race is necessarily referred to its own origin. Therefore so many and so great churches are that first one from the apostles from which all are. Thus all are the first and apostolic, while all prove unity together." How far this is from having anything to do with Roman supremacy or Rome's being a security for truth, save as part of the whole, or Peter's being the one who ruled over all and secured truth, I need not say. It shuts out any such thought wholly. This was the common ground of those who pleaded prescription.
I turn to Cyprian. You quote from him, "The Lord chose Peter first and built the church on him."
I will complete the phrase. "But custom is not to be used as an authority, but one must be overcome by reasons. For neither did Peter, whom the Lord chose first and on whom He built His church, when Paul afterwards contended with him about circumcision, claim anything insolently to himself, or assume anything arrogantly, so as to say that he held any primacy."
This is a strange passage to quote to prove Peter's primacy by; but, the truth is, Cyprian was the stern and successful resister of the commencing pretensions of Rome, and maintained an active correspondence with Asia Minor, Spain, and other parts to consolidate the whole episcopacy, for that was his system against any pretensions to a primacy. He expresses himself thus: "One episcopacy diffused in the accordant multitude of many bishops." So with the whole synod of Carthage, speaking of the apostles, he says, "to whom we succeed, governing the church of God with the same power." By no one, while acknowledging Peter as a centre of unity, is the equal power of bishops and their independency more stoutly maintained.
In his fifty-fifth letter he says, "The bond of concord remaining, and individual fidelity to the Catholic church maintained, each bishop disposes and directs his own acts, rendering an account to the Lord of his course." And writing to the pope, to whom he never yielded, he says, "In which manner we neither do violence to any one, nor give the law, as each one who is set over [a church] is to have in the administration of the church the free judgment of his own will, having to render account of his conduct to God." The history of what passed between him and popes in this respect we have referred to already.
"I will build my church upon thee."
Jerome does say so, and in a letter full of flattery and servility flies to Pope Damasus to know whether he is to say three hypostases or three persons; and he says, "I know that the church was built on that rock," that is, the See of Peter. And he says pretty much the same in his commentary on Isaiah, lib. 1, chapter 2, though he makes all the apostles mountains. But then on Amos, lib. 3, chapter 6, he says: "Christ is the rock who granted to His apostles that they should be also called rocks -- 'Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.' Whoso is on these rocks, the adverse powers cannot pursue him." And this application of it to all the apostles is common in the Fathers, as Ambrose and Augustine. So Jerome himself, in his violent letter against Jovinian, in favour of celibacy, says, "Thou sayest the church is founded on Peter, although the same in another place is so upon all the apostles, and all receive the keys of the kingdom of the heavens, and the stability of the church is established equally upon them." Then it suited him to say so. He says that John was more loved of Christ and dared to ask when Peter did not; knew Him when Peter did not, etc.
You cite Ambrose. He does call Peter a foundation. Let us see how far his statements make for your cause. "He acted in the first place (took the primacy), the primacy of confession truly, not of honour; the primacy of faith, not of rank."
And, after saying he was thus a foundation, he goes on, "Faith, therefore, is the foundation of the church; for it is said not of the flesh of Peter but of his faith that the gates of death should not prevail against it. But confession conquers hell. And this confession does not exclude one heresy. For, as a good ship, etc., the foundation of the church ought to avail against all heresies." He is speaking just as Hilary in the same case of Peter's owning Christ to be the true Son of God, his subject being the incarnation and the eternal divinity of Christ.
Augustine comes next. In his Psalm against the Donatists, a poor production -- poor in thought and morality -- which he says he wrote for the poorest that they might commit it to memory, and be able to meet them -- he presents Peter as the rock and a sure centre of unity to these poor people. He did the same (he tells us in his Retractations) in a book also against the Donatists, not now extant. Augustine is not happy in his spirit or reasonings with these Donatists. They had resisted one who had given up his Bible in the last persecutions, being a bishop. A vast number of bishops and their flocks sided with them, and the schism lasted a very long time, more than a century. The Catholics, as they call them, appealed not to the pope but to the Emperor, and the Donatists were cruelly persecuted and put to death. Their passions were roused, and many of them took arms and fought and used violence against the other party -- a wretched scene in the so-called Holy Catholic church. But so it was. Augustine cannot justify the party he espoused, but says there must be evil in the church, and the Donatists were worse. But he was every way embarrassed with these people. For, contrary to Cyprian and the East in earlier times, their baptism was held good. Now Augustine believed the Holy Ghost was conferred by baptism. They said to him, "Well, then, we confer the Holy Ghost, so we must have it." Yet he said they were not in the unity of the Catholic church, and so had not got the Holy Ghost; and here he toils and labours, to get out of the net he had got himself into, so as to make any one pity him. But I must pass on, only it is well to keep in mind what this socalled Holy Catholic church was.
Now hear the same Augustine when he is soberly seeking to edify souls in his sermons. In one of them we have an elaborate statement on the point, of which I can quote the kernel. It is on Matthew 14: 24 (or de verbis Domini 13 in some editions). He quotes the passage 16: 18, and says, "But this name that he should be called Peter was given him by the Lord; and this in such a figure as that he should signify the church, for Christ is the rock, Peter the Christian people, for rock (petra) is the principal name. Therefore it is Peter from petra (rock), not petra from Peter, as Christ is not from Christian, but Christian from Christ. 'Thou therefore,' says he, 'art Peter, and upon this rock which thou hast confessed, upon this rock which thou hast known, saying, Thou art, etc., I will build my church,' that is, upon myself, the Son of the living God, I will build my church. I will build thee upon Me, not Me upon thee." And again, "Thus they were baptized, not in the name of Paul, not in the name of Peter, but in the name of Christ, that Peter might be built upon the rock, not the rock upon Peter." This is plain enough. Faith was at work, not controversy or servile theology.
In his sermon on Pentecost (or ex Sirmondianis 22) he is equally plain. "For I am a rock, thou Peter ... and upon this rock I will build my church, not upon Peter, which thou art, but upon the rock which thou hast confessed." So in the sermon on Peter and Paul's day (ser. 295, or de Diversis, 108): "Upon this which thou hast said, 'Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God,' I will build my church. For thou art Peter, from petra (a rock), Peter, not the rock (petra) from Peter. Do you wish to know from what rock Peter is called? Hear Paul." He then quotes 1 Corinthians 10: 1-4, ending "and that rock was Christ," as whence Peter comes. He goes on then to say, "These keys not one man but the unity of the church received," and quotes John 20: 22, 23, to shew that it was to the whole church to whom Peter was given, there to represent in its universality and unity, all the other apostles having then received it; and then Matthew 18: 15, 18, to shew that it applies to all the faithful saints, concluding "the dove binds, the dove looses, the building on the rock binds and looses." His words are, "That you may know that Peter stood there as representing the whole church, hear what is said to herself, what to all the faithful saints."
Such was the teaching of Augustine. In his Retractations he mentions that in the lost book against the Donatists he had called Peter the rock (he refers to the psalm, but not to Peter's being named in it), and then says, "I know I have very often afterwards [he had written the book against the Donatists when only a presbyter] expounded it as meaning him whom Peter confessed; ... for it was not said to him, Thou art a rock, but Thou art Peter, but the rock was Christ." "Of these two opinions the reader may choose which is the more probable."
That makes a solid ground, by the consent of the Fathers, for your theme of Peter's being the rock. What I have cited proves two things, that is, that the Fathers generally contradict you, and that their authority is worth nothing, for they contradict themselves. No one taught of God would hesitate which to choose, the blessed Lord or Peter, for the rock on which the church or his own soul is to be built. It is evident that the Lord rests on the word, as Hilary and others say, of the blessed truth, that Jesus was the Son of the living God. Over what was founded on that he that had the power of death could not prevail. Nor will he. Happy those that are built on Him. But I will quote one more so-called father, because he was a pope, and an eminent one -- Gregory the Great. Of all the earlier popes, save Leo, he, while condemning the present papal claim of universal jurisdiction as the act of a forerunner of antichrist, most pushed on the papal power. Yet he says (lib. 31, 39, Job 97), "Where rock in the sacred language is used in the singular number, what else is understood but Christ, of which Paul is witness -- 'But the rock was Christ?'" In lib. 35: 42, 13 of the same book, he calls it the solidity of faith, of which solidity the Lord says, "On this rock I will build my church," and refers the whole thought to the incarnation.
There is a passage still stronger in his letters, which I cannot lay my hand on, where he says, "Persist in the true faith, and establish your life on the rock of the church, that is the confession of Peter, the prince of the apostles." It is said forty-four Fathers and ten popes have given it the sense opposite to the one you say all give it. So Felix III, Nicholas I, and John. I have never verified the accuracy of this assertion. What we have examined suffices to shew that not only do the Fathers contradict your assertion, but each other and themselves. And we have two points where they refer to Peter. Very many make Christ, or the confession of Christ, the rock. When they make Peter the rock, it is individual -- his own faith, and the grace personally given to himself; many to his personal work in founding the church -- two, you allege, carry it into the See of Rome; of these, one states the contrary also, and it is only in a most servile correspondence with his patron, Damasus, that he says what you quote him for, when he was attacked as a heretic, and wanted the pope to back him up. The other case, Augustine, was an effort in controversy to gain the poor among the Donatists, while in his own expositions he carefully and elaborately taught the contrary.
What kind of a foundation of the truth is this? what security for it? for that is what we are seeking. And we have learnt another thing, that is, that the boasted Fathers are a security for nothing at all. But you have said that the famous Council of Chalcedon, composed of six hundred and thirty prelates, declare the same truth. So Bellarmine says. But alas! we have always to examine the assertions of your party. It is quite unfounded. What is said there of the prerogative of Rome is solely and exclusively the pretensions of the papal legate in giving his voice. Paschasinus, his two colleagues joining, after going through Dioscorus' misdeeds,+ says, "archbishop of the great and elder Rome, Leo, by us and by the present synod, with the thrice blessed apostle Peter, worthy of all praise, who is the rock and base of the Catholic church, and foundation of the right faith, has deprived him of his dignity," etc. Then Anatolius, archbishop of Constantinople, gives his voice, and so on the rest. But the Council was very far indeed from admitting the pretensions of Rome. Indeed I am surprised that you should quote the Council of Chalcedon, only that your writers reckon on people's ignorance.
+He had presided at what was meant to be a general council at Ephesus, which was called by the Emperor and attended by the legates of Rome, where they had beat poor old Flavian, archbishop of Constantinople, so that he died of it, and had even excommunicated the bishop of Rome, which was doubtless worse in Rome's eyes.
Pope Leo, most holy and blessed, urged that the council should be held in Italy, but the Emperor would not agree. The council decreed (Action 15, 28) that Constantinople, or new Rome, should have equal privilege with old Rome in ecclesiastical matters, as it had in civil matters, having the Emperor and Senate there. In the next Action, 16, the legates complained, and said the bishops had been compelled to sign this, which they all denied, and the said Paschasinus, quoted a forged copy of a decree of the Council of Nice to give the primacy to Rome, but Constantius, the secretary, read a true copy, provided by the archdeacon of Constantinople, which confounded the legate. It gave Alexandria authority in Egypt, Antioch in its Eparchy, and Rome in its own district. The judges then -- for they sat with the council -- recited the decree giving equal rights to Constantinople. The bishops all declared this is a just sentence: "This we all say, this pleases us all. What is established must remain valid. All was regularly decreed. Let us go, we pray you; we all remain in this sentence, we all say the same thing." Lucentius, another of the pope's legates, then said, "The apostolic see ought not to be humbled in our presence," and begged that what had been decreed the day before in his absence might be reconsidered, or else he should have to protest against what was done, and that he might clearly know what he had to report to the apostolic man [chief bishop of the whole church],+ who would judge of the injury done to his see, or any subversion of the canons. (Hardouin, vol. 2, Conc. Chal.) The bishop of Sebastia said, "We all remain in the opinions of your magnificence."++ The judges said, "What we have spoken of the whole synod has approved "; and so it ended there.
That Rome never approved this is natural enough. But this was a general council, and held to be such in the whole of Christendom, and remained in force. Alas! it was wretched ambition on both sides. Leo's legate had orders, when he could not get the council in Italy, not to consent to anything prejudicial to Rome. But what kind of foundation is all this for the faith? Really it is miserable worldly ambition; but how is a simple soul, when told to hear the church, to find out who and what he is to hear? Can a divine faith be founded on confusion like this? It is impossible divine faith can be founded on a parish clergyman; and when I go to learn what the church holds, which requires enormous research, I am only launched in a sea of confusion. I turn to scripture, and all has divine authority.
+What is in [ ] is not in the Latin copy.
++The Greek is wanting here, and in the Latin the sense is not very clear.
Note another point here. The patriarchal and metropolitan authority really followed the civil divisions when Constantinople became an imperial city. The Council of Constantinople, professedly for that reason, made it next in honour to old Rome, declaring that Rome had the first place, because it had been the ancient seat of empire. So the prelates who sat at Antioch and Alexandria respectively, as the great cities of Africa and Asia, were patriarchs there. And this was the case with all metropolitan cities. The Eparchies had patriarchs, the provinces metropolitans, and the chief cities bishops. All followed the civil order. This is an historical fact. Two general councils state it in establishing Constantinople, which before was not even a metropolitan see, but subject to Heraclea. And the different metropolitans were forbidden to outstep their provinces; only in the Council of Chalcedon, the dioceses (which at that time meant large civil divisions, including provinces) of Asia, Pontus, and Thrace, were made subject to Constantinople. This aggrandisement of Constantinople led to unceasing war between its ecclesiastical chief and Rome, ending in the separation of East and West, and still more jealously between it and Alexandria, which, till Constantinople was given the second place, had enjoyed that pre-eminence. To end this sad history, John of Constantinople took the title of universal bishop. Gregory writes to the Emperor that such pride proves the time of antichrist was come, and to the patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch, to stir them up against him, because their authority was gone if they allowed this; and, he says, the faith too. He quotes Matthew 16: 18, "On this rock," and says, "Yet Peter never claimed to be universal apostle" (Letter to Maurice, page 300, Ven. 1770, to the Patriarchs, page 325.)
This Maurice, whom he relates as the most pious lord constituted by God, had just murdered his master and predecessor to get the empire. He says in both that Chalcedon had offered Rome the title, and Leo had refused it, which was a great untruth. Who would think that we are occupied with those who profess to be the followers of the blessed Lord (who forbade withal any to be great among His disciples), or that such authorities could be alleged as a foundation and security for divine faith? Rome, as a great centre, did early acquire great power, and sought greater. The Emperors leaving Rome left them free. The setting up Constantinople as a new patriarchate above Alexandria and Antioch excited the jealousy of those sees, and they often appealed to Rome to help them. Rome profited by this too. In the west was no other patriarch, so Rome had free scope, though for centuries Africa openly and positively condemned and rejected all appeals there, decreeing, so late as Augustine, that if any one did so appeal, he should be excommunicated, as we have already seen. When the Emperors lost the West, the German nations having overrun the western empire, the popes formed the only centre, and, these nations being heathen or Arian, they extended their influence gradually over them. Ireland and Britain, strange to say, remained entirely independent till much later, the eighth century.
The evangelization of Germany and Switzerland was by British missionaries, though the pope got hold of Boniface, and so of Germany, making him archbishop of Mayence. But this was not all; actual and deliberate fraud, as is now owned by all, was the great means of the popes establishing their authority in the church. There was a collection of canons, that is, of church rules, by Dionysius, containing various decrees of popes. These were continually added to, and among the rest a collection of them by Isidore, of Seville in Spain, a widely-respected man. This last dated from 633 to 636, as its contents proved; but in the ninth century a new edition of the Isidorian collection appeared, with spurious decretals of early popes, containing, as a matter of acknowledged right, all they now pretended to -- others interpolated to the same purpose. It was a regular system of fraud and forgery. This the popes constantly used as proof of the legitimacy of their claims as having subsisted from the earliest days. No one questions the forgery now. They quote a translation of scripture then current as cited by popes who lived long before it was made; they make false dates of two hundred years, and the like. The French bishops, in the question between Pope Nicolaus I and Hincmar about the excommunication of Bishop Rothad by the latter, looked up Dionysius, and called them in question even then; but Nicolaus persisted, and reminded them they often quoted them for their own purposes, so it passed into authority till later and more critical ages. Only think of resting the foundations of faith and infallibility on such materials as these! It was on these spurious decretals and subsequent forgeries that the fabric of the pope's authority was all built.
Father O. Nobody pretends now that these decretals are not forgeries, but it was in the dark ages they were current, when there was very little critical discernment anywhere.
N. All true, but they were used by the pope as giving him his true position, and sustaining his loftiest claims. He gave away kingdoms and hemispheres, and had, he said, the world entirely at his disposal; he rested his title on these decretals. And if there was an infallible teacher and rule, how came there to be such dark ages? how did they get so dark? And how can I recognize as a security for truth one who either could not discern imposition from truth, or was rogue enough to profit by it because people were in the dark? One or other of these was the case of the pope. There is no doubt or question that their pretensions to authority and power were founded on, and justified by, these spurious documents, forged in order to give it to them. A dark age could not detect the falsehood, but this does not affect the question of the forging them, and the use of them by the popes. And they did so as long as they could. It was only at the Reformation the fraud was detected, and at last Romanist writers were obliged to give them up, and bow their head to the shame of it. Is all that like Christ, or the truth, or security for the truth, as it is in Jesus? The popes founded their authority and rights on these forgeries of their friends. Either they knew they were spurious, or they did not. If they did know it, they were unprincipled impostors; if they did not, their pretended infallibility is not worth a straw. They pronounced things ex cathedra continually on the ground of these decretals being genuine, and appealed to them, and they were all false forgeries, forged to give them this power.
However, what gave them the West lost them the East, and the Greek church remained independent to this day, so that a Catholic or universal church has never subsisted in unity since the ninth century.
Father O. But how can these poor people judge of all this history, or found their faith upon it? I do not see any good in pursuing such questions.
N. They can see that the pretensions of Rome, founded on Matthew 16: 18, alleged to be so interpreted by all the Fathers, are false pretensions, and that Fathers contradict it. As to founding their faith upon it, they surely cannot. But that is exactly what I am contending for. It is perfectly ridiculous to have a poor man founding his faith on ponderous folios of Fathers, and on a consent which does not exist. The pretensions of the pope, your pretensions, are no foundations for the church to be built on. As to feeding sheep, the Fathers insist that it applies to all pastors.
We have councils to consider, to see if they are infallible; though how some dozen, and even thirty, folios in Greek and Latin are to help an inquiring soul to the truth of doctrine is hard to tell. They are an entangled web of questions and ambitions of every kind. They were never begun till the Emperor, being Christian, called them to settle disputes, and quite as numerous ones, and more so, decided for error as for the truth. And who is to decide which is general? The pope never called a general council while the church was united; he has only called such as he calls general since the East and West have been separated and hostile, so that a general council, whatever it was worth, was impossible. The early ones referred their decrees to the Emperors, and the Emperors held the chief place and authority in them. Next, they were not reckoned infallible by the gravest authorities among Fathers and popes, so that they can be no foundation for faith. They were gathered to settle points in question, not to lay any foundation. There were none for three hundred years after the apostles' days, and never any till the Emperor Constantine, the first Christian Emperor, who thought of, called one, and directed it. Thirdly, their history will tell us what a poor foundation they are for faith, for Romanists cannot even clearly tell us which are general councils, nor shew any unanimity as to their authority.
The truth is, there never was such. All the first councils in the East were called by the Emperors, and under their authority, and at the council in which the greatest number of Western prelates were found, there were not more than six of them. The later ones were called by the popes in the West, and no Eastern prelates were there. The empire was then in rapid decay, and had wholly disappeared in the West. In the ninth century the Eastern church was entirely separated from Rome. The only council where both Easterns and Westerns were found was that of Florence, in the fifteenth century; the Eastern Emperor had need of the West, being pressed by the Turks, and sent some Eastern bishops; but the steps they took were protested against then by the most eminent among them, Mark of Ephesus, and were repudiated by all the Greeks on their return.
It is extremely difficult to say what constitutes a general council, as we shall see when we come to their history. Those who plead their divine origin appeal to Acts 15; but here there was no general council at all. The apostles and, if we look beyond apostolic authority, the elders of one church assembled to consider the matter. At this time there were churches throughout Palestine, in Syria, where the question arose, and in the south of Asia Minor, and settled in full order by the Apostle Paul where he had been. They do not hear a word of the said council, only some went from Antioch, where the question had been raised, to propose it at Jerusalem. The truth is, it was a question whether Judaism was to be forced on the Gentiles. God, in mercy, did not allow it to be rejected at Antioch and prevail at Jerusalem, so as to split the church in two at once; but in His gracious wisdom, under the apostolic guidance, led the Jewish part of the church to decide that the old ordinances they clung to were not binding on Gentiles. This was most gracious. But most certainly there was no general council, but the apostles and a single church. And the epistle sent out so declares.
Under the heathen Emperors there were constantly provincial councils, and all was regulated within each province. When Constantine had succeeded in finally subduing the heathen Emperors, he took up the church, finding it distracted about Arianism and the time of celebrating Easter. He sent Hosius, his very particular friend, to Alexandria, the great scene of conflict, and wrote a letter to make truce between Alexander and Arius, saying they were disputing about trifles, but in vain. He then called the bishops from all parts to meet and settle the question.+ The ecclesiastics were not the movers in it.++ Constantine appointed the place of meeting, which was in his palace at Nice, and when they were assembled, came in in a splendid dress, on which Eusebius, the ecclesiastical historian, expatiates, and on his fine figure, and with great airs of modesty took his place amongst them. He over and over again says to bishops in his letters, it was his pride to be their fellow-servant, and declares that he had undertaken with all the bishops to settle the question. It has been discussed who presided. It is a vain discussion. Constantine did. He had a little modest golden seat at the top of the room, and the bishops sat on seats down the sides. The first on the right said a few words of compliment to him, how happy they were to see him there; and then he opened the session with a long speech.
+The truth is, what are called general councils were all of them, till the Emperors lost their power, measures taken by them to get peace among church leaders. They managed and governed them, and sanctioned what was done. They were for ever meddling in church matters, and the various bishops recognized continually their right to depose them, and the like, and they exercised it.
++The uncertainty which hangs over the Council of Nice is curious for no unimportant event. Eusebius, in his Life of Constantine, says expressly there were two hundred and fifty prelates there. Afterwards it was held there were three hundred and eighteen, but reference was then made to the number of Abraham's servants, which was then held to be a great mystery.
Nor was this all. As soon as he had done, neither his fine figure, nor purple robe and jewels, restrained the bishops: they began disputing fiercely. He soothed some, reasoned with others, encouraged and approved others, and so got all to sign the creed but five, who were banished, though some of them came round. And on a very strange explanation of "consubstantial" by the Emperor himself, Eusebius also signed the word. Strange to say, it had been positively condemned in a considerable Eastern council before.+ Afterwards a subsequent Emperor turned Arian, and all the bishops Arian with him. One Emperor was Arian in the East, and another Nicene in the West. The Easterns were all Arian, the Western Nicene; a few rare exceptions were true to their conscience. The pope was not at the council, it is said, through old age, but sent two presbyters; not only did they not preside, but never signed; first, Hosius, the Emperor's private friend, did that. Constantine, in his letter to Egypt after the council, recommending unity, repeats his having called the council, and undertaken the business. Though this council, under God's good providence, may have been in some respects helpful in stopping so horrible a doctrine as Arianism, yet a vast number of prelates, sound in the faith, were far from being satisfied, especially when Marcellus of Ancyra, a great stickler for the council, who even assisted at it, was condemned as a heretic, and deposed; having run, through his views on the subject, into denying the eternal Sonship of Christ, and being suspected of Sabellianism.
+In the Council of Antioch, where Paul of Samosata was condemned Then the very word, omoousios, which was afterwards the orthodox test of Arian or not Arian, was condemned as false doctrine. Athanasius, de Synodis, 43, says both judgments are to be respected; that we are not to think these seventy prelates at Antioch were wrong, and seeks to reconcile the two. In Nice, if I understand the matter aright, as distinctly stated in the authentic accounts of the council, which are confirmed by Ambrose, Eusebius, who was Arian, or semi-Arian, in his views, wrote (I suspect referring to this council), saying, If we say that He is Son of God, and uncreated, you begin to own Him omoousios, (Ambr. 3, de Fide 15.) And the council took up the word thereupon, and made it a test.
However our point now is the Emperors calling the councils, and here the Emperor managed it altogether. The next council called general is that of Constantinople. Yet here we are at a loss to know why it is a general one. There was only a hundred and fifty Eastern bishops. The popes Leo, Gelasius, and Gregory rejected the canons, only accepting the doctrine. Yet the canons were always received in the early and are in the code of the canons of the universal church. The popes took no notice, and had nothing at all to say to it, when it was going on. Up to this Arianism ruled under Valens. Now Theodosius turned all the Arian bishops out. Here again Theodosius convoked the council, chose the bishop of Constantinople, and the council formally refers all its acts to his ratification. (See the first document in Hardouin, Conc., vol. 1, 807.)
As to the Third so-called General Council, it is quite certain the Emperor Theodosius the younger called it.
It is well, perhaps, we should look into the character of this council, and the principal figure in it, a little closer. If it were not for the heartless and relentless persecutions he underwent, there is nothing in Nestorius' character to attract regard. An eloquent, it would seem a vain, man, on whose character there was no reproach, he had a reputation for sanctity as a monk, and thought himself perhaps a great theologian. He came from Antioch, whence Chrysostom had been called to Constantinople, and was called to that see, to the bitter disappointment of two others who aspired to it.
In judging the expression, "the mother of God" (a monstrous and really offensive expression), although he fully admitted the two natures and one Person, he used expressions justly objected to, and which his enemies did not fail to take hold of; but he did not really swerve from the truth as far as Cyril, who over and over again asserts that Christ had only one nature.+ At Ephesus, at the instance of John, patriarch of Antioch, he consented to use it even as capable of a good sense, as he had indeed already stated in his reply to Proclus' sermon.
I now leave him till he appears in the history of the council, and turn to Cyril the great actor in it, a man who is the very stay of modern high-church notions. The church of Alexandria was a very powerful church indeed, and its patriarchs had been always counted next to Rome in dignity. But Constantinople, having been made the seat of empire, began somewhat to eclipse its grandeur, while the pope was left by the same fact freer than ever. The jealousy of Constantinople was great at Alexandria, which continually looked to Rome as a support equally jealous of Constantinople, which originally had been a subordinate city. The predecessor of Cyril had got Chrysostom banished, now counted a saint, but who died, banished from his see, and put out of church records, as unworthy of being recognized among Christians, in what were called the Diptychs, a kind of ecclesiastical record of bishops' names. Rome had restored him, Alexandria not, so that there was a breach of communion between them. Cyril began by persecuting the Novatians, a body separated from the general church, and seizing their property. The Jews, very numerous there since the time of Alexander, having raised sedition against the Christians and slain many, Cyril put himself at the head of his adherents and the Parabolani (a kind of military monks whose nominal office was to visit the sick, etc., in seasons of plague or the like), attacked the synagogues, and drove the Jews out of the city, and gave up their houses to be sacked. Recourse was had to the emperor. The monks, so famous and so numerous in Egypt, attacked the governor and wounded him. The individual who wounded him was executed. Cyril canonized him, and ordered him to be honoured as a martyr. Other violences took place, and brought on the intervention of the emperor.
+Thus, in his 17th Paschal Homily (v, page 2, 230 B) he denies that it was as man He grew in wisdom and stature. That is to divide and make two Christs, he says. So in his first and second letters to Luciessus (v, page 2, 137, 143), after the union we do not divide the natures from one another. We do not cut the one and undivided into two sons, but we say one son, and, as the Fathers have said, one nature (phusin) of God the Word made flesh. Again, after union in an ineffable way, he shewed to us one nature of the Son, but, as I said, made flesh. And so very frequently. What was offensive in Nestorius was his saying that he could not say a child of two years old was God; but he excused this as said in the heat of argument, and urged that his words should not be insisted on. It was verbally at Ephesus. Cyril's statements are in elaborate treatises on doctrine. The Council of Chalcedon, though sanctioning the Council of Ephesus and Cyril by name, condemns (Actio Quinta) in express terms what in express terms Cyril taught, and what Nestorius and the Easterns objected to.
At Constantinople, one of Nestorius' clergy preached against the expression "mother of God," and then Proclus, previously candidate for the see, made a famous sermon for it. Nestorius then answered him, and the controversy was commenced. Cyril wrote to the monks on the subject, and this letter Cyril sent to Constantinople by his agents, then pretending in his letter to Pope Celestine that it had been brought by some to Constantinople. The pope now became engaged in the matter, and sided with Cyril, finding the court against him. Cyril wrote then, and particularly to the Emperor's sister, for which the Emperor rebuked him severely, as sowing divisions in the imperial family. She was ill-disposed to Nestorius, who had charged her with too great familiarity with some great man about court. At last, Nestorius, it seems, proposing it, a council was called at Ephesus by the Emperor, and the patriarchs ordered to bring only a few bishops to settle the question. Cyril came at once with as many as he could bring. Meanwhile, the pope commissioned Cyril to act for him in carrying out the Roman judgment against Nestorius, who was summoned to retract within ten days from receipt of the monition; and Cyril published twelve anathemas as to the doctrine of the incarnation, containing his views. The Emperor, in calling the council, put Cyril on his trial as well as Nestorius, and the former, not only as to the doctrine, but as to crimes committed at Alexandria. Cyril had at the same time excommunicated Nestorius, and sent to him the denunciation, and exhorted the monks of Constantinople to be firm. These and those in Egypt were main agents in the violence that took place. The patriarch of Antioch and the Eastern church were opposed to Cyril's views, and he wrote a work at this time against one which had been approved by a council at Antioch.
It is attempted to be said that Theodosius summoned the council by advice of the pope; but all honest Roman Catholic historians admit it was not, and could not be so. The pope held a local council at Rome, excommunicated Nestorius, and commissioned Cyril to carry it out, and Theodosius' notice to the pope of the Ephesian Council came first from the Emperor to Celestinus after that. The dates prove it. Cyril presided at the council, such as it was, and all was over as to Nestorius before the legates arrived, and they then agreed to what had been done. Nestorius, and those with him, and John of Antioch, never took part in it at all. Nestorius came first with the ten bishops from Constantinople, Cyril with some fifty from Egypt. The Emperor's lieutenant ordered them to wait for the Oriental bishops who could not yet arrive. This did not suit Cyril. He met with his party, which was the more numerous, on June 22, summoned Nestorius, who did not go, nor some sixty-eight bishops who were now with him. Cyril went on, suspended and degraded Nestorius from the clergy without further ceremony, and his twelve anathemas were read, approved by silence, for there is no other positive decision of the assembly found as to them, though it be asserted by their adversaries and not questioned till afterwards, when they were used by the Monophysites,+ and all was finished on this main point. Cyril drew up the acts of the council and (it is admitted) dressed them as it suited him, and there are gaps hard to understand. Candidius, the Emperor's lieutenant, protested against it as well. Memnon raised a tumult in the city, so that Nestorius was protected by troops, nor did his partisans, as it appears, refrain from violence.
A few days after John of Antioch came; he would not receive Cyril's deputies at all; met with the bishops who came with him -- he had only, it is said, brought three from each province -- and he deposed and excommunicated Cyril and Memnon. The result was, both parties appealed to the Emperor, who sent a commissioner. The Emperor confirmed the depositions of the three. Then eight deputies went from each party. The Emperor ordered Nestorius, Cyril, and Memnon into custody, and they were kept prisoners.
+The reader may consult Tillemont.
Meanwhile matters went against Nestorius at court. A mob of monks had beset the palace. Cyril found means to escape and get to Alexandria. Nestorius' mainstay at court died. The Emperor sent Nestorius back to his monastery at Antioch, and let the bishops go home. Cyril had already gone back, having escaped from his confinement; the Emperor peremptorily refused to condemn John and the Easterns, and they went home. Cyril spent all the treasures of the church of Alexandria, which was very wealthy, and brought it into considerable debt in bribing the courtiers, and even the Emperor's sister. This we know, not only from the accusations of his enemies, but from the statements of John of Antioch, of Acacius of Berea; and the letter of his archdeacon and Syncellus states that Cyril had sent the presents, and the list is given to whom the presents should be made. This sister of the Emperor, made a saint of afterwards, married a nobleman, on condition of not living with him as a husband, to raise him to the throne. But Cyril and Memnon remained excommunicated by the East, which denounced his anathemas as heretical. The Emperor sent an officer to make peace. The Easterns refused to the end the anathemas of Cyril, and would not condemn Nestorius, nor indeed say anything about him. The Emperor's officer finally succeeded as to John and the majority. But they would not accept Cyril's doctrines. They drew up a document which condemned Cyril's anathemas; he explained, then he would not retract them, but signed the Eastern confession of faith which set them aside. Then John and most of the Easterns came into communion with him, and they condemned Nestorius. But a great many, firmer than John, would not, and two or three whole provinces separated from Antioch. Then John got the Emperor to persecute. Those who would not yield were driven from their sees. These provinces after some time were reunited with Antioch, and the greater part of the unyielding bishops went into Persia, where the Emperor's authority did not reach, and Nestorianism remained a large body with a hierarchy, and, though now overrun by Mahometanism, still subsists. In the sixth century it had christianized large tracts of Asia, and China itself was in the main nominally Christian. Nor was this all.
The successors of Cyril held that Christ, after the union of the divine with the human, had only one nature, and this has subsisted with its hierarchy in Alexandria ever since, and constitutes the Jacobite or Coptic church of Egypt, Abyssinia, etc., though also oppressed by Mahometanism, but having its hierarchy like Nestorianism, with the patriarch of Alexandria for its head. Nor was this the only result. The term "mother of God" pleased the heathens as Nestorius alleged. And in the West they flocked in swarms into the paganised church, the heathen temples and worshippers being turned into Christian churches and congregations without more trouble.
I add the account given by a Roman Catholic of this result in the West, in an essay crowned by the French Royal Academy: "They [the peoples] received this new devotion [to the Virgin] with a sometimes too great enthusiasm, since for many Christians it became the whole of Christianity. The pagans did not even endeavour to defend their altars against the progress of this worship of the mother of God. They opened to Mary the temples they had kept shut against Jesus Christ. It is true they mingled often with the adoration of Mary their pagan ideas, their vain practices, those ridiculous superstitions from which they seemed unable to separate themselves; but the church rejoiced to see them enter into her bosom, because she knew well that it would be easy, with the help of time, to purify from its alloy a worship whose essence was purity itself. Thus some prudent concessions [he had before spoken of these] temporarily made to heathen manners (or morals), and the influence exercised by the worship of the Virgin -- such are the two elements of force which the church used to overcome the resistance of the last pagans." He adds in a note, "Amongst a multitude of proofs, I choose only one to shew with what ease the worship of Mary swept before it the remains of paganism, which still covered Europe. Notwithstanding the preaching of St. Hilarion, Sicily had remained faithful to the ancient worship. After the Council of Ephesus, we see its eight most beautiful pagan temples, in a very short space of time, become churches under the invocation of the Virgin." He then gives the list, "The ecclesiastical annals of each country furnish similar testimonies." (Beugnot, Histoire de la destruction du Paganisme en Occident, 54, 12, chapter 1, vol. 2, 270-1.)
Nor was this council held then for an ecumenical council. No Western was there unless a deacon from Africa, and the pope's legates, after Nestorius was condemned. Gennadius, patriarch of Constantinople, wrote against the twelve anathemas. The Eutychians always appealed to Cyril's famous sentence, 'The union was made out of two natures; but after the union there was one nature of the word incarnate in Christ.' I give it as Petavius states it. I have already given the words from Cyril. No one can doubt that Eutychianism (the doctrine of one nature in Christ) and the Jacobite church of Alexandria were the fruit of Cyril's doctrine. He says positively that Athanasius stated expressly (and quotes it), that there was only one nature after incarnation. A century afterwards this was denied and is still uncertain. But that Cyril does not really deserve confidence, it would be hard to refuse his testimony.
The truth is, that both Nestorius and Cyril were meddling with matters beyond their depth, and that both used unjustifiable language. But the orthodox East never received Cyril's anathemas. He signed their creed. The subsequent Council of Chalcedon alone gave credit to this Council of Ephesus, but declared Theodoret and Ibas orthodox, who had written books favouring Nestorianism; but a general council after that (Constantinople) declared these same books heretical, saving always the authority of Chalcedon. The Cyril party -- very probably the Emperor's sister, St. Pulcheria, who was charged with incest, and had great power over the Emperor -- persecuted Nestorius, who was banished to the desert and died in want.
For the authorities for the details I have given the reader may consult Baronius (who, of course, condemns Nestorius, and approves Cyril), Tillemont, a great favourer of Cyril, also Dupin, who is much more moderate. If he can read German, Walch's Heresies, vol. 5, where the subjects and documentary evidence are fully investigated, and which judges Cyril more severely, as indeed every honest man and humble Christian must, though not accepting the doctrines which Nestorius held or was accused of. With these come the Collection of Councils and Mercator. The English reader may find a full summary in Gieseler's Compendium 1, 393 following. But I have not used Protestant writers for the history, save as an index to the various authorities. Cyril and Mercator, both bitter enemies of Nestorius, and the council itself, with something on ecclesiastical authorities and collections of letters at the time in the Synodium, are the original sources. With these I have used the Roman Catholics, Baronius, Bellarmine, Petavius, which last is full as to the doctrine of Cyril.
It is difficult to speak of this council, it was conducted with such fraud and violence. Cyril, the open enemy of the person charged, and himself charged too, and to be judged by it, began it before the Eastern bishops, or even the pope's legates were come, not in this heeding the protestation of the Emperor's lieutenant, who protested publicly and left.+ Some seventy bishops who were come protested also against beginning. Then, with those of his party, he cited Nestorius twice in one day, judged the case, and pronounced his deposition. Both parties appealed to the Emperor, who banished Nestorius, and desired all the bishops to return to their dioceses. The Eastern bishops had on their arrival excommunicated Cyril and Memnon, and Cyril and Memnon excommunicated them. However Cyril's party gained the court, and the Emperor had some one consecrated in the place of Nestorius, who was banished. And the Easterns and Cyril, a layman having been sent to bring them to terms, had years of negotiation before any peace was made, and then only by Cyril signing a creed drawn up by the Easterns, which condemned his doctrines promulgated and tacitly accepted at Ephesus, but without his publicly condemning them, and a large number of bishops were after all deposed by the Emperor, and the doctrines of Cyril became the seed of endless disputes and controversies, and in truth led to Eutychianism, and were its greatest stay. The papal legates never presided in this council. The Emperor's lieutenant, when he came to make order, turned Cyril and Nestorius out, and Juvenal of Jerusalem presided. This, let me add in passing, is a pretty thing to call a general council to found faith upon. The doctrines of Cyril have never been accepted. It is quite certain that Athanasius largely condemns in his second book against Apollinarius the expression on which Cyril so much insisted. Would anyone think we had to say to Christians? The Emperor's lieutenant had to have guards mounted to prevent acts of violence.
+Or, as he says, was driven out, for Cyril had with him what were called Parabolani, a bodyguard of military monks that he had brought with him from Alexandria.
Father O. I do not see what we can gain by going through all these points; but allow me to remark that though Theodosius called the Council of Ephesus, it was on the demand and by the advice of the pope. The Emperor did it administratively.
N. Not only is the historical fact admitted by all, even by Bellarmine and Baronius, that the Emperor did call the council, but it is impossible that the pope could have anything to say to it, because he had held a council at Rome and condemned Nestorius, and written to Cyril that he was to publish his deposition if he did not retract in ten days after notification. Cyril assembled a local council at Alexandria, on November 3rd, to carry this into effect, and on the 19th the Emperor issues his order for the council to meet, writing to the pope as to others; and the pope in answer recognizes that the Emperor had convoked the council, and that it was his business to care for the peace of the church (Hard., 1473). You will find the facts I have alleged as to councils in this book, Socrates, Sozomen, Baronius (consulting Bellarmine), Dupin, and Tillemont. Baronius, it is true, tries to call in question the canons of the Council of Constantinople, but his well-known annotator, Pagi, shews it is impossible to do so. It only shews he felt how it pinched. I pursue my history.
As to the Council of Chalcedon, the Fourth General Council, the pope wanted to get one in Italy to condemn Eutychus. The Emperor Theodosius refused, saying all was settled at Ephesus, that is, at a second in that town, of which hereafter: so little did popes call general councils then. His successor was well disposed, but refused peremptorily to have it in Italy, called it at Nice, and then, in order to manage it better, brought it to Chalcedon, close to Constantinople. His commissioners sat in the council save one day, suppressed the violence of the prelates at the beginning, saying they ought to shew a better example, and made propositions, gave their consent, in fact presided actively all the time in the council, save one day. On that day, on which they left the prelates to settle about the creed, the council deposed Dioscorus, also patriarch of Alexandria for his crimes at the previous Council of Ephesus. On their return the next day the commissioners said they must answer for it, they had not been there. In truth their consciences need not have been much burdened. But even as to the creed to be signed, one was proposed. The papal legates opposed, and said they would go if Leo's letter was not assented to as it was, along with the creeds of Nice and Constantinople. The letter was in point of fact in many respects an admirable one. But what was done? It was referred to the Emperor, who decided what was to be done, and the council stated their views in detail for themselves, though approving Leo's letter, but would give their own definition of faith. Afterwards Constantinople was put on an equality with Rome. The legates craftily keeping away, they protested on their return; but the bishops maintained it, and the commissioners declared it had passed, and the council said, We remain in this judgment. In this council Ibas and Theodoret, favourers of Nestorius' views, were declared orthodox. They publicly recognized the Empress Pulcheria as the person who had put down Nestorius.
The Fifth General Council is too plain in its history to need more than the plain statement of facts. There had been a great contest about the merits of Origen, and the monks had been breaking into each other's monasteries, and in the course of the disputes which followed, blood had been shed in the churches, indeed it was far from being the first time. However, they got the Emperor to condemn Origen's doctrine. As to the merits of the case, there was reason enough. He was a powerful prince, and recovered Italy and Africa from the barbarians, and liked his own way. A certain Theodore of Caesarea, a great favourite with the Emperor, was fond of Origen and of Eutychianism, and determined to have his revenge, and he engaged Justinian to condemn three persons' writings, Theodore of Mopsuestia,+ Ibas, and Theodoret, all three opposed to Cyril, who had his way in the Council of Ephesus. These three persons had been pronounced to be in full communion in the Council of Chalcedon, which had rather tended to set up Nestorius' reputation again, whom Cyril and Ephesus had condemned. Justinian published a long decree condemning the three chapters, as the writings of the three prelates above-named were called. He had a kind of council, and the Oriental patriarchs and prelates were obliged to condemn them too. Pope Vigilius condemned them and excommunicated the patriarch of Constantinople and all who had condemned the three chapters. However Justinian thought he would be more tractable at Constantinople, and made him come. There, in fact, he joined in communion again with the excommunicated ones, and condemned the three chapters. But then all the prelates of Illyria and Africa, in fact of all the West in general separated from his communion as unfaithful -- a bad business according to modern Romanist notions. To get out of the scrape he acceded to the proposal by some of these prelates of a general council, and withdrew his condemnation of the chapters, and forbade any resolution till there was a council. The Emperor persecuted him (indeed he had exiled him and afterwards brought him to Constantinople); he fled to Chalcedon, and the Emperor compromised, and he came back He then pressed for a council in Italy. That did not suit the Emperor, and he refused, but called one at Constantinople. Vigilius would not go there, and he signed his private judgment with eighteen other Western prelates, while one- hundred and sixty or one hundred and seventy sat in the council under the Emperor's authority. This letter of his, called Constitutive, was given to the Emperor, but is taken no notice of in the council. To say the truth, it was on the whole the most sensible paper in the whole miserable business, and he forbade by the authority of the apostolic see in any way to contravene what he then pronounced. However, the Emperor went on with his council, when, save a very few renegades, there were no Western prelates. The council condemned altogether the three chapters, which was quite different from Vigilius' constitutive; and Vigilius refused to sign as he had refused to be present. Justinian banished him again, and he gave way, and signed; and it became thereby, say Baronius and the Romanists, a general council. If that does not make a sure foundation for faith, what will? Yet universal confusion was the result.
+His writings were greatly read in the East. Cyril tried to get him condemned; but the Easterns absolutely refused. He is said to have been the originator of Nestorianism, and even teacher of Nestorius.
The Nestorians established a patriarchate at Seleucia, were favoured by the Persians in opposition to the Roman Empire, and spread over all the East, Christianity becoming very nearly the established religion of China at that time. And the Eutychians, raising their head through the activity of a monk, Jacobus, spread too; and the patriarchates of Alexandria and Antioch, such as they are since Mahometanism overran the East, are in their hands, spread as far as India, and have a primate in Abyssinia. Both subsist. Not long ago violent persecutions were set on foot against the Nestorians, it is said, at the instigation of the so-called bishop of Babylon in connection with Rome, the Consul of France.
James. But where are we got, sir? Is all this really the history of what they call the church? Why, there is no Christianity in it. At any rate, the Bible is simpler than all this. I had, sure enough, rather have the plain holy words of Paul and Peter, which are really the words of God.
N. No wonder. I go through it because it is well we should know the difference. Mr. O. cannot deny these facts. They are drawn from the authentic histories of the day, from his own historians, such as Baronius, a great stickler for the pope; Dupin, a most honest Romanist historian, whom perhaps he might not like so much; Tillemont; Hardouin's Councils -- books you cannot of course judge of, but Mr. O. can very well. I have referred to Protestant books merely to assist me in collecting the information.
Any one can judge whether such proceedings can be a foundation for a Christian's faith, or whether it is by wading through all this, instead of reading the Lord's and the apostles' words, a poor man will get at the truth. Here the pope contradicts himself, and one general council, let them say what they will, contradicts another; for Chalcedon had acquitted and Constantinople condemns the three writers we have spoken of.
Here is Baronius' remark: "If you compare this synod with all that of which a synod ought to consist in order to be called a general council legitimately congregated in the Holy Spirit, things standing as the acts plainly shew they do, you will agree that it does not merit the name, not merely of a general council, but not even of a private one, being one which was gathered, the Roman pontiff resisting, and judgment pronounced by it in like manner against his decrees." "We will say farther on how it came to obtain the name of a general council." He then abuses it (his annotator, Pagi, approving it) and cites Pope Gregory and others as disapproving it too; however, though he says certainly Vigilius did not consent to it by letters, as either he or his successor, Pope Pelagius, consented to it, it became ecumenical, as the first of Constantinople had done, which was gathered in spite of Damasus (Bar. Acc., 553, 220-224).
The sixth General Council will furnish us with some curious elements as to papal infallibility and the progress of church history. Eastern Christendom was always discussing points, Rome pushing its power. In the East they got a new point, on which it is surely not my purpose to dwell here: -- Christ had only one will, or at any rate His divine and human will coalesced, though He had two natures. The Emperor adopted, and Pope Honorius wrote a letter approving it. However, there was a change, the Roman legates opposed it at Constantinople, and one of them, Martin, became pope; he then denounced all holders of it. The then Emperor published a rescript forbidding discussions, and all men to be left in peace. The pope denounced this as sanctioning evil. The Emperor tried to get hold of him, failed the first time, but succeeded the second, and brought him prisoner and kept him so till he died. The Roman clergy less staunch than the people, gave way, and elected another pope whom the Emperor confirmed; he never had confirmed his stern predecessor, Martin. So now there were two popes. The one at Rome soon after died, his successor was on good terms with the Emperor. The Emperor, who had always maintained his rescript, died too, and his successor was a gentler prince. He proposed a conference to settle it.
Four popes had succeeded one another rapidly during his reign, and at last Agathon assembled a Western council, at which, however, no prelates from Spain, Britain, or Germany were present, save one on his own affairs, and three from France. However, they put themselves forward as representing the whole Latin church. In truth, save Scotland and Ireland, and the north of England, it was at this time pretty well papalised. However, as the council of the apostolic see, as they say, they condemn the Monothelites, as they were called. Legates went from the pope to Constantinople, but they were not to discuss, the pope said, nor a title to be altered in the confession. The Emperor had removed a stiff patriarch and put in a milder one, and formed an assembly at Constantinople, and ordered Macarius, the patriarch of Antioch, the Monothelite leader, to assemble as many as he could of his party. Thus, besides other prelates, the Eastern patriarchs, or their legates, were present. The West was only represented by the pope's legates. Macarius was deserted by most of his partisans who found the tide against him, for the Emperor sought peace, though they had pretty well reviled each other. Macarius, however, insisted on the authority of Honorius, of Sergius, previously patriarch of Constantinople, and of Cyrus, patriarch of Alexandria, but he was all but unanimously deposed and excommunicated.
But now comes the strange result. They condemn all the writings of these heretics, and their memory they anathematize -- that is, deliver over to the curse of God -- Theodore of Pharan, author of the mischief, Sergius, Patriarch of Constantinople, and two of his successors; Cyrus, Patriarch of Alexandria, Honorius, Pope of Rome, and Macarius of Antioch, and all following them. In the thirteenth session they are declared out of the pale of the Catholic church, that is, lost for ever; and, in the sixteenth, anathema is pronounced on the heretic Sergius, etc., etc., on the heretic Honorius, Pope of Old Rome. This council was accepted and confirmed as the Sixth General Council, when the result was notified to him by Leo, the pope who succeeded to Agatho; and he anathematizes expressly Honorius and the others.
Father O. But Baronius rejects this letter.
N. He does; but his annotator Pagi, as do others, treat this as folly, as indeed it is worse, for all the acts of the council, the letters to the pope, the Emperor's edict, the reading of Honorius' letter, which gave occasion to his condemnation, the acts of subsequent councils, and the old Roman breviary, and every other possible proof exists to shew that it is a mere foolish effort to get rid of what he cannot deny. He pretends that it was the Patriarch Theodore of Constantinople, and that his name was scratched out everywhere and Honorius' put in. But why read Honorius' letter to condemn Theodore? You must know that Baronius' notion as to this is rejected by everyone.
Now mark the result. Constantine, the Emperor, presided with his court and judges in person at the council during the first twelve and the last sessions, and, excusing himself in the interval by public affairs, left his representative. The acts of the council declare it called by his command and recognise his presidency. The general council declares the pope a heretic, and condemned for ever for it; and this was sanctioned by another pope (Leo II), who confirms the council and anathematizes his predecessor. Nor is this all. What Pope Gregory the Great called the See of Peter in three different cities, that is Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch (which he was uniting against John of Constantinople, who claimed to be universal bishop), three, he declared, derived from one (Peter), and which were one, all three were in this same heresy, Cyrus of Alexandria, Honorius of Rome, and now Macarius of Antioch; all successors of Peter, we are assured, are anathematized as heretics, and held to have no place in the Catholic church, and that by a general council and another pope. How am I to get security here? In the pope as successor of Peter, or in the council who sent him to hell as a heretic (happily the poor man was dead)? If you blame the council, your security for the faith is gone by any council, or in the pope either; for they acted very much on the letter of one pope, and all their definitions were accepted by another. If you accept the council, then all the fine theory about a successor of Peter fails, for his successor was a condemned heretic.
Father O. But I think Pope Honorius may very well be defended against the charge of being a Monothelite, and Maximus, a martyr, did so.
N. Well, I should not be indisposed to accept your excuse. There is certainly something to be said for him, though he went very far. But if you are right, what becomes of the authority of the general council and another pope's condemnation of him and his doctrine? No; great as their influence was become -- quite paramount in the West at this epoch -- no one dreamt then of the popes being infallible. As to general councils, it is rather hard to tell what they were. No Western bishops were in this; only the pope assured them that what he wrote was the judgment of all the West. But that did not make their assembling in the Holy Ghost. Agatho's Roman council was composed of Italian and Sicilian bishops. Only two bishops signed as deputies of all France and England; a queer way, too, of assembling in the Holy Ghost. At any rate the Emperor gathered and presided in the Sixth General Council, and the pope was condemned as a heretic by the council and by his successor. In this Sixth General Council there were at first some thirty or forty bishops, at the end one hundred and sixty.
I will now go on to the Seventh General Council, if we can find out which it is. An Emperor, Leo the Isaurian, who had long known the Arabs, and seen them despise the idolatry of Christendom, had a strong desire to reform the abuses of image worship. He issued a decree in 726, forbidding them to be worshipped, and the pictures and images were directed to be put high up, but were not ordered to be taken away; but Germanus, the Patriarch of Constantinople, and Pope Gregory II opposed vehemently; the Greeks rose in insurrection, and, advancing to Constantinople, were defeated. The Emperor now went farther, and in 730 had the images and pictures destroyed; thence tumults, murder, and reprisals by the Government. Germanus and the popes sustained their cause by appealing to the most ridiculous fables, which no one believes now, that Christ sent a miraculous picture of Himself to Abgarus, King of Edessa; insulted the Emperor in the grossest possible language; and Gregory the pope says that Uzziah profanely removed the brazen serpent which David had sanctified, and put with the ark into the temple -- a confusion a child could have avoided who had read a little scripture. Hezekiah is commended for doing it. He says, where it is said, "Where the carcase is there are the eagles gathered together," the carcase meant Christ and pious Christians, living men flocking to see Him at Jerusalem, and that so strong was the impression of the figure of Christ on their minds, that at once they made portraits of Him, and carried them about to convert people with. However, he says they did not of the Father and the Holy Spirit. But now even that is done.FOURTH CONVERSATION -- INFALLIBILITY