give us satisfactory evidence of the faith of all its members. Another objection is that the councils called general are not deserving of the name. They have in no case been either a full or fair representation of the existing church. Take that of Nice for example. We should be glad to believe that Christendom was, as to the main point, there fully represented. But what are the facts? There were present at that council about three hundred and eighteen bishops; of these, seventeen were from the little province of Isauria; while there was but one from all Africa, but one from Spain, and but one from Gaul. Is it not absurd to say that one bishop could represent the faith of a whole province, and that one acting without authority and without delegation? Suppose the attempt to be now made to hold a general council, and an invitation to be issued to all bishops and presbyters to assemble at a given time and place. Suppose further that Mr. Newman should attend from England, Bishop Hughes from America, the Abbé Genoude from France, could the assent of these volunteer delegates, with any show of reason, be taken as proving what was the faith of the Church of England, or of the church of God in these United States? Yet this was the way in which councils were generally called. The reigning emperor issued his summons, and those who had the inclination or ability attended; those who were disinclined to the object of the council, or unable to travel, remained at home. It is obvious that such councils could not give a fair expression to the voice of the church. It may be said indeed, that, however imperfect the representation, the acquiescence of all parts of the church in their decisions, affords proof of unanimity of faith. There would be some force in this suggestion, had we any evidence of such acquiescence. We know however that decisions in councils were in almost all important cases more or less resisted; and the struggle continued until one party or the other obtained the advantage, and then, by excommunicating the dissentients, the voice of the whole church was claimed for the majority. This has been the course of Rome from the beginning. Refusing to recognise as a part of the church all who do not adhere to her, she boasts of having the suffrage of the whole church in her favour.

A still more decisive proof that councils cannot be relied upon as expressing the faith of the whole church, is that they contradict each other. The council of Nice decided against Arianism; a much larger council, within twenty-five years, decided in its favour.* The church was thrown into a state of violent contention. At one period or in one part of the empire the orthodox prevailed; in others, the Arians. Each party had their councils; each at differ

The council which met for the western church at Ariminum, and for the eastern at Seleucia, "which," says Bishop Stillingfleet, "make up the most general council we read of in church history. For Bellarmine owns that there were six hundred bishops in the western part of it. So that there were many more bishops assembled there than were in the councils of Nice; there was no exception against the summons nor against the bishops present."

ent times could claim the majority of the whole church; one bishop of Rome was with the orthodox, another with the Arians, and thus the conflict was continued with various success for more than three hundred years. How then can catholic consent be claimed for the Nicene creed? If catholic consent means the consent of all, everywhere, and at all times, it is a gross imposition and absurdity to claim it for a creed with regard to which for a long time Christendom was nearly equally divided.

The heresy of Eutyches, respecting the person of Christ, was first condemned by a council held at Constantinople, A. D. 448; then approved by the second general council at Ephesus, in 449; and then again condemned by the council of Chalcedon, in 451. Pelagianism was condemned in Africa, sanctioned in Palestine, approved by the council of Diospolis, pronounced to be according to scripture, in the first instance, by the Bishop of Rome, afterwards repudiated by the same bishop, and finally condemned by the council of Ephesus, A. D. 431. ́ Even with regard to the canon of scripture, we have council against council; that of Laodicea excluding the Apocrypha, that of Carthage including them in the list of inspired books. It is therefore a plain historical fact, that even those councils, which have most deserved the name of general, have not agreed, and therefore can neither be regarded as infallible, nor as any conclusive evidence of catholic consent.

There is another objection to the notion that the faith of the church universal can be gathered from the decisions of councils, which ought not to be overlooked. The authority of tradition is, both by Romanists and the writers of the Oxford Tracts, defended mainly on the ground of its apostolic origin. The fact that all Christians have received any doctrine is held to be proof that it was derived from the apostles; and to ascertain what all the early Christians believed, we are referred to the decisions of the ancient general councils. But unfortunately, there was no council, having the least pretension to be called general, held during the first three centuries. How is this chasm to be got over? We can understand how an assembly, even at the present day, with the scriptures before them, can give a judgment as to the doctrines of Christianity, which shall be entitled to all the deference due to their opinion. But since the world began, has any such thing been known as the transmission of unwritten doctrines unchanged for three hundred years? Without a miracle, for which we have neither promise nor evidence, the thing is impossible. Would it be possible for the present clergy of Germany to bear trustworthy testimony to the unwritten teaching of Luther and Melancthon? Does there exist now in England any knowledge of the doctrines of the Reformers, not to be gathered from their writings? Would not the claim of an English convocation to enforce any doctrine, not contained in their Articles, Liturgy, or Homilies, on the ground of traditionary knowledge of the oral teaching of Cranmer or Latimer, be received with ridicule by the whole church? How then can we believe

that the council of Nice had any tradition or knowledge of the oral teaching of the apostles worthy of confidence? If a tradition cannot be traced up historically to the times of the apostles, it can, on the very principles, though not according to the practice, of our opponents, be of no authority. The prevalence of an opinion in the church, three hundred years after the apostles, is no proof that it was derived from the apostles, any more than the prevalence of Arminianism in the Church of England, or of Rationalism in Germany, proves that these forms of error were derived from the Reformers. It is therefore not from the decisions of councils that we can gather catholic consent.

The only other important source of knowledge of the faith of the early church, is the writings of the fathers. It has been assumed that the consent or agreement of the early Christian writers, in the belief of any doctrine, is to be considered satisfactory evidence of the derivation of such doctrine or usage from the apostles. Traditionists have generally felt the necessity of some caution in laying down this rule. It is so obvious that the fathers differ among themselves, and that the same father differs in many cases from himself, that we are cautioned carefully to distinguish between what they deliver as teachers, which is often erroneous, from what they deliver as witnesses. It is necessary that we should have not only their unanimous consent, but also their unanimous testimony, that the doctrine taught is part of the faith of the church. We do not say that traditionists adhere to these limitations, for they do not, but they feel the necessity of stating them, to secure even the semblance of authority for their rule.

The question then is, whether the unanimous consent of the fathers is proof of the apostolic origin of any doctrine? This question, as far as it has any bearing on the present controversy, must be understood of doctrines, not clearly contained in the scriptures. Their unanimous consent to the being of a God, to the divine mission of Christ, to the fact that he was born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried, that he rose again on the third day and ascended into heaven; cannot be considered as in any degree increasing our assurance that these doctrines and facts are contained in the New Testament. It is not for such purposes that their testimony is required. But is their consent a warrant to us of the oral teaching of the apostles? Must we believe what they happen to agree in believing? We think this a most unreasonable demand, for, in the first place, the consent of some sixteen writers, is very insufficient evidence of the faith of the whole Christian church for three hundred years, and it is only as witnesses for catholic consent that their writings are assumed to be of any authority. The fact that the remains of the first three centuries are so scanty, creates of itself almost an impossibility that we should find in them any fair or full representation of the whole church during that long period. Would any man dream of extracting from some ten or twenty works, many of

them mere fragments, taken at hazard from the whole list of English divines, any knowledge of the doctrines of the English Reform. ers, which is not to be found in their authentic writings? Would it not be considered in the highest degree absurd, to maintain that the interpretation of the thirty-nine articles must be regulated by the consent of these fragments? Suppose all these remains of English theology were of one school, say the Laudean, what view should we then be forced to take of the English articles? Or suppose that some were of the school of Whitgift, some of that of Laud, and some of that of Hoadly, contradicting each other on almost all points, each accusing the others of departure from the faith of the church; would it not be a perfectly hopeless task, to attempt to gather from their conflicting statements, the meaning of the articles? Yet this, and even worse than this, is the rule of faith which traditionists would impose upon the church. We say worse, for the supposed fragments of English writers would at least be all genuine, in a language we understand, relating to controversies with which we are familiar. The remains of the first centuries have no one of these advantages. They are confessedly more or less mutilated and corrupted. It is really a matter of surprise to read the frequent and loud complaints made by the fathers of the frauds to which they were subjected. Spurious writings were issued on all occasions; the writings of distinguished men curtailed or interpolated to serve the purposes of a party. We hear not only of the gospel of St. Thomas, the epistle to the Laodiceans, of the acts of Paul and Thecla, but complaints are made of the name of one father being put to the writings of another to give them currency. This is a difficulty and an evil which Romanists themselves are forced to admit. On this point Mr. Goode remarks, "Above one hundred and eighty treatises, professing to be written by authors of the first six centuries, are repudiated by the more learned of the Romanists themselves, as, most of them, rank forgeries, and the others not written by those whose names they bear; though, be it observed, they have been quoted over and over again by celebrated controversial writers of the Romish communion, in support of their errors against Protestants." An evil still greater than forgery, because more difficult to detect, is interpolation. Many of the early Greek works are extant only in a Latin translation, which is so corrupt as to be unworthy of credit. This is the case with the work of Irenæus, and with the translations by Ruffinus, whom Jerome charges with the most shameless adulteration of his authors. This is a subject which cannot be treated without going into details, which our limits forbid. It is however a notorious fact that the remains of the early ages have come down to us in a most corrupted state, and that it is a task of great difficulty, if not of absolute impossibility, to separate what is genuine from what is spurious. What a rule of faith is here!

But besides this difficulty, the writings of the fathers are on various accounts hard to be understood; not only because of the lan

guage in which they are written, but from the principles on which their authors proceeded. They relate also in a great degree to controversies with which we have no immediate concern, being directed against Paganism, or obsolete heresies. These are the writings which are to remove the obscurities of scripture, and supply its deficiencies. We might as well take the waters of the Thames, after it has traversed all London, to purify the limpid river at its source.

Besides all this, the fathers are not trustworthy, as witnesses of the faith of the early church. They are too credulous. This is proved by the fact, that they claim the support of tradition for acknowledged error or for opposing doctrines. Some say they de

rived it from the successors of the apostles, that our Lord was fifty years old at the time of his death; others, on the same authority, assure us that his ministry continued but for one year; Origen, as we have seen, claims the tradition of all the churches in support of the allegorical sense of the historical parts of scripture; he says tradition leaves it doubtful whether the sun, moon, and stars, have souls or not. Papias, who flourished about ninety years after Christ, says, "As the elders remember, who saw John the disciple of the Lord, that they heard from him what the Lord taught about those times, and said, The days shall come in which vines shall exist, each containing 10,000 shoots, and in each shoot shall be 10,000 arms, and in each true shoot shall be 10,000 branches, and on every branch 10,000 clusters, and in every cluster 10,000 grapes, and every grape, when pressed, shall give twenty-five firkins of wine," &c., &c., &c. This account is endorsed by Irenæus, who quotes Papias "as a hearer and companion of Polycarp." The eastern churches affirmed that the observance of Easter on the fourteenth day of the moon, had been delivered to them by the apostle John; the Romans and those in the western parts said that their usage was delivered by the apostles Peter and Paul. Cyprian insisted that those who had been baptized by heretics and schismatics, should be rebaptized, and appeals to the catholic faith and church in his support. Stephen, the Bishop of Rome, said, "The apostles forbade that those who came over from any heresy should be baptized, and delivered this to posterity to be observed." Augustin says, it is the "catholic faith," that all unbaptized infants are lost, though he is suspected of being himself the father of the doctrine. Many claim the authority of the church for the notion that the angels have bodies. Some say that tradition taught that all souls are immediately created, others that they are derived, ex traduce. So in all their disputes, each party appealed to tradition in its own behalf, and condemned all others. The heretics, especially, driven by argument from the scriptures, were distinguished by their appeals to patristical tradition. Irenæus says, "When they are reproved by the scriptures they immediately begin to accuse the scriptures themselves, as if they were not correct, nor of authority, and that they are not consistent; and that the truth cannot be