a shaggy tunic and a black vest; you were in mourning garb, pale in face, and rough in hand; now you parade in linen, in silk, in the figured stuffs of Atrebatæ, and the attire of Laodicea. Your cheeks are red; your skin is sleek; your hair is dressed behind and before; your paunch is protuberant; your shoulders are round; your throat is full; and your jaws are so fat that your words are almost strangled. Certainly, in such a contrast of food and clothing, there must be fault on one side or the other. Not that I will impute sin to food or to dress; but that the variation and change for the worse is next door to a reproach.”—ii. 21.

2. The same Father is even more energetic in defence of the martyrs against Vigilantius:-"Who, madman, ever at any time, adored the martyrs? who took man for God? did not Paul and Barnabas, when thought to be Jupiter and Mercury by the Lycaonians, who would sacrifice to them, tear their garments, and say they were men? We read the same of Peter, who raised Cornelius when desirous to worship him, saying, 'Rise, for I also am a man.' And do you venture to talk of that 'something or other which we honour by carrying about in a small urn ?' I want to know what you mean by 'something or other.' Speak out, and blaspheme freely. 'Some dust or other,' you say, 'wrapped up in precious linen in a small urn.' He grieves that the remains of martyrs have a precious covering, and are not tied up in rags or sackcloth, or cast on the dunghill; that Vigilantius alone may be worshipped in his liquor and his sleep! What! are we sacrilegious in entering the Basilicas of the Apostles? Then was the Emperor Constantius so, who translated the sacred remains of Andrew, Luke, and Timothy to Constantinople, at which demons howl, yea, the tenants of Vigilantius acknowledge their presence. Sacrilegious, too, is Arcadius, Augustus at this time, who has translated, after so long a period, the bones of blessed Samuel from Judea into Thrace. All the bishops, not only sacrilegious but infatuate, who carried in silk and gold a vile thing and crumbling ashes. Fools, the people of all the Churches, who met the sacred relics, and received them. as joyfully as if they saw the prophet present and alive;

so that, from Palestine even unto Chalcedon, swarms of people intermingled continuously, and with one voice resounded the praises of Christ. It seems they were adoring Samuel, not Christ, whose Levite and prophet Samuel was!

""You reverence the dead, and therefore you blaspheme.' Read the Gospel, 'I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; He is not God of the dead, but of the living.' If then, they live, they are not shut up in an honourable prison, as you would have it. For you say that the souls of Apostles and martyrs rest either in Abraham's bosom, or under the altar of God, nor can be present from their tombs, and where they will. It seems they have a sort of senatorial dignity, not shut up, indeed, with murderers in the most horrible prison, but in free and honourable confinement in isles of the blessed and the Elysian fields! Are you the man to prescribe laws to God? will you put chains on Apostles? so that, till the judgment-day, those are kept in ward, and are not with their Lord, of whom it is written, 'They follow the Lamb, whithersoever He goeth?' If the Lamb be everywhere, they, too, must be considered everywhere who are with the Lamb. And, whereas the devil and the demons range the whole earth, and by their extreme rapidity are everywhere present, shall martyrs, after the outpouring of their blood, be shut up under the altar so to be unable to leave it?

"You say, in your book, that 'while we live we can pray for each other, but after death no one's prayer for another is to be heard; especially since martyrs, though praying for the vengeance of their own blood, have not availed to obtain it.' If Apostles and martyrs, while in the body, can pray for others, when they ought as yet to be solicitous about themselves, how much rather after their crown, their victory, and their triumph? Paul, the Apostle, says, that two hundred and seventy-six souls in the ship were granted to him; shall Vigilantius, a living dog, be better than he, a dead lion? So I might rightly argue from Ecclesiastes, could I confess that Paul was dead in spirit. In short, saints are not said to be dead, but asleep.

"We do not light wax tapers in the broad day, as you

idly slander us, but to relieve the darkness of night by this substitute; and we watch unto the light, lest, blinded with you, we may sleep in the dark. If any secular men, or at least religious women, through ignorance and simplicity, of whom we may truly say, 'They have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge;' if such have done this for the honour of martyrs, what do you lose by it? Once, even Apostles complained of the loss. of the ointment, but they were reproved by the Lord's voice. Not that Christ needed ointment, nor the martyrs wax lights; and yet that woman so acted in Christ's honour, and her devotion was accepted. And whoever light wax tapers are rewarded according to their faith, as the Apostle speaks, 'Let every one be fully persuaded in his own mind.' Do you call such men idolaters? I do not deny that all of us who believe in Christ have come out of the errors of idolatry; for we are not born, but new-born Christians. And because we once honoured idols, ought we now not to honour God, lest we seem to venerate Him with an honour like that paid to idols? That was done to idols, and therefore was detestable; this is done to martyrs, and therefore is allowable. For, even without the remains of martyrs, throughout the Churches of the East, when the Gospel is read, lights are lit, while the sun is bright, not at all to chase away the dark, but as a sign of rejoicing. Whence, too, those virgins in the Gospel have always their lamps lit. And the Apostles are told to have their loins girded, and burning lights in their hands: and John Baptist is said to be a 'burning and shining light;' that under the type of material light might be signified that light of which we read in the Psalter, 'Thy word, O Lord, is a lanthorn unto my feet, and a light unto my paths.'"—5—8.

I have already allowed that there are points in Jerome's tone of mind which I receive at the Church's hands without judging; and, again, that superstitions existed in the Church of his day about the holy relics, as, indeed, he seems to grant in the above extract; yet, after all allowances on this, and the other subjects which have here come before us, I do not see that our Protestant brethren gain much by their appeal to the history of Aerius, Jovinian, and Vigilantius.

Chapter xbi

Canons of the Apostles

"Let Thy Thummim and Thy Urim be with Thy holy one, whom Thou didst prove at Massah, and with whom Thou didst strive at the waters of Meribah; who said unto his father and to his mother, I have not seen him; neither did he acknowledge his brethren, nor knew his own children: for they have observed Thy word and kept Thy covenant."

SUCH

UCH is the testimony borne in different ways by Origen, Eusebius, and Cyril, Aerius, Jovinian, and Vigilantius, to the immemorial reception, among Christians, of those doctrines and practices which the private judgment of this age considers to be unscriptural. Let the object with which they have been adduced be clearly understood: not thereby directly to prove the truth of those doctrines and practices; but, the hypothesis having been hazarded in some quarters, that perhaps those doctrines and practices were an early corruption, and the burden of proving a negative being thrown upon us by men who are better pleased to suggest doubts than to settle anything, we, in our excess of consideration, are going about from one quarter to another, prying and extravagating beyond the beaten paths of orthodoxy, for the chance of detecting some sort of testimony in favour of our opponents. this object I have fallen upon the writers aforesaid, and since they have been more or less accused of heterodoxy, I thought there was a chance of their subserving the cause of Protestantism, which the Catholic Fathers certainly do not subserve; but they, though differing from each other most materially, and some of them differing from the Church, do not any one

With

of them approximate to the tone or language of the movement of 1517. Every additional instance of this kind goes indirectly to corroborate the testimony of the Catholic Church.

The more we can vary our witnesses, the better. The consent of Fathers is one sort of witness to Apostolical truth; the accordance of heretics is another; received usage is a third. I shall now give, at some length, an instance of this last mentioned, as afforded in the existence of the Apostolical Canons1; and with that view, I must beg indulgence once in a way, to engage myself in a dry and somewhat tedious discussion. These Canons were once supposed to be, strictly speaking, Apostolical, and published before A.D. 50. On the other hand, it has been contended that they were composed by some heretic after 450. Our own divines maintain that they were published before 325, and were undoubtedly the digest of Catholic authorities in the course of the second and third, or at the end of the second century, and were received and used in most parts of Christendom. This view has since been acquiesced in by the theological world, so far as this, to suppose the matter and the enactment of the Canons of the highest antiquity, even though the edition which we possess was not published so early as Bishop Beveridge, for instance, supposes. At the same time it is acknowledged by all parties, that they, as well as some other early documents, have suffered from interpolation, and perhaps by an heretical hand.

They are in number eighty-five, of which the first fifty are considered of superior authority to the remaining thirty-five. What has been conjectured to be their origin will explain the distinction. It was the custom of the early Church, as is well known, to settle in council such points in her discipline, ordinances, and worship, as the Apostles had not prescribed in Scripture, as the occasion arose, after the pattern of their own proceedings in the fifteenth chapter of the Acts; and this, as far as might be, after their unwritten directions, or

1 The following account is principally from Bishops Beveridge and Pearson.